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.
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