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.
No comments:
Post a Comment