Joy Division: 10 of the Best

The gloomy quartet from Manchester had a short run but made a big impact with their songs of miserable beauty – here are the standouts

1. Disorder

Tony Wilson, speaking in 2007, said it best of all. “Punk enabled you to say ‘fuck you’, but it couldn’t go any further. It was a single, venomous, two-syllable phrase of anger. Sooner or later, someone was going to say more; someone was going to want to say ‘I’m fucked.’” That someone was Joy Division. A gang of surly ruffians from Manchester, led by a disgruntled civil servant,they formerly sounded like nothing more than also-ran Sex Pistols or second-rate Buzzcocks. But then they changed everything: they took punk’s poison, but rather than lashing out, they turned their anger inwards. It all seemed to click once they’d changed tack. In 1978, they switched their name from Warsaw to Joy Division and released the so-so An Ideal For Living EP. By 1979, they had produced debut LP Unknown Pleasures. On album one, side one, track one is Disorder, fizzing with dread and worry. Everything, from Stephen Morris’s dry, rattling drums and Bernard Sumner’s tight, claustrophobic guitar, sounds clear and clean and cruel and cold. Then comes Ian Curtis’s voice, a deep croon that’s just hankering for some – any – comfort or connection. “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand,” he confides. “Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?” Forget the filth and the fury; this is the scarred, scared sound of fear.

2. She’s Lost Control

Listen to the nervy horror of She’s Lost Control now, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s been cursed by some crooked finger of fate. It all seems spookily predestined that Curtis would write the lyrics when, in his nine-to-five job at the Department of Disabled Services in Manchester, he witnessed a young woman collapse with an epileptic fit. Later he’d learn that she died of a seizure; and eventually he’d be diagnosed with the condition himself. But even without the foreshadowing, She’s Lost Control would still sound starkand stern, like the last waltz at the death disco, coiled around Peter Hook’s rumbling bass. Curtis goes way beyond physical trauma lyrically too, turning the sight of jerking, flailing limbs into a cerebral crisis. Lost control means lost dignity, and the longer the song goes on, his voice becomes less steady, too: “She’s clinging to the nearest passer by / She’s lost control / And she gave away the secrets of her past,” he barks.

3. Insight

It’s straightforward for students of the Fab Four: when paying tribute to George Martin’s production work with John, Paul, George and Ringo, you just dub him ‘the fifth Beatle’ and be done with it. There’s no such easy shorthand when it comes to Martin Hannett and Joy Division, however. His role was part guardian angel, part evil sod: a sullen weirdo who, legend has it, was so tyrannical he once forced Morris to dismantle his drum kit and reassemble it using parts from an old toilet. Both Hook and Sumner felt he’d sullied Unknown Pleasures by muting the wild energy of their live shows in favour of austere, cavernous atmospheres. But time proved Hannett to be right, and the icy bleakness of Unknown Pleasures is owed as much to him as to Joy Division. Insight, in particular, is full of devilish tricks and touches. It was his idea to record the creepy clatter of the rickety old lift at Strawberry Studios and use it for the song’s opening, setting the tone for the moribund guitar and laser-like synths that follow. Curtis’s voice – recorded, as per Hannett’s instructions, down a telephone line to make it sound as distant as possible – sounds defeated. “I don’t care anymore, I’ve lost the will to want more,” he sings. But there’s still danger ahead: “And all God’s angels beware / And all you judges beware.” Whatever’s out there, the end is nigh, and there’s no escape from his, and Hannett’s, grip.

4. Transmission

Look beyond both Unknown Pleasures and 1980 swansong Closer, and you’ll find some of Joy Division’s choicest treats. Transmission, released as a stopgap single between albums, is among the finest of them all, a heavy danse macabre of scorched-earth bass, spidery guitar and doomsday drums that destroys all that stands in its way. And while it could be easy to draw a line between its pulsating, pounding beat and the sound New Order would later perfect, Curtis’s grim-as-you-like lyrics make it quintessential Joy Division. It’s an Orwellian nightmare: his voice ringing out as if at a dystopian rally, trying to wake a population of people who’ve become mindless, all-obeying automatons. “Listen to the silence, let it ring on / Eyes, dark grey lenses frightened of the sun,” he howls. “And we would go on as though nothing was wrong / And hide from these days as we remained all alone.” How perfect, then, that its manic, wild-eyed chorus has grown into a cruel joke over the years, a soundtrack that still tricks barflies into missing the point at every indie disco from Land’s End to John o’Groats. “Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance! To the radio!”

5. Atrocity Exhibition

It’s the empty spaces that make Unknown Pleasures so scary, the fear of what’s lurking in those shadows. Closer, though, is entirely different: it’s harrowing because all of the pain is present, and it’s spilling in every direction. Curtis’s personal life became even trickier when he began a relationship with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, despite having a wife (Deborah, who he married in 1975) and a young daughter. The push-pull between two separate lives and the guilt that came with it is all over Closer, and it’s laid bare in the rattle-and-flinch opener of Atrocity Exhibition. Lifting its title from JG Ballard’s experimental novel, in which people’s personal lives are pored over by by mass media, it’s one of Curtis’s most disturbing compositions. It’s easy to imagine he’s picturing himself as the one being strung up and flayed while people gawp: “Asylums with doors open wide / Where people had paid to see inside / For entertainment they watch his body twist / Behind his eyes he says ‘I still exist.’” It sounds sonically sick, too – Sumner playing his guitar like he’s sawing bone, Morris hitting his drums like he’s thwacking cadavers – until it’s one big, evil horror show, with Curtis hollering: “This is the way, step inside!”

6. Isolation

They say it’s the hope that gets you, and it’s the hope that punctures Closer: the remarkable Isolation is a trap you can’t help stumbling into; it starts off seeming like it’s going to give you a cheery leg-up after the queasy Atrocity Exhibition, and just as quickly pulls it away. It’s built around a crisp, breezy synth – almost pleasing, almost friendly – until Curtis arrives to spoil the party: “Surrendered to self preservation / From others who care for themselves,” he chirps incongruously. “A blindness that touches perfection / But hurts just like anything else.” The awful simplicity of his grand confession stings: “Mother I tried please believe me, I’m doing the best that I can / I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am.” A ghoulish wolf in sheep’s clothing.

7. Decades

The bitter, brittle finale of Closer, in which Curtis conjures up his very own anthem for a doomed youth. Here, he sounds utterly exhausted: flat and tired and defeated, his voice low and sombre, backed by morbid, washed-out synths. There’s echoes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in his words – like Curtis has dragged himself off a blood-splattered battlefield – as he wonders what all the suffering’s been for. “Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders / Here are the young men, well where have they been?” he intones. “We knocked on the doors of Hell’s darker chamber.” This, after all the angst that’s gone before, is a transmission from the heart of darkness, and it’s clear he’s given up. “Weary inside, now our heart’s lost forever / Can’t replace the fear, or the thrill of the chase,” he sighs. Away from the studio, things were more troubled than ever for Curtis. His epilepsy was increasingly uncontrollable, Deborah had finally filed for divorce, he was still entangled with Annik and he was dreading the heavy slog of Joy Division’s first ever US tour. It was too much: on the evening before he was scheduled to fly to the US, Curtis hung himself in his kitchen. Closer, released two months later, would be his – and Joy Division’s – final ever album.

8. Atmosphere

And to think that the French nearly got to keep the magnificent Atmosphere all to themselves. In 1980, across the Channel, the Sordide Sentimental label released it as a France-only limited-edition single, and it wasn’t until Curtis’s death that it was reissued in the UK. Since then, it’s become a unbreakable testament to their brilliance: a glacial, glittering masterpiece that serves so beautifully as their final farewell, the song handpicked by John Peel to be played on the airwaves after announcing Curtis’s death. It’s so delicate and pristine, it feels like it could evaporate at any moment; everything from those sparse, subtle drums and low bass to the shimmering, gossamer-like keyboards that rise and swell and then sink again is in its right place. And has Curtis’s voice ever sounded as rich, and heavy, as it does here? “Walk in silence / Don’t turn away, in silence,” he sings wearily. “See the danger / Always danger / Endless talking / Life rebuilding.” A perfect goodbye.

9. Dead Souls

There’s a fantastic snippet in Sumner’s autobiography Chapter and Verse, released last year, in which he details how he hypnotised Curtis just two weeks before his suicide. The full transcript of their ersatz therapy session is an eerie thing, as Curtis rambles about a past life as a mercenary who fought in the hundred years’ war. That same sense of being transported into a weird otherworld is found in Dead Souls, the original B-side to Atmosphere. Here, Curtis sounds like he’s being pulled by ghostly apparitions, trapped in a place “where figures from the past stand tall / And mocking voices ring the halls”. “Someone take these dreams away / That point me to another day / A duel of personalities / That stretch all true realities,” he sings, and the music behind him sounds like it’s in a trance, too, a menacing wall of noise that snakes on a loop and finally explodes into a giant crescendo. This is Curtis’s musical seance with the spirits of yore, a dreadful, hypnotic spell that freezes your limbs and can’t be shaken off.

10. Love Will Tear Us Apart

“I remember standing in the audience at London University,” remembers Factory Records’s sleeve designer Peter Saville in Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary, Joy Division. “And thinking: ‘Oh fuck – now they’ve got a single.’” Back in 1979, he’d just witnessed Joy Division playing a new song for the very first time, and he’d been rendered totally dumbstruck. “Oh fuck” is still the best response to Love Will Tear Us Apart now, too. It’s Joy Division’s whole history carved into one stone tablet: the legend that’s inscribed on Curtis’s memorial stone, and an entire legacy distilled into 3m 46 sec of perfect pop music. It’s also unlike anything else in their entire back catalogue. There’s no heavy murk or gothic doom, just that gorgeous, squirrelling synth that’s sad and sweet, vulnerable and lost. And while Curtis’s words are so often rooted in morbid fantasy worlds, there’s no highfalutin concepts here: just the harsh reality of a relationship withered and gone wrong. “Why is this bedroom so cold? You’ve turned away on your side,” he asks, bitter and bruised, as two people lie next to one another but can’t bring themselves to talk or touch. “You cry out in your sleep, all my failings exposed,” he adds later, “and there’s a taste in my mouth / As desperation takes hold.” Sometimes, it might seem perverse that Love Will Tear Us Apart has grown into Joy Division’s defining statement – here, after all, is a band who journeyed into the void and returned from some hopeless event horizon with such torrid, terrible tales, and now they’re best remembered for singing a pop single about lost love. But what else could it be but a song that’s so wickedly, wonderfully devastating it’ll still have you whispering “oh fuck” every time you hear it?

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