FEATURE:
New Dawn Fades
Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures at Forty-Five
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THERE are plenty of…
PHOTO CREDIT: Lex van Rossen/MAI/Redferns
interesting features around Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Ones like this and this are well worth reading. I am going to bring in a couple. The reason for this is that the debut album from Joy Division turns forty-five on 15th June. Recorded and mixed over three successive weekends at Stockport's Strawberry Studios in April 1979, with producer Martin Hannett, many consider this album to be one of the best of all time. I will end with a couple of reviews. There are some features that are expansive and detailed that are worth uniting. Giving a clear impression of Unknown Pleasures. How it came together and the impact it has had. I will start out with Irish Times. They celebrated, what they called, an accidental masterpiece on the fortieth anniversary of Unknown Pleasures in 2019:
“Unknown Pleasures seemed to have arrived through a slipstream, from another time and place. And though it could be enjoyed as both a bleak pop revue and an exorcism (ultimately unsuccessful) of singer Ian Curtis’s demons, the LP was above all profoundly mysterious. All these decades later there’s a case that it remains fundamentally inscrutable. You may think you’ve got its measure – but you’re never quite there, never really all the way in.
“Unknown Pleasures once sounded like the future – its genius is that, four decades later, it still sounds like the future,” says John Robb, Manchester musician, rock journalist and author of The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City 1976–1996.
Melancholy
“It is a remarkable and astonishing record made by a band who had no idea how good they were, with a singer who didn’t live long enough to see how important they would become. Its bass-driven soundscapes utilise space, emotion and melancholy in ways the generations of bands are still trying to unravel.”
Robb cuts to the heart Unknown Pleasures’ dark charm in describing it as the sound of the future glimmering over the horizon. Steeped in the social-realistic science fiction of JG Ballard and raised amid the infinite greys and browns of postwar greater Manchester, Joy Division had transcended punk and gone somewhere sadder and scarier.
They did so in part thanks to the expressive lyrics of Ian Curtis, lines delivered with the lights out, words recited from the heart, during the late-night sessions at Strawberry.
“To the centre of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you/ To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you,” Curtis sang on Shadowplay, a fever-dream striplit by halogen street-lighting and the flash of passing traffic.
“I could have lived a little better with the myths and the lies,” continued the narrator on She’s Lost Control. “When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried.”
Foreshadowing
She’s Lost Control was about a woman with epilepsy Curtis had met at the Macclesfield job centre where he worked. She died during an epileptic fit and, with Curtis himself diagnosed with the condition, the track is both a requiem and also a foreshadowing of his own future (he died by suicide in May 1980). But it chills even outside of that context, as a mediation on how ill-prepared we all are when life throws its worst at us.
Curtis’s unflinching lyrics were counterpointed by Bernard Sumner’s minimalist guitars and by the funereal stomp of bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris. To this was added Peter Saville’s instantly iconic cover sleeve, based on the zig-zag radio frequency of a dying star.
“Unknown Pleasures may very well be one of the best white, English debut LPs of the year,” wrote the group’s future biographer Jon Savage in Melody Maker the week of its release. ”Without trying to baffle or overreach itself, this outfit step into a labyrinth that is rarely explored with any smidgeon of real conviction,” said the NME. Soon it was agreed that Joy Division had created a masterpiece.
Everyone in Manchester knew they were the best band in the city. I saw them play and sometimes they were s**t but most times they were great
All of this the band achieved, as already pointed out, largely by accident.Their ambition had been to make a cacophonous punk record in the vein of their idols Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols. But Strawberry Studios, bankrolled by members of soft pop ensemble 10CC, was the domain of control freak producer Martin Hannett. He took care that Unknown Pleasures was his vision as much as Joy Division’s.
Eating glass
Hannett was an eccentric taskmaster. He taped, during the sessions, the sound of breaking glass, someone eating crisps (which he then played backwards) and the chilling clunk and shudder of the antiquated Strawberry Studios lift. “[Joy Division] were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue,” he would reminisce. “They didn’t argue.”
After the fact, though, they groused at length. “The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album,” guitarist Sumner complained. “We’d drawn this picture in black-and-white, and Martin had coloured it in for us. We resented it.”
Joy Division were not at that point regarded as potentially one of the most significant British groups of their generation. Nonetheless, they were perceived as the Manchester band most likely to step up and break out.
“Joy Division were such a great band,” Jez Kerr of contemporaries and label-mates A Certain Ratio would later state. “Everyone in Manchester knew they were the best band in the city. Ask anyone from that era who was the best band in Manchester and they all say Joy Division. I saw them play and sometimes they were s**t but most times they were great. It’s the mark of a good band that starting out you can be crap but at other times totally brilliant.”
Hannett was introduced to Joy Division by Tony Wilson, a local scenester who had signed the group to his label, Factory Records. The Factory story is closely bound up with the north of England punk movement. But it also boasts several unusual Irish connections. Many of Factory’s most famous releases – including the 1979 Factory Sampler EP, and Joy Division’s timeless single Love Will Tear Us Part – were pressed at the Carlton Productions vinyl pressing plant on the John F Kennedy estate on the Naas Road.
Friendship
Wilson, meanwhile, maintained a lifelong friendship with Meath football manager Sean Boylan. They had met when Wilson’s family was holidays in Dunboyne, where they struck up an enduring connection.
“Tony fell in love with our family and everyone around Dunboyne,” Boylan would recount. “So he came every Christmas. He came at Easter. He came at summer. He came at Whit. Every break there was he came, even when he went to Cambridge . . . Once you were a friend of Tony, that was it.”
Joy Division were also a huge influence on early U2. Hannett recorded the Dubliners’ seven-inch 11 O’Clock Tick-Tock, imbuing it with a Factory-ish veneer of monochrome angst. A Day Without Me, a single from U2’s debut album, Boy, was, moreover, partly a lament for Curtis (albeit one U2 had debuted in uncompleted form prior to his death).
Its black-and-white sleeve shot of Booterstown railway bridge was perceived as echoing Joy Division’s famous photoshoot at Epping Walk bridge in Hulme. Bono would later tell Wilson that U2 were ready to take the Manchester’s group’s place.
“Bono once said to me, he [Ian Curtis] was the best,” Wilson remembered. “‘I was always the number two, but he was the best. But you know, I’ll do it anyway. Now he’s gone.’ But I think Bono did do it. I mean, I’ve never been a massive U2 fan, but when I saw him, that wonderful performance at Live Aid, I thought, well, there you are.”
Wilson was a dedicated schmoozer, it’s worth acknowledging. As portrayed by Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s 24-Hour Party People, he seemed to enjoy the spotlight more than his bands did. Still, he wasn’t a shill – and he gave Joy Division the freedom they required.
Extraordinary
What they, and Hannett, did with it was extraordinary. “I was such a fan of punk I thought all good music would end at that point, nothing would top the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam etc,” recalls Tom Dunne, radio presenter and Something Happens frontman. “Then Unknown Pleasures arrived. I found it jarring initially. It was so unlike what had come before. I didn’t take to it at once. But slowly it crept into me. Ian Curtis singing those lonesome, plaintive words drew me in. He was mesmeric. There was an intensity about them.”
Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Peter Hook of Joy Division. Photograph: Harry Goodwin/Rex Features
If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times
Listened to today, what’s most striking is how contemporary Unknown Pleasure feels. It really hasn’t aged at all.
“If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times. Listen to Joy Division now, and you have the inescapable impression that the group were catatonically channelling our present, their future,” wrote Mark Fisher in his 2005 essay collection Ghosts of My Life.
Unknown Pleasures would inevitably be overshadowed by Curtis’s death. He hung himself in the kitchen of the Macclesfield terraced house he shared with his wife and baby daughter 11 months after the album’s release. Joy Division had just completed their second LP, Closer, and were planning a tour to America.
Curtis was just 24. He had married young and become a parent barely out of his teens. And while he had a sincere and thoughtful streak – as manifested in lyrics that referenced Ballard and Burroughs – he was a young man in a successful band.
An affair with a Belgian music journalist left him crippled with guilt. But it also stoked resentment towards his wife, Deborah, and the opportunities denied him by dint of his responsibilities towards her and their daughter. The heavy medication he was required to take for his epilepsy didn’t help.
I will come to some reviews now. There are so many tributes to the album and features about it. Going into detail about its brilliance. I hope that this feature gives you a better impression and understanding of Joy Division’s debut album. Unknown Pleasures is considered one of the greatest albums ever. If some in 1979 were mixed in their reception, things have changed now. Some noting that there was bleakness and this nightmare sound running through the album. Not sure how to take it. In the years since, the reviews have been unanimously positive. This is what NME noted in their review:
“Joy Division’s reputation has grown with every year after their abrupt and tragic end in May 1980, when Curtis hanged himself in his Macclesfield home on the eve of the band’s first American tour. It’s a story told in full in the forthcoming Anton Corbijn biopic Control, an intoxicating mixture of musical triumph and personal tragedy. But it’s the music alone we’re here to talk about, as both studio albums (along with the posthumous compilation ‘Still’) are receiving timely reissues complete with extra CDs of live material.
The band’s debut ‘Unknown Pleasures’, originally released in 1979, is simply one of the best records ever made, and is still powerful enough to floor you 28 years on. With an almost dub-like, spacey atmosphere sculpted by studio genius Martin Hannett, the band’s sound – Peter Hook’s rumbling basslines, Barney Sumner’s eerie guitar shrieks and Steven Morris’ machine-like drumming – was almost the polar opposite of the punk music which had brought them together after a Sex Pistols show in 1976.
The album’s raw power is still gripping, most notably on the haunting ‘Day Of The Lords’ and ‘She’s Lost Control’, which Curtis, who was epileptic, wrote in sympathy after hearing that a girl he
knew with the same condition had died.
‘Closer’, released just months after his death in 1980, is an appropriate epitaph for Curtis. With personal problems and his medical condition causing him extreme pain both physically and mentally, the likes of clattering opener ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and the harrowing ‘Decades’, which both refer to psychosis and mental breakdown, offer compelling evidence that this was a man at the end of his tether. Even the most upbeat moment is chilling – ‘Isolation’’s icy synths adding a sinister edge to what is essentially an electropop tune.
‘Closer’ almost touches the same heights as the band’s debut, but lacks an anthem – but then the contrary bastards did decide to release the peerless ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as a stand-alone single instead, just because they could.
The remaining members regrouped after Curtis’ death and, as New Order, went on to change the alternative rock landscape again after investing in a sampler. But that’s another story entirely. The happy ending here is that, thanks to the astonishing, timeless, awe-inspiring music, Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson and Joy Division will all live forever”.
I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. It will be interesting to see how others react to the upcoming forty-fifth anniversary of Unknown Pleasures. On 15th June, I am sure that we will get a lot of new perspectives about a classic debut album. Joy Division followed Unknown Pleasure with 1980’s Closer. Even though I did not discover the album until fairly recently, I can recognise that it is an astonishing debut. A hugely influential album. If you have not heard it then I would advise that you spend time with it:
“It even looks like something classic, beyond its time or place of origin even as it was a clear product of both -- one of Peter Saville's earliest and best designs, a transcription of a signal showing a star going nova, on a black embossed sleeve. If that were all Unknown Pleasures was, it wouldn't be discussed so much, but the ten songs inside, quite simply, are stone-cold landmarks, the whole album a monument to passion, energy, and cathartic despair. The quantum leap from the earliest thrashy singles to Unknown Pleasures can be heard through every note, with Martin Hannett's deservedly famous production -- emphasizing space in the most revelatory way since the dawn of dub -- as much a hallmark as the music itself. Songs fade in behind furtive noises of motion and activity, glass breaks with the force and clarity of doom, and minimal keyboard lines add to an air of looming disaster -- something, somehow, seems to wait or lurk beyond the edge of hearing. But even though this is Hannett's album as much as anyone's, the songs and performances are the true key. Bernard Sumner redefined heavy metal sludge as chilling feedback fear and explosive energy, Peter Hook's instantly recognizable bass work was at once warm and forbidding, and Stephen Morris' drumming smacked through the speakers above all else. Ian Curtis synthesizes and purifies every last impulse, his voice shot through with the desire first and foremost to connect, only connect -- as "Candidate" plaintively states, "I tried to get to you/You treat me like this." Pick any song: the nervous death dance of "She's Lost Control"; the harrowing call for release "New Dawn Fades," all four members in perfect sync; the romance in hell of "Shadowplay"; "Insight" and its nervous drive toward some sort of apocalypse. All visceral, all emotional, all theatrical, all perfect -- one of the best albums ever”.
Released on 15th June, 1979, we are not far from the forty-fifth anniversary of Unknown Pleasures. Songs like Shadowplay and She’s Lost Control still sounds so powerful and haunting to this day. So arresting and compelling, there are few albums that have the same legacy and significance as Unknown Pleasures. Once heard, this is an album that will…
NEVER be forgotten.