Joy Division - "Heart and Soul" NME Review

PREMIER DIVISION

JOY DIVISION
HEART AND SOUL  - THE BOX SET
(London/CD only)

IT WAS ALL GREY trenchcoats, black expressions, post-industrial depression and existential ennui in my day. Oh yes. As if the recession, inevitable nuclear destruction and Spandau Ballet weren’t bad enough, all indie music (you were allowed to call it ‘indie’ then - hell, people were PROUD to be ‘indie’) was depressing as f-. You weren’t allowed to smile, or wear anything with a colour or have nice hair in case you got it mistaken for a member of Blue Rondo A La Turk. And the two bands chiefly responsible were The Smiths and, originally, Joy Division. Manchester, eh? So much to answer for.

Joy Division’s appeal has, however, far outlasted their tragically short life because, if' they were miserable, they did miserable differently. And what strikes you most about Joy Division from listening to this collection is not their mythical, mysterious singer, but the band, how they frequently sounded like they came from another musical planet to their contemporaries. Or at least Finland.

They expressed a sublime-sounding kind of melancholy which was deeply emotionally resonant despite sounding utterly alienated and austere. Moreover, listen between the lines to the tracks on these four CDs and they reveal a band establishing a different way of playing rock. On songs like ‘Disorder’ or ‘She’s Lost Control’ the sound is all angular, awkward and inflexible, no doubt the result of teaching yourself how to play your instruments without knowing how it’s supposed to be done. The rock’n’roll traditions of blues, funk and sex are all ruthlessly expunged from these  performances, replaced, musically and lyrically, entirely by white angst and white noises.

It was a whole package, too. Onstage, Ian Curtis’ infamous ‘fly’ dance was the embodiment of uncoordinated dysfunctional nerddom. Everything about them said ‘we can’t dance, can’t f-, can’t speak the lingo, and can’t fit in’. They were the classic square peg banging at the edges of the round hole of cultural orthodoxy. Brian.

And yet, for all this Teutonic-style austerity and bleak, blank textures of their sound and Curtis’ vision, what makes Joy Division great is that despite themselves there’s so much humanity, so much emotion in there, a heart and soul that punk probably never fully understood or respected, but which inexplicably grips you listening to these records.

‘Unknown Pleasures Plus’ (9) takes their first, and arguably definitive, studio album and fleshes it out with outtakes and single releases from those sessions, slightly diluting the effect. But it can’t conceal the fact that even now this music sounds unique in its cold metallic minimalism and bleak, brooding beauty.

Original as they were, you can still trace where they came from at times here. ‘Interzone’ sounds like The Stooges stripped of the sleaze, down to a startlingly hollow echo of good-time rock’n’roll. But on the other hand, ‘Ice Age’ sounds like The Damned. Hmmm.

By the time of the material on ‘Closer Plus’ (9) - Ian Curtis was experimenting with a Scott Walker-esque croon on songs like ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Decades’. This, along with ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (the nearest they got to an anthem), was hymnal, elegant stuff, full of resignation and doomed romance, a far more epic sound than they’d suggested they were about before. And yet ‘Colony’ is as stiff and stark as post-punk contemporaries like the Gang Of Four.

There are more dynamics, more light and shade about these songs than on their first album and after sounding at one point like they’d never heard a disco record, ‘Isolation’ and ‘These Days’ point to the way New Order would take the Joy Division legacy. And the fact they  reinvented themselves in equally inimitable fashion in the ’80s can only further give the lie to the idea that this band was about one rather odd, depressive bloke and his backing band.

You shouldn’t be surprised when you hear ‘Studio Rarities And Unreleased Tracks’ (7) on which we glimpse how a deeply mediocre bunch of punk fumblers called Warsaw turned into one of the greatest bands of their generation, as the gonzo punk sound was stripped down and painted grey, they learnt to play in their own way and they got, like, really, really dark, man. And it would only ever get more so.

‘Live’ (5) was presumably recorded in a swimming pool, and brings little to the, erm, party that you haven’t heard done better on the official live album ‘Still’. By far the most fascinating unreleased tracks are the last two on CD3, rehearsal tracks of ‘Ceremony’ And ‘In A Lonely Place’. The latter in particular is an almost unbearably desolate, haunting howl from a voice in our past. The despair and hopelessness is gut-wrenching, and frankly, if you felt like that, you might well come to the same conclusion as the man who sang this song did.

Not entirely surprising, then, that it was the last song he ever wrote. On May 18, 1980 Ian Curtis committed suicide. There was nothing mysterious, mythical or magical about it. Just tragic. And yet, he and Joy Division came closer to God in the space of about 18 months than other bands do in a lifetime.

Johnny Cigarettes