Joy Division

Essential Albums

  • Closer (Collector's Edition)
    Closer (Collector's Edition)
    Closer (Collector's Edition)

    Joy Division bassist Peter Hook was at a wedding when producer Martin Hannett began mixing the band’s second album, Closer, in March 1980. By the time Hook returned to London, where they were making the record at Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row Studios, a couple of tracks were ready. “Barney [bandmate Bernard Sumner] took great delight in taking me in to play [them],” Hook tells Apple Music, “because he knew that I’d be as pissed off as he was. It was like, ‘Ohhhh...Martin.’ And Martin would just be, ‘Shut up, you pair of morons.’” This wasn’t a complete shock. A year earlier, Hook and Sumner had been similarly peeved when they first heard Hannett’s austere, haunted treatment for their debut album, 1979’s Unknown Pleasures. And Hannett was equally unmoved by their protests. Despite that record restating the sonic ambitions and emotional richness of British rock in the wake of punk, Hook still yearned to sound like the Pistols and The Clash on Closer. “I wanted to rip people’s heads off with my guitar,” he says. “And I was absolutely wrong. Thankfully, Martin Hannett recognised the maturity of our songwriting and the strength in our songs that he felt needed playing down, making more seductive.” The Manchester band arrived at Britannia Row with firm ideas for Closer’s nine songs, the product of jamming sessions fuelled by what Hook calls a “wonderful chemistry” between himself, Sumner, singer Ian Curtis and drummer Stephen Morris. Any enduring tension with Hannett—“He just thought Barney and I were a pair of idiots, but he felt very, very in tune with Ian”—was counterbalanced by what the studio offered in terms of sound, equipment and catering. “I think we had £1.50 a day to spend, so, literally, you could either have a pint or a sandwich, and that was the whole day,” says Hook. “If Britannia Row hadn’t put sandwiches out at teatime for free, I think we probably would’ve starved to death, to be honest.” Hannett helped the band detach themselves from punk’s compressed rage by plugging in a growing arsenal of synths. With techniques cribbed from Motown’s recording processes, the producer explored the space within the music. Thrumming with reverb and ghostly tones, Closer is colder and more brutal than Unknown Pleasures, yet also more melodic. From the grotesque industrial clatter of “Atrocity Exhibition” to the doom-disco urgency of “Isolation”, it set new standards in bleak-hearted music—ones that legions of bands chase through the gloaming to this day. “To be cited as an inspiration for bands as varied as The 1975 to anybody is absolutely amazing,” says Hook. “And we didn't even know what we were doing. We had no idea. We were just a bunch of fucking idiots, all of us. It just shows you the magic of rock ’n’ roll.” Like Hook and Sumner, Curtis was seemingly unimpressed with what he heard when Closer was done. In a letter to the band’s manager Rob Gretton, he called it “a disaster” and took aim at Hook and Sumner as “a sneaky, japing load of tossers”. “We were still being very, very boisterous as a group, young boys,” says Hook. “We drove Ian and Annik [Honoré, Belgian journalist and friend of Curtis] mad, because they were in the flat opposite us [where the band were staying near Marylebone], so there was still a lot of boy japes going on, a lot of playfulness, which was sometimes misinterpreted, particularly by Annik. She just didn't get our northern sense of humour at all. But it was a wonderful experience recording Closer, apart from Ian's illness. And it came to such an awful end.” Curtis took his own life shortly after the album was completed, and these songs of disillusionment and despair have inevitably been seen as windows into his anguish. “You would say, taken in isolation, ‘Oh my god, this guy’s crying for help,’” says Hook. “It's a very melancholy end [to the album]. Looking back now, you could say, ‘Look at “The Eternal”. Look at “Decades”. This is a great band, a great man, disappearing.’ But these lyrics are hidden in such beautiful music for the most part—positive, angry, strong music—that you just listen to this LP and go, ‘Oh my god, this is a great record. Fantastic.’ He hid it well–which pretty much sums up his attitude to everything.” While making Closer, Curtis’ marriage was becoming increasingly strained, and his epilepsy was so severe he was afraid to hold his baby daughter. As a consequence, he was being prescribed a debilitating regime of medication. “The most telling thing was when they did the documentary Joy Division [2007], they took Ian's prescription to a modern-day epilepsy expert and asked him what he thought,” says Hook. “The guy said it was guaranteed to kill him.” Closer deserves to be regarded as more than a final statement, though. It’s a towering testament to the artistry of Curtis and Joy Division. Watching Curtis contend with his illness left the band with “an awful, awful feeling, the helplessness”, says Hook, but the singer’s drive often masked the depths of his suffering. Hook recalls finding him bloodied in the studio toilet one night after suffering a seizure and hitting his head. As Hook helped him clean up, Curtis insisted on getting straight back to recording. “He fought it tooth and nail, every moment,” says the bassist. “Ian was so ambitious, and he was so positive about Joy Division. Every gig that he had a fit and was carried off, in the dressing room afterwards, he wouldn’t want to go to hospital or go to bed. He wanted to go out and party. We were like, ‘Oh well, so do we.’ In an odd way, as a youngster, as a group member that looked like they were on their heady way to stardom, him turning round and letting you off the hook was what you wanted most.” Curtis died on 18 May 1980, aged 23. It would be a while before his bandmates could bring themselves to listen to Closer, having resolved to carry on as New Order. “All we were interested in was being together, and making sure New Order, in any way we could do, survived, flourished,” says Hook. “And we managed to do that by ignoring Joy Division completely. When you’re [that age], every minute, you keep thinking someone’s going to take everything off you, like a child, because you are no more than a child. It was important for us to carry on, to throw ourselves into what we were doing and push that painful memory away.” Hook says it was two or three years until he listened to Closer: “I found that I didn't have the connection with it that I had with Unknown Pleasures. I was able to listen to Closer and actually enjoy it—it became one of my favourite records. That’s how divorced I felt from the reality of what it was: I could listen to it and think it was somebody else.”

  • Unknown Pleasures (2019 Digital Master)
    Unknown Pleasures (2019 Digital Master)
    Unknown Pleasures (2019 Digital Master)

    You don’t always know when you’ve made a masterpiece. In April 1979, Joy Division—singer Ian Curtis, bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris and guitarist Bernard Sumner—convened at Strawberry Studios in Stockport with producer Martin Hannett. Three weeks later, they’d recorded an enormously influential cultural landmark. However, Hook and Sumner in particular were unconvinced. Hannett’s singular, haunting vision for their music was in keeping with the bleak melodrama of Curtis’ lyrics, but some of the punk intensity of their live shows had been lost. “Martin had definitely toned down—or twisted—the rawness into another kind of rawness,” Morris tells Apple Music. “It wasn’t amped up. Martin gave the music a depth and put it in a setting that it was made for. It was just a setting that we'd never imagined our music being in, so it was like, ‘Wurgh, what have you done?’” What they had done was create 10 songs whose frostbitten grandeur, minimalist aesthetic and unflinching introspection continue to manifest themselves in literature and cinema and on catwalks as well as countless dark-souled indie, synth-pop and goth bands. To get there, Hannett’s eccentric methods included messing with the studio heating so that the band regularly suffered extreme temperatures and ordering Morris to completely disassemble his drum kit and play the parts separately. Here, Morris takes us track by track through a process of isolation, very few choruses and an experiment that almost destroyed the studio in a fireball. “Disorder” “Quite a frantic song. The three songs that should never be played together are ‘Disorder’, ‘Interzone’ and ‘Transmission’ because I collapse at the end. So of course that happened quite a lot. I really liked the lyrics. Going in the studio was really the first time that we'd been able to hear them properly. Before then, the only bit that I was certain about was the spirit/feeling bit [‘I’ve got the spirit but lose the feeling’].” “Day of the Lords” “I always think of ‘Day of the Lords’ and ‘I Remember Nothing’ as a pair. They've both got that iciness, but they're both nail-you-to-the-wall numbers. We did it in an afternoon probably. We were doing it in isolation, cut off from the rest of the Manchester music scene. We had this nobody-would-give-us-a-gig thing, so we were just stuck in the rehearsal room, writing songs: ‘Well, this will show them—we'll write the best song ever.’ We certainly didn't think that what we were doing was going to be something that would stand out 40 years later, at all.” “Candidate” “This was made up pretty much on the spot. We were sound-checking the drums and bass, jamming with Hooky, and Martin recorded it. Ian went away and wrote the words pretty quickly. He got ideas from films and TV as well as books. I can't remember what the film was, it might have been The Manchurian Candidate—there's someone in that who gets assassinated. I think that's where the title came from.” “Insight” “This has my first drum synthesiser sound. I discovered that if you turned the filter knob right up, you could turn it into the sound of a Star Wars Imperial Stormtrooper laser battle, which was always a highlight live. I didn't understand that the volume increased exponentially as you turned the knob up, so when we did the break, it was deafeningly loud. It’s another typical Joy Division song in that it doesn't really have a chorus. It’s just two moods—it goes from quite reflective to very, very sort of angry, then back to being reflective. Ian’s lyrics are absolutely perfect. We knew this one definitely didn't sound like anything else, and again, it just arrived one Sunday afternoon.” “New Dawn Fades” “I remember thinking, ‘Oh god, this is really, really fantastic.’ And then, yeah… Martin accidentally erased the cymbals. I am absolutely amazed at how the album still sounds modern. We were very interested in the future, but we weren't aware that what we were doing was something that would end up there.” “She’s Lost Control” “The version on Unknown Pleasures is pretty much the same as we'd been doing it live, but after that we got taken with the idea of a 12-inch disco remix. In order to embellish the drum synth rhythm on it, Martin sent me into the tiny vocal booth to spray tape head cleaner in time to the drums. I think we went through two tins in half an hour. I should really have noticed the picture of the flames on the side of the can—it was highly inflammable. When we'd finished, I was going to light a cigarette, but fortunately [manager] Rob Gretton had run off with my lighter. Otherwise the whole thing would have just gone bang.” “Shadowplay” “This always reminded me of ‘Ocean’, the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed song. Ian's lyrics are fantastic, a science fiction landscape thing. I remember listening to it for the first time, you could see this place, like out of a J.G. Ballard book. I’ve always played it exactly the same, because it's just like a reflex action, a muscle memory thing. But the other day I sat down and tried to work out what the hell I was playing, and it's like... God, you would never really play that. It was just a reaction to what everybody else was playing, and when I tried to analyse it, I just got lost.” “Wilderness” “The stop-start-y one. I can remember Ian going on about an old ’60s black-and-white film about pirates who get marooned in the Sargasso Sea and cross the ocean with balloons on their feet… This sounds like I'm making this up, like some sort of psychedelic nightmare I once had. It was the idea that these people were just sort of stranded somewhere, and I think Ian got some lyrical inspiration from it. It's a very peculiar song, very unusual rhythmically: I had one more drum than was strictly necessary for a drum kit, and I couldn't figure what to do with it, so I wrote a pattern using this drum which otherwise would never get hit.” “Interzone” “We all wanted to do something that was a bit like ‘The Murder Mystery’ on the third Velvet Underground album. Two lots of vocals going on; one's on one side and one's on the other side of the stereo. Ian wrote two lots of lyrics for it. He's singing one and Hooky's singing the other. In the end, when Ian's epilepsy became really bad, ‘Interzone’ became the song that we had to do because Ian couldn't sing anymore, Hooky could sing it.” “I Remember Nothing” “This was probably the biggest step that we took on our own into technology. Bernard had brought the Transcendent kit synthesiser, which he made himself, and Rob and Ian had this idea that we should do this jam—unimaginatively called ‘The Synthesiser One’—at the end of the [live] set. It’s a brooding thing, it's malevolence in a tune. It was the beginning of Ian turning into a singer/guitarist, because when we did it live, Bernard would have to play the synth. Ian wouldn't go near the synth: He was frightened he’d break it.”

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About Joy Division

It all started in 1976 when guitarist Bernard Sumner posted an ad in a Manchester record shop: "Band seeks singer." Ian Curtis answered the call, joining Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and, later, drummer Stephen Morris to form what would become arguably the most influential post-punk band in the world. They re-christened themselves Joy Division—a grim Third Reich reference—after their original name, Warsaw, proved too close to that of London punk band Warsaw Pakt. The group earned enough buzz from their manic live shows, dominated by Curtis’ intense stage presence, that in 1979, John Peel invited them to record a session for his prestigious BBC radio show. Later that year, they headed into the studio with producer Martin Hannett and emerged with Unknown Pleasures, a brilliantly bleak masterpiece. Visceral songs like “She’s Lost Control” and “New Dawn Fades” merged a stripped-down punk ethos with sound effects, synthesisers, and Curtis’ booming, dark baritone and heart-on-sleeve lyrics. Not only was the sound groundbreaking, but the minimalist duochrome cover art found by Sumner and finished by Peter Saville became instantly iconic. The band toured relentlessly throughout 1979, before heading back to the studio. As they worked on their second LP, Closer, they released “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, a soaring yet nihilistic love song, in 1980. Days before the group were slated to start their first U.S. tour, Curtis died by suicide. In the wake of Curtis’ death, the band’s albums entered the charts, and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" became the group's first hit. It was cold comfort for the trio, who broke up and reformed as New Order, picking up where Joy Division left off before blazing a trail all their own.

ORIGIN
Salford, England
FORMED
January 1978
GENRE
Alternative

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