Praise for the series: All six books revel in the distinct shapes and benefits of an album, its ability to go places film, prose or sculp ture can't reach, while capable of being as awe-inspiring as the best of those mediums—Philadelphia City Paper Each volume has a distinct, almost militantly personal take on a beloved long-player . . . the books that have resulted are like the albums themselves—filled with mo ments of shimmering beauty, forgivable flaws, and stub born eccentricity—Tracks Magazine At their best, these books make rich, thought-provoking arguments for the song collections at hand—The Phila delphia Inquirer Praise for individual books in the series: Dusty in Memphis Warren Zanes ... is so in love with Dusty Springfield's great 1969 adventure in tortured Dixie soul that he's willing to jump off the deep end in writing about it— Rolling Stone Zanes uses Dusty in Memphis as a springboard to rumi nate eloquendy on the history of Atlantic Records and the myth of the American South—Tracks Magazine
Forever Changes Hultkrans obsesses brilliantly on the rock legends' semi nal disc—Vanity Fair The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society This is the sort of focus that may make you want to buy a copy, or dig out your old one—The Guardian This detailed tome leads the reader through the often fraught construction of what is now regarded as Davies's masterpiece—and, like the best books of its ilk, it makes the reader want to either reinvestigate the album or hear it for the first time—Blender Magazine Miller makes a convincing case for the Kinks' 1968 operetta of English village life as a heartbreaking work of staggering genius—Ray Davies' greatest songwriting triumph and an unjust commercial dud—with deep re search and song-by-song analysis—Rolling Stone Meat is Murder Full of mordant wit and real heartache. A dead-on depic tion of what it feels like when pop music articulates your pain with an elegance you could never hope to muster. 'Meat is Murder' does a brilliant job of capturing how, in a world that doesn't care, listening to your favorite album can save your life—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Pernice hits his mark. The well-developed sense of char acter, plot and pacing shows that he has serious promise as a novelist. His emotionally precise imagery can be bluntly, chillingly personal—The Boston Weekly Dig The Piper at the Gates of Dawn John Cavanagh combines interviews with early associ ates of Pink Floyd and recording-studio nitty-gritty to vividly capture the first and last flush of Syd Barrett's psychedelic genius on the Floyd's '67 debut—Rolling Stone Packed with interviews and great stories . . . will cer tainly give you a new perspective on Pink Floyd— Erasing Clouds
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Also available in this series: Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim
Harvest by Sam Inglis
Cooper Music from Big Pink by John Niven
The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller
Paul's Boutique by Dan LeRoy Doolittle by Ben Sisario
Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
There's a Riot Goin' On by Miles Marshall Lewis
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electric Lady land by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott Sign Vthe Times by Mchaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let It Be by Steve Matteo Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk Aqualung by Allan Moore OK Computer hy Dai Griffiths Let It Be by Colin Meloy Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz Grace by Daphne Brooks Murmur by J. Niimi Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Endtroducing... by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken
Stone Roses by Alex Green Bee Thousand'by Marc Woodworth The Who Sell Out by John Dougan Highway 61 Revisited'by Mark Polizzotti Loveless by Mike McGonigal The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor Aja by Don Breithaupt Rid of Me by Kate Schatz Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite
Forthcoming in this series: Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr Let's Talk About Love by Carl Wilson and many more . . .
Unknown Pleasures 331
Chris Ott
•
A continuum ••NEW
YORK
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LONDON
2007
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2004 by Chris Ott All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ott, Chris. Unknown pleasures / Chris Ott. p. cm. — (33 1/3) ISBN 0-8264-1549-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Joy Division (Musical group). Unknown pleasures. 2. Joy Division (Musical group) I. Title. II. Series. ML421J696O88 2004 782.42166'092'2—dc22 2003027593
Contents
Preface. 18.05.03 xi Chapter 1. Suffer No Fiction 1 Chapter 2. The Illusion Vanishes 31 Chapter 3. The Record is Alive, as That Which It Recorded is Alive 61 Chapter 4. His Very Flight is Presence in Disguise 85 Chapter 5. The Helena 105 Postscript. 115
Preface. 18.05.03.
I'm listening to a cover version of "Disorder", the first song on Joy Division's debut album, Unknown Plea sures. It was recorded in the auditorium of a Dallas, Texas Community Church in March of 1994 by a band called Bedhead, using a single, carefully positioned mi crophone. Bedhead wrote monastically austere music and clothed it in increasingly minimal album sleeves, willfully remaining in a shadow cast in large part by the short-lived Manchester, England band they pay tribute on this track. Yet there is no opportunism in their prox imity: Bedhead's rendition of "Disorder" communicates the internalization of a past they can only lament, and without crass or naive appropriation of Joy Division's signature sound. In nostalgic recognition of the song's enduring power, "Disorder" was only performed a few times over the Dallas band's five-year existence, and always as a concert finale. As a farewell to their lead
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singer's adoptive home, "Disorder" was the last song Bedhead ever performed in Boston, on a frigid spring night in 1998. Twenty-three years ago today, twenty-three yearold Ian Curtis committed suicide. His singular voice coated Joy Division's harrowing music in wondrous in finity, but relative to his lamented legacy, Curtis was unknown in his lifetime, performing only eleven con certs outside his native England, and barely fifty beyond the city limits of Manchester. His lyrics revealed a mounting, innate gift for poetic exposition that— although it was barely realized—could only be called genius. Initially naive, stoic observations on societal fail ure gave way to a crushing fatalism as Curtis turned his unwavering, unforgiving gaze inward. This flagellant self-analysis brought forth anguished verse so nakedly honest, it was impossible for those closest to him— distracted by possibility or alienated in its wake—to recognize his words as a literal cry for help. Decades later, we continue to pine for so tragic a loss. As online communication exposes the true desires of pop music fans—allowing them to talk amongst themselves—Joy Division are more and more revealed as one of the most significant and renowned bands of all time. No longer the elitist herald of critics and tastemakers, their music has become a rite of passage for anyone even casually interested in the histories of
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punk and alternative rock. Though this fame is due in no small part to the eternally romantic allure of suicide and the latter-day mainstream success of New Order, Joy Division's music has defied imitation, and continues to confound listeners with its unparalleled gravity and grandeur.
Acknowledgments
Unknown Pleasures began as a brief essay titled An Ideal For Listening, originally published by Pitchforkmedia.com and subsequently reprinted without my permis sion (or complaint) by the comprehensive Joy Division/ New Order fan site Worldinmotion.net (they inexplica bly re-titled the piece "His Story"). Written in a few days, the essay was intended as an overview of Joy Divi sion's career, but was not at all comprehensive of my thoughts. All the same, it was exhausting, as the history at hand has been retroactively filled with so much misdi rection, exaggeration, and marginal journalism—often by authors prohibitively taken with the band's mystique. Perhaps that's contentious, but one thing invariably missing from discussions of Joy Division's work is per spective, and only time can lend that. However objective one aims to be, and however distant they are from
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the story, Joy Division's music is potent as any drug: overwhelming, stupefying, and certainly addictive. I had doubts about the toll a longer examination would take on me, but I couldn't turn down the invitation of Con tinuum's expert, corralling editor, the ever-supportive David Barker.
Chapter 1. Suffer No Fiction
The dramatic, distant work of Joy Division endures as one of rock and roll's most challenging curiosities. Forming in the wake of England's punk rock explosion, Joy Division were known for a few minutes as the Stiff Kittens, for a few months as Warsaw, and for an eternity as the authors of spectral anthems like "Love Will Tear Us Apart", "Transmission", and the sonorous "Atmo sphere". Their beginnings aren't particularly extraordi nary, but the band's furious evolution over the course of just three years is testament to a fearless imagination, purposeful single-mindedness and innovative spirit as potent as any in the history of popular music. The daring of Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop pointed up rock's ability to challenge more than just a concert
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hall audience: young New Yorkers embraced their aban don and found freedom in a sneering disregard for de luded, detached pop stars. Frustrated by malaise and by America's bi-polar postwar conservatism and paranoia, a tattered, Bowery-bred poetry of futility flowered in the mid-1970s. Andy Warhol's Factory band the Velvet Underground had split, but their depressed anthems provided a much darker template for rock and roll, inspiring Richard Hell, the New York Dolls and—more directly—Television, but it was the all-energy Ramones, with their leather jackets, dirty jeans and postmodern rock and roll irony that came to define punk in the popular consciousness. The sped-up, zoned-out Beach Boys and Ronettes covers on their self-titled debut al bum arrived in the UK in 1976, and acted as an instruc tion manual for both the Sex Pistols and the Clash. But The Ramones' tongue-in-cheek, way-oh pop had grave implications when mixed with politics and screamed in British dancehalls, where there was literally no future to hope for. Punk rock instantly divided England, simultaneously identifying and embodying the nation's economic fail ure. Armed with outrage and their minder Malcolm McLaren, the blushing brats in the Sex Pistols hastened to celebrate ideological anarchy. As Todd Rundgren succinctly put it in the documentary series The History of Rock AT Roll, their "Cash from Chaos" ethos fanned
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from spark to inferno because "England was a) much more fashion conscious than America, and b) poor." With nothing to lose, they had everything to gain. The future members of Joy Division were raised in a decaying industrial landscape of vacant chemical plants and mild-to-severe poverty, and though the Sex Pistols were equally if not more impoverished, in London they had access to a social network of wealthy backers. Their metropolitan locus lent them a sense of urgency: the sustaining, center-of-the-universe belief that what they were doing could change their world. Excluding lowgrade celebrity supporter Tony Wilson, the players in Joy Division's story lived relatively disconnected lives in Manchester, a city that bred self-sustenance and pride as virtues. To Mancunians, what went on in London was fit for critique, not sacrosanct; the very first London punk groups overcame this ingrained doubt thanks to fury, originality and bombast. Before infamy would taint their initially untouched, anarchic light, the Pistols brought hope to audiences the same way their predeces sors had in America. Their obnoxious, exuberant deconstruction of rock and roll inspired peers who would create even more remarkable music. Like many anecdotes in this famous story, it's end lessly retold that Peter Hook bought a bass guitar for £35 the day after the Sex Pistols' fabled June 4th 1976 concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, having no
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idea how to play it. Though we still marvel at the noise he made with the instrument, the tale endures not only because of his work in Joy Division, but because it underscores an event so significant, it not only intro duced the Factory Records biopic 24 Hour Party People, it spawned its own book, / Swear I Was There, later adapted for a Granada TV documentary. (Approxi mately 42 people were at the Pistols' first Manchester Free Trade Hall gig, though thousands would later claim attendance.) "It was absolutely bizarre, the most shocking thing I have ever seen in my life," recalled Hook in the New Music Express. Included in the spotty crowd: Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, their future manager Rob Gretton, sound engineer and fledgling producer Martin Hannett, Manchester's Granada tele vision reporter Tony Wilson, and his then-best mate, actor Alan Erasmus. The Pistols, just weeks into their career and not yet media pariahs, returned the next month, allowing the band that brought them to Manchester in the first place—Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto's underdevel oped Buzzcocks—to officially debut, on July 20th (ex actly one week after the publication of the first UK punk 'zine, Mark Perry's Sniffin' Glue). It was the first time Ian Curtis saw the Sex Pistols, and like Sumner
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and Hook, he was irrevocably altered (and perhaps for different reasons: the gig descended into a Cockney v. Mancunian row, sides charging at each other during and long after the Sex Pistols' set). Where surprise and shock greeted a few dozen curious and/or clued-in music fans (and probably an equal number of clueless punters) on June 4th, the July 20th gig was an event, a proposition that divided and energized Manchester's youth. Punk as a national movement didn't gel into an unde niable, palpable phenomenon until a month later, in August 1976. The Damned, Nick Lowe, and protopunk pub-rockers Eddie & The Hot Rods all performed at the Mont De Marsan Punk Festival on the 5th, a concert Ian Curtis and his wife Deborah—both teenag ers—journeyed to see three weeks before their first wed ding anniversary. Deborah Curtis details their trip in her memoir Touching From a Distance (required reading for anyone interested in Joy Division's history), but that French festival was eclipsed by what's become the defining event in punk rock's developing year, the Au gust 29th 1976 Screen On The Green gig in Islington, featuring the Clash, Buzzcocks and Sex Pistols. By the time Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook met Ian Curtis at the Pistols' triumphant Electric Circus shows in De cember, those tattered London maniacs had shocked
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all of Manchester on Tony Wilson's So It Goes variety program, and "punk rock" was becoming a fire threaten ing to burn down British society. Simplicity, suspicion and selfishness were implicit in punk rock, and proved its undoing, as the primary play ers descended into stubbornness and absurdity at breakneck speed; around them, bands jumped on the spiked leather bandwagon, using this new freedom as an excuse to exploit, smashing at their instruments in a self-absorbed bid for fame, money and girls. The band that became Joy Division grew disinterested in such uncreative chaos and aggression; whatever fame they strove for would be justified in their music. Sumner and Hook had been practicing together for a few months, Bernard having fashioned a makeshift amplifier out of his grandmother's phonograph. Curtis joined their nascent "band" as singer after their Decem ber 1976 meeting, but they wouldn't find a proper drummer or even settle on a name until the day of their first show, a full six months later. The potential early moniker Stiff Kittens has perhaps been taken too seriously over the years by fans and critics, thanks in large part to joking references from Factory Records and the band itself. As the story goes, a woman living above the Buzzcocks supposedly shouted "This room's full of stiff kittens!" after her cat delivered a lifeless brood; front-man Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks'
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manager Richard Boon found it hilarious, and swore they'd use it, offering it to Ian Curtis, who had been poking around the studio during the December 28th sessions for their learning Spiral Scratch EP. Curtis didn't even have a band yet, so it's entirely possible the whole thing was a joke Boon and/or Shelley were playing, a way of—as the British say—taking the piss out of their young friend. Peter Hook recalls their debt: "We had a meeting with Pete Shelley in a pub in Broughton to ask him how we should form a band. And he told us." The fledgling group, with untrained friend Tony Tabac on drums, were billed as Stiff Kittens by Boon in advance of their support slot for the Buzzcocks' May 29th 1977 Electric Circus gig. The day of the gig, the group indignantly demanded Boon change the marquee, disgusted with such an unserious name that, more im portantly, wasn't their own creation. They had already decided to take the name Warsaw, which at the very least "wasn't 'the' somebody," as Bernard later put it. Mancunian musician, critic, author and journalist Paul Morley was a fervent listener and passionate con sumer of all things pop in his youth, and wrote an evenhanded (if not generous) critique of Warsaw's first gig for Britain's premiere rock weekly, the New Musical Express. Already hugely involved in the Manchester mu sic scene—he'd been running his own fanzine and had
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played with a few wanting punk acts like the gimmicky Negatives (before forming the commercially and cre atively triumphant Art of Noise in 1982)—Morley's en couraging, step-by-step dissection of Warsaw would help the band move beyond their limited beginnings. He had yet to succumb to the band and singer he would become inextricably linked with over the years, but when compared with other reviews of the gig, comments of Morley's like "There's an elusive spark of dissimilarity from the newer bands that suggests they've plenty to play around with" are positively beaming. As can be expected, reaction from mainstream writers was less forgiving, and far outweighed Morley's curiosity. Ian Wood's bitterly dismissive article in Sounds has been quoted most often, referring to Bernard as a "refugee from a public school" and noting that Curtis had "no impact." In fact, the only compliment he paid the group was a nod to Peter Hook's leather biker cap. Ian Curtis would come to intimidate audiences with his frantic, burning stage presence, but his understand able early insecurity and Warsaw's Nazi-era outfits— leather pants and 1940s moustaches—are embarrassing in retrospect. Friend and initial drummer Tony Tabac was at odds with these poses and left in late June, in stantly replaced by Steve Brotherdale, who improved the band's power hugely, though his punk whirlwind style limited their dynamic.
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Warsaw played repeatedly at two Manchester pubs throughout June of 1977: Rafters, and The Squat, a dilapidated University hovel located on Devas St. off Oxford road (today, Devas St. is little more than a drive way leading to the Contact Theatre and its Deluxe Bar). The band's evolution from naive, politically bent punk was rapid: of their earliest material, "Failures"—which originally included the parenthetic appendix "(of the Modern Man)"—is the band's most egregious musical debt, a dead ringer for the first-ever punk single, "New Rose" by the Damned. Still, a focused, barreling energy makes up for the similarity, in contrast with most of the other, comparatively rote Warsaw tracks from this era. The almost hardcore stomp "At a Later Date" is the only memorable song from their first batch, and wound up being their first released recording. Like all of Warsaw's early tracks, the first studio recording of "At a Later Date" is widely available on a suspect but somehow ubiquitous compact disc, featuring a baby's face on the cover. The Portuguese record label Movie Play Gold has been steadily repressing a Warsaw CD since 1994. Though the sub-amateur artwork runs contrary to Fac tory Records' design legacy, the recording information and track list are entirely accurate, down to the inclusion of Steve Brotherdale, who was ejected from the group right after their first sessions. By all accounts this is
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a bootleg, exploiting loosely defined European rights: Zomba took charge of the global rights to Joy Division's catalog once they signed to Factory, but these no-fidelity demo tracks were never retroactively absorbed into their holdings. It's not known whether they were sold to Intermusic SA before Zomba knew of them, but cer tainly, the members of Joy Division would not have released such incongruous material, and even Factory Records—who've released a fair share of questionable post-mortem "archives" from their roster—would have to concede these tracks are commercially unmarketable, even as history. For Joy Division's most dedicated fans, however, Warsaw is an invaluable document, combining the two unreleased sessions recorded under that name: the May 1978 demos for RCA—which we'll come to shortly—and their first session, five songs they produced themselves on July 18th 1977 at Pennine Sound Studios in Oldham. Warsaw Demos Recorded July 18 1977 at Pennine Sound Studios, Oldham. Self-produced. [Never officially re leased. Available on the Movie Play Gold compact disc Warsaw] At a Later Date Gutz 10
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Inside the Line The Kill You're No Good For Me
The performances here are totally amateurish. Bernard Sumner's guitar tracks benefit from distortion, masking his inaccurate playing, but Peter Hook's bass work is sloppy and behind the beat, sounding as though it was recorded direct to tape from his amp. Though these technical failings can be blamed on an urgency born of financial limitations, no manner of sonic finesse could help Hook's playing at this stage—he'd yet to develop the high-fret style he's now known for, and his clumsy low-end lines on this demo are a muddy mess. Critiqu ing these run-throughs is needlessly severe: the session lasted just half a day, and was only intended to help the nascent group get gigs. Each member walked out with his own cassette copy, and no one's sure what happened to the badly damaged master reels they recorded on. Deborah Curtis is sure the Warsaw bootleg is taken from a cassette copy, not the masters, and in all likeli hood she's right: a no-name band in Warsaw's financial situation was probably relegated to loaning out fre quently recycled "economy" reels at the studio, and these could have been recorded over within days. For their marginal empirical worth, these songs document 11
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the heavy metal sound Warsaw began with, and though they were all shelved—indefinitely—within a few months, they point toward two of Joy Division's most powerful songs, "Shadowplay" and "Dead Souls". "Gutz" was originally intended as the band's showstarting anthem, Curtis screaming "Warsaw!!" at the top of his lungs, calling the band to action for one of their most thuggish Motorhead/Sex Pistols hybrids. The lyrics are a grotesque, sexist hodgepodge of con demnation, savaging everyone from female pub-goers to his wife as controlling maternal figures and "chic tarts." Curtis's ego and arrogance comes to bear in lines like, "Blame bad things on me/ Whatever you do/ When I come home/ My world is different from you." You hope that a measure of third-person imagination is at work here, but—as detailed in Touching From a Dis tance—Curtis's teenage marriage proved to be a frequent source of tension and hostility, though by Deborah's account this was his doing. A dramatist to the last, Curtis often espoused a dour home life when out with his mates, somewhat cruelly objectifying his unknowing young wife as the embodiment of stations he considered beneath him: the domestic role-playing of marriage and an unremarkable working class life. Vague and paranoiac, "The Kill" is only notable for its heavily staged and pub-baiting chorus: "It's a-nother, 'nother, 'nother, 'nother kill!" The song would be re12
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worked to an unrecognizable degree with all new lyrics, and though it audibly evolved from its earlier namesake, the April 1979 Strawberry Studios recording of "The Kill" could have been called anything. Hardly a success even when revamped, that second version of "The Kill" wasn't released until the posthumous Still double-LP of August 1981. The direst moment in Warsaw's formative catalog is unquestionably the head-bobbing pub metal dud "Inside the Line", featuring macho Oi chants of "Hey! You!" after each verse. It's a level of standard rock riffing difficult to reconcile for anyone familiar with the band's brilliant later work, but it's also the strongest evidence of just how dramatically Joy Division would change over the next year. Warsaw had spent the better part of six months working up a set of by-the-numbers punk material for their demo, but soon after laying down their learning tracks, the band became fed up with the genre's stifling boundaries, and the increasing fraternity of other bands out to enjoy status more than music. Having played to a few relatively large pub audiences, they met with more experienced musicians and fans, and started concentrat ing on new sounds rather than the rock and roll cliches someone like their drummer was out to enjoy. Immedi ately after recording the Warsaw demo, Steve Brotherdale joined a second local band, The Panik, today 13
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notable only for their manager: local DJ Rob Gretton. Brotherdale attempted to lure Ian Curtis away from Warsaw during August of 1977, having him sing along to The Panik's single, but unsurprisingly, baritone vo cals didn't work over post-pub rock. Soon after, Broth erdale was quite literally ditched by Warsaw, when they asked him to check on an ostensibly flat tire. A glam rock hangover, a braggart and namedropper who re galed pub-goers with tall tales of life on the road in America—claiming he'd opened for Kiss—Brotherdale never fit in with Warsaw, and once he'd tried to steal Ian Curtis away, his boorish behavior wasn't so easily laughed off. Still, his acquaintance with Rob Gretton was an inroad for a band with few connections, and though Warsaw weren't in a position to take on manage ment in 1977, they were making a name for themselves in the tiny Manchester scene. For most of the summer and fall of 1977, Curtis holed up in a triangular room of his and Deborah's Macclesfield apartment, which he'd painted sky blue. He smoked Marlboro Reds and wrote constantly. His lyrics began to move toward more nostalgic, linear storytelling, but, passionate as they were, his ideas were still born of a naive, black and white view of the world: his condemnations, reproaches and preaching are shal low and obvious. Barely into his twenties, however, his melodrama is forgivable: artistic divinity was unspoiled 14
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in the heart of this record collector, and his first flights were buoyed in equal part by adoration of his heroes' egomaniacal conviction, a desire to attain their success, and the fear he'd fail in this mission. Curtis had the brio and drive to impress people whose wisdom he envied. Never obsequious or fawning, he shot his mouth off and stuck to his guns, and if his opinions were occasionally too brash—or flatly wrong— his directness, earnestness and fervor always intrigued his elders, even if it meant laughing him off. Demanding to be heard, refusing to accept that anyone else should be talked about when he was obviously more talented, Curtis accosted or offended a number of musicians as Warsaw climbed the stunted ladder of Manchester's late-70s music scene. "I just thought he was a pretty sort of intelligent, happy, funny guy," recalled Bernard Sumner. "He wasn't depressive at all; he could get on a soapbox about things though, if you got him on the right subject. He'd go off and he'd rant and he'd be like—dare say it?—Hitler making a speech. That was the only thing, you had to be careful not to light his fuse." Recalling an occasion when he approached Gus Gan grene of bland Mancunian also-rans The Drones (an act initially backed—and produced—by Paul Morley), Curtis summarized his overzealous campaigning: "I thought I would easily be able to ingratiate myself. I 15
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mean, I was very naive ... I didn't know whether that particular band was really any good or not, but they were up there, onstage, doing it. I was really in awe of that." By all accounts, Curtis wanted to make his mark, but he was a know-it-all who knew very little by the standards of many chic contemporaries. Insecure about any possible ignorance, he read constantly—heavy phil osophical and literary works sure to lend severe opin ions—and listened to the most challenging sounds coming out of the hyperactive late-70s underground. Throbbing Gristle formed in London at the start of the 1976 punk explosion, but they've been compara tively overlooked in the wake of the Sex Pistols' more accessible tunes and media-friendly daring. Essentially responsible for Industrial music as it came to be known—and it wasn't so much music at that point as grating, overpowering noise—Throbbing Gristle incor porated prostitutes, pornography and images of the ho locaust in a detached all-is-art debacle. Celebrated by the "Bromley contingent" (who would go on to form Siouxsie & The Banshees and Generation X), Throbbing Gristle released their debut LP Second An nual Report in the wake of a politically decried October 18th 1976 concert at the ICA in London, featuring all manner of "unseemly" imagery. The troupe broke moral and artistic rather than political or social boundaries; they were barely real, impossible to figure, and were 16
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often dismissed as mere shock art by confounded, clo seted observers. (To be fair, they were more simply considered "shit" by an equal number of disinterested witnesses.) The Sex Pistols tapped into the understood image of a rock and roll band—guitar, bass, drums, superstar lead singer—which excited Ian Curtis (and the rest of Britain's youth) immensely, but as he explored music further, Curtis became deeply fascinated by the button-pushing bravado of Throbbing Gristle's inarguably vile, controversial imagery. Warsaw's early flyers owe much to Throbbing Gristle's stylized postwar nihilism. Diving headlong into shock art and frequently don ning a wartime trench coat, Curtis penned the overt "Novelty", which trumpets the band's shift in focus: "Can't rest on your laurels now/ Not when you've got none/ You'll find yourself in a gutter/ Right back where you came from." The next verse begins too honestly: "Someone told me being in the know is the main thing." Curtis is pushing himself to contend with the present, to confront his fears, but the verse quoted here resonates even more personally with regard to Joy Division's guitarist. The street where Bernard Sumner was raised in "old" Salford (Lower Broughton) had been collapsing in on itself for years, engulfed by a huge chemical plant and littered with its waste. Yet amid the environmental squa17
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lor, he enjoyed "a strong sense of community" that was eventually demolished along with the neighborhood: his family was moved to a tower block, like so many during the depressed 1970s. Around the time Joy Divi sion were getting together, he was already stuffing enve lopes, wasting away his teenage life for a meager paycheck. Perhaps even more than Ian Curtis, Sumner had a real insight into the bleak possibilities that lay ahead, and the dashed happiness of his adolescence proved a powerful motivator. Aside from acknowledging his mutable surname—Sumner has steadfastly refused to comment on this formative hobby beyond citing "per sonal reasons"—"Barney" (as he's known to familiars and cloying journalists) is foggy on Joy Division's ori gins. He often refuses to acknowledge that Joy Division were ever known as Warsaw, which is perhaps the strangest contradiction in any account of the band's past. Flyers, master reels and his other band members have all been quoted—even in interviews dating from the 70s—referring to the group as Warsaw, until their late 1977 name change. Sumner was posing with the Teutonic stage name "Albrecht" during the Warsaw and early Joy Division eras; it "sounded German," which meant it sounded intimidating to late-70s England, but it was altogether harmless: he had worked in an office with a printing machine named for Albrecht Pfister,
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the Bavarian who produced the very first illustrated book, Edelstein. Warsaw found new and instantly permanent drum mer Stephen Morris through adverts in August 1977, just weeks after kicking out Steve Brotherdale. With his famously recounted inspiration to "be a drum machine," Morris would prove a catalyst for the band's maturation. Unlike most drummers, Morris was quiet between songs during rehearsals, which meant the band could hear what they were playing, not to mention what they were thinking. Morris had a wicked sense of humor, and had attended the same school as Ian Curtis (he was a year or two Ian's junior). Curtis remembered him as part of a group of troublemakers briefly suspended for drinking cough syrup—an activity he could readily identify with, as Curtis too had a history of teenage experimentation. This culminated in a stomach-pumping overdose of chlorpromazine hydrochloride, or Largactil. Phenothiazines like Largactil—including the more recognizable American drug Thorazine—are used to treat extreme emotional disorders such as schizophrenia, and even at prescribed doses can cause seizures and facial ticks. It's tempting to link this to Curtis's later bouts of crippling epilepsy, but in Touching From a Distance, his wife Debo rah recalls a few minor incidents that would indicate Ian had low-grade, undiagnosed epilepsy since his early
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teens (out of body sensations, and one specific collapse in 1972 after a concert featuring a strobe light). The solidified lineup of Curtis, Sumner, Hook and Morris played some early dates—most notably on Au gust 27th at Eric's in Liverpool, their first concert out side Manchester—but these were really warm up gigs: Warsaw's new intentions were officially announced dur ing the closing weekend of Manchester's most im portant punk-era nightclub, the Electric Circus. On the evenings of October 1st and 2nd 1977, just about every band in Manchester played a set at this weekend-long farewell to the Circus, an event recorded for posterity and released on Richard Branson's Virgin imprint. Only a select handful (including The Fall and The Drones) made it onto Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus, a 10" compilation of these performances released long after the fact. Warsaw were supposed to play on the first night, but they were bumped at the last minute, as the gig was overbooked. Their version of "At a Later Date" from October 2nd benefits from the tension and frustration of this delay, and as a stand-alone track nicely sums up the band's formative "punk" year. Sumner (as Albrecht) famously bellows, "You all forget Rudolf Hess!" at the beginning of the track, in reference to the enfeebled Nazi war criminal then languishing without proper medical attention in a Spandau prison following a massive heart attack. Sumner's intention was to chide 20
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people, to remind postwar Europe and England of their cruel treatment of Hess as a scapegoat, a lazy pat on the back assuring them that at least one man was paying for the crimes of his peers. But Sumner's political jab was misconstrued as sympathy, when—thanks to de lays—Short Circuit wasn't released until eight months later, hitting the shelves in June 1978 just as the band were mailing out their controversially sheathed debut EP, An Ideal for Living. In November 1977, a shaggy, fame-hungry band of London rockers calling themselves Warsaw Pakt flooded shops and posted bills with their gimmick LP Needle Time. With the considerable financial support of Island Records, the album was recorded, mastered, produced, packaged and distributed in one day, from 10 p.m. on Saturday, November 26th to 7 p.m. on Sunday. Thanks to advertising saturation, it sold over 5000 copies in its first week of release, but in a blatant display of Island's intent to set a Guinness Book World Record, Warsaw Pakt were unceremoniously dropped a week later. Guitarist Andy Colquhoun remembers, "We were warned it was all experimental. They treated us well, but they didn't hear us. It was a bit like being a contestant on a game show." In the wake of this fiasco, Warsaw—already debating new directions—changed their name to Joy Division. It was an appalling choice given the term's definition, 21
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and it's only thanks to the strength of their later work that the band's use of Nazi imagery can be forgiven. To many people, the new name implied that Warsaw could only have referred to the European capital where Polish Jews were massacred after rising up against their tormentors. It's an unfortunate coincidence, as the band always said they got the name from "Warszawa", an atmospheric instrumental track off of David Bowie's critically adored 1977 album Low. (Erroneous release date information has led a few recent authors to specu late that this story is a cover-up, but Low was available from January 14th 1977, well before Warsaw took their name.) The phrase Joy Division—as well as a spoken word passage Ian Curtis recites during "No Love Lost"— comes from Yehiel Dinur's House of Dolls, a deeply dis turbing account of the buildings where subjectively selected, "racially pure" women were held near concen tration camps and military outposts, and abused un speakably at the command's leisure (the racial qualification was of course a complete fiction: many Jewish women were held in the same sort of barracks). While the band may have felt they were empathizing with, or calling attention to perhaps the greatest atrocity the Nazis committed, the name Joy Division referred to an aberration so offensive, it probably shouldn't have
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been associated with something so slight as pop music. Such is the conviction and intensity of youth. Bernard Sumner: "There was a bomb shelter in our backyard. There were underground shelters at the end of our street where we used to play. All the films on TV when we were kids were about the war. So when you grew up and understood what had gone on, you were naturally pretty interested in it. It was unfashionable to talk about it—you had to drop the subject—but I didn't think it should have been dropped and I think that was where our interest came from. It had been a decade before we were born—not that long ago." In David Nolan's / Swear I Was There, Peter Hook is a bit less revisionist in his nostalgia: "Me and Bernard used to go buy Scout shirts and paint swastikas on them and put SS badges on and all that crap. God, you wouldn't be allowed anywhere near it now!" In 1977, Ian Curtis was firing stern political salvos at the tall shadows of WWII. He preached damnation for the nation's head-in-the-sand retreat into mod cons, and a postwar conservatism that proved to be England's downfall. The first proper Joy Division release, a seveninch EP called An Ideal for Living, was designed to offend these ostriches: emblazoned with a Nazi-era Germanic font and extraneous umlauts over the vowels of their instruments (e.g. Peter Hook: Bass), its cover image of
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an Aryan Youth drummer boy was taken from a vintage propaganda poster. Designed by Bernard Sumner/"Al brecht", the interior foldout featured a grainy, black and white photograph of a Nazi foot soldier pointing his automatic rifle at a small Jewish child whose hands are raised in surrender. While hardly as grotesque as anything Throbbing Gristle purported, this morose, grieving invocation of the holocaust was hard to distin guish from the twisted crosses worn by Sid Vicious and the Pistols' shock troops. Nazi imagery was already falling out of favor within the punk community as a racist National Front began marching in the streets of England's major cities, but Joy Division's early dares were only intended to raise eyebrows. Without becoming an apologist for their boy ish viciousness, it's easy to see these romantic, dramatic young men were—like the original punks who co-opted the more blatant swastika—concerned with the forbid den aspect of Nazi Germany, the terrible specter of the fascist engine that threatened to lay waste to their homeland. These poses offered the press a bleeding cutlet, but the band weren't prepared with a concise explanation, and came out the worse for it in interviews. Of course, they sheepishly blamed this on the "idiots in the press," which only made writers more eager to rip them to shreds. Reviewers condemned Joy Division's careless, blatant employment of Nazi memes. It's one 24
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thing if your entire aim is to shock, but Joy Division's relatively straightforward music was hardly so theoreti cal or conceptual as to suggest heady academic subtext. To critics, their looks and layouts reeked of affectation, a juvenile misappropriation of something they could never understand well enough to trumpet as inspiration. An Ideal For Living was financed by a faked £400 furniture loan Ian Curtis divined from his and Deborah's bank manager. Everyone concerned—including Ian's wife—helped assemble the sleeves in their Macclesfield home, but the boxy, dry sound on this initial, self-pro duced run of 1000 7" EPs was a crushing defeat for the band. In October 1978, when the first printing was almost sold out, the band remastered and repressed the EP on 12", in part prompted by the discovery that the name they'd chosen for their first "record label"— Enigma—was in use by a legitimate American imprint (bands were long in the habit of inventing phony record companies to stamp on their self-released material in order to lend a more professional look). Once the tracks were remastered properly, the band were elated to find that clear, if not excellent sound was buried beneath the botched, muddy mastering that dulled the original 7". An Ideal For Living Recorded December 1977 at Pennine Sound Stu dios, Oldham. Self-produced. [7" vinyl pressed 25
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January 1978, released in June 1978. Remastered 12" reissued in October 1978. Included in full on both the 1988 Substance compilation and 1997 Heart and Soul anthology.] Warsaw No Love Lost Leaders of Men Failures (of the Modern Man)
The brief "Warsaw" serves as nominal recognition of their recent past, and along with "Failures" marks the best and last straight punk tracks the band would record. "3-5-0-1-2-5 Go!" Curtis shouts, using a concentration camp identification number as a morbid alternative to "1-2-3-4!" House of Dolls—the novel that inspired so much of Ian's reproach at this time—was based on the diary of a captive Jewish woman, and written under novelist and holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur's "Kazetnik" or "inmate" number, 135633; Curtis got the num ber used in "Warsaw" from elsewhere in the book. As with all the tracks on An Ideal For Living, "Warsaw" is still lyrically bound to simple observations—accusations of external falsity, declarations of internal integrity—but it's melodically much darker than initial tracks like "At a Later Date" or "The Kill", thanks to the Sabbath-style 26
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heavy metal riffs that informed Joy Division's evolving sound. For whatever relative inequity the song weathers alongside their later catalog, the bleak and contemptu ous energy of "Warsaw" is more exciting than most of the pedestrian and topically poppy punk tracks other acts were peddling in 1978. Its pulsing tempo points toward "Digital", the first song they'd record for Factory Records and the definitive bridge between Joy Divi sion's punk roots and a more captivating future. "Leaders of Men" is less appealing, and is certainly the weakest of these four tracks, bogged down by fatuous couplets typical of Curtis's earliest lyrics: "When you walk down the street/ And the sound's not so sweet/ And you wish you could hide/ Maybe go for a ride." It does offer his most powerful, tonally accurate singing to this point, during the much better last verse. The a typically open major guitar chords in the chorus sound something like a younger, ascendant London band, The Cure (whose records Rob Gretton refused to play while DJ-ing at The Squat: see Tony Wilson's excellent 24 Hour Party People for fond remembrance of his stub bornness). Joy Division would go on to open for The Cure a handful of times over the coming months, and had an immeasurable influence on Robert Smith. The second track on An Ideal For Living is really the beginning of Joy Division proper. As much they came to be known for funereal dirges and morbid, despondent 27
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anthems, the swerving, almost funk tempo of "No Love Lost" is a perfect example of how their more driving post-punk songs snapped tightly on the beat. Much of this is due to Stephen Morris's precise drumming: unlike planted players, Morris's entire frame drove into each beat, casting off pints of sweat and striking from the elbow with remarkable power from such a rail thin physique. Sounding something like Wire, but not as strictly bound to the blues scales of Pink Flag, the song's introductory measures also point up another frequent comparison leveled against Joy Division: their similarity to The Doors, in this case, "Riders on The Storm". In a September 1979 interview recently made available as an appendix to The Complete BBC Recordings, Stephen Morris laughs off the comparison—or at least the notion that it should be damning—revealing that "Barney an' Hooky ain't even 'eard The Doors!" While there's no reason to doubt this, it's undeniable that Ian Curtis was hugely influenced by Jim Morrison's stage presence, and loved The Doors' music. Moreover, Peter Hook has since admitted that the band covered "Riders on The Storm" in rehearsals, though in their inexperience it never sounded anything like the original. Disregarding minutiae where influence is concerned, "No Love Lost" deals most directly with Ian's holocaust obsession with its passage from House of Dolls, but his bookend lyrics—like most from this period of work—are 28
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about impatience, expectation and disappointment, con demning: "You've been seeing things in darkness not in learning/ Hoping that the truth will pass." There's a specifically fascinating moment of pentameter imme diately following this line, when Curtis sings "No life underground/ Wasting never changing/ Wishing that this day won't last." The first three words are delivered with such darting, barked breath as to highlight the funk rhythm underlying Bernard's triplet guitar accent, mixed hard left. It's also the first moment of real sonic exploration, with double-delay on Curtis's vocals and Bernard's harmonic slide down the strings. Joy Division had taken their punk phase to its limits, and "No Love Lost" is the first hint of where they'd take things in the coming months. By this time, the political nerve was already being pinched down in London. The band were, for the most part, unaware of the company with which they were being compared, and wisely opted to abandon such dis tractions in favor of perfecting their monolithic deconstruction of rock and roll. As they retreated into bleak, amorphous anonymity, Curtis began to focus on more philosophical, expressive lyrics. The more the band ap peared to succeed—the more positive press and popular ity they garnered—the more seriously Curtis took himself and his work.
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Chapter 2. The Illusion Vanishes
To the considerable frustration of Manchester's Manpower Services Commission, Ian Curtis often missed work. As it happened, his absenteeism worked to his advantage, when the record store owners he'd been skipping shifts to pump for Iggy Pop posters called with a proposition for his struggling band. The events surrounding Joy Division's brief flirta tion with RCA Records have been inaccurately reported from the beginning, perhaps in an attempt to gloss over the disastrous pairing, an utter embarrassment for everyone involved. UK music industry fixture and latterday Lisa Stansfield manager Derek Brandwood was run ning a northern RCA promo office in Piccadilly Plaza in the late 70s, and often entertained Curtis on his 31
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illegitimate days off, in all likelihood humoring the slightly skewed up-and-comer (at least initially). In early 1978, Curtis had given him a pre-release copy of the Ideal For Living EP, which although far too rough to really excite Brandwood, put Joy Division in his line of sight. Soon after, Brandwood's chief employee, north ern soul DJ Richard Searling, brought him a strange but probably lucrative offer from his friend John Anderson. Anderson had just started a new soul label called Grape vine with Bernie Binnick, the owner of a classic Ameri can rock and roll imprint, Swan (a label with many claims to fame, foremost among them the U.S. distribu tion of The Beatles' first single "She Loves You"). Binnick was quixotically looking to break a British New Wave band in America via a cover of Richard Flowers's "Keep On Keepin' On", most famously recorded by N.F. Porter. Brandwood thought Joy Division, with their singer's deep voice, was the best option in his region, and put Anderson and Searling together with Ian Curtis. Curtis ignored the overtly Mephistophelian intent behind their offer, and though Peter Hook thought it ridiculous, RCA was the home of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and David Bowie. Joy Division could hardly refuse the chance to join such ranks, and all but blindly leapt at the opportunity to record on someone else's tab, at Manchester's most professional 24-track studio, no less. 32
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With a £1500 initial investment divided equally between Anderson, Searling and Brandwood himself, Joy Divi sion began preparing for a weeklong session at Arrow Studios with Searling set to produce. While rehearsing and writing in late March and April 1978, Joy Division grew closer as a unit, enjoying the absurdity of their task and mutilating the N.F. Porter single they were given. For their playful attitude, they did come up with "Interzone" using some key progres sions from "Keep On Keepin' On". But it was an April 14th concert performance that became the turning point in Joy Division's career, where they would demonstrate their intense onstage presence for the two most im portant figures in their future. Still promoting the Ideal For Living EP, they were frantic for a break at the Stiff/ Chiswick Challenge, a Manchester battle of the bands orchestrated by those two up-and-coming London re cord labels, held at Warsaw's old stomping ground, Rafter's. In the name of equity, the bill was determined through a hat drawing, and almost predictably, Joy Divi sion pulled the last, or "headlining" slot. Headlining in this case, though, was a disaster, since—if the band even got to play at all—it would be so late by the time they went on that the significant audience members (label personnel, photographers and reviewers) would either be exhausted or long gone. Throughout the night, Joy Division threatened the other bands and complaineq1 33
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bitterly, accosting Paul Morley, Richard Boon and who ever else they could corner. Ian Curtis even sat down next to Tony Wilson and called him a "cunt" and "bas tard" for not having put Joy Division on his short-lived TV program So It Goes. Curtis and company finally made it onstage just before 2 a.m., and as might be expected after this long night of anxious paranoia, their performance was furiously over the top. Curtis behaved as if touched—he didn't have a seizure—and although they only managed a few songs in the brief time they had left (the club was closed down around 2:30), they had unknowingly accomplished as much that night as in the entire year prior to it. It turned out that Tony Wilson and Rob Gretton had, for the most part, attended the Stiff/Chiswick Chal lenge to evaluate Joy Division as a potential investment. Thoroughly taken with their live set, Gretton became their manager only weeks later, as the group labored through sessions for RCA. Tony Wilson also took them under his wing, inviting them to headline the opening of his Factory night at the Russell Club in June. In September, when he had the opportunity to book local talent for the Granada Reports segment What's On, he remembered Ian Curtis's foul-mouthed request and brought them on. As is the case with every great band, the moment Joy Division perceived a sympathetic audi ence and potential backers, their previously untapped 34
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creativity exploded—fostering a unity, hope and belief that produced three of their best songs in a matter of weeks: "She's Lost Control", "Transmission" and "Shadowplay" dated everything they'd recorded to that point. On May 1st, Joy Division entered Arrow Studios with John Anderson and the vastly experienced producer Bob Auger overseeing Richard Searling. The sessions were produced directly for Derek Brandwood. Amid these seasoned, occasionally slick industry types, Sear ling can be excused as the overexcited, hopeful agitator, eager to make his name on a band that, by mid-1978, was one of very few plausible investments in Manches ter. (The Buzzcocks had signed to United Artists back in November of '77, and The Fall were, to put it kindly, unmarketable in their spitting, abstract obtuseness.) After a few tentative days of vocal treatments and plan ning with Bob Auger at the boards, Joy Division hit a major wall with John Anderson, who had come to dominate the younger Searling and had the final say over Auger's mix. Anderson didn't take the group seriously at all, and in fact felt they weren't technically capable of recording a proper album. He'd thought about getting session men in to correct their still audible imprecision, and of course, the band was livid at the idea of this. When Anderson suggested putting synthesizers over the tracks to lend them a more polished sound, Joy 35
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Division exploded in a litany of expletives and umbrage, and—in a moment of massive retrospective irony— lambasted the use of synths as a demeaning manipula tion of their raw sound. Searling called in Derek Brandwood to negotiate the stalemate, whereupon the band pointed a finger at Anderson, moaning, "He can't produce shit!" The older, wiser (and admittedly commercial-minded) Anderson calmly explained the dilemma to Brandwood: "They just can't play." His dismissive treatment of Joy Division betrays a staid expectation of airtight, virtuosic material aimed at the radio, but in his defense the group were stifled by the unfamiliar, imposing situation, and sounded tentative working outside the comfortable, selfdetermined world of their rehearsal room. A band's first time in a professional recording studio is usually exciting and often revelatory, but beyond their bad case of nerves and mistrust, Joy Division—especially Curtis—had set themselves very high standards, consid ering their inexperience. Their dream of turning out the next Low or Heroes was pitted against a rush job: although they recorded an album's worth of material, the RCA underlings were only interested in getting a saleable version of "Keep On Keepin' On" for Bernie Binnick. Aside from two promising brand new songs, Joy Division were still running through the same set of Black Sabbath punk they'd been playing as Warsaw. 36
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From the sound of these tapes, or at least the mixes that have survived to bootleg, Auger made no effort to embolden the group's sound with heavy panning or multitracking. Apart from slight reverb, the tracks are as unexceptionally dry as those on An Ideal For Living. John Anderson only ended up tainting two tracks with post-production synthesizer before the sessions col lapsed, inserting Genesis-caliber blips into "No Love Lost" and a nascent, sluggish version of "Transmission" with the subtlety of a blunt axe. The three best tracks from the session were included on the 1997 retrospec tive box set Heart and Soul, but in light of the later versions the band would polish with Martin Hannett, these only serve as honest evidence of this acrimoniously aborted disaster. RCA Demo Session Recorded May 1-5 1978 at Arrow Studios, Man chester. Produced by John Anderson, Bob Auger and Richard Searling. ["The Drawback", "Interzone" and "Shadowplay" were released as part of the 1997 Heart and Soul anthology. The entire session is available on the 1994 Movie Play Gold compact disc Warsaw.] The Drawback Leaders of Men 37
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Walked in Line Failures Novelty No Love Lost Transmission Ice Age Interzone Warsaw Shadowplay
Of the songs they hadn't previously recorded, "Ice Age" is a notable standout, and was a concert favorite in 1978. It's one of the earliest tracks to illustrate how Stephen Morris's jittery tempos and preference for torn rhythms turned the band's basic progressions into more beat-driven, undulating dirges. His stuttering but totally accurate command of the kit was a huge component of the evolving Joy Division sound, and helped tighten up Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook's playing con siderably. The brief "Interzone"—written around the basic melody of the N.F. Porter tune they were hired by RCA to cover—is one of the best punk tracks Joy Division ever recorded, and survived to make the cut for Unknown Pleasures just under a year later. In the final Unknown Pleasures version—which definitely stands out as simpler 38
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than the rest of the album—Hannett and/or the group would choose to de-emphasize its most curious and energetic component: Ian's choked, rattling yodel. His yelps sound uncannily like the whirring Dies Irae ghosts Stanley Kubrick would use just a year later over the opening shot of The Shining. The actual lyrics—even in the final version—are somewhat rudimentary: it's a frustrated first person account of walking around the decaying city, "looking for some friends of mine," and "trying to find a way to get out." "The Drawback" is one of the band's earliest tunes, very simple in its chugging progression and overreach ing, world-weary lyrics ("I've seen the troubles and the evils of this world/ I've seen the stretches between godli ness and sin"). What's most interesting about the song, beyond Curtis's exceptionally smooth, velvety delivery, is the line, "I've had the promise and confessions of true faith," which looks forward to New Order's hugely successful single of 1987. That single was about young boys growing up together, then succumbing to drug addiction and self-destruction: it was a clear nod to their frantic younger days, a time the band always looked back on, though usually with a greater degree of subtlety than in this case. "They Walked In Line" and "Novelty" were both pounded out as contentious, barking pub-punk tunes at this stage, but were recent compositions, and stuck 39
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around long enough to be fleshed out and reworked during the Unknown Pleasures and "Transmission" ses sions with Martin Hannett in 1979. Those subsequent versions would strip away the anger and preachy cer tainty, hollowing the songs out nicely, but never making them exceptional enough to rise above their status as B-Sides. "Shadowplay" is the finest of Joy Division's metalinfluenced anthems—which makes sense, as it's the last song they wrote in this vein. Sumner's three-note, de scending lead carries the hollowed out passages after each verse as Hook's warbling, low bass line rumbles menacingly in the background. As a fairly straight rock song, it suffered little for these stiff recordings, always communicating the craven, echoing desolation of 1970s Manchester in the dead of night. That Martin Hannett was able to improve the song so hugely for Unknown Pleasures is testament to his unique skills. The real glimpse of change in these RCA sessions is "Transmission", which—although it was written just the week before—was fully realized. Structurally identi cal to its later incarnation (if much slower), it was oblit erated by nonmusical, superfluous synthesizer sounds added only for their chic "production value" by John Anderson. When the band came around to synths and electronic sounds in early 1979, they would redefine their purpose with Martin Hannett's help, layering 40
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tones like strings behind Hannett's already cavernous reverb and digital delay. When Rob Gretton came on board as manager soon after the RCA session, the band began negotiating much better gigs, thanks in large part to Tony Wilson's sup port (he had them headline many of his Factory nights at the Russell Club). But it was Gretton's protective, dedicated managerial zeal that saved Joy Division from falling victim to their exasperated, recognition-starved antics. With an increasing fan base garnered from Man chester-area gigs and Paul Morley's attentive coverage (and indirect tutelage) in the NME, the band were flush with possibility, driven by the notion that what they were doing could matter: artistically, socially, and per haps even economically (who wouldn't prefer wealth as a guilty rather than unknown pleasure?). Rob Gretton allowed them to concentrate on these possibilities. His friendship with local music industry magnate TJ David son paid off when Joy Division were able to secure the top floor of his imposing new rehearsal warehouse, capped by cathedral roofing and shot through with mas sive lead windows. This enormous, elongated penthouse of warped wood, brick and hazy light was the perfect—the abso lutely ideal—location for Joy Division to nurture their increasingly potent songwriting gift. The band's mount ing creativity and originality translated into increased 41
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isolation from their comparatively basic peers; they re treated, resolute, from the cold shoulders of their neigh bors at TJ Davidson's space, and pressed on. As they enjoyed a summer of practicing and mucking around as a very real force on the shrinking Manchester scene, their manager voraciously fended off RCA with outra geous demands, requesting an unheard of, unrealistic advance—between £10-15,000—and a stratospheric 15% royalty rate. With or without Gretton's grand standing (which was actually effective in staving off Richard Searling), the pitiful 3.5% publishing contract RCA had offered Joy Division in the midst of the Arrow sessions was carelessly backdated from May 3rd to 1st, when recording began, and was therefore illegal. Addi tional minutiae in the contract—based on American legal standards—worked in contrast to British copyright law. Gretton had a solicitor friend detail these actionable items in a letter to John Anderson, and Derek Brandwood soon conceded the situation was untenable. Though Searling had hoped to make the band his suc cess story, the embittered disappointment with the RCA sessions left a bilious taste in Joy Division's collective mouth, and Gretton constantly pressed on RCA to final ize their situation. Though they didn't physically hand the check over until January of 1979, by the latter half of 1978 Joy Division were legally free of RCA, and had agreed to repay the initial £1500 investment of Searling, 42
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Anderson and Brandwood. The band's calamitous dalli ance with the majors set them up for a wonderful fall: they were easily wooed by the bombastic, philosophi cally saturated advances of their most recent and capti vating convert, Anthony Wilson. After a brief flirtation as the A&R man for Eric's Records—a label run by Roger Eagle, owner of Eric's in Liverpool—Tony Wilson decided to partner with Alan Erasmus and take their Factory from the club on to vinyl. Relatively wealthy after a £12,000 inheritance from his mother's passing, Wilson looked to launch Factory Records with just under half that figure. Alan Erasmus would act as conductor, officiator, and cop, while Peter Saville—a Manchester Polytechnic student who'd designed the poster for Factory's first night at the Russell Club—was given a shot as the imprint's art director. Wilson gave Joy Division a chance of exposure on Granada's Whafs On segment, for which the band re corded a sedate, slightly bored, slightly nervous rendi tion of "Shadowplay" on September 20th. Static, negative footage of monotonous highway traffic and industrial cityscapes played behind them on blue screen. The group were aghast: the utterly pedestrian subject matter of these World In Action documentary reels re minded them of the "production value" synthesizers with which John Anderson had ruined their RCA ses43
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sion. Sure, Joy Division had just performed on televi sion, but they were soon to reissue An Ideal For Living and were concerned about the impact these cheap effects might have on their image. Forgiving the technical limi tations of late 70s British television, the imagery isn't totally incongruous with the band's most overtly indus trial track, and though the performance is subdued, it survives as a glimpse of Curtis in a more controlled mode, quietly snapping his fingers and shuffling his feet. Preparations were soon underway for A Factory Sam ple, an impractical double-7" EP to debut Wilson and company's new label. It would feature two tracks each from Joy Division, Vini Reilly's effects-driven guitar outfit the Durutti Column, industrial/electronic innova tors Cabaret Voltaire, and, oddly enough, Mancunian comedian John Dowie, "England's answer to Lenny Bruce." Dowie was a friend of Wilson's from Granada TV who enjoyed minor celebrity in the 1980s (and returned in 2001 with a popular monologue called Jesus, My Boy)—but, we can safely say that original copies of A Factory Sample don't fetch hundreds of pounds because of Dowie's brief shtick "Hitler's Liver". Having persuaded Martin Hannett to split time be tween Factory and his own imprint—the quickly fading Rabid Records—Wilson finally had a producer on the Factory board, and—more significantly, as it turned out—on the Factory books. An infamously impractical 44
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visionary, Hannett defined the notion of a creative rather than reflective producer, bringing new ideas to bands rather than documenting theirs. Over the years, the sonic depth of Joy Division's music has been contro versially laid at the altar of this second genius in their midst, and though the first two tracks they recorded with him aren't as obviously influenced by his designs, one of them is named for a brand new device whose possibilities Hannett would explore via Joy Division's music, creating sounds and shapes unheard before or since. A Factory Sample Recorded October 11 1978 at Cargo Studios, Rochdale. Produced by Martin Hannett. [Released December 24 1978] Digital Glass
The surprising, almost shockingly upbeat "Digital" bounces into action with Peter Hook's elated bass line, spurred on by Stephen Morris's binary drum pattern and a wall of guitar reverb. But it's in the frigid musical echoes and warped, warbling effect that Hannett's delay would have on Ian Curtis's voice that "Digital" reverber45
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ates as a conflicted, frustrated rock and roll masterpiece. The chorus harks back to classic Stax tracks, like the slow, steady burn of a Sam & Dave chorus, though the R&B influence has been filtered through the maudlin rock and roll of the Velvet Underground. Curtis contin ues what he started in "Ice Age", thinning out his verses, and removing the unwieldy, overflowing sentences of his punk tunes for simpler, more evocative lines. "I feel it closing in/ Day in, day out, day in, day out" may not resonate as well in print, but with fewer syllables to force out, Curtis is able to concentrate on melody, each syllable ringing with a previously unheard power and tonal command. His vocal track clips to static with Han nett's reverbed delay, crackling during the harrowing final plea "Don't ever fade away/1 need you here today." "Glass" is another leap forward, marking the first appearance of the exasperated croon Curtis became syn onymous with from this point forward. It's also redolent of Hannett's involvement: he employs his new digital delay box in a left-to-right stutter, prominently mixes synth chimes and alarms in the right channel, and fills the left channel with heavily flanged guitar feedback. Peter Hook resents how easy a case "Glass" makes for the arrival of Martin Hannett as an ordering, polishing influence and developer of their monolithic studio sound: "A lot of people [say] that was the moment things turned, that Hannett [changed] us, found our secret 46
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weapon. I don't see it that way at all. Hannett was OK—we were a bit in awe of him—but he didn't write the songs." Indeed, Hannett's new toy is superfluous on Stephen Morris's snare, and the guitars are still mixed up front. "Glass" is the bridge between the raw, combat ive Warsaw material and the momentous, assured tracks of Unknown Pleasures, the point where Hannett is still figuring out how to construct the sound he heard under neath Joy Division's dark chords, anxious drumming and booming baritone vocals. Peter Hook recalled meeting the irascible Hannett in a December 1997 issue of the NME: "Bernard and I were very down to earth, and he was, like, from another planet. He was just this really weird hippy who never talked any sense at all—at least, I never knew what he was talking about anyway. Still, you had a rapport with him." He used to say to Rob, 'Get these two thick stupid cunts out of my way.' In the studio, we'd sit on the left, he'd sit on the right and if we said anything like, 'I think the guitars are a bit quiet, Martin,' he'd scream, 'Oh my God! Why don't you just fuck off, you stupid retards!' It was alright at first, but gradually he started to get weirder and weirder." In his brief and legendary tenure as the genius pro ducer of Joy Division's music, Hannett's mania and increasing drug abuse make sense. As Factory swelled, so did Martin Hannett. In the fall of 1978, he was very 47
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taken with the nascent promise of Factory, and had glowed about its future with Manchester's almost comi cally omnipresent music industry overlord, Derek Brandwood. Soon, however, the Factory players would usurp his status: in just over ten years, with a few hugely successful pop bands, they would be competing on an equal footing with the likes of RCA. All in good time— and good times—but sadly, Hannett wouldn't enjoy much of it. Or, if he did, he certainly wouldn't remem ber it. The week after their first and most economical ses sion with Hannett, Joy Division re-released An Ideal For Living as a 12" with all new, formless artwork (the entire cover is a single image of scaffolding) and an improved remix. The reverb on Steve Morris's drums was increased, and Bernard's guitar tracks were panned more dramatically, clearing out more "space"—a quality the band would come to define with Hannett's help. The disc was handed out to reviewers after the band's very well received set at Tony Wilson's Factory club on October 20th. Joy Division were fast becoming one of the most important bands north of London, and had yet to record a proper single, let alone an album. On dates throughout northern England in Novem ber and December, crowds were inconsistent but they frequently locked in on the band's energy. After a brief tour in support of the Rezillos—during which the head48
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lining act broke up—A Factory Sample was released on Christmas Eve, and Joy Division finally made their Lon don debut on December 27th 1978, at The Cure's stomping grounds, the Hope & Anchor in Islington. Whatever the cause—weather, exhaustion from travel ing to so many gigs outside Manchester, or simply germs—Bernard Sumner was suffering from a terrible flu that night, and had to be packed in a sleeping bag for the drive down, as the idea of missing their inaugural London concert was unthinkable. Expecting to convert a large, eager audience, Joy Division were shocked to discover the Hope & Anchor was a small pub, and—to their further dejection—only a few dozen young fans had turned up. During the miserable ride home, Sumner and a depressed Curtis fought for the sleeping bag: during the tussle, Ian lapsed into a major seizure. The band pulled over and, once the fit had subsided, drove recklessly to Luton Hospital, where Ian was given Phenobarbitone tablets and sent home. (Now referred to as Phenobarbital, it is still one of a very few medications available to treat epilepsy.) It would be almost a month before Curtis was clinically diagnosed, on January 23rd 1979. A Factory Sample sold respectably during its first two months, and would soon sell out thanks to continuing support from Paul Morley in the form of a late-March NME review, but at the time of its release, all of the 49
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contributors were unproven, and the record didn't travel far from the already established, isolated audience of spotters and critics. On January 8th, Joy Division finally paid back Richard Searling, John Anderson and Derek Brandwood their investment in the RCA demos, and with a renewed sense of freedom, looked forward to touring and recording their new material. On January 13 th, Ian Curtis appeared on the cover of the NME for the first time, after months of lobbying from Paul Morley. The Kevin Cummins image of Curtis in his olive overcoat—wintry complexion, cigarette in hand—remains as one of very few staged portraits, and revealed a beautifully sculpted Roman countenance. Up to that point, Curtis had predominantly been known for his panting, wide-eyed flailing onstage, an image the NME cover countered. Though Anton Corbijn became more widely known for his photo and film work with Joy Division, Cummins was Factory Records' first dedicated photographer and, as of this writing, is negotiating to release a fine art book of his prints from this era. Two weeks after the NME feature, Joy Division were invited to record a session for Radio One DJ John Peel's renowned program, the launching pad for nearly every critically acclaimed UK rock act of the last three decades.
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Peel Session 1 Recorded January 13 1979. Produced by Bob Sargeant, engineered by Nick Gomm [Broadcast February 14 1979. Released as a stand-alone EP in November 1986 by Strange Fruit. Compiled for Strange Fruit's Peel Sessions Album in 1990 and reissued in 2000 as part of The Complete BBC Recordings. "Exercise One" was also released as part of the 1997 box set Heart and Soul.] Exercise One Insight She's Lost Control Transmission
This session was effectively the first opportunity large numbers of people outside Manchester had to hear Joy Division, and even clued-in fans hadn't heard any of these songs outside small clubs and booming concert halls (where sound quality varied greatly to say the least). To their loyal but tiny legion of raincoat-wearing fans, Joy Division were still a screeching cacophony of punk guitars and frantic drumming, which, for their power, were pushed to the background by the increasingly pos sessed performances of their lead singer. During this
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Peel Session, fans and casual listeners were treated to four new songs, including future singles "She's Lost Control" and "Transmission". "Exercise One" and "In sight" were both recorded for Unknown Pleasures, but the former was kept off for some reason, and wouldn't see release until Factory's posthumous 1981 compilation of Joy Division rarities, Still. "Exercise One" boasted fantastic lyrics, including the icy first verse used for the introduction to the gorgeous booklet which accompanies the Heart and Soul anthol ogy: "When you're looking at life/ Through a strange new room/ Maybe drowning soon/ Is this the start of it all?" Its central guitar riff was a bone chilling minornote clash—even without the ghostly delay Martin Han nett would add during the Unknown Pleasures sessions— but it was compositionally weak at just over two minutes, and proved too simple to lead either side of their debut album. Opening a record with feedback was already terribly gauche in 1979, so that was right out; wherever else you could sequence it, the long introductory passage would disrupt the flow from one song to the next. But it's unlikely there was much debate about this, as the band apparently never cared much for "Exercise One", only performing it at a handful of concerts over the next year and a half. The other three tracks from the Peel Session were much more accomplished and proved tantalizing teasers 52
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for fans, record labels and critics. "Transmission" is nude in comparison to its eventual, awe-inspiring Han nett production, but in this raw, twanging take—as in a Granada TV performance later in 1979—Ian Curtis's vocals aren't as smoothed by effects. In the final verse, his now famous scream "And we could dance!" is more captivating and unsettling for it, a furious performance of a track that would take on a more majestic, eternal glimmer when recorded as a single six months later. "Insight" began with the kind of liquid, high octave bass line that became Peter Hook and Joy Division's trademark. He attributes his signature sound to neces sity: "If you played higher up the guitar, it was easier to hear yourself, 'cos your equipment was so crap." The incessant double-tap beat from Stephen Morris included a new electronic drum pad they'd acquired; this was more noticeable in the industrial echoes of "She's Lost Control", a future single that—along with "Love Will Tear Us Apart"—would endure as one of Joy Division's most popular tracks. It was an early indication of how electronic sounds were coming to the fore in the wake of punk rock's boxy, all-guitar squall. Though Wire were clearly leading the way in this capacity with 1978's Chairs Missing—and both the Human League and Or chestral Maneuvers in the Dark were just months away from bringing it to the mainstream—Joy Division's at tachment to the pop song format set their dark dirges 53
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apart from the titanic dub instrumentals John Lydon was screaming over in Public Image Limited. Of all the post-punk contenders, Joy Division split creativity and the desire to communicate in their favorite medium right down the middle. The Peel Session evidenced their rapid evolution over the few months since they'd said goodbye to the Electric Circus, pointing toward an almost accessible but serious sound. It elevated their standing hugely within London. In many ways, John Peel has been doing the legwork for lazy (or—more forgivingly—less-attuned) London A&R men for over thirty years now. On Valentine's Day 1979, the major labels were handed a taste of Joy Division on a platter. This resulted in a chaotic Spring filled with opportunities, but the band couldn't capital ize on the interest with live shows: between January and March, Ian Curtis's recently manifested epilepsy mounted and—beyond the reasonable expectation that he might take a few months off to rest and test out new medications—his wife was in the final stages of her pregnancy. In the wake of their Peel Session, Joy Divi sion wouldn't play until March 1st, and only seriously entertained one record label. Immediately after hearing the broadcast, Buzzcocks producer Martin Rushent put together a deal with an advance of around £40,000, for
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a two-album contract with Radar Records (a Warner Brothers imprint masquerading as an independent). In the 1980s, Rushent's production company Genetic would do for sequencing what Hannett did for digital delay, making superstars of the Human League, but at this stage he wasn't yet known as an ingenious wunderkind. He was a respected producer in the punk commu nity—especially in Manchester—for his work with the Buzzcocks and Generation X, but as much as he wanted to produce Joy Division, he was out to break an exciting new band to further the standing of his production company. After a better-attended, if not triumphant, return to London's Hope & Anchor on March 1st, Joy Division returned to the capital three days later to re cord demo versions of five songs with Martin Rushent. Genetic Demos Recorded March 4 1979 at Eden Studios, London. Produced by Martin Rushent ["Insight", "Glass", "Transmission" and "Ice Age" were made avail able for the first time anywhere as part of the 1997 Heart and Soulanthology: "Digital" never surfaced until much later, appearing on a beautifully pack aged European bootleg called PerformancesOl in early 2003.]
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Insight Glass Digital Ice Age Transmission
A rote run-through of some of their newer material in a single day, these tracks are wholly unexceptional, and from Curtis's uninvolved delivery one can assume he was either rushing through recording or already dis interested. In fact, by the time they recorded these de mos just weeks after hearing from Rushent, it might have already been a foregone conclusion that the group would stay with Factory for their debut full-length. Fac tory was still using that tasty 50/50 profit split as mani festo, and as the band's audience continued to grow with London now paying attention, the 8% royalty rate offered by Genetic/Radar/Warner Brothers seemed like a losing proposition. Generic's offer was fair, and with the advance possibly gracious, but there has always been a Mancunian distrust of London, and Rob Gretton in particular loathed its stately pomp; he detested fashion victims and the effusively positive outlook major label employees seemed to be infected with. Joy Division would rather not involve themselves with so uncaring 56
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a business, and, as Peter Hook put it, for Gretton "it was better to work with someone you could get hold of. Factory, for all its failings, if you had a beef, you could yell." The group had developed a close relationship with their manager, lobbyist, defender, brawler and—most importantly—believer Rob Gretton, though it took some time for Ian Curtis to accept his guidance. Stephen Morris remembered a particularly explosive incident in the NME in December 1997: "He was like Basil Fawlty. He'd just boil up, boil up, boil up and then go mad and run around the rehearsal room with a bucket on his head. At the time we all thought it was dead funny, but in retrospect I suppose it was quite bizarre." Bernard expanded on the incident in the liner notes to Heart and Soul: "I remember him having this argu ment with Rob Gretton at our rehearsal room [at] TJ Davidson's. He got so frustrated that he picked up the garbage bucket, stuck it over his head and started run ning up and down the room, screaming at Rob, and he was just completely mad." As Deborah Curtis put it, Ian "made up his mind to accept Rob Gretton," but as she further states, "Ian had no interest in learning anything practical at all." Totally cerebral and often self-absorbed, Curtis was also born clumsy and ashamed to the point where he made no effort to learn a simple task like driving. He would 57
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always have trouble understanding how finances worked, and without Gretton for guidance, his confu sion would have been a serious detriment to Joy Divi sion's success, especially once contracts and concert guarantees came into play. In late 1978, after listening to a heady speech from Tony Wilson about artistic ideals, equal shares and a 50/50 split of the profits after Factory recouped over head costs, Gretton prodded the dramatist Svengali for his credo in writing. According to legend, Wilson wrote on cocktail napkins in his own blood, "The musicians own everything, the company owns nothing. All our bands have the freedom to fuck off." Whether he wrote all of that in blood, or inked it and signed in blood, Wilson's bravado nevertheless impressed Gretton and certainly Joy Division, who were starving for some cred ibility, embarrassed by the gauche industry they had recently brushed up against. The only hesitant party in the room was a somewhat confused Alan Erasmus, who had discussed the meeting with Wilson beforehand and intended to draw up a proper contract (and in fact, there were more words than those on the napkins, to the effect that the master tapes would revert to the band after six months). Wilson, swept up in one of his signa ture pontifications, ruled the room as if directing a show; Erasmus looked on, likely amused, and decided that day to follow Wilson's lead. For all his graceful and grand 58
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salesmanship, Wilson was leading with the advantage of a sizeable inheritance and appreciable income as a television personality. Though he wouldn't regret it until years later, Erasmus might have behaved differ ently if given the chance to do it again; he has totally dropped from the pages of the Factory story, a willfully anonymous contributor from the start, who left with a bitter hatred for Tony Wilson (who has since been accused of cynically using Erasmus's long-standing vote within Factory to get his way in the out of control 80s). In 1978, Wilson could only be accused of unrealistic optimism and idealism, but his charm went a long way. Twenty years, in fact. The decision to remain with Factory was not rooted solely in philosophy or comfort: Joy Division and Caba ret Voltaire weren't bankable names at the time, yet the double-7" EP A Factory Sample nearly sold out its 5000copy run. It happened almost entirely on word of mouth. With the fair, if not cheap £2.99 cost to consumers, the EP proved that affordability and image alone—the record's image, not necessarily the group it docu mented—could attract buyers. In the appropriately slick 1993 documentary neworderstory (produced by Paul Morley), Peter Saville—the graphic designer responsi ble for the gorgeous record sleeves, and the look of nearly every item in the Factory Records catalog— points to a New York Times article by Jon Pareles entitled 59
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"How Cool Is Coldness?" In the article, Pareles dis cusses the idea of a mass-produced secret, something that 250,000 to half a million people are aware of, but that has never been discussed or advertised in main stream media. It's a proposition that had, on a much smaller scale, already played itself out in 1979. With only one notable radio appearance, no national televi sion exposure—yet—or even much in the way of adver tising, Joy Division's independently produced debut album Unknown Pleasures sold 5,000 copies in its first two weeks of release, and another 10,000 within six months.
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Chapter 3. The Record is Alive, as That Which It Recorded is Alive
In April of 1979, Joy Division finally committed to tape the frantic performances on which they'd built a modest but critically impressive reputation. At the posh, 36-track Strawberry Studios in Stockport—lined with gold records—Martin Hannett produced the set of fif teen songs they'd built up during months of rehearsals at TJ Davidson's. It was during these sessions that the band first realized the depths of Martin Hannett's mer curial personality, increasing drug use and impatient, cerebral hyperactivity. While his temper was bearable during the single day of recording for A Factory Sample, Factory had hired out Strawberry Studios for three weeks to record and mix Unknown Pleasures. Joy Division 61
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endured Martin's inexplicable recording techniques, drug-fueled irrationality and inherently abusive person ality for five straight days, then fought for weeks to be present for the off-hours mixing. On the third day of recording, Hannett famously disassembled Stephen Morris's drum kit down to its metal rims, searching for a rattle that was bleeding through due to his brilliant, if hilarious, technique: the output from the drum room was lined down to an Auratone speaker that sat perched on the seat of a tiny basement toilet, removing all reverberation. In the kind of dead silence you'd only find in a basement, Stephen Morris was playing to ghosts, who in the form of a single microphone breathed back his muted wooden thuds to Martin Hannett's fantastic little black box. Just weeks before recording "Digital" and "Glass", Hannett had gleaned a prototype of a digital delay rig from friends within AMS Neve, a cutting-edge electronic audio company based in Burnley, Lancashire. Though the digital delay line had been invented in the 60s and large technology companies were already working with it, binary digital delay hadn't yet been captured in a separate device that could be selectively applied—post-effected—to live sound. Wah-wah and distortion pedals were already commonplace in rock, but they modified sound as it traveled from the guitar to the amp. Digital delay was the first device that could 62
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reproduce that sound exactly. Reverb was a series of reflections, with limited and diminished frequency re sponse: it had a uniform sound and any tracks using it would bleed together in a Joe Meek racket. Chargecoupled (CCD) analog "tape echo" had been available, but it produced unmanageable line noise and increasing distortion with each bounce. Binary digital delay trans lated its input into electronic data—l's and O's—before bouncing it back, completely intact, as frequently as the operator chose. Hannett chose a miniscule report time, as Factory staple Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column— who were inextricably linked with guitar delay—later explained: "Martin used that digital delay not as a repeat echo delay but to make a tiny millisecond that came so close to the drum it was impossible to hear. I would never have thought of doing that. Nobody else would. I don't know how he could have possibly envisaged the final sound." The urgent, alien thwack of Stephen Morris's pro cessed snare drum as it bounced from the left to right channel was so arresting, one could have listened to that opening bar for hours trying to figure how on earth someone made such sounds. Like John Bonham's ludicrous, mansion-backed stomp at the start of "When The Levee Breaks"—only far less expensive—the crisp, trebly snare sound Martin Hannett would make his career on announced Unknown Pleasures as a finessed, 63
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foreboding masterpiece. Peter Hook's compressed, somewhat flat bass line rides up front in the mix, and it's not until the hugely reverbed, minor note guitar line crashes through that you can understand the need for such a warm, analog treatment. Layering a few tracks together to create a six-string shriek on par with Siouxsie & The Banshees' The Scream, Hannett's equal ization cuts the brunt of Sumner's fuller live sound down to an echoing squeal. In search of vocal clarity and space for delay and reverb to ring out, Hannett relegates the guitar to hard-panned stereo placement in later tracks, and thins the robust double-humbucker sound of Sum ner's Gibson SG. And that's what Bernard Sumner's historic dissatisfaction boils down to: in 1979, he still heard guitar attack and fury. From the Heart and Soul liner notes: "We played the album live. The music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars. The production in flicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we'd drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin had coloured it in for us." As Sumner often says, the band were always more aggressive in concert, but Ian Curtis was very impressed with the icy, evocative sound of Unknown Pleasures. His approach to lyrics had been steadily evolving, and by the time the group entered the studio he had moved beyond storytelling and condemnation into expression64
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ist pleading: "I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand/ Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?" The album's open ing lines, from "Disorder", suggest Curtis is lamenting his depression and alienation. The song's very name seems to invoke the epilepsy that was, along with the powerful medications he had to take, preventing Curtis from pursuing the late nights, casual alcohol intake and cathartic stage shows he enjoyed so much with Joy Divi sion. The booming, climactic finale spins out of control as Curtis bellows "I've got the spirit/ But lose the feel ing." "Disorder" is so arresting, cathartic and novel, it's hard to fathom there are even more potent moments beyond its collapsing explosion of snare drum and cymbals. Few lyric poets are as readily dissected as Ian Curtis, whose every word seems to have layered meanings en twining personal struggles—his disease, ensuing suc cess, possible failure and the ultimate futility of either—with more universal pleas for honesty and con viction. Regret and self-doubt would rule the rest of his short life, but on Unknown Pleasures he's still asking questions, wondering if his affliction would subside, and whether he'd find happiness as Joy Division continued to make bold strides. "Where will it end?" he screams, during the surprisingly laconic dirge "Day of the Lords" (named for a discarded early lyric sheet that included 65
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the phrase). By this point, Joy Division have clearly laid punk's quickly-consumed fire to rest, concentrating instead on atmosphere and the severity of slower tem pos: hammering chords ring out into stretched silence; during lulls, there's space for more complex guitar pro gressions, menacing feedback and eerie, monotonous keyboards. Like all the material written in advance of Unknown Pleasures, "Day of the Lords" confronts uncer tainty, the onset of adulthood and the death of youth's romantic abandon, building to a pulsating crescendo with each despondent, imploring refrain from Curtis. "Candidate" is even more subdued, a barely-there backdrop of repetitive bass broken by drum fills. Hap hazard, creeping guitar squeals rise and fall in the dis tance, swirling between both channels; Hannett's snare treatment is at its most exposed, punching with first contact and quickly dispersing as controlled, shim mering high-end decay. In "Disorder" and "Day of the Lords", Curtis's voice is sonically flush with the song's palette, a mostly realistic recreation of their perfor mance, but on "Candidate", Hannett increases the tre ble to the vocal track, creating a throaty, tremulous timbre shattered by hissing consonant inflections. The lyrics are perhaps the album's most egregiously morose: "Corrupted from memory, no longer the power/ It's creeping up slowly, that last fatal hour."
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Sumner and Hook's instant dissatisfaction with Han nett's production is easiest to appreciate during "In sight", which is hugely diminished on record in comparison to the song's in-concert power (and even compared with the Peel Session performance in Janu ary). Hannett's focus on drums, vocals and electronic noises to the exclusion of guitars reduces this driving, climactic composition to a nervy, tame mid-tempo bal lad, staging the electronic drum breakdown toward the end too dramatically. Lyrically, the song is perhaps the most telling document of Curtis's fermenting internal resignation and fatalistic outlook: Guess the dreams always end They don't rise up just descend But I don h care anymore Vve lost the will to want more Vm not afraid not at all I watch them all as they fall But I remember when we were young His debilitating epilepsy and impending fatherhood— Deborah gave birth to a daughter as Martin Hannett was finishing the mix for Unknown Pleasures—weighed heavily on such a dramatic young soul. The shift in tone from the band's simpler first wave of punk songs was
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undeniable, but it was art, and so artistic, so outstanding that Curtis's fellow band members were excited by the seriousness it lent their already brooding music. Know ing he was suffering through frequent seizures and was affected by the heavy medication he was taking, it seems obvious that someone should have pried into his mental state right away, but as Deborah Curtis would later write, "it was too incredible to comprehend that he would use such a public method to cry for help." Indeed, photographer Kevin Cummins has dozens of prints from early 1979 of Curtis laughing and messing around like schoolboys with his band mates outside their re hearsal space. To people who knew him, Ian Curtis was a fun if explosively temperamental character. Whatever self-obsessed fatalism he was beginning to harbor was kept secret, revealed only in his lyrics and denied outside their context as poetry and art. Though Unknown Pleasures remains a debut album of unparalleled drama and scope, the central passage from side one (titled "Outside") to two ("Inside") is where it makes its most powerful first impression. "New Dawn Fades" closes the first side at a faster tempo than "Candidate" or "Day of the Lords", but it's definitely of the same monolithic, stately stock as these newer tracks. Sumner plucks a series of notes through the first half, distantly chiming behind Hook's hard downstrokes before the song's explosion at the 2:45 mark, 68
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Curtis bellowing in a cracking, full-torso scream, "The strain's too much/ Can't take much more/ I've walked on water, run through fire/ Can't seem to feel it any more/ It was me/ Waiting for me/ Hoping for some thing more." Deborah Curtis was rightly unsettled by such grave lyrics and their depressed delivery—especially audible in "Insight"—and questioned her husband about the morbid, flailing finale of "New Dawn Fades". Her justi fiable consternation only drew protestations and slight denials: the pair fell into a fight, and Ian stormed off in a frustrated huff. It's an incident that betrays Curtis's increasingly solipsistic, self-absorbed outlook after ac quiring a disease he had studied just over a year earlier. While working as the Assistant Disablement Resettle ment Officer at Macclesfield's Employment Exchange in late 1977, Curtis was required to take a course on epilepsy to better understand its impact on the people he was helping. That he could then succumb to such a dramatic case of the disease was a bizarre coincidence. But, using the anomalous adolescent incidents and Ian's description of feeling "flashbacks" as a teen—most likely pre-seizing "auras" that never fomented, or only culmi nated in easily ignored "absence seizures"—it seems obvious epilepsy was lurking in the background, waiting to manifest itself until Curtis reached his twenties, when so many neurological maladies assert themselves. 69
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Ian's experiences with the mentally ill informed the band's defining track to this point: "She's Lost Control", the band's first ever hit with audiences. It was written about an epileptic woman who would often turn up at the Macclesfield Employment Exchange looking for work; when she stopped coming in, Curtis wrote the comparatively normal, descriptive lyrics about her, but as his own epilepsy took hold, the song grew to have awful implications, especially after he learned she'd died. Joy Division would glossily re-record it in 1980 as Curtis himself spiraled out of control; a side-by-side compari son of his vocals just nine months apart reveals defeated, desperate slurring, made all the more unsettling by de lay, which only accented the inaccuracies of his delivery. The Unknown Pleasures recording of "She's Lost Control" is far superior in its compact, tense drumming and demented vocal effects, but neither studio version captures the overwhelming volume of Bernard Sumner's barre chord progression as it blared in concert. The analog, muted treatment of the bass is also a problem, as without the slight distortion—or at least the trebly ring—of his live rig, Peter Hook's lead line is discon nected, too isolated from the rest of the tracks. Though it approaches in-concert intensity toward its end, Han nett's production again defers to the electronic percus sion elements and the subtly mixed but complex effects on Ian Curtis's vocals. 70
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For punk and heavy metal fans, "Shadowplay" was the gateway track that sold them on Joy Division's jetblack album. A swelling, churning industrial portrait— Morris even accents the beat with an electronic percus sion hit that approximates gasping machine valves opening and shutting—it's the one moment on Unknown Pleasures where Bernard Sumner is given his due, al lowed to dominate the song with two huge, deafening tracks of guitar, ringing out over all else. "Shadowplay", like "Interzone", was a more familiar, older track, and as such the lyrics are notably less morose, appreciable for their narrative beauty rather than any morbid revisionist analysis. Still, "Shadowplay" hides one of Curtis's most salient first-person lyrics: "In a room with no window in the corner, I found truth." "Wilderness" shoulders the most overt use of Han nett's digital delay, Stephen Morris's snare ricocheting from speaker to speaker like a heavy dub reggae track. A precursor to their later masterpiece "Dead Souls", "Wilderness" is the weakest track on Unknown Pleasures, with obvious religious lyrics based in fantasy and myth ology, and a guitar progression that's too repetitive. But it's quickly forgotten when the surprisingly traditional rock riffing of "Interzone" starts up, a holdover from the band's 1978 RCA session. For the Unknown Pleasures version, Ian adds a second track in the right channel, a spoken word counter to his surprisingly high-pitched, 71
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smooth main verses. His fluttering, whooping choral yodel is still audible, but it's nowhere near as arresting or up front as on the original RCA demo, which—for its raw performance and flat sound—is of huge interest to fans and was wisely included on Heart and Soul. Following what—relative to the surroundings— amounts to a lull, the album's finale serves as a devasta ting rejoinder to the more easily absorbed, instant and danceable pair of songs that precede it. "I Remember Nothing" uses the same hollowed out template pre viewed on "Candidate", ripping a hole in its own tense fabric with the jarring sounds of breaking glass and shrill electronic crashes, all disintegrating rapidly inside Hannett's box. Like the earlier dirges on Unknown Plea sures, "I Remember Nothing" props up Ian Curtis's alternately timid and commanding voice, belting out a message almost certainly aimed at his wife, cruelly focusing on the line "We were strangers/ For way too long." As with "Disorder", the very tide refers to his affliction: epileptic seizures occur because of chemical and/or neuron disruptions in the brain, sometimes re ferred to as "electrical storms". As a result, sufferers never remember them. The violence Curtis intimates in his rasping, barked delivery is also tied to his seizures: "Violent, more violent/ His hand cracks the chair/ Moves on reaction, then slumps in despair." His preg nant wife tried to stifle these attacks so that he wouldn't 72
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hurt himself: the image is too painful to envision, but with Ian's unflinching use of his tumultuous home life as a source of poetic inspiration, he left his spouse no choice but to replay these incidents. Devastated, Debo rah Curtis was forced to ask herself agonizing questions about her husband's intentions, even at this early stage. Her memoir Touching From A Distance is uncomfortably, brutally honest in places, but owing to love, respect, and her laudable awareness of its impact, she put more than a decade of distance between her feelings and her husband's emotionally devastating death before writing about their life together. While his band mates and producers heard drama, potent lyricism and mounting vocal talent, the person closest to Ian Curtis heard the actual words.
Unknown Pleasures sessions Recorded April 1-17 1979 at Strawberry Studios, Stockport. Produced by Martin Hannett [Un known Pleasures released June 14 1979. "Autosug gestion" and "From Safety to Where . . . ?" released October 1979 as part of Earcom 2: Contra diction (FAST Records). "Exercise One", "The Kill", "The Only Mistake" and "Walked in Line" released October 8 1981 as part of Still. "Auto suggestion" and "From Safety to Where ... ?" re73
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released June 1988 as part of Substance. The entire session is included in the 1997 Heart and Soul anthology.] Disorder Day of the Lords Candidate Insight New Dawn Fades She's Lost Control Shadowplay Wilderness Interzone I Remember Nothing Autosuggestion From Safety to Where ... ? The Only Mistake Exercise One The Kill Walked in Line
To this day, the surviving members of Joy Division complain about Hannett's hand in the sound of Un known Pleasures, which they immediately felt weakened their deafening live sound. Of the recording process, 74
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Bernard Sumner later recalled: "Martin didn't give a fuck about making a pop record. All he wanted to do was experiment; his attitude was that you get a load of drugs, lock the door of the studio and you stay in there all night and you see what you've got the next morning. And you keep doing that until it's done. That's how all our records were made. We were on speed, Martin was into smack." Joy Division still identified with punk's urgency, having seen every first-wave British punk band in person and performed with many of them. Hannett's forward-thinking obsession with digital delay and the distant, warehouse guitars he favored created a sound too studio-processed, too close to the excesses their generation was still burning at the stake. "She's Lost Control" and "Insight" incorporated an electronic drum pad from the beginning, but both songs were driven as much by Bernard Sumner's overblown guitar and Peter Hook's unforgettable treble bass riffs. Though all par ties would come around to Hannett's approach and the use of more ambient and electronic sounds, much of Joy Division's music was, at this point, still in line with punk rock's evolution. Bernard Sumner summarized his and Hook's initial feelings in the Heart and Soul box set: "We resented it, but Rob loved it, Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the public loved it: we were just the poor stupid musicians who wrote it! We swal lowed our pride and went with it." Oddly, Stephen 75
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Morris has never complained much about the produc tion, considering his performance was the most affected by Hannett's techniques. "I mean Martin did teach us a lot—he taught us to look at music and our songs and our sounds in a totally different way. We had a very narrow vision of them, we'd just turn our amps on and that was it. When we got in the studio we couldn't understand why the monitors didn't sound like our amps. He taught us to make allowances for certain things like that," admitted Peter Hook in Charles Neal's Tape Delay, but he also complained that Hannett "took it right down"; one won ders how their newer, slower tunes like "Candidate" and the majestic "I Remember Nothing" could have been "rocky," as he put it, even in concert. If not as grievously tortured as the anthems they'd record for Closer, they were romantic, bleak tunes. Bernard Sumner has been humbly forthcoming about Curtis's central role in Joy Division: "He was a catalyst for the rest of us. We would write all the music, but Ian would direct us. He'd say 'I like that bit of guitar, I like that bass line, I like that drum riff' He brought our ideas together in his own way, really." As such, Curtis loved Unknown Pleasures. Hannett had taken their dark rock and roll and infused it with the kind of confrontational, novel soundscapes Ian so admired in groups like Throbbing Gristle and Kraft76
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werk. Hannett had made Joy Division's debut as formi dable and unique as the records Curtis admired. It seems clear that Joy Division was changing again, in Ian's mind if not Hook's and Sumner's, and Hannett shepherded that change at a speed that left the guitarists feeling the record was taken away from them a bit. Which, in one literal sense, it was: Hannett didn't want the band members present while he mixed Unknown Pleasures, and would head to Strawberry at all hours of the morn ing hoping to avoid them. Peter Hook: "The scene was stupid from the word go. Martin never understood that he was working for us. We were paying him and so he should have done the mixing when we said so ... he should have done what we said at all times." For his part, Hannett later claimed they ran out of time at Strawberry and that he would have changed some aspects of his mix if he had more time, and this is backed up by the post-production recording and re mixing of "Walked In Line" for Still in 1981. That version was a little over the top in the midranges—so much so that it would be released in its original state for the Heart and Soul anthology—but even in the origi nal mix from the Unknown Pleasures recordings, Hannett used distorted electronic squeals to approximate clapping. True to Hook's and Sumner's fears, the synthesizers, electronic percussion and smashing glass would leave 77
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the most immediate impression on critics and listeners, though these effects only featured notably in the first and last songs on Unknown Pleasures. And the noises themselves weren't Hannett's idea: the group were be coming increasingly fascinated with Kraftwerk, whose Trans-Europe Express and Autobahn LPs were always around, and they'd also taken some cues from Roxy Music and Brian Eno's solo work. But they were only toying with keyboards and electronics at this stage, as accents; it was down to Hannett's hollow mix and digital delay box that the electronic and industrial noises had such an impact, and changed the perception of Joy Divi sion instantly. Hannett's most extreme use of the nascent AMS delay technology wouldn't even end up on Unknown Pleasures: the six minute "Autosuggestion" was as close to dub as Joy Division ever came on record, although Hook later claimed that Hannett had done dub mixes of "Digital" and "Glass" as a way of learning the device. (In a rueful instance of neglect, Peter Hook's partner in Suite Sixteen—they had purchased Cargo Studios and renamed it—sold all the master reels when he left, including these dub mixes, at 50 pence each.) The sprawling, experimental "Autosuggestion" would indi cate Hannett had a sustained interest in dub production techniques at the time, so we can only regret the loss of those artifacts. 78
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Something of a jam, "Autosuggestion" is nonetheless engaging—a slow, echoing anthem in the vein of "Day of the Lords" and "New Dawn Fades", if somewhat sparser. Unlike the more bleating tracks on Unknown Pleasures, "Autosuggestion" bursts to a frenzied doubletime finale of rare and inspiring hope. Much like the superlative single "Transmission" that would follow in the album's wake, "Autosuggestion" appears to be a work of self-reprimand, Curtis fighting his new fears of unpredictable seizures and his much older habit of living within his mind. He urges himself (and, more universally, anyone) to "take a chance and step outside," to "lose some sleep and say you tried." The upbeat "From Safety to Where ... ?" is decor ated with brighdy flickering beams of delay and bril liant—if subtly mixed—acoustic guitars. Though only two slight minutes of liquid strings (and the earliest precursor to New Order's sound), "From Safety to Where ... ?" contains the most explicit, direct discus sion of Curtis's sense of paralysis, debating his future fame—"I got this ticket to use"—and the domestic promise he'd made at eighteen: "Just passing through, 'til we reach the next stage/ But just to where, well it's all been arranged/ Just passing through but the break must be made/ Should we move on or stay safely away?" With the exception of "Walked in Line", any of the discarded tracks could have been released to acclaim, 79
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but it's this pair that were made available to Scottish new wave label FAST, who included "Autosuggestion" and "From Safety To Where ... ?" on its Earcom 2: Contradiction 12", released in October 1979. "The Only Mistake" was unfortunately sequestered in the vaults—like all but two of the April 1979 tracks left off Unknown Pleasures—until the posthumous, May 1981 rarities collection Still. Alongside the band's most haunting tracks—"Atmosphere", "Heart and Soul", and "The Eternal"—"The Only Mistake" is among the most sonorous compositions the band ever recorded. Sum ner's doubled guitar tracks are layered with an almost breathing delay that calls the listener deeper into its hypnotic, swirling gaze. Morris has a few drum fills to break up the oppressive bass line, climbing the same four notes over and over. Repetition, meditation and atmosphere come together in a wintry, defining mo ment of gothic austerity. Lyrically, the song is from the first spate of self-loathing that produced "Autosugges tion" and "Transmission"; not yet resigned to his fate or failure, Curtis condemns his selfishness: "Made the fatal mistake/ Like I did once before/ A tendency just to take/ 'til the purpose turned sour." The band perfected "Exercise One" with Hannett, but except for its excellent guitar line and Curtis's pointed lyrics, it never evolved beyond a single progres sion. In many ways, it's a precursor to the more accom80
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plished, impossibly honest "Passover" from Closer. "The Kill" is barely recognizable in comparison to the War saw tune of the same name, though some of the melodies are similar enough. Dominated by keyboards, the song is a frantic, coursing dart, overtly indebted to Siouxsie & The Banshees. The song features one of Curtis's more simple verses, its refrain "through it all I kept my eyes on you" a potential nod to his possessiveness. Recycling the title "The Kill" may have had nothing to do with their earlier punk tune: for Ian Curtis's dramatic lyrics and their powerful music, Joy Division usually paid little attention to song titles. Later, Bernard Sumner would reveal: "We did a concert in Berlin with Joy Division in an old cinema, and in the dressing room there was this old, old film poster on the wall. And we stole it, and took it back to our rehearsal room and it listed every film that was gonna be on for, like, the next five years at this German cinema. And every time we wanted a title, we'd look at this film poster and pick two or three titles. Like 'The Eternal' came from a film called The Eternal Flame." The famous Unknown Pleasures sleeve design of a Fourier analysis on a black background was done by Peter Saville. Bernard Sumner is reputed to have found the image "100 consecutive pulses from the pulsar CP 1919" in a textbook, but in From Joy Division to New Order: The Factory Story, author Mick Middles recalls 81
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that, after he picked up the prints of the artwork for Rob Gretton in exchange for one of the closely-guarded promo copies, he asked Bernard where the cover image came from. "Fucked if I know" was his response. What ever the source, this framed industrial line drawing of the sound of a dying star is perfectly emblematic of the digitally precise, spiraling music inside. The title Unknown Pleasures in all likelihood refers to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, a divisive, drawnout autobiography of the author's willful, self-absorbed youth. While Remembrance of Things Past is widely con sidered an embellishment if not egomaniacal revision ism, the series invariably appeals to self-determinate young men, who savor its unapologetic solipsism. As personal and emotional as Curtis's lyrics were, the sense of despair and frustration they conveyed had broad implications in the England of the late 1970s, where hopelessness was a very real sensation. The eco nomic downturn resulted in labor strikes ranging from garbage workers to nurses to gravediggers. The working class boys in Joy Division found decent jobs—and kept them, never unrealistically leaping for the indentured servitude of a major label advance—but Manchester was in a state of economic stasis, and—as in London—tower block living and dole queues were a grim reality for most.
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Adding to this stagnation, the promising fire of punk rock was almost totally consumed, and disco still ruled the radio in its fourth straight year of saturation: Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and Amii Stewart's remake of the Eddie Floyd classic "Knock on Wood" were charttoppers while Joy Division recorded Unknown Pleasures. As hope for real musical progress began to fade, the Sex Pistols disintegrated into farce and pretention, while many of their contemporaries became darker and more distant.
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Chapter 4. His Very Flight is Presence in Disguise
Ian Curtis developed a lofty romantic idealism in his youth, obsessed with the notion of dying young at the height of public adoration, a la Jim Morrison (though this particular hero didn't die in so grand a display). Curtis took Bowie's "Rock and Roll Suicide" and "All The Young Dudes" to heart. Bowie gave the latter song to Mott the Hoople, who took it to No. 3 in the UK: "Well Billy rapped all night about his suicide/ How he kick it in the head when he was twenty-five/ Speed jive don't want to stay alive/ When you're twenty-five." As reenacted for 24 Hour Party People (and one of few accurate exchanges in the film), Curtis considered Bowie a traitor to his art for outliving those lyrics (Bowie performed the song in concert throughout the 70s). As 85
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much fun as Ian had with his band mates, he was hanging on to some dangerous absolutes and held himself ac countable to what in most people's eyes were clearly romantic fantasies. In one sense it's foolish to discuss poets, as their art is at once a biography of thought, albeit draped in veils of dramatized emotion. Lyric poetry in particular tends to reveal more of its author than perhaps is intended, inviting simple, direct couplets—this is especially so when tied to pop music's basic four-bar structure. As Joy Division's technical and compositional skill im proved on the simple pace of punk rock over three years, so too Ian Curtis transcended teenage contention in his lyrics, which—like the band's image—leapt from simplistic postwar imagery to an existential dread argua bly unparalleled in the history of their chosen field—a field ruled for the most part by pure ego and/or desire. Lovingly referred to as the "dead fly dance" (after an NME quip), Curtis's famous stage presence is a dead giveaway for the affliction that contributed so hugely to his collapse. Paul Morley: "The first time anyone saw him do it there were only about four people there, so he had the entire floor. He leapt off the stage and was doing it all over the place. I thought it was cracking. I didn't get any feedback that anyone thought it was comical, because it was so obviously intense." Ian's movements were always mechanically precise, snapping 86
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on a beat; Deborah Curtis recalls, though, that he had always danced with such quick motions, even at their engagement party in 1975. As much as the music drove Curtis to emotionally agitated states, it also, in the later days, provided a means of coping with the constant synaptic explosions he couldn't control, allowing him to incorporate them into his unique style of dance, using the structural guide of the four-bar pop song. Playing guitar helped even more, and in his later days his cream-colored Vox guitars—a Phantom VI and a Teardrop—were increasingly slung over his shoulder, an anchor keeping him terrestrially bound. This was never an overt consideration: the band simply liked his sound, as Bernard Sumner recalled: "He hated playing. We made him play. He played in quite a bizarre way and that to us was interesting, be cause no one else would play like Ian. He played in a very manic way. We thought it was good." In January 1979, Curtis started had started taking the standard combination of Phenobarbital and Phenytoin Sodium (brand name Dilantin). Dilantin is an accelera tor—it increases and stabilizes Phenobarbital blood lev els—but notably, Curtis wasn't initially prescribed Carbamazepine (Tegretol), which is a favored counteragent to the considerable side effects of Phenobarbital. Only one contra-epileptic drug has been widely ac cepted since the time of Curtis's diagnosis, the highly 87
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touted Valproate (also known as Depakene). But Val proate is not so dramatically superior to Phenobarbital that we could reasonably assume Curtis would have benefited right away (he did start taking it later in 1979); though Bernard Sumner has consistently blamed the barbiturates Ian was taking for the depression and con fusion that ultimately led to his suicide, Ian Curtis suf fered from such a serious case, his life would have been ruled to obsolescence by his severe epilepsy without such powerful medications. Joy Division started using white, constant lights for shows, which the press considered "stark," "Teutonic" and "gothic," when in reality the flashing and/or red lights were the only epileptogenic aspect of concerts they could readily remove. Curtis continued to drink, smoke and stay up late, all contraindicated behaviors in an epilepsy maintenance program. Doing what he loved—pursuing the fame and drama he wanted out of life—made the seizures worse and more frequent. Immediately after the birth of his daughter and the completion of Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division set out on weekly dates throughout England. The day after a gig in Altrincham, at home with his wife, Curtis suffered the most serious seizure of his life, on May 24th 1979. A. status epilepticus grand mal is defined as any prolonged tonic-clonic (rigid/lashing) seizure lasting upwards of thirty minutes, and is considered a life-threatening
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event. Curtis's violent, sequential attack lasted until un consciousness, but—after only a week in the hospital— Joy Division pressed on. Epilepsy is a notoriously unpredictable affliction, and June 1979 proved to be an easy month at home and with the band, though Joy Division were still laboring in the doldrums as Unknown Pleasures trickled into stores, their independent label doing its best to sell the album. Peter Hook: "At the Good Mood Club in Halifax [June 22nd 1979], we had one person in the audience. And he lasted two numbers. It felt like the end, like we were just wasting our time, that nobody wanted to know at all." After abortive sessions at Central Sound Studios in Manchester, Martin Hannett and Joy Division retreated to the comfort of Strawberry Studios to record what many consider their defining moment, "Transmission". Certainly their most accessible song aside from "Love Will Tear Us Apart", it was the first indication of the grand Joe Meek/Phil Spector sound Martin Hannett had possibly imagined for Unknown Pleasures but never completed. "Transmission", like the later "Atmo sphere", defines the zenith at which Joy Division's unique music and the incredible talents of Martin Han nett as a producer meet. The snare is delayed in time with the beat, so that the echo acts almost as a sympa thetic second beat, reporting in the seemingly endless 89
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distance. But the explosive wall of guitar that enters exactly halfway through the song would redefine "dis tance" as it relates to the spacial limits of stereophonic pop music. In many ways, it plays as a wizened "fuckyou" from Hannett to Sumner and Hook, in response to their public dissatisfaction with his guitar work on Unknown Pleasures. The full-chord lead is, to this day, without parallel in its beauty, resonance and terrifying volume. Just seconds later, this astonishing moment is outdone by Ian Curtis's most famous utterance: the scream "And we could dance!" leading into the song's final, immemorial chorus of "Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance to the radio!" Behind this refrain is an indecipherable cacophony of twinkling, frantic key boards and guitars screaming from miles away. "Transmission" extended the shelf life of Unknown Pleasures, which had stopped selling and was cluttering the Factory office and co-founder Alan Erasmus's apart ment: the album went on to sell out the initial 10,000 copies within weeks, and more in subsequent pressings, generating roughly £50,000 profit for the label and the artist—to be, theoretically, split down the middle. But Wilson would famously spend most of Joy Division and New Order's profits on projects like The Hacienda—as well as the Factory offices, and later the Dry Bar. Unknown Pleasures continued to sell in the following months, thanks to local adoration of "Transmission", 90
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word of mouth fueled by critical praise, and their sing er's increasing renown as a not-to-be-missed attraction: "Live, he appears possessed by demons, dancing spastically and with lightning speed, unwinding and winding as the rigid metal music folds and unfolds over him," wrote Jon Savage in a July 1979 issue of Melody Maker. The same month, Mick Middles wrote in Sounds, "Dur ing the set's many 'peaks' Ian Curtis often loses control. He'll suddenly jerk sideways, and, head in hands, he'll transform into a twitching, epileptic-type mass of flesh and bone." It was so obvious, there was no other way to describe it, but Curtis rarely fell into full-blown sei zure at this stage. Things would change as 1979 wore on. Curtis had two systemic patterns. In the most fa mous, his right arm crosses his hips as the left swirls in an arc past his face: this movement gives the impression of a man swimming desperately for shore, trying to get the leading edge of time itself behind him. The second pattern is more disturbing to behold, a less-ordered flailing at the elbows, like a child swatting at a swarm of mosquitoes. It's not seen as frequently, but it appeared intensely during a September 1979 BBC2 television performance of "Transmission" during the program Something Else. A third indication of pre-seizing activity is subtler, documented in that same performance: as Ian's head darts from side to side, like a spinning top, you can see his eyes are staring straight ahead, locked 91
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onto some object that kept him rooted in the moment. In hindsight, with some knowledge of epilepsy, these indicators are instantly apparent, but during the punk rock years, all manner of outrageous behavior was en couraged and acted out. In fact, on this occasion a num ber of viewers called in complaining about the wildeyed, "drug-crazed" singer they'd just seen on television. Bernard Sumner has always maintained that Curtis was straight, and just "needed a couple of Carlings" to get excited for the performance, but Deborah Curtis no ticed Ian withdrawing into silence and irritability once the press latched on to Unknown Pleasures. It seems a grotesque assumption, but it's clear that Curtis felt his home life was an embarrassment—at the least a hin drance—to the lone wolf superstardom he'd fantasized about his entire life, and was beginning to enjoy, albeit on a small scale. He would later reveal his own embar rassment and guilt for falling into this easy trap. Wives were shunned and rock star self-absorption was promoted: this has always been Deborah Curtis's primary contention about the frantic last year of her husband's life—but Tony Wilson has explicitly denies fostering this environment. Of course, he's also tired of being asked to bear any responsibility for Curtis's decision. Joy Division were the biggest band on his label, and they made everything that Factory Records
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accomplished possible, but they had their own manager, their own wives, their own responsibilities, even at that young age. As Peter Hook put it, "[Ian] had a lot of responsibilities. I wouldn't count myself as any different now .. . but youth is blind. We thought, 'Why doesn't he just shut up and get on with it?' That's what you do when you're young. You don't think about the ramifica tions." Wilson, until recendy, wouldn't answer the "Why?" questions, and after prodding would say things like, "People die. What, are you gonna blame me?" But lately he has been more candid about the events surrounding the death of Ian Curtis, as well as his envy—of Joy Division's music, and of Curtis's intensity. Curtis's death created legends of both the band and Factory Records: the unassailable purveyors of pure will, high art, ano commercial success, together at last. Those things are predicated on mystery and allure, and in general can't bear the weight of truth. Ian Curtis's lyrics were crushingly honest: he relent lessly drew from his own failures, never able to get out from under them. In the last year of his life, he carefully orchestrated his suicide, penning increasingly resigned, morbid reflections on regret. It's perhaps too easy—too romantic—to view his death as design, since so many of his lyrics seem to call back from the grave, but it's certain that, in making his death as melodramatic and
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emotionally volatile as possible, Curtis achieved immor tality as the late twentieth century's version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's infamous creation, Werther. Heralded in his lifetime—in his early twenties no less—Goethe was a writer whose instinct for lyrical beauty reigns for the most part unchallenged over the Romantics who flowered in his wake. Opinions vary on his position in the literary canon: harsh critics consider Goethe an indulgent, bourgeois diarist, but his most passionate and perhaps lucid follower Ralph Waldo Em erson defended his life as transubstantiation: "A man exists for culture, not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him." Inasmuch as Curtis was a lyrical genius, he was cer tainly ushered along by a wider admiration for that role, and was recognized as such almost instantly by his peers and by the press. Curtis never stumbled for his selfawareness, because he believed utterly in art and ro mance as ideals, the way only the very young can. He was uncannily perceptive of the human condition. He read famous and fashionable works of history, philoso phy and fiction, but was never an academic. His talent was an innate empathy for the human condition, a stark inability to look away from hypocrisy, failure and stagna tion that allowed him to see in the shadows—yet he couldn't bear the weight of the revelations he found there. Increasingly blind to reality, Curtis saw the world 94
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as an almost ordered if not decipherable collection of signifiers and fated occurrences, regarding humanity itself as a single, evolving personality. Goethe's chief works—the partially autobiographical The Sorrows of Young Werther and Elective Affinities—are in one sense morality plays, detailing the exasperated passion of youth and the death of its unrestrained, crys tallized feelings at the hand of marriage. Far from con demning marriage, Goethe offers cautionary advice: in the first title, Werther commits suicide rather than live without his married inspiration. The book is widely considered a biting commentary on its main character's selfishness, a message from an older, somewhat wiser Goethe to his more impulsive younger self. In many ways a sequel to The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities deals more specifically with temptation, and contrasts the idyllic notion of marriage as a sacred insti tution with the more immediate satisfaction of new ex periences. The book was branded immoral when published for suggesting love could be a chemical reac tion, but the author's use of physiology as evidence of destiny has, as science evolved, gained significant favor with Western literary audiences. The impassioned ramblings of Werther are replaced by a near mystic fatalism that frequently borders on predetermination; written much later in Goethe's life, this more longing, rueful work looks down on its fated spouses from above in 95
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measured tone, detailing their descent into emotional adultery. Ian Curtis's adultery is—at least to his most earnest fans—a distasteful topic to broach, but it's a massive factor in his emotional collapse, which was not entirely the result of epilepsy, preventative medication or his ignoring medical advice. After refusing to discuss the subject for two decades, Tony Wilson wrote about a few poignant moments in the twilight affair that Curtis began with a Belgian girl, Annik Honore. (You can read these in his editorialized script for 24 Hour Party People, wherein he phonetically refers to her as Aneek.) I'll defer you to Wilson's loving recollections on that score, but—as detailed by Ian's widow Deborah—infidelity was nothing new: like many young "alpha" type men, Curtis was both possessive and extroverted. In Touching From A Distance, she details a number of transgressions, his impatient and often rude behavior, and even a few uncomfortable moments of physical intimidation at his hand. Married at 18 and a father at 20, Curtis led a con flicted double-life. In the end, the reputation he so longed for—the actualization of his fantasies about Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and David Bowie—won out. His self-absorption and ego were spurred on by cheerleading followers—"the raincoat brigade"—and the under standably excited members and managers of Joy 96
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Division, all of whom were focused on the band's suc cess. His advisors could only act on what Curtis told them, and as Deborah Curtis put it, he "painted a bleak picture of his home life." She feels that much of his moaning about their life together was in aid of his desire for attention, and in many warm moments she shares with readers, it seems clear there was a serious case of face and mask with Ian Curtis. More than willful, Curtis was will in action, a manipulator of events generating a storm of confusion and need all around him. When with his mates, he was carefree and cool, even if he occasionally lashed out; at home, he confronted the reality that would await him when his empowering role as the leader of a critically lauded, increasingly popular band came to an end—as he was quite certain all things would. Throughout July and August of 1979, his seizures increased as—in addition to his day job—heavy touring, litde sleep, and the extended "Transmission" sessions wore away at his stamina. By late August, Unknown Pleasures had cemented its reputation as a critical favorite for the year, and rave reviews for Joy Division's perfor mance at the massive four night post-punk festival— held at the Prince Of Wales Conference Centre on Tottenham Court Road in London—ran in Melody Maker and the NME (one of their least impressionable writers, Adrian Thrills, called the band "phenomenal"). 97
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Joy Division finally gave up their jobs and prepared for a major tour in support of the Buzzcocks, trying to break through to the largest audience possible. Owing to the massive relief of leaving his job behind him, Curtis suffered only one major attack during August and September, before their farewell set to the Factory nights at the Russell Club on September 28th. The gig was remembered more for Peter Hook's row with a group of skinheads, during which he snapped the neck of his heavy Rickenbacker bass in two. Joy Division dominated most reviews of the Buzz cocks' October tour dates, upstaging the headliners in print as they did in concert. During a mid-month break, they capitalized on the chance to play at Plan K in Brussels on October 16th, with the more experimental Cabaret Voltaire, both groups supporting a reading from idolized American author and poet William S. Burroughs. (Ian was rebuffed by Burroughs, which hit him hard as he was a great fan.) At Plan K, Ian either met or reacquainted himself with Annik Honore; it's debated whether they first met at a secret, one-off Lon don gig in late August played for only a few dozen teenage German exchange students and never adver tised. Whatever the case, from October forward, Ian was seriously involved with Annik. Stephen Morris: "Annik. Talk about getting deeper into it. It didn't help at all. I think he just wanted to
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change something about his life, but he didn't really know what it was. I know he felt very guilty about it, and we didn't help because we just gave him grief all the time. She was a vegetarian, so we'd try to get him to come for a kebab if she was around." By the end of the Buzzcocks tour in early November, audiences were requesting encores from the opening act, booing when Joy Division left the stage after their meager half hour timeslot, often wandering off immedi ately after Joy Division's set, shell-shocked. Birming ham on October 24th was an exception to this norm, but Curtis goaded the cadre of bored Buzzcocks fans with "Sorry we're not UK Subs." They were won over. Critics, already intrigued and mostly converted were, by late 1979, fawning over the band's power. Most were mere witnesses to Ian Curtis's channeled stage presence. He had a conviction and severity that few critics could fend off, though Dave McCullogh tried after a frustrat ing interview with the uncommunicative band: "No amount of windmilling obscurity will convince me that Joy Division's static, murky militancy is real... the mu sic is too supercilious (like the people) to ring true." But there was no question of the band's status: Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon filmed their sets on both trium phant nights at the Manchester Apollo in late October (the footage was later compiled for the IKON/Factory
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Communications Limited film Here Are The Young Men). Once the tour was over, however, Joy Division, and especially Ian Curtis, found themselves in dire financial straights. The winter was spent in almost abject poverty, Ian drawing a bare minimum £15 wage from Factory while Martin Hannett and Peter Saville entertained an offer valued in excess of $1,000,000 from Warner Broth ers' VP of A&R, Bob Krasnow (who went on to head up Elektra/Asylum—home of The Doors—and signed The Cure). At the time, "Transmission" was selling fine—5000 copies—though considerably less than Fac tory's unrealistic expectations. Unknown Pleasures was approaching 15,000 in total sales, and the vast majority of proceeds from all of this were split between less than ten people. Joy Division, like New Order after them, never saw a dime of the money they earned their backers, and it's sad to think Warner Brothers' offer—which far exceeded what the band merited, having released just one album and a pair of singles that hadn't even charted in the UK—was rejected outright by Hannett, who idi otically told Krasnow that they were only looking for help distributing the album in America. Hannett pro posed to Bob Krasnow, in all seriousness, that rather than acquire his label's best property, Warner Brothers should act as a distributor for Factory Records in America. We must assume that Krasnow laughed in his 100
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face. After realizing what an opportunity they'd missed, Joy Division were scheduled to negotiate an even more favorable offer in May 1980, but it wasn't to be. New Order would eventually capitalize on Warner's loyal interest, thanks to the intercession of Quincy Jones, who signed them to his WEA imprint Qwest (Factory would continue to suck the band dry in the UK). After a long winter spent in near-poverty, and know ing Curtis was pining for another woman and emotion ally abusing his wife, Factory plotted a convenient European Tour for January. Ian left in a hurry, without saying goodbye to his wife, as he continued to tell his band mates how horrible his married life was. However selfish Curtis tried to be, he was still sidelined by epi lepsy, and did not find a sympathetic nursemaid in the young, fashionable Annik Honore. She was uncomfort able with his seizures and couldn't understand them; according to soundman Terry Mason, she behaved cru elly toward him in these moments of need. "That one at the Moonlight... he was crushed and she didn't want to know. He was gutted that night." Bernard Sumner recalled of this concert, before which Ian had a serious seizure, "We did some gigs that we shouldn't have fuck ing done. He had a fit... we did the Moonlight and he was really ill and he did the gig. That was really stupid." Curtis was pulled apart by the pressures he had taken on. In love with a cold but crystallized "other self," he 101
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was ignoring his wife and child both temporally and emotionally, wishing he could simply start over. There's no doubting Curtis's presence of mind during the affair, nor his awareness of its impact. The songs he composed in late 1979 and early 1980 lay his feelings bare. "Pass over" is particularly succinct: "This is the crisis I knew had to come/ Destroying the balance I'd kept." It's no surprise that Ian Curtis wanted to commit suicide, but it's stupefying that he actually managed to; ignoring the lyrics he wrote, there was—as there usually is—a failed suicide attempt in February 1980. Immedi ately upon returning from the January European tour, Curtis downed a bottle of Pernod and slashed at the Book of Revelations' passages about Jezebel. He made cuts on his arms that could have been seen as incidental given the flailing about. Stephen Morris explained Cur tis's reaction: "He talked about it as though he'd gone through some strange religious experience, where I'd say he just got blind-drunk and cut himself up. The way he told it, it was just one of those stories ... we thought he was sorting it out." After a few well received but noticeably darker, more sedate gigs in February, Deborah Curtis found Annik Honore's name in Ian's notebook, and confronted him. Though he said he'd call things off, Annik and Ian were rented separate quarters in London for the recording of Closer at Pink Floyd's Britannia Row. 102
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Stephen Morris: "Annik thought it was terrible. She kept saying, 'It sounds like Genesis.' Ian was frantic, he thought we were going to have to remix it all." "I remember being at Britannia Row," recounts Ber nard, "and asking Ian whether he was feeling alright because he'd been acting strangely for days, and he said, 'It feels like I'm caught in a whirlpool and I'm being dragged down and sucked under water.' I think... he had dark thoughts about committing suicide, which he never shared with us. It was like he felt this was his destiny." Deborah Curtis, alienated, hadn't heard the morose songs her husband had composed for Closer, and in the ignorance imposed by Ian, she continued to believe his lies. After calamitous Moonlight and Rainbow gigs in London over the Easter weekend of 1980 marked by repeated seizures, Curtis returned home on Easter Monday, April 7th. His wife understood instantly from his behavior why he'd stayed on an extra night, but shamed him with silence. That evening, he came to her and told her he'd overdosed on his Phenobarbital tablets. She called an ambulance and Curtis had his stomach pumped. He had left a suicide note. The next morning, Alan Erasmus, Tony Wilson and his wife Lindsay took Deborah to the hospital to see Ian, who was judged fit for release after a brief observation. Wilson, in an effort to assuage Deborah Curtis, sug103
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gested she might want to start looking for another man—and while that sounds instantly reprehensible, Deborah later realized that Wilson was discounting Ian as a deserving investment of her time. His problems, as well as his confusion, were the result of his childish desire to rediscover first love and artistic synchronicity with Annik Honore. While at Ian Curtis's bedside, Lindsay Reade made perhaps the most touching gesture of anyone in the midst of this agonizing situation, inscribing a brief sketch with a passage by the British playwright David Hare: "There is no comfort. Our lives dismay us. We have dreams of leaving and it is the same for everyone I know." Within the pages of Hare's play Skylight lies a powerful summary of Deborah Curtis's predicament, spoken by the female lead: "You don't value happiness. You don't even realize because you always want more. I love you, for God's sake ... but I'll never trust you, after what happened. There's no peace in you. I know this. For me there is no comfort. The energy's wonder ful, but with the energy comes the restlessness. And I can't live in that way." Deborah Curtis filed for divorce in April of 1980. Ian Curtis committed suicide on May 18th 1980.
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Chapter 5. The Helena
"Digital", "She's Lost Control", "Transmission", "Atmosphere", "Love Will Tear Us Apart" ... it would seem difficult to locate a turning point in a career of such extraordinary and sustained creative growth. But if any point in Joy Division's history can be seen as the moment they crossed over from their intense, boyish bravado to the monolithic austerity and grave, poetic romanticism they're remembered for, it's the Sordide Sentimental single Licht und Blindheit (Light and Blind ness), recorded in late October/early November 1979. From the moment Joy Division recorded "Atmosphere" and "Dead Souls", Ian Curtis had tapped into some thing—there's no other word for it—eternal. His voice 105
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had recently improved after technical examinations (urged by Tony Wilson) of Scott Walker and Frank Sinatra, and—coupled with this improved expressive ness—he turned his ever-increasing fatalism and selfloathing into poetry as economic, evocative and har rowing as anything in the history of pop music. Paul Morley once referred to "Atmosphere" as "the end of pop," and he was correct. Aside from its inherent beauty, the song turns its back on ego, succumbing to the de feated realization that success holds shallow rewards. Curtis could see that the long-awaited audience he now enjoyed could no longer empower him; he'd lost the strength required to sustain their embrace, or to convert further masses. Each accomplishment was a disappoint ment for Ian Curtis, as reality could never approach his fantasies. His resignation in "Atmosphere"^ is audible, and to this day it's overwhelming to behold. The record was released in a gothic gatefold sleeve, containing a melodramatic essay byJean-Pierre Turmel. If not for this essay—with its overreaching, awkward prose, and its somewhat embarrassing effort to insert Joy Division into a philosophical tradition including everyone from De La Croix to the Marquis de Sade— the single is flawless. The music is powerful enough to withstand or validate the lofty scripture, depending on your view; unsheathed, Licht und Blindheit is easily one 106
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of the most expressive pieces of vinyl ever released. "Atmosphere" employs the ghosts of American rock and roll, specifically Phil Spector's wall of sound singles and the hearty baritone of the Righteous Brothers. The song seamlessly integrates these nostalgic echoes with modern electronic chimes; the result is an unsettling, monastic anthem that ushers the most despondent lyrics Ian Curtis would ever pen. It is impossible to abbrevi ate them.
Walk in silence Don V walk away, in silence See the danger Always danger Endless talking Life rebuilding Don't walk away Walk in silence Don't turn away, in silence Your confusion My illusion Worn like a mask of self hate Confronts and then dies Don't walk away • 107 •
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People like you find it easy Naked to see Walking on air Hunting by the rivers, through the streets, every corner abandoned too soon Set down with due care Don V walk away in silence Don V walk away Martin Hannett's glistening treble and subtle, watery torn delay lap perfectly beneath Curtis's voice. The ca thedral organs of its chorus crest in sympathy, each a perceptible wave of memory and time breaking over you in breathtaking slow motion. "Dead Souls" is less polished—an intentionally raw, screeching dirge from which the caterwaul "They keep calling me!" rises again and again. The lyrics, overt in their politico-religious condemnation, draw from Curtis's young fascination with "eternals," a proposition Nazis used to defend the rise of the Aryan race. Bernard Sumner had once hypno tized Ian, who spoke of dying in a previous life, and Curtis often told his wife he felt he'd lived before. "Dead Souls" is the only clear indication that Ian may have literally believed he had lived before. At the very least, the song documents a commonplace fantasy, but when delivered with such shrill, barking certainty, it's hard to argue with. Curtis reincarnates history for three 108
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minutes, dancing with ghosts and shadows. Eleanor would have knighted him. Sordide Sentimental session Recorded in late October/early November 1979 at Cargo Studios, Rochdale. Produced by Martin Hannett ["Atmosphere" and "Dead Souls" re leased as Licht und Blindheit in a March 1980 run of 1578 numbered copies. "Ice Age" released Oc tober 8 1981 as part oi Still and on the 1997 Heart and Soul anthology.] Atmosphere Dead Souls Ice Age In March of 1980, four months after recording Licht und Blindheit and a number of radio sessions—including a second Peel Session previewing the classic "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in a more urgent, drum-driven state— Joy Division completed their last three sessions with Martin Hannett. The first two were for "Love Will Tear Us Apart", as smooth and universally accessible a song as the band ever produced, and one of their only recordings to employ acoustic guitars. Like the 12" ver sion of "She's Lost Control" recorded at the same time, its subdued, medication-affected midrange is eerily dis109
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placed when compared with the rest of the band's catalog. Immediately after completing those sessions, the band moved to the state-of-the-art Britannia Row, which was to Pink Floyd what the lesser-equipped Strawberry Studios were to Joy Division. Martin Han nett, at the urging of the band, radically changed his production approach for Closer, tempering digital shapes with more live echo in the form of playback from speak ers in other parts of the studio. The drum tracks and guitars benefit from this more analog treatment, and—in contrast to Unknown Pleasures—subjugate the electronic flourishes, which are more subtly layered. In the midst of a personal breakdown (though not necessarily demonstrative about it during the sessions), Ian Curtis unloaded months of self-torture in the al bum's lyrics. The pallor cast over the proceedings is only audible in retrospect, as the sessions barely lasted more than a week and were as much a retreat for Ian and Annik as they were anything else. No one had any time to process what was ending up on tape, nor were they operating as the unified troupe that blared in unison from concert stages. Nobody was thinking about Closer as the last album they would ever record because, in only a month, Joy Division were set to take on America, the dream of every British teenager who ever picked
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up a guitar. Ian had been busily buying new clothes for the trip with Deborah. Heads were spinning. Immediately after recording Closer, on April 4th 1980, Joy Division played at the Rainbow Theater in London, at a benefit for The Stranglers' singer Hugh Cornwell, who was in jail for drug charges. Though Joy Division generally had the house lights up during their performances to prevent Curtis from lapsing into sei zure, the Rainbow used strobes and turned them on toward the end of the set. Curtis spun completely out of control and crashed headlong into the drum set. He recovered from the episode, but was devastated by Annik's embarrassed inability to cope with his affliction. Tony Wilson decided that the best solution would be a Joy Division concert with a rotating cast of singers, so that Ian Curtis could rest and avoid the stress of singing the more energetic numbers. It sounded as ridic ulous then as it does now, but Wilson called Alan Hempsail, singer for Joy Division imitators Crispy Ambulance (Hempsall had also interviewed Joy Division for a fan zine in January). Wilson asked Joy Division to build a set around the songs whose lyrics Hempsall knew best. The April 8th gig at Derby Hall in Bury dissolved into a full-on riot during a laborious run through "Sister Ray" with Hempsall on vocals. Peter Hook and manager Rob Gretton both brawled with outraged audience
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members, who had been egged on by a few obnox ious skinheads. Weeping uncontrollably at the sight of this mayhem, feeling responsible for it, and having attempted suicide barely hours earlier, Curtis in all likelihood crossed a boundary on the night of April 8 th from which he never returned. Though Joy Division played three more gigs without incident, both band and label realized they needed to take a break before leaving for America, for their singer's sake. Their last show, on May 2nd at Birmingham University, was recorded for posterity by Martin Hannett, and would eventually be released as half of the memorial 1981 double album Still. It was the only time Joy Division ever performed "Ceremony" in concert. "Ceremony" and "In a Lonely Place" segue into New Order's catalog, and were the first two songs recorded by Sumner, Hook and Morris once they decided to carry on without Curtis. They were the last two songs Curtis completed with Joy Division, and both play as postcards from the grave, the lyrics a series of statuesque images with detached, departed refrains. "Ceremony" culminates with "Avenues all lined with trees/ Picture me and then you start watching/ Watching forever," while "In a Lonely Place" more desperately pines "How I wish you were here with me now." As with almost
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everything Curtis wrote from Unknown Pleasures for ward, his state of mind is all too clear in retrospect. The last months of Ian Curtis's life were as melodra matic and horrifying as "Twenty Four Hours", the most brutal and unyieldingly morbid song Joy Division ever recorded. Curtis describes the futility hanging over him in its third verse: / never realized the lengths Td have to go All the darkest corners of a sense I didn't know Just for one moment I heard somebody call Looked beyond the day in hand—there's nothing there at all Looked beyond the day in hand—there's nothing there at all Yet he counters this fatalism with a final verse: Now that I've realized how it's all gone wrong Got to find some therapy—this treatment takes too long Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway Got to find my destiny before it gets too late "The Eternal" and "Decades"—the back-to-back dirges at the end of Closer—are restrained, forgone conclusions in which Curtis has accepted his situation, and seems resigned to ending it sooner rather than later. It's only in "Passover", "A Means to an End" and "Twenty Four Hours" that he shows any desire to fight his circum-
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stance. But, as concert breakdowns mounted, and as the drugs stopped working (or worked too well), Ian Curtis faded away, weathering his final days with dazed resolve, observing the world with a pitiful eye. As with all suicides, it's easy to say the departed "gave up" or "quit". Surely it's fairer in this case to say that Ian Curtis lost. He lost to a disease no doctor could cure—one that kept him from living the life he had dreamed about. That he considered those dreams more important than the people who loved him betrays his youth and naivety. His epilepsy took a huge physical toll on him, and he felt shame at leading such an indul gent life, while his affair with Annik became less a ro mance than a monument to his dashed idealism. The poetry that Curtis created from his obstinate observa tions and idyllic dreams all but validates his conviction, making it hard for those as passionate about music as he was not to deify this confused genius. However casually, critically or romantically we approach Joy Division's music, we can only mourn the overwhelming, frustrated agony that Ian Curtis could not bear.
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Postscript.
At the close of his spiraling memoir Nothing, Paul Morley—without a doubt the most significant person in this story who was not directly involved with Joy Division or Factory Records in the late 1970s—offered a brief soundtrack to his labor of love. In tribute, here is a list of music I listened to regularly while writing this book: Before ... but Longer by The Czars "Sparkwood and Twentyone" by Aix Em Klemm LC and Another Setting by The Durutti Column Whatfunlifewas by Bedhead Sweat ln' Soul: Anthology by Sam & Dave Three Imaginary Boys by The Cure Fight Songs by The For Carnation On Fire by Galaxie 500 Lustwandel by Roedelius Marquee Moon by Television "Second Dark Age" by The Fall 115
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Minor Shadows by 1 Mile North Barely Real by Codeine Monday at the Hug and Pint by Arab Strap Slattery For Ungdom by Alva "Pur" by Cocteau Twins Boom in the Night by Bush Tetras "Walk on Water" by Ride Constantines by The Constantines "Spangle" by Seefeel The Final Cut by Pink Floyd Live at KROQ by Morrissey The Good Earth by The Feelies "Final Solution" by Pere Ubu A Different Kind of Tension by Buzzcocks "Loose Fit" by Happy Mondays II by The Sonora Pine "Jealous of Youth" by The The Come on Die Young by Mogwai "Trem Two" by Mission of Burma "Get The Message" by Electronic
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Dummy by Portishead Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk 154 by Wire "Love Spreads" by The Stone Roses "Discreet Music" by Brian Eno
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