He came into the old assembly hall where we were rehearsing, sneering at our clanging, trebly racket and faux-Pavement-isms. He was in the year above, wore a pair of sleek, black smoking shoes and, by and large, thought he was as hip as anyone in the school. This was band practise; serious business for a straggly bunch of nascent indie rockers, and we’d be damned if we weren’t going try to impress our new singer. He reminded us all of an Italian mobster, he was all grease and snarls and had a switchblade temper. We were all equally in fear and in love with him, even if he did casually brush us aside, as one might an irritating kitten. It was this day, I remember, that I was to have my introduction to a band, and vitally, an album that would barely leave my eardrums at all in the next year and a half, from an artist that had been on the fringes of my consciousness for years.

Kenton, the new singer, ambled up to the mike as we thrashed at our battered Epiphone ‘starter’ guitars, spindly school music room equipment, sparking with static. So he grabs this cheap microphone, and starts jerking and juddering to our chugging rhythms. He opens his mouth to sing, and what comes out nearly makes me stop diving into those thundering barre-chords. It was all incomprehensible through the screams of feedback, but his voice, and its depth, was something completely unlike any of the whiny, pubescent psuedo-American grungers we’d sweet-talked into singing for us before. I wanted to know what this kid listened to; I wanted to know what made him tick. We had to have him. ‘Julian Cope’, the bassist sniggered. ‘Fucking havin’ a laugh aren’t you, I thought you said he could sing?’ someone else whispered, behind me.

Anyhow, after we’d been shooed out by the hordes of menopausal cleaner ladies, I nourished his ego and congratulated him on his singing. I then asked him what he’d been listening to, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out this c.d, sparse black cover, with a central design of what appeared to be collage of a mountain range and a heart monitor in white. ‘Joy Division,’ he drawls, glowing. ‘Borrow it, if you like.’

For the next week, I wilfully plunged into an otherworldly plain of solemn, marching mechanical works, icy waters and gargantuan channels of raw, dark energy. I’d been allowed a peek into another, altogether more shadowy, exciting world, where desolation was beginning to sound almost glamorous. I wasn’t going to let them shut the door on me, I wanted in, I wanted to wait on the corner of the dark, drizzle beaten streets outside the Free Trade Hall, I wanted to shuffle conspicuously in my army-surplus coat in the rain. I wanted dark rings around my eyes. I was wholeheartedly, ardently, offering myself into this new nocturnal world. I wanted them to want me.

I’d listen to this album, 'Unknown Pleasures' through headphones, striding out into the rain, on dishwater grey days when my exasperated parents would just droop open mouths my way, and go back to lives in the real world, the other world, the world which I’d ceased to be a part of. I’d walk briskly, nostrils savouring crisp, spilling surface run-off, steam hissing from the old dock works around the harbour. I’d embrace the dark, clinging on to the rumbling train-like basslines shooting through my head. I wanted the pedestrians in the street to share this ecstatic, joyous catharsis, impeccably poised and taut in my hormonal, chaotic teenage brain. I’d sometimes let my secret go, I’d have to, and I’d find myself singing, loudly, ‘She’s clinging to the nearest passer-by, she lost contr-o-ol.’ I’d have a peculiar little hop and skip in my step, the way people do when they’re happy in the rain.

The voice that drifted, as if from the bowels of black-mass riddled cathedrals, over those drilling acid-beats, haunted me for a while. I couldn’t fathom how a man could create such an unnatural sound in his throat. I couldn’t picture him, not in those preliminary days of my courting relationship with Joy Division. I didn’t want to see him just yet, to listen was enough. I’d be lost to the world, missing my bus-stops, hunched in my seat, my mind wandering the gothic mansion in ‘Day of the Lords’, when I’d realize I’d ended up miles and streets from my house, yet it didn’t matter, I’d have all the more time to wander the greyness, just to listen to the album. There would be blood, and love, and water and God rolling on my tongue, all before I could reach my front door. I would be drifting on council estates, syringes and amphetamine sulphate crunching underfoot, I’d be in the murky puddles in the parks and then I’d wander, alone, into the derelict, proud Hacienda in my head. By the time I’d reached my street, I would be clinging on to a few lines, words that’d trickle down my spine and stay there.

‘This is the car at the edge of the road. There's nothing disturbed - all the windows are closed, I guess you were right, when we talked in the heat. There's no room for the weak, no room for the weak. Where will it end?’

‘Unknown Pleasures’ is the sound of a different Manchester. A city with vast, spanning, unimaginable visions and dreams. A bolt of energy from up high, not quite harnessed, too overwhelming even for its own creators. It's the sound of a thousand cries in the dark, a black mass at midnight, a choir in full throat. It’s now, strangling, soothing, taunting.
After my lost week, I returned to school and handed the album back to Kenton, the singer. All of a sudden he didn’t seem so aloof and untouchable anymore, how could someone who had heard what I’d heard? We cemented a friendship, and he often lent me albums by other artists I’d yet to discover fully; Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Fall and so on. He’d offered me the key to a portal that’d I’d so often climb through and lose myself in, and I was grateful. He’d shown me a different world.

‘And all God's angels beware. And all you judges beware, sons of chance take good care. For all the people out there, I'm not afraid anymore.’