BAGGAGE FREE WIND BACK WEDNESDAY DEPLANES JOY DIVISION
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
The bloke was coming down the steps from a plane wearing a band t-shirt and next thing, people with no cultural history were losing their shit. Another day in the genocide-distraction, or to quote from Atrocity Exhibition, a song that’s not on the album represented on that t-shirt, but apt nonetheless, “You'll see the horrors of a faraway place/Meet the architects of law face to face/See mass murder on a scale you've never seen/And all the ones who try hard to succeed”.
Sure, the furore was ridiculous but maybe it got some of those alerted to the “outrage” curious about a group that existed for a comparative blink of the eye, left a small sonic footprint, but rippled through the next five decades.
If that’s the case, Wind Back Wednesday as always is ready to help, in this case pulling out a piece from 2007 when Joy Division and related matters were topical, repackaged and conveniently available.
Hardly the definitive or final word - there are some really good books on them, check them out - more a sample tray, but you gotta start somewhere, right?
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JOY DIVISION
Unknown Pleasures; Closer; Still; Permanent; Substance (Warner)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Music From the Motion Picture Control (Warner)
AESTHETICS MATTERED in the atmosphere, and yes indeed the mythology, around Joy Division.
There was the stark imagery of their two studio albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer: no band name; oblique or obscured graphics/picture; no track listing; limited colours.There were the photographs, some of the most famous by Anton Corbijn (who would later direct the film Control), which were invariably black-and-white, unsmiling and even when taken in sunlight felt like grim Manchester mid-winter.
There was the sound, where producer Martin Hannett eschewed replicating the fevered live shows, choosing instead to create a precise, chilled and sparse world. Here Stephen Morris's drums seemed to come from different parts of the room and felt free of human fallibility; Peter Hook's bass was often trebly and loose and lifted the rhythm from your gut to your shoulders; Bernard Sumner's guitar was a limited tool whose limitations became its selling point as it cut across the songs in narrow frames of cold sheets of chords.
Combined, they added up to a sense of distancing, reticence and ambiguity, potentially mechanistic and impersonal. But above them all was the voice of Ian Curtis, seemingly racked with frustration, self-flagellation, incipient gloom and a coil of anger which seemed all the more threatening for never being completely unleashed.
Curtis didn't have any more range than Sumner's guitar but suggested depths which would only reveal themselves when you were too far in to leave easily. I wouldn't recommend idly venturing into the icy but riveting world of I Remember Nothing, which closes Unknown Pleasures.
A similar warning, or invitation if you're so inclined, needs to be issued about the stern, bitter-to-the-taste and utterly urban landscape of Colony, the mid-point of Closer. There are angles here which sear like paper cuts but Hook's bassline holds you in.
What were they like live? As the Australian reissues of the two albums don't have the extras of live concerts offered on the UK versions, we can only really judge on Still. This recording of Joy Division's final show in Birmingham (featuring a muffled version of Ceremony, later recorded by New Order) shows more of the urgency of their beginnings and less of the icy control of Hannett's recordings. It's also a curiously dispassionate show which does the band few favours.
The two compilations, Permanent and (the superior) Substance are the places to head if you want to cut through to the songs you already know, several of which - the rather important pair of almost-pop-songs, Love Will Tear Us Apart and Transmission for a start - weren't on either album. You need them to get those songs but neither compilation is adequate without the studio albums.
A surprising better bet is the Control soundtrack which has the necessary Joy Division songs (Transmission played by the film's actors-as-players), a couple of New Order songs and a number of key influences on Joy Division, from Bowie and Roxy Music to Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground.
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