"There is a screaming across the sky." Thus begins Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. As my friend read the rest of the page it felt like I imagine hypnosis to feel, a waking buzzing numbness in which all sensations are coloured by an opening statement or command. When I later tried the novel for myself I gave up through lack of interest. I'd ploughed through Ulysses and devoured whole chunks of Finnegans Wake but this reputedly conquerable tome left me cold except for that first experience. I still love that first page as an opener; the newness and boldness of it still thrill me.
That's how I feel about Love Will Tear Us Apart. The opening crash of the acoustic twelve string playing the sustain chord over the chugging electric, the ice cold snare drums knocking and insisting until suddenly the song is in flight with its shadow shrinking to nothing on the terrain below. The riff, the riff of the decade to follow, soars with us, playing a modal melody both bold and vulnerable on the synth strings. It's screaming like an airliner but it's crushingly sad.
When routine bites hard...
Ian Curtis' mournful croon enters, he's enunciating but he's tired, exhausted. Ambitions low, resentment high and emotions stiffened and dessicated.
Why is the bedroom so cold?
One follows the other.
You cry out it your sleep...
This is the line that gets me. She cries out in her sleep and all his failings are exposed. You can feel how cold the bedroom is and how hard the routine has bitten in those few syllables.
And love, love will tear us apart again...
The contrary motion of this delicate arrangement is extraordinary because what should sound skeletal and hollow is actually quite gorgeous. No tonal instruments (including voice) double each other until the chorus where the fullness of it is enough, needing no change in volume or extra instrumentation. The deceptively simple drumming can sound robotic but Steve Morris is putting a lot of little inconsistencies in there. Peter Hook's bass line is the riff during the verse while the synth courses through a slower figure. And Curtis sings a variation of the riff for the verse and note for note in the chorus. The whole thing sounds like a machine keeping itself working but the machine's sole purpose is to sing a lament. Even in the 1980 of Blitz, Gary Numan, The Cure and Public Image in the charts this one stood out, sounding like it came out of an industrial lab in Schweinfurt.
Anyone who gets into Joy Division to even a slight degree will come across the tidbit that Curtis was given a copy of a Frank Sinatra greatest hits album, not to listen to the music but the sound of ol' blue eyes' voice. And he did and the great DC3 drone came out of the speakers and into Ian's ears. It was like a fog horn at first but then, as with any constant signal, he heard the nuance, the brief lift and fall of the tone of the engine here and there and he understood. The result is that he sounds both fearful and vulnerable but also confident and in control, eerily conflicted. The beauty of the refrain, sung four times at the end and it never seems enough, hurting because it's soothing.
And then with the same kind of insistence as at the beginning and in the song's sole break one chord is repeated like all the biting routine. But then the gear shifts completely and we swing into an unambiguous major figure. It's borrowed from And Then he Kissed Me, a charming but cheesy girl group teen anthem from generations gone. It's back. Love. It's back. That's the point of the spookiest part of the chorus: the word "again". This entire situation repeats. After all the screaming and the bruises and the scarifying admissions have settled and healed and the shock of the slap has passed, repeat. Plug it in, turn it on and run it all over again. Here we are in the midst of life.
I knew nothing of the band when this song came out but it only took one airing on Countdown (I wish I could say 4ZZZ) for me to buy a copy. The picture sleeve looked like a gravestone which went with the detail, served up like garnish whenever the song was mentioned, that not long after this the second album, on the eve of the big breakthtough US tour, Ian Curtis hanged himself. I didn't get either album for a few years as I didn't like buying into the suicide worship nonsense and thought the band otherwise sounded too serious (guffaw!). Later I got right into everything I could hear or find out about them. But at the time I didn't need their stormcloud rock.
My brother's marriage was a disaster. I hadn't been there for the honeymoon or its gasping pursuit but when I got to it (sharing house with it in 1980, the year of the song's release) and witnessed the dark violence of it for over two years. My parents could fight and get quite disturbingly callous with each other but this verged on assault and from both parties. She controlled by finding guilt-holds in everyone she encountered. He used and ruined almost everything he touched as though it had were an unwanted gift. I would wake to their screams and stay out until exhaustion drove me home. There were lighter moments but I struggle to recall one that wasn't threatened with collapse by either of these two forces of hatred in a moment of feeling a little unloved.
Still, while all this returns now and then when I hear the song and I need to close my eyes or stop it playing I can yet let the newness and boldness of the opening takeoff lift me into knowing skies and soar through them. There is a screaming across them but I just stop listening and glide.
No comments:
Post a Comment