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There can
be few more melancholic, harrowing albums than Joy Division's
Closer. Driven by bassist Peter Hook's
elegiac basslines and Stephen Morris' clipped, sparse
percussion, it's well known that singer Ian Curtis drew on the
disintegration of his marriage and his frequent bouts of
epilepsy to create a poignant, nightmarish opus that has few
peers in the rock canon. What's less publicised is that
shortly after recording it, three of the members of Joy
Division decided to show a porno featuring a variety of buxom
ladies and an eel to some steel workers who were striking up
the road. A posh French journalist interrupted this pleasant
scene, who'd fully expected them to find them leafing through
novels by Camus and Solzheinitsyn. "She seemed pretty
shocked," beams bassist Peter Hook.
And this is symptomatic of a dichotomy at the heart
of Joy Division. As journalist Roy Wilkinson pointed out in a
review of The Complete BBC Recordings, the
band crafted some of the most sublimely gloomy music
imaginable while at the same time "they'd enliven journeys to
London by mooning at fellow travellers from their transit".
Enthused by the Sex Pistols' disregard for musical
competence, the quartet (Curtis, Hook, Morris and guitarist
Bernard Sumner) came together under the suitably morose name
Warsaw, but were forced to change because of a long forgotten
group called Warsaw Pakt. So, unfazed, they came up with the
even more depressing name Joy Division, lifted from the World
War II novel House of Dolls, brothels kept by SS officers in
concentration camps.
Unsurprisingly, early songs pegged them
down in the Pistols slipstream, but they were destined to move
beyond the three-chord orthodoxy. Unlike their amateurish
peers, the band immersed themselves in the Velvet Underground,
The Doors, the Stooges and the cold electronica of Bowie and
Kraftwerk.
The band were signed to Tony Wilson's fledgling
Factory label (despite a violent altercation between Wilson
and Curtis on their first meeting, the band crafted the steely, claustrophobic
Unknown Pleasures in June 1979. Recorded
under the truly strange producer Martin Hannett, it's certainly the finest album to come out in
the post-punk period, an edgy, venomous distillation of urban
dis-ease.
But the success of the album and the single
'Transmission' only led to increased pressure on Curtis. Being
diagnosed with epilepsy did nothing to tone down his boozy
lifestyle. To make matters worse, Curtis' extra-marital
affair and constant drinking blighted the recording of the
band's elegiac second album Closer. With a US
tour set to start on Monday 19th May, 1980, Curtis returned to
his house in Macclesfield on the Saturday to discuss divorce
proceedings with his wife. Alone, Curtis watched the film
Stroszek, in which a musician commits suicide
rather than choose between two women. In the early hours of
Sunday morning, after listening to Iggy Pop's The
Idiot, Curtis hung himself. He was 23 years of age.
Of course the band continued under the
guise of New Order. And Joy Division's influence has never
been greater, whether filtered through the more dolorous
moments of Primal Scream's XTRMNTR or in a
variety of post-rock bands from Mogwai to Godspeed You Black
Emperor! Indeed, one of the biggest bands in the world
wouldn't exist without their steely legacy - Bono frequently
pays tribute to "the holy voice of Ian Curtis" while Tony Wilson believes that had Curtis
lived, Joy Division would be in the position U2 hold today.
And who could forget Paul Young and PJ Proby's covers of
Love Will Tear Us Apart? Everybody,
hopefully.
RESOURCES
The definitive Joy
Division Book is Touching From A Distance: Ian Curtis
And Joy Division (Faber and Faber 1995), written by
Ian Curtis's widow. The singer's erratic behaviour and illness
are tragically and movingly detailed, and the book reproduces
many of his unfinished lyrics. There are also many fantastic
websites especially Here
Are The Young Men.
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