UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ 45

I didn't have this LP in 1979. The only Joy Division record I owned until 1984 was the Love Will Tear Us Apart seven inch. As for the band, I laughed at them but this was really about their fans, the people who would tell you at parties after midnight that you could hear Ian Curtis' epilepsy in his vocals. They seemed like a hobbyist death cult. Still, the name and the album title and the black leather look cardstock of the cover and the white inner sleeve blended strangely with the gloom and force of the music and I pushed them away because I feared what would happen if I didn't.

If I recall this album rather than play it, I think of it as samey, track after track of gloomy slow guitar rock. It takes a listen to remind me of the varying textures and moods and that the songs are quite distinct from each other. I think that's the artwork. Black, leathery cardstock with a small spiky diagram and a white inner sleeve with a creepy negative photo of a hand at a door on one side. Even the label was enigmatic: both sides repeat the cover image but one is white on black and the other is black on white and they aren't just sides one and two but outside and inside. If there is something being communicated it isn't being open about it. It was as though it had beamed in from another dimension.

In 1979, when cover art was still a matter of brash punky images against the airbrushed mainstream, this was edgy. A band that had emerged from the punk scene and considered itself a punk outfit was hitting the record shops with mystique. Had we not fought in the punk wars to rid the world of such Hipgnosis blare? If you're going to go around in a T-shirt that says I hate Pink Floyd, you should probably avoid the enigmatic on the old record sleeves. 

The problem is that Peter Saville's cover design for this record says everything visual about this record that you need to know before you've heard a note. The cow on Atom Heart Mother might well have been an inspiration of opportunity that worked because that's what was put there. The Unknown Pleasures cover looked like manual for something you didn't want to know about. It was forbidding. No rock album cover since Never Mind the Bollocks served the music on the disc more aptly than this one.

And the music? The band had already had a stab at some of these tracks and had produced an EP. These sides, for all their promise, were raw and recognisably punky. In a series of now famous decisions, producer Martin Hannett effectively future proofed the songs, taking them from overdrive and vocal snarl to a kind of cinema.

Disorder starts with palpitating drums and a picked loping bassline before the two-note pattern guitar comes in like a siren before the vocals begin talking about looking for a guide to help him cope with normal life. He has the spirit less the feeling but needs the feeling. This is one that can easily be imagined as an outright punk attack. Here it is more mildly paced and spacey. The voice that builds from a mumble to a cry (as it does in many of these songs) is in the centre set in warm reverb.

Day of the Lords cranks things down to glacial pacing. A guitar and bass figure rise menacingly through the minor scale before crashing deep and dark, the bass finishes the full figure with what at first sounds like major third to tonic but falls back down to the shadows around the minor. Curtis is central and darker with lines about a room and associated images of atrocities, warfare, torture and deadly competition before asking where it will end as a shrieking synthesiser calls out and floats above. The final verse is an octave up and repeats the opening verse ending with the question, "where will it end?" in a scream. This grinding atmosphere of nights of crime against humanity is what many people who have heard Joy Division think of when they hear the band name, a sound that couldn't be reasoned with and preferred skulking in the dark at the party.

Candidate comes slowly out of the shadows with a reverby drum pattern, slow and splashy. It's joine by a bass with a modal figure. Curtis comes in strongly but also heavily reverbed, the guitar making distant and barely tonal punctuation points around it, squeals, croons, metallic processes. "Forced by the pressure, the territory's marred, not longer the pleasure, I've since lost the heart..." Whatever the relationship was it is now beyond negotiation. The end, as the warped guitar wanders around in the dark like a stumbling ghost, is a repeat of the plea, "I tried to get to you."

Insight begins with what sounds like someone getting punched in the guts by a car door before a ride cymbal intro gives way to another descending bass line. Curtis' voice is phased or phlanged. A lyric of disappointment at one's own youth. A middle section sounds like a blast of video game laser effects before a calm return to the verse. This ends with the repeated claim, "I'm not afraid anymore," as the track closes with another burst of laser fighting.

New Dawn Fades is one of the band's most celebrated and covered songs. It's also one of their most forbidding being a statement of defeat. Spacey drums and a descending bass line lead to a big present guitar line that moves upward before finding its place in one of Bernard Sumner's signature two-note patterns. Curtis comes in as the guitar changes to a spooky but pretty arpeggio down the scale. He sounds full voiced but exhausted. After a brief instrumental respite playing through the progression twice the vocal returns an octave higher but more angry and desperate than anything else on the side. By the time he wails about them waiting for him in futility, Bernard is playing his own two-note figure higher on the fretboard and returns to a much higher iteration of the opening growling scale before he leaves it to the bass s it rushes to capitulation and the last few bars of the drums. End of side one.

She's Lost Control starts as a drum pattern that seems to start halfway through before one of the band's most famous bass riffs comes in with a crooning tone. Curtis' vocals are anything but crooning, describing a woman having a seizure but she's not just helplessly flailing on the floor. The source point for this song was something that Curtis saw in real life. He had epilepsy himself but the horrors he's describing here are not just about a medical condition but a general force that the woman in the song finds is wrenching her away from life into an inner chaos. She talks to the song's narrator, explains and corrects him. Whatever he witnessed on that occasion took him to further imagined states. To leave it at the seizure undercuts the lyricist's creativity (which is where those first gen JD fans used to leave me cold). The guitar doesn't appear in the arrangement until the end of the first verse when it clanks up through the minor scale. When the bass re-enters with its cooing riff there is a clear sense that for the woman in the song, this thing accosting her feels like it's taking forever, just repeating when she allows it. "And walked upon the edge of no escape and laughed I've lost control."

There's a version recorded later which ended up on the b-side of the Atmosphere single. It's cold as hell and ends with a wall of searing keyboards. I never worked out why they re-recorded it like that. It's from the same session as an instrumental that feels like it continued or emerged from the older song so it might only have been that. There's a mumbled coda that's all but unintelligible. What interests me about it is that for all its stripped back emotion, it only sounds crueller than the Unknown Pleasures version which scrubs up a lot warmer, despite the nightmare of its situation.

Shadowplay is one of the older songs on the record. The version on the Warsaw album is punkier and has a higher pitched Curtis vocal. Here, Martin Hannett has tamed the snotty edge that made it sound like too many other hopefuls and gave it gravitas. When the band kicks in from the slashing ride cymbal and bass hook it's crunching rather than thudding and Curtis' vocal has more confidence and character. Assassins, secret rooms and more despair. Bernard's guitar rises to the end of the track, insisting on single notes played high before a final chord.

Wilderness begins with a gymnastic bass lope before settling into a guitar grind. The singer has travelled far and wide and reports what sound like religious atrocities. A high two-note guitar figure sounds white against a black background. The second verse calls out more misery.

Interzone. A snarling chord riff and a distant scream start this rocker with its call and response vocal. Peter Hook takes the first vocal and Curtis responds, often repeating the initial line. This is another of the songs that sounds like it would be at home as a punk number. Images of violence that might well exist in the title's source, William Burroughs setting for some of Naked Lunch. This was one of the songs the band wrote in the studio when some of the tracks were dropped form the album (another was Candidate) and was very vaguely based on Keith Hudson's Turn the Heater On. 

I Remember Nothing swells up as a formless electronic drone, blostered by a spacey drum pattern, big picked bass notes, more synth and a clicking muted guitar. Suddenly a shattering of glass. Curtis comes in already at ten with the main refrain: "Weeeeeeeee were strangers ... for way too long." Alienation, violence, gaps between people filled with frozen air. The outro continues the drone, spiking, thudding and clanking with more noises of slamming and crashing in a spacious reverb. A few final moments of violence as metal collides with walls and floors. End.

My 1984 had been enjoyable, the complete antithesis of homelife from my undergraduate years with my brother's bad marriage. While that circumstance was good for driving me into my studies and music it wasn't good to come home to. Then that ended and all but myself and another brother were left the next year. I was still able to spend a little money every dole cheque on records and books and Joy Division were among those catch up bands whose records I bought. 

I found this at Skinny's for about $2 and spent the next week living in it. Closer came soon after and then Still. I didn't become one of the uberfans that I'd ridiculed until a few years on and I still can't quite work out why that happened. But back in '85 when the fragments of the previous year's enjoyable lifestyle eventually blew away, I was left feeling flat and the big gloomy notion that that was all my life would be. After three years of ecstatic cultural blitzkrieg it was the path to the mainstream and colourless conformity. I was still writing short fiction and had some ambitions there but no one makes money out of that. In the gap between hanging on to the fun of the early eighties as the mid point was about to click over and absorbing into the Brisbane streetscapes and the revitalising move to Melbourne, Unknown Pleasures made a kind of sense to me. Not a self pitying wallow but a kind of recognisable cultural filter, something that told me I wasn't like the rank and file and could still get something expressive done. 

You give up on such things when you understand how your best efforts cannot match your ambitions. There's no shame in that but unless you have something to break your fall you're going to have a harder time of it. Unknown Pleasures was one of a number of records that gave me that break. Now, if I see the cover image on a T-shirt worn by someone too young to know what it means, I let it pass. And however absurd and self-embarrassing the more extreme fandom redrew them I forgive it all, knowing I once had the judgement to allow a couple of sides of music, a guide to take me by the hand, to keep me from a quiet surrender.

Listening notes: I took the bold and clean hi-res downloads from either Pro Studio Masters or HD-Tracks to guide this post. Utter bliss and not loudness-warred.

JOY DIVISION - SUBSTANCE @ 35

Joy Division didn't put their singles on their albums. Even on Still, the typically perverse collection of outtakes, obscurities and live tracks there were no studio Transmissions, Atmospheres nor any loves tearing anyone apart. In the years following the end time you could get those songs on 12 inch discs with all new cover art and in enhanced audio but if you wanted them all gathered on an LP you were out of luck.

Two things: New Order wanted to move on and everything they wanted to release had been released. Problem: New Order had to answer questions about Joy Division at every interview they did and that wasn't helped by the burgeoning bootleg market that seemed to find something fresh in the attic every few months. Zine-quality books on the band appeared in the dustier corners of indy record shops that detailed (sometimes accurately) all sorts of releases made on forgotten compilations, tossed on to flexidiscs and given to Euro Magazines or sent to radio stations as non retail playlist fodder. And then there was the erroneously titled Warsaw LP. It wasn't finished before it was abandoned so there was plenty of room for old tracks from the early EP and other sources. And it was delivered on discs so untroubled by quality control that they were afflicted with shrieks and jumps.

Joy Division's legacy started at the two impeccable albums, those extraordinary singles, an unpleasantly patchy compilation and a trove of utter shit. By then, everyone who knew knew that there was a treasure waiting for anyone who billed up for some remastering and a decent release. I mean, the band's sudden and early demise made them prime material for bootleggers. Worse, if you got to hear the best of it, the lousy sound of the overpriced discs would make the toughest of us cry.

And so it was that in 1988, whatever was left of Factory Records released Substance on to a world whose margins included a multigenerational ready made fanbase. The LP  was a tight package, ending with the band's most famous song Love Will Tear Us Apart. The CD and cassette versions, however, bore seven other tracks. This was wrapped up in new and characteristically mystique-heavy artwork by Peter Saville whose efforts for Factory releases and posters gave a generation the same kind of stylistic template as Hipgnosis did for the previous one. I had the double cassette and it was beautiful.

When you opened it and chucked it on there was more and more and more.

"3 - 5 - 0 - 1 - 2 - 5 - GO!" yells a young strident Mancunian and the down flowing guitar and bass riff plunge us into action as the solid drumming builds to open the door on the raw vocal which delivers statements from a figure duped by power into servitude and brutality. The title Warsaw serves the context and we do the rest. More dynamics than the punk rock it otherwise resembles with a break here and a sense of dramatic cadence. It's not a masterpiece but nor is it cod Sex Pistols or second hand Clash.

Leaders of Men comes in with brooding bass and drums that are joined by a serpentine dark guitar figure and, as rough as it is, we are getting a much clearer indication of the band to come. If there were real arrangement dynamics in Warsaw this one leaves it in the dust. Brief statements over chugging guitar make way for a solidly developing melody and end in a rasping minor key fanfare. Towards the end there is a new progression that adds even more urgency and gravity.

These tracks amounted to half of the first EP, Ideal for Living and I could scarcely believe how good they were sounding, considering the means they were made with and the reputation that the initial 7 inch release was reputed to have very poor sound. So, not only were we getting what felt like pristine presentations we were getting them from the start. (Yes, I know there are earlier tracks on the Warsaw bootlegs but this was from a full genuine release.) I would have settled for the crappiest of garage punk but these were real songs.

And then before anyone could ask if there ever had been a studio version of Digital it started up. This one was one of the live tracks on Still and while it was impassioned and hard it didn't seem to amount to much. The studio recording doesn't either and misses out on the drive of the live  version but hearing it alone was like having an old debt repaid. That's what it sounded like.

Autosuggestion begins with crackles, clicks and buzzes as a slow bass figure persists as the delayed drums start. "Heeeeeere, everything is by design..." A distant clicking guitar plays a kind of stuttered drone or breaks out into distorted chords while around it other guitar tracks variously feedback or play harmonics. It's a big grey ambienceas a figure in the centre of it is deciding whether to leave or stay. Curtis' lyric is not making it easy, on one hand encouraging and on the other frowningly suggesting, "lose some sleep and say you tried." This last phrase becomes the taunting chant as Curtis revs his vocal up to a constant yell as the guitar gets as angry while the bass and drums, eerily remain calm and constant. It ends with a few echoing clicks.

The side (on LP and cassette) closes with the mini epic Transmission, the band's first real single. A brief synthetic chord which might as easily be a processed choir is interrupted by Peter Hook's rapid thudding on the bass. It drops a tone and goes back up and starts again. Drums come in with the guitar playing a two note figure which leaps up a fourth and then back down to the E-string. After a tiny respite the bass reaches up to the vocal intro: "Radio. Live transmission. Radio Live transmission." And then the verse begins: "Listen to the silence, let it ring on." A doomed relationship is described. The last line of the first stanza gave Curtis' wife Deborah the title of her memoir of him: Touching from a Distance. Second stanza, "we could go on as though nothing was wrong," leads to the chorus which on first hearing seems unrelated to the situation in the verses. But then it's a lot darker when you understand that the advice he's giving is to forget about all the tough stuff like the emotion and the life and dance dance dance dance to the radio, keep a tight seal on everything actual until it collapses while the automatic responses kick in. After the second chorus, which is screamed by Curtis, the big force of it winds down like an exhausted machine into a large blurring drone, a few snare hits for the final kicking moments.

Side two starts with the version of She's Lost Control from the B-side of the Atmosphere single (it was the A-side in the US!). The rhythm and bass line are the same but the temperature has been lowered to Arctic conditions. Instead of the swirling delay around the vocal it's more of a slapback, almost rockabilly setting like singing in an empty metal barrel. The guitar growls low in the mix and eventually gets swamped by keyboard arpeggios with a middle eastern flavour. It is stark and unfriendly but compelling.

Incubation sounds like the jam the band got into after they finished the previous track. It's mostly a thumping monotone bass and slightly riffing guitar. No words of vocals, just an oddly compelling forward motion.

Dead Souls, the original B-side of Atmosphere when it was given to a French Magazine on a flexidisc sounds as welcome as it did on Still, a strong, articulate rock song with a catchy riff and chorus. "Someone take these dreams away..." Images of oppression, conquest and cruelty call out to him as the chorus progression descends like a squadron of tanks.

The huge icy fog of Atmosphere follows with its cloudy keyboards and thundering tom toms. "Walk in silence. Don't walk away in silence..." Curtis croons a helpless plea to a departing other who is retreating and continuing. Nothing will change. There is no real chorus but a few instrumental breaks begun with a rise and fall, glittering flourish and synth strings playing a two note motif over a first to fourth chord change. These glorious moments feel ecstatic despite the situation of the lyrics. Curtis even starts the next verse a third higher as though more hopeful. Then, after another break the clamorous middle eight barges in with anger: "People like you find it easy, aching to see, walking on air..." This is a view from a window to a desolate world of cruelty and persistent rebuilding. "Don't walk away." The song ends on a break where all the subtle fourths swell up or sing distantly until the full end which feels like an earlier line suggests: set down with due care. The spell of this song always catches me and I can attend to nothing else when I hear it.

A chugging clean electric guitar is joined by a triplet chord played on an acoustic 12 string. The interplay of the two and the drums speeds to a crashing introduction of the theme played high on the synth strings. The motif is also sung in the chorus and played on bass in the verses. "When routine bites hard and ambitions are low ..." Ian Curtis croons under the reported influence of Frank Sinatra, using the power in his lower range without the strain he'd put into the early punky numbers. The arrangement is delicate with the frame of the drums up front supporting skeletal guitar single string strumming, simple modal keyboard movement and constant poignant insistence on the bass. Love Will Tear Us Apart is a perfect pop song. Line it up on a jukebox and people will dance. Listen to it in a dark room and climb down into a personal hell. There is, along with most of the other Joy Division songs about relationships, no warmth or hope here and there won't be in any sung lines but the main melodic motif is so bright and the fade insists on a figure lifted from And Then He Kissed Me and feels like better days. But this is after bad tastes in the mouth, bad things cried out in sleep, failings and static emotions and the plain observation that this, like all other attempts at love, will divide and keep dividing. The fragility of the arrangement almost dares the listener to remove any component and watch as it collapses. Joy Division's best known song is a musical description of the claimed truth of its lyric.

That is where the original LP ended. If you had the money for a player and bought the CD or, like me, the double cassette, you'd also get the following. I'll be describing the tracklist on the download package from an online retailer which adds two further tracks. I'll note them as they come up.

First is the remaining pair of tracks from the Ideal for Living EP. No Love Lost begins with a similar long instrumental introduction beginning with Krautrock drums and brooding bass. The guitar comes in with a sparse riff  ending in a tremulous single note attack before turning into barre chord swashes. Repeat then slam into the main punky chord riff. Curtis enters with a strained shout with images from the novel that gave the band its name, House of Dolls. Between the first and second verses there is a spoken word passage which sounds like it might be from the book but wasn't in the translation I read in the 2020 lockdowns (and finally, as I'd found it at an op shop back in the late '80s and always gave it a pass when choosing a next book). This is the same with the different version that appeared on the Warsaw bootleg which has a different again spoken word verse. It presents as harsh punk but there's a lot of gloomy ambience and drama.

Failures, on the other hand is four on the floor punk with the same strained vocal and crashing barre chords with high energy drumming and guitar rifferama between verses. A guitar solo screams out briefly before the second half and that will happen again to the fade. Moments of responsibility through history that only get hard and repeat despite the knowledge of all the failure that lead to them and continues. For all the callow crude textures and force to these EP tracks there is a clear indication of things to come, especially with the Unknown Pleasures album only two years and a genius producer away. The sense of story, setting, atmosphere and dynamics are right here at the start.

Next we get the song that I always zone out to if I can't easily skip it. Glass has all the hallmarks of Joy Division from Martin Hannett producing them onward, modal riffs, a severe Curtis vocal and lyric. A series of instructions lead to a screamed order to do it again and again and again. This is in the Digital camp for me in that it is musically charmless, amelodic and dragging. It's childish in its obviousness in a way that none of the raw and unformed Ideal for Living tracks are. The band clearly found great value in it to put it here as well as on Still but it has never improved to these ears.

From Safety to Where was one of the grail Joy Divison recordings. The haunting bassline, highly creative guitar scaping and assured Curtis vocal put it clearly in the Unknown Pleasures era and the clear stamp of Martin Hannett building a world of boomy percussion and distant cries from instruments. The singer feels lost but is assured that everything has been taken care of. It's the kind of cardigan wearing sci-fi that the BBC was churning out that, for all its dowdy looks, could create horror by the dullest and subtlest of means. Like Glass, it has all the Hannett-era elements of this band but unlike Glass, I'll not only turn it up if I hear it but go to it especially. 

Novelty is the song Peter Hook wrote by himself and entered the band's repertoire early on. It was also tried out in the RCA sessions that were compiled for the Warsaw bootleg. This is the Hannett-produced version that appeared on the B-side of the first single, Transmission. It's a much more conventional rock song from the era. After a grinding minor key ascent which is not used again in the song the main chord progression. The chorus slightly modifies this progression and it's played under the solos but everything is close enough to sound as though a single structure is repeating throughout. The lyrics are a kind of taunt to a second person who has taken on a superior air but is due for a fall. It's exactly the kind of song you'd write in your late teens about someone in particular who, when the band takes it and turns it into a part of the set, fades into the recycle bin of history. Like all Joy Division B-sides, it's a corker.

Komakino sounds distinctly like the music on the second album Closer. The guitar starts up a staccato riff that would be funky if it weren't dressed in downward thrusting bass and Steve Morris machine man drums. Think Colony or Atrocity Exhibition off Closer. The lyric is an expansion of another failed romance but set this way in the machine like arrangement it becomes a kind of final diary entry in a long epistolary horror story. "This is the hour when the mysteries emerge..." is the opening line. My favourite, though, is the eerie, "The shadow that stood by the side of the road always reminds me of you." This was the A-side of a flexidisc single given to a magazine. My copy was an Italian 7 inch promotional copy for radio. The song grind on to the bitter end with interplay between the bass and the tattooing tom toms into a clean ending rather than a fade. One of my favourite of the "new" tracks on the compilation.

The B-side was two instrumentals. We've covered Incubation above and the last one was As You Said. Both instrumentals. Incubation is a few minutes of unrelenting force. As You Said, which made its official release debut on the download version of this compilation (meaning it wasn't on the CD or cassette) is a drum loop and a Steve Morris rhythm augmented with some gleaming synthesiser play. It goes nowhere but is perfectly listenable for all that.

These Days I had known from have the Love Will Tear Us Apart 7 inch at the start of the '80s. It sounds like the future of the band. A frenetic treated guitar doodles into the light and supported by echoey drums and a a rolling down bass line. Curtis comes in without his lower mids in a determinedly harsh but clean vocal with lines about training to be ruthless for these days. Skeletal instrumental sections are suddenly enriched with a high warbling synthesiser in a break which, ingeniously gets superimposed on to the final verse, giving the song a cinematic heft and lifting the feel into intrigue and joy. They really didn't waste B-sides. This also sound very Closer era.

The other addition to the online version is the earlier recording of Love Will Tear Us Apart. This appeared on the 12 inch version of the single (with the tombstone angel cover) but it never made much of an impression. The arrangement is essentially the same but not played with as much conviction as the 7 inch release. The quote riff of the end hasn't been discovered yet. Curtis' vocal is also very different and it sounds as though he's trying too hard to incorporate the Sinatra style with almost every line rushed in its second half. The fully described melody weighs heavier and sounds far more poignant, as though, after experimentation they found that what they'd begun with was already right. Still, it's worth having and the song is so indestructible that you can hear it twice in the same compilation without feeling fatigued by it. 

This is were I would point anyone curious about the seminal band. It will tell them where they had started with the unrefined punk that yet demonstrated a taste for exploration and then the realisation of that potential as the musicality found its momentum in a brief but astounding and heavily influential career. If our imagined new listener wanted to go further they have two extraordinary albums by a band recognisably the same but advanced beyond expectations in the space of a single year. This record attests to that. Later compilations that mix album tracks with singles and obscurites lack the force of this and the gargantuan Heart and Soul box is long out of print and costs over a thousand dollars. Get this and move on to the albums and reach out to Still for a few further obscurites that will by that stage pretty much delight.

I began drafting this with a personal account of how I stood with this band but it grew so long and floppy I ditched it. Here's the short version. I was intrigued by Love Will Tear Us Apart and bought the single in 1980. I met fans of the band whose fancies and theories about them were so whacked out and overly serious I met them with ridicule. Ideation chic indeed!. After Uni I bought second hand copies of the three LPs available, Unknown Pleasures, Still and Closer and chowed down on them now that the goopy fans were out of the picture. A few years later I skipped Brisbane for Melbourne and took up the cause, finding more articulate fans and became almost the kind of fan I'd already made fun of. At some point I let this fade and just enjoyed the music. I listen to Joy Division to this day and this collection is both a sentimental favourite as it felt like new stuff long after the band had gone and it was good stuff. It was better than that. Still came out less than a year after the band's existence. It was shrouded in grief. Substance came out seven years after, and after seven years of New Order. It felt like a celebration.

1981@40: STILL - JOY DIVISION

The aftermath of the personal cataclysm of Joy Division felt like respectful silence but it was strange. The surviving members retooled the band, found a new member who wasn't an Ian Curtis-alike and began releasing outstanding new material. This album was released in October 1981 by which time New Order no longer needed the legacy to function. Their records will be given due attention later but this one from Joy Division remains an intriguing artefact. In spite of the opportunity to heighten sales by them this record contains none of the three singles that continued to be heard on alternative radio. The live recording (excluding the cover version) has historical moment as the band's final gig but it isn't particularly compelling beyond that, considering the bootlegs of better recorded and better played performances were doing business on mail order catalogues. Sheathed in a cold but grand, grey gatefold with Peter Saville's characteristic attention to balance and fonts it comes across as a dusty trophy room in a cathedral.

1988's Substance behaves like a compilation album with all the singles (and both sides) as well as flexidiscs, the Ideal for Living EP and stray deep cuts like Komakino. The cd and the double cassette (which is the one I had at the time) had a wealth of material that benefitted from a very canny curation. You could put it on and leave it on. Back in the early '80s I didn't know anyone who didn't skip on the studio sides of Still or played the live sides after hearing them once. A friend of mine at uni asked if I'd like to go halves in a deluxe copy of it. The deluxe aspect was the packaging: same gatefold but with a hard hessian bound cover, a fancier disc sleeve for each platter and a ribbon on the side. Looked beautiful but was really just more cover art for a record difficult to love.

So if it wasn't a "best of " or "Joy Division Live and Fatal!" what was it? A number of cuts from deep in the history but neither given context nor delivered chronologically. Some of these are extraordinary and others unremarkable. Fans (even secret ones like me) knew there was more in the coffers than this but this is what we got. Truly none of it had appeared on albums before so it was new to most of us and there was a kind of thrill in knowing we were listening to the last time they played live. What did it all mean? The wall of minimalist design would keep its mystery close but that just meant there would be a million versions of it, told into the early mornings from fan to fan. That's how you work a world.

That world might well have thrilled to drop the stylus on this record for the first time, hoping for something great. It was and remains great ... sort of. Exercise One starts with a choir of guitar feedback wailing and rising like the cries of prehistoric creatures emerging from a swamp. A brooding bass figure turns into a rhythm before the drums come in as the wailing swamp life caterwaul. The guitars change with the entry of the vocal, exchanging a terrified howl for a series of growling chords on the first of the bar as the progression rises to the minor third. Curtis comes in with a vocal line that ascends and descends the minor third with words of stress and inevitability. The machine like drums remain in a holding pattern. After two short verses the guitars now climb the same scale like intertwining snakes until the sudden stop. A little reverb trail and it's over in three minutes.

Ice Age starts all galloping drums and chromatic riffs. Curtis' buried vocal snarls of atrocities, bunkers and a future of sticks and stones. The message is typical of its time in that it imagines a future after the then almost inevitable nuclear holocaust. It's a punky shout of protest and sounds like it was done for the first EP. There'll be more on the timeline vs sound later.

If the wailing at the start of Exercise One evoked the beginning of life on Earth The Sound of Music begins with a trilling jungle call that sounds like a dinosaur calling across the savannah. Again the emotionless drum pattern 

Glass must be a star turn of one of the members in some way. Whether it's a bass lick or a drum fill, this undercooked guitar stab with overcooked vocals that make the lyric sound adolescent, made it on to this and the later Substance. A between projects thing that they threw away on a compilation and which should never have been heard of again but was. If I make it to whatever is playing it I'll skip this one.

The Only Mistake is what Joy Division probably sounded like to people who had only heard of them but not the records. An ominous ascending bass made out of notes of black tar climbs up through furiously fast high hats and a clanging guitar progression with a modal tone. Curtis comes in low, growling about making a mistake with a refrain about taking the strain. It works perfectly well as a kind of jar of concentrate but has none of the nuance or details of even the slammiest Unknown Pleasures track (which album it was left off). If I hear it, though I leave it on. End of side one.

Walked in Line roars into the kind of speed punk the band had started out with. Razor guitars and strident growling vocals. "They made it through the whole machine..." And then, like the marching that it suggests most of the song is a chanting of the title. For all it's wham bam punky energy there is that extra x ingredient that says it's the same band as Day of the Lords or Decades, a kind of tincture of despair as everyone pogos on the floor.

The Kill throws  us back to the pre Unknown Pleasures with slashing chords, grunting bass and speed drums. Like a top fuel version of Day of the Lords this pounder of a song aimed at a second person he can't take his eyes off but not from sweet, sweet love. He is acting from compulsion, a series of possibly brutal actions in the service of a person of deity who remains aloof and quiet. Is he adopting a persona or being autobiographical? As harsh as the arrangement is here the melody is strong, short phrases but adhered to. Replace the guitar with keyboards and tone the bass down and you've got something more like These Days or even a track from Movement.

Something Must Break bursts into a grinding push, a two note figure from a guitar that sounds multitracked and heavily treated, almost like an aggressive synthesiser. This would be as unlovable as Glass but for the genuine compulsion of the interplay between the guitar and vocal which keeps the tension high yet with more melodic force. The narrator cannot decide whether to be or not to be and instead of allowing this to be trite teen agnst, Curtis refreshes the choices but they always come back to the same place: "decide for me, please let me know..." "had thoughts for one, designs for both..." Other lines suggest godhead or at least a youthful fancy of it, terrifying lines from warfare and finally creepy image of a face in the window. Something did break.

Dead Souls begins with the machine in refuel, toms and snare idling mechanically as the guitar runs two note riffs up and down the strings. FInally, we build power and blast off with a crashing descent of chords and once in the air broaden the gutiar to thicker chords. After the next chorus the vocal finally starts with Curtis in full deep growl: "Someone take these dreams away..." When the chorus hits he yells at the end of each descent:"They keep calling me!" A second verse about ancient power and invasion and they are still calling him. After a brief instrumental (really just the chords again) he croons with the weight of a cathedral on his back:"Calling me, calling me.." And then another chorus and a playing out until a safe if sudden landing. A few minutes of brutal confidence in a rock song. They'd given it away to a magazine, on a B-side (the A was the gorgeous and freezing Atmosphere). If you ended up really only going back to one song of this record it was this one.

A stumbled start with a bum bass note and Sister Ray has lift off. The original by the Velvet Underground is a story of a party gone wrong set to a pedestrian two chord riff. What it has that none of its cover versions have is Lou Reed. Anyone can make that walking progression work in some way but if you don't have the acting chops to sound simultaneously as though you've lived this tale and are above it then yours is just going to sound like a cover. Ian Curtis struggles to get further than sounding like Friday night at the Pig and Whistle open mic. It stops ten minutes short of the Velvets take when you hear the audience and realise it was a live track.  "Wow," says Curtis. "You should hear our version of Louie Louie."  He and the audience might have been in the spirit but you'll be surprised if you listen to it more than once intentionally and it will be the first and last moment of levity in the band's output. We're about to go live momentously.

When a live recording is made days before one of the people you're hearing took their own life it has moment. When it's the aural focus and the writer of the strange bleark lyrics it holds your attention to ransom until you listen to every last note. And then what do you have but a live gig that despite its generally good audio quality and the committment of the playing and singing doesn't sound anywhere near as compelling as the records.

At its worst it sounds like a poor foldback mix where players or vocals sound forced because people can't hera their own parts. The vocals tend to sound the way they never do now, boomy like big grey clouds of lower mid range against the sound of the drums and amps. That said Morris' kit sounds full and separated, Bernard's guitar playing is clear and the songs do carry a feeling that they have formed as full statements rather than just words and chords that bad gigs are. The arrangements are different from the recorded versions when there is enough space for if not wild improvisation at least some thought put into the emotive atmosphere as in the already sparse Passover. As for keyboard heavy tracks it's down to the sounds Bernard can find. Isolation sounds like a live version of the record. Decades sounds like it was hung to dry just before it rained. Curtis is baerely audible and Hook's bass has no presence. Is this really from the same gig? Like Glass, Digital keeps popping up in posthumous releases even though it's made of very little more than attitude.

My vinyl copy of Still featured an unlisted performance of 24 Hours from Closer. I haven't hear that for a while and wasn't tempted to Youtube it in case it had been uploaded. I'll let my impression of it as rushed and atmosphere-free stand. It came in after New Dawn Fades and stole the thunder of that song after Curtis for once sounded clear and powerful. In the final shouted verse where he shoots up an octave and really means it, even improvising a little with a few lines.

The song in the live set that always gets me is the opener Ceremony. It was among the last songs with a Joy Division credit which means it was one of Curtis' last statements (along with the grinding nightmare lyric of In a Lonely Place). When the band regrouped after his death as New Order they led their singles with this song. Before I knew of the aurhorship I thought the song rang of hope and new beginnings. Well, it might have. The version here fades in because the very beginning wasn't recorded but, considering how faithfully the single versions (there were two) followed this arrangement this probably also started with the big boomy guitar arpeggio. There are no vocals until the final chorus. Curtis sounds strained and shouty but that also sounds like he can't hear himself well. This one gets me as it pretty clearly suggests that New Order's still future direction was towards dancey electronic pop with plenty of upbeat lyrics along with the bright music. There was, of course, also a lot of poignancy and they never quite abandoned the base melancholy. But here at the inadvertent end of their darker first incarnation is the joyous shout of hope: "Heaven knows it's got to be this time". Well, it was, just not the time any of us were thinking of.

So, this double record came out when most of the other sides were available, albeit rare. These included the then two singles which were given 12 inch spots permanently on the record shop shelves and a lot of bootlegs of varying quality. I had a live boot called A Xmas of Jox Division which was good once so it's pink vinyl self was put on show rather than on the turntable thereafter. A friend lent me a copy of the Warsaw album which was mostly tracks from the aborted RCA album. There were tracks scattered over singles and flexidisks and compilation albums. 

This official response to the call for more Joy Division was this highly selective set of songs from various sources that felt like that, as though they didn't belong on the same record. For all the solemnity of the mausoleum-like cover art this grab bag felt like very little. Dead Souls? Any day of the week but Glass? And what was with the cruddy version of Sister Ray? 

Recently, the Beatles' estate released a massive version of the White Album (yes, I know it's really called The Beatles, did you know that The Beatles referred to it as The White Album?) which included disc after disc of Beatles gold gathered from the famed and much bootlegged Esher demos and out takes. Everything seemed to be there. Everything, that is, except for the infamous twenty-seven minute version of Helter Skelter. Giles Martin reasoned that it was that or leave out twenty-seven minutes of what proved highly listenable alternative takes. He added that it wasn't half an hour of the proto-metal version but the draggy, glacial blues number that eventually was ramped up to the released take. Twenty-seven minutes of uninspired garbage that served as a counter-example of how to approach a song that was meant to excite. There's a long enough take like that on the set and you might not even make it through that once. It's just because it's rare and has been herad by few. See also the same band's instrumental Carnival of Light improvised  in the studio for a happening around the itme of Sgt Pepper. From descriptions of it as uninspired drones, murmurs, noises, coughs etc that might have worked superbly in the background while the guests were flying the lysergic carpet but I really have to interest in hearing it. But people want it.

So, instead of Atmosphere (which wasn't a widely available single at the time) or the Ideal for Living tracks (I've never known anyone with a copy of that EP) we get a cover of a song that really only suited the band that wrote it. Sister Ray is classic Velvet Underground and its epic, fuck you, two chord glory really only works when Lou Reed is talking about things that at least sound like he lived through them. Covers of it are like covers of Liza Minelli's Liza With a Zee (which Norman Gunston did as a good joke once). If it was an attempt at showing the dour, doom merchant Joy Division as party guys at heart it was successful at showing a dour, doom merchant band slug through an interminable two chord slog. We should hear your version of Louie Louie, Ian? Havent you just played that. Yet, if it hadn't been included someone, someone would have cried rip off.

The thing is that Still's incoherance feels more like a taunt than a celebration. Enter the sepulchre to find a few old photos and a video of someone's twenty-first where the guy no band wanted, grabs the mic for a three hour version of Wild Thing. The last gig has moment but only as the last gig, not as a performance. We looked at it and thought, oh ok, if that's really all there is... Really, wasn't the Ceremony/In a Lonely Place Single a better transition; the new band starts with the old band's last number? Would've thought.

Afterwards there was the magificent Substance which offered almost everything that wasn't on Still including the mighty singles and B-sides (if you got the cassette, like I did, or the CD which I picked up in an op shop), genuine curios like Komakino or hidden wonders like From Safety to Where (and fucking Glass ... AGAIN!) arranged with a sense of both chronology and merit. Too much. I listened to it solidly for weeks and then again when I got the CD as it was what Still should have been, a great album. After that came Permanent, a fine if pointless grab of album, single and stray tracks. After that came Heart and Soul which didn't quite live up to its promise of everything studio and the best of live but did a pretty good job. Finally, every time a Joy Division album gets released a new live recording surfaces in the bonus material. You can go chasing them and perhaps find real gold. It's your money.

It's hard to know what to say about Still at this remove. At first listen it probably sounds like a mess with a few good bits. It's hard to think of it reaching beyond its release date through the decades to tell new listeners of a band that forged their own path from well trodden tropes to climes eerie and new and approached their biggest statements with power that only the brave or foolish will display. It would be more like: well, there's some stuff but they were crap live.

But perhaps the damage is not so bad, thinking of those other releases that really do fill the gaps, and there are live recordings of good quality to turn the impression of the Still live tracks around. Perhaps the trouble is what this unfriendly record did to a fan base already drunk on mythology and fabrication. Clues in the live mix? Did the songs spell a message? The run-off groove had chicken feet on one side and the words "the chicken stops here" which were in reference to the Wener Herzog film Curtis had supposedly watched the night he hanged himself. No help from the words on the cover or the discs; you got what we gave you and that is all there is ... What otherwise? A bright red vinyl with dance mixes? The plain grey of the cover isn't just funereal, it looks like a muggy afternoon in Brisbane, where I first heard the record. They couldn't have just left it as the massive sunset landscape of the fadeout of Decades, there had to be the personal effects to pick up, the socks and jocks and cigarettes. Well, that's what you get.

1980@40: CLOSER - JOY DIVISION

A rapid pattern on the tom toms sounds like a Renaissance courtly reel but there's something cold and industrial about it, something machine-like. It's joined by a blast of something that sounds like a jackhammer and crawling from underneath it is a quiet electric bass. A metallic wail like a workshop saw warbles. The voice comes in, detached, observing. A list of organised scenarios of pain, violence and oppression follows and the voice becomes the carnival barker: "This is the way. Come inside". And sometimes, quieter, almost a whisper, simply:"this is the way." The tonality has a minor feel about it but never mounts a resolution with a dominant major. It is, in fact, modal. While this was kept on the previous album to vocal melodies, it now controls the music from start to finish. Given the right instruments and a very little time, you could play this whole record's songs as a song cycle from the 1400s. .Translate the lyrics into French or Latin and no one would know the difference. That it's being played on rock instruments with an edge of industrial and electronic music lays a cowl of icy deliberation over the set. As dark as Unknown Pleasures got it doesn't approach the sheer impersonal scariness of Closer.

Well, that was Atrocity Exhibition, track one. It took its title from J.G.Ballard, a writer of the concrete fantastical, and its imagery from a wide ranging look at human history. The track's arrangement and production feel both heavy and light and while it feels on the long side, the song never drags. There's just too much compulsion created between the voice at the centre of the thuds and sharp edges of the music around it.

Isolation begins with what sounds like a drum machine pushed to the edge of clipping distortion. An energetic bass figure boosts it before bight flashing chords on a keyboard play a kind of fanfare. A synth introduces a sticky descending riff before the vocal enters, distant, couched in metallic reverb. The narrator suffers from a socially crippling sense of inferiority to the id monsters around him, diving down to the plea to his mother to believe he's done his best but is ashamed of the person he is. Finally, he sings of the beauty he feels he is alone in seeing, knowing it's the one quality he has. The song ends with his repeated call of "isolation!" and crashes in a brief bright echo.

In Passover the crisis the narrator was expecting is not given a name but doesn't need to be. It has more to do with the recognition that the order we expect in our lives is a thin veneer of unreality, masking the destruction and survival competition beneath. The title does have a quite direct relevance to the lyric as the line' "left with a mark on the door" refers to an instruction to the chosen to identify themselves with a mark in blood on the doors of their houses so that the great divine vengeance machine will spare them. Perhaps the celebration of Passover was explained to Ian Curtis and he stretched the relevance out to all of humanity. The song takes the form of a continuous declamation of violence and failure and is set in a gentler rhythm than the opening tracks with what sounds like a real drum kit, growling bass and the same kind of electronic wailing on the guitar as the opening track which takes breaks in lieu of choruses. A hymn to resignation.

Slicing guitar chords, again heavily processed, supported by a big boomy bass, play a pattern that sounds like it isn't in 4/4 (but it is). The bass falls in with the drums that leave enough out of the bar to make the time signature sound off but are played so forcefully that the repetition drives the song into order. In the breaks the guitar plays the closest thing to a blues influenced figure but it's drawn out so much that it falls back into modal territory. Curtis vocal follows this falling figure through the song's length until he breaks out at the end with the final lines. A decaying marriage, a child's memories of separation, surgery, coercion and a chant of religious finality: the words don't feel to be recounting any specific thing but rather the experience of being taken over by circumstances or just stronger people. The line that always chills me in this song is: "as he lays asleep she takes him in her arms. Some things I have to do though I don't mean you harm." The sense of entrapment is constant and violently supported.

A Means to an End is the kind of title that gives the shallower of fans a clue to the notion that the whole album is Ian Curtis' suicide note. While the beat of the massive chromatic descent sounds like disco, the downward force quashes that. It's a pounding, earthbreaking assault. Curtis comes in with a voice EQ-ed to a telephonic thinness. Images of a strong kinship broken by betrayal. "I always looked to you," is replaced by, "I put my trust in you" which words end the song, impassioned until the repetition exhausts them. It ends on an artificial and sudden fall in pitch as Martin Hannett physically turned the speed dial down, slowly at first and then abruptly for the final note. End of side one.

If the first side of the old LP was a cry against injustice, violence and betrayal, side two, though it can get violent, is more about resolve. A gentle minor figure in the bass is joined by a tight drum pattern and a spooky distant electronic wave and then a an insistent and understated guitar figure. Curtis enters with a gentle vocal that seems to float in a bubble of reverb. Instead of the railing against the weight of human ill this statement, almost entirely unchanging for nearly six minutes closes with a shrug about existential meaninglessness of approaching the chaos of living with an even handed view. And in the end: "heart and soul, one will burn." The skeletal guitar plays a minor descent on insistent repeat before giving in to the bass, drums and distant howling of the synth.

Twenty Four Hours begins with one of those riffs that drive you nuts guessing the time signature but even where the bar begins. A bass figure rises through a modal scale, descends and rises again, resting on a syncopated drum pattern, accentuated by muted guitar with heavy reverb. This plays a few times until the bass begins to fill the bar and the drums and guitar thicken and hasten into a full bodied grind on the riff. Curtis comes in, reverby and trebly, describing a galloping failure as the band charges around him. This suddenly switches back to the gentleness of the opening and the narrator's plea for time to understand more of his life rounds in the anger of watching destiny slip away as the band again gears into full strength. This keeps happening, growling disappointment and quiet reflective moments that end in anger. "I looked beyond the day in hand. There's nothing there at all." The song returns to the figures of the opening but with a fragile, glassy guitar low in the mix playing a swirling figure until the hard finish.

The final two songs on the record carry such strength that they characterise it for people who have heard so often they could dream it. When I think of Closer I imagine the cover art (on which more later) and a kind of coldness to the music that was wilder and devastating on the previous album. And I think of extended keyboard use. But apart from a few moments on side two and the shortest song on side one, the keyboards are almost entirely contained in these two songs. To many, the whole album closer sounds like them and it takes a replay to remind them of how most of it is a conventional rock band on tracks (however out of step the songs themselves, their melodic schemes etc were)

The Eternal begins with what always sounds to me like cicadas and lawn sprinklers on a hot day. It's a synth noise generator using a rapid oscillation. Soon a big bass guitar begins a circular chromatic descent until a mournful piano figure enters along with a choir-like keyboard sound and sparse roomy drums over a thudding heartbeat. The narrator describes a procession and something like a wake but is himself unable to do more than recognise the failure as he witnesses it. The last line puts these events passing before him on the same footing as the sight of leaves falling from trees.  The song plays out with the hissing lawn rising in the mix as the delicate piano figure tinkles above and is brought to a soft, careful landing.

This band was a self-avowed thrashing punk outfit only the year before.

Decades begins with a sharp crochet, pause, double quaver rhythm in big reverb. A thick chunky palm muted bass plays a minor modal figure once before a tide of bright keyboards comes in with stuttered chords alternating between the old folky minor chord to major below it. Curits' vocal is way out front, more trebly than the previous song's mournful clarity but with a melody almost identical in shape and scansion. Again, the theme is one of oppression, a closing of doors to freedom as the young men of the first line (they could easily be soldiers but it feels more universal, despite the gendering) The verse stops abruptly as a keyboard drone sounds and then is built to an almost Latin groove as Curtis intones with a gentle grief: "where have they been?" This stays on the Latin-influenced rhythm and stays there for the second, final and shorter verse where the door is not just closed but slammed in their face. This gives way to a massive enriched repeat of the first chorus break as wide sunlit vistas of sound thunder out. After two mighty soundings of the main chords of the chorus n synthesised strings the rhythm returns with the question, "where have they been?" and then spreads out to a majestic repeat of the chorus descent until the sunlight fades and all is no more.

For an album that starts with a jackhammer this record comes a long way to provide such a strangely uplifting landscape as a closer (geddit?) It's important to remember how varied this album is and at how much variance it is from the band's preceding statements. A scattering of hard punk sides that reached the sublime heights of the first album. The single Transmission which sounds like the bridge that it is to their best known song, Love Will Tear Us Apart and then to Closer is a journey of feverish development from adolescent rage to this measured, serious and often frightening testimony.

Like Love Will Tear Us Apart, Closer was a posthumous release. Only one and a bit months after Ian Curtis took his own life the record that launched a million pouting twenty-somethings on their own journeys to the end of the darkness was itself launched. The band, still in the throes of hard line punk, considered Martin Hannett's extraordinary production a let down but seem to have changed their minds about it in the intervening years. There's a good interview with Steve Morris where he remembers how disappointed he was with Hannett's production but then laughs as he admits that Hannett "future-proofed" it. This puts things into a strange place for band and fans alike. Do we go with the original vision of the composers and players or give in to the bullying bastard in the control room? Well, it's not hard to resolve. Just listen to how the modal scales they lit upon as an expected part of their ongoing development and how that stretches back centuries to much older music. It's easy to imagine something of what Martin Hannett heard when the songs were played to him.

I didn't know any of this as a recently of age 18 year old getting through a repeat of his senior year of high school. I was having fun. I did buy the 7 inch of Love Will Tear Us Apart but the songs they played on 4ZZZ from Closer sounded a little too scary for me. Intriguing and attractively so, yes, but still scary. It wasn't until I finished uni and passed through all those others at the pub and parties with their Unknown Pleasures T-shirts and reverently whispered "secret" legends of Curtis' last minutes of life. Was it legend or real about the local boy who hanged himself in solidarity? People hang themselves for a lot of reasons but they usually have a lot more problems than liking a few songs before they do. A close friend at uni wanted to buy the box set, cloth bound edition of the even more posthumous compilation Still and asked me if I'd like go halves as it was so expensive. I declined but refrained from letting him know that I thought what he was asking was bullshit.

But after uni I was free in a way I never had been before. True, I was still living in a house my parents owned but the tempestuous marriage of my brother had left the building and a whole new crew of people moved in and, for a good few months, created a pretty happy place. I started writing fiction and got back into reading it after years of solid texts. My band continued long enough to do some more recording. I was still in my early twenties and knew it.

And then I came across cheap second hand copies of the Joy Division records and bought all of them. I'd been returning to my original musical love of anything written before the nineteenth century but these platters with their mysterious cover art reached out beyond all the lies and legends. What was the music like outside of those few tracks on the radio?

Closer was the first one I bought. I played it solidly for a week. My brother, also a flatmate, hated the record, calling it concentration camp music but all I heard was a rough but genuine poetry and heavy musical exploration. From the crunching first track to the spreading illuminated plain of the last moments, this set of despairing complaints and shrugged resignation completely captured me. I got worse before I got better, too. I moved down to Melbourne where you not only could wear black all the time but had to as part of the local by laws and no one scoffed if you listened to funeral boogie like Joy Division.

I no longer buy into the legend. Books and movies later the story is more straightforward (if no less tragic) and the music still powerful. And as to the power of cover art, Peter Saville's work for Factory records is well remembered for its striking originality and apposition of the music. I still think of Unknown Pleasures music as black and Closer's as white and sepulchral. Indeed, those images have so long been kit that undergrads decades later wear the shirt without knowing the band or their central importance to a decade with a beginning unequalled for innovation and convention breaking. Their loss.

To me, now, I listen with neither nostalgia nor denial. The music itself remains as strong as it started. Some odd clumsiness in the wording that used to annoy me (very Brit expressions like "sat" instead of sitting) have long moved beyond issue. If there is any good-old-days to this it's more in how I finally put the discs on to the turntable an unfashionable few years after the fact of the band's life and proved to myself how very wrong I'd been about them. A few years on from that I learned the same lesson about not judging bands by their fans when The Smiths attained subcultural godhead. The difference is that I was right to cry "naked" to The Smiths  and I'm still right about about Joy Division.

Love Songs #8: Midst of Life: LOVE WILL TEAR US APART - JOY DIVISION

"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.