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.
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