2009 06 22 Joy Division NME

30 YEARS OF JOY 1979-2009

In June 1979, Joy Division released the bleak masterpiece that is ‘Unknown Pleasures', a record so majestic it changed the face of music. NME celebrates its genius

Pictures Kevin Cummins

There can’t be many people left in the civilised world who haven’t, at one time or another, sat down and discussed the influence of 'Unknown Pleasures' over the last 30 years. But reeling off a list of indebted bands that’s longer than time itself is now only one facet of why Joy Division’s first album is so significant.

The story of how Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis teamed up with their peerlessly innovative producer Martin Hannett to make the album is so fascinating that it has provided the inspiration for more books that most people will read in their lives. That’s to say nothing of the numerous documentaries which have provided a nice little earner on the talking head circuit for anyone who spent more than two weeks in Manchester during the late 1970s. Let’s not forget the two major motion pictures - 24 Hour Party People and Control - that also depicted the album’s recording and which were widely celebrated for it. Then there’s the small matter of the unmistakable radio waveform lifted from The Cambridge Encyclopaedia Of Astronomy to be one of the most iconic album covers of all time. Not only does it inspire regular reinterpretations in the world of art and design, it also gets printed up on T-shirts and flogged in high-street shops to be worn by people who wouldn’t know a Joy Division song if they fell over one. Essentially, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ is not just one of the great British albums of all time, it’s a cultural cornerstone that spans languages, interests and disciplines like precious few others.

That widespread relevance means Joy Division’s first album has become far more crucial than when it was released in June 1979. So, three decades on, NME speaks to two of the surviving members (Bernard was unavailable) about how the album was born and more importantly, why it will never die.

NME: Why did you go with Factory to do the first album?

Peter Hook (bass): “Genetic Records were offering us a deal. It was £70,000, which we were over the moon about - it was more money than any one of us had heard of, ever! The four of us were daft as brushes and I think Rob Gretton [manager] thought that taking us dickheads out of Manchester and putting us in a big London studio might mean that he ended up losing control over everything. He felt that it would be better to do it with Tony Wilson and Factory to keep us as we were - grounded. And the thing was, us lot were so stupid that we just went ‘Oh, OK!' (laughs) There was 70 grand on the table, and then it was gone, and we went along with it. Trust is a wonderful thing, and we trusted Rob and Tony. In hindsight, that deal allowed us to develop. We could be as awkward as we liked and we didn’t have to sell as many records as Siouxsie And The Banshees or even the Sex Pistols to make a living.”

What was Ian Curtis’ mindset like during the recording sessions?

Hook: "When we did the album, it was only a few months after Ian's first grand mal epileptic fit but he hid it really well on that session. I don’t remember it ever being a problem. By ‘Closer’ it definitely was a problem - he was much more ill. Ian could be very serious - almost to the point where I thought he was pompous.

So me and Bernard would take great delight in ripping the piss out of him and playing jokes. Then he would relax and join in himself after a little while.” Stephen Morris (drums): “Ian could be as much into the practical jokes as the rest of us. The level of sophistication was pretty low, though. He had a whoopee cushion for one thing...”

Did Ian ever talk about what his lyrics were about?

Hook: “No. In fact, the ‘Unknown Pleasures’ session was the first time I’d actually heard Ian’s lyrics. You could never hear them live and we just couldn’t listen to the demo version we did for RCA because it was so horrible. So when I heard what Ian was singing, I was just really proud. It was a wonderful feeling of power and contentment to know that you had that in the band's arsenal. I think people were very touched by Ian - his lyrics, his personality, and unfortunately his untimely demise. It struck a chord with a lot of lonely, depressed people who felt they didn’t quite ht in life. That connection started with ‘Unknown Pleasures'. It was me that used to handle the fan mail, and as time went by there’d be some horrific letters that got sent to us. After he died, we even got some that were written in blood.”

Was there anything that Martin Hannett did or asked you to do that was a bit too much?

Hook: “Well, Ian was a very nice person and very in awe of Martin; he wanted to make Martin happy, so if me and Bernard started moaning about something, he’d say, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to let him do it. He's a genius.’

Martin did make us dump the weaker, punkier tracks like ‘Ice Age’ and write new ones, and it was because of that that we ended up with ‘Candidate’, 'Autosuggestion’ and ‘From Safety To Where...?’ [the latter two ended up on the ‘Earcom 2' compilation EP]. Bernard didn’t like ‘Candidate’, actually, and he was very reluctant to play guitar on it”.

Morris: “I was alright with what he was asking us to do mostly, although he did make me use the aerosol can on the 12-inch version of ‘She’s Lost Control’ like you see in Control. He shut me in a room with a can of tape-cleaning fluid and made me press it in time with the song. By the end, the booth was filled with noxious fumes. I think he was just trying to kill me. If I’d have lit up a fag, the whole of Strawberry Studios would have gone up in smoke.”

So how long did it take overall?

Hook: “I’ve got a feeling the whole of the album was done in three weekends - six days in total. And that includes mixing. When you think of how well it’s lasted and the impact it’s made, it’s fucking unbelievable. It’s a very odd thing that the longer you’re a musician, the longer you take to make a record. 'Waiting For The Sirens’ Call’ [the last New Order album] took three years from start to finish.”

Morris: “Martin did the mixing during the middle of the night because it’s when your brain is at its most creative. He liked the unsociable hours and isolation, and I think he’d do a little speed if only because he was on borrowed time and we had to get it done.”

How did the sleeve art come together? 

Hook: "The funny thing about the sleeve is that Peter Seville got the credit for it but it was Bernard that found the image on the cover in a book. The inside of the sleeve was done by Rob because he wanted to use a picture of the door because I think he felt it was symbolic because opening a door is like a beginning. The only contribution Saville had was the typeface and the texture of the cover. And he's been dining off it for 30 years!”

Is it strange seeing that design getting reproduced on just about anything and everything?

Hook: “We never actually did an official ‘Unknown Pleasures’ T-shirt until 1994 but they got bootlegged all over the world. When we got investigated by the taxman because of the Hacienda being all fucked up, he said that he couldn’t find any receipts for ‘Unknown Pleasures’ T-shirts. We told him we were a punk band and we didn’t believe in that kind of self-promotion. He said that he thought we were either lying or just completely stupid and he ended up fining us anyway. So we had to pay a load of money for not declaring profits on a T-shirt that we didn’t do!”

Did you expect the reaction to ‘Unknown Pleasures’ to be so positive? 

Morris: "A lot of times when we did an interview, the journalist would say things like, ‘Oh well, there obviously is a deep symbiosis between the music you produce and the bleakness of your environment' and we’d look at each other and think, ‘What did he say? Symbiosis? What’s he on about?’ I think a lot of people had got into their heads that this album had come from the heart of darkness. We did try and contradict that idea but it didn’t do much good, really. We’d rush out and buy NME because it was great that people were writing about us, but quite often we could only understand every 10th word! Sometimes, Rob would say to us, ‘We’ve got an interview, right, so here’s my idea: just let Ian do the talking.’ It was so people wouldn’t realise we were basically a bunch of idiots.”

Do you still listen to the album?

Hook: “Over the years, I haven’t really listened to it. I think I deliberately ignored it because of what happened to Ian. For a while, it was almost unmentionable, which is a very New Order and Factory thing to do. But I had to listen to it for the re-mastering a couple of years ago and I was fucking gobsmacked at how good it still sounds and how radical Martin’s production was. It’s not hard to understand why Martin did what he did with the album now, but at the time it was very hard. Bernard and I would have just made a standard punk rock record and tried to take people’s heads off with the guitars. Martin made it a masterpiece and ensured it lasted 30 years.”

How do you think the album stands up now?

Morris: "The other day I went into a shop to get a sandwich and the bloke behind the counter knew who I was. He said he had someone moaning about having Radio 2 on and his reply was (adopts strong Lancastrian accent) ‘Well, I can’t have bloody Joy Division on, it’d drive the customers out of the shop!’ At first I was a bit offended but I realised that it does say something. It’s not easy listening and it’s still not being sucked in by... the man. I went out feeling quite chuffed thinking that it’s not the sort of thing you can play in a sandwich shop.”

SIDEBARS

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UNKNOWN PLEASURES

FACT FILE

Recorded: April 1 -17, 1979 

At: Strawberry Studios, Stockport 

Released: June 15,1979 

Personnel: Ian Curtis (vocais/guitar) Bernard Sumner (guitar/keyboards) Peter Hook (bass) Stephen Morris (drums)

Words & music by: Joy Division 

Produced by: Martin Hannett 

Engineered by: Chris Nagle 

Highest UK album chart position: 71 

Label: Factory Records 

Initial run: 10,000 copies 

Cover design: Peter Saville and Joy Division

What the critics said: “Leaving the 20th century is difficult; most people prefer to go back and nostalgise. Oh boy. Joy Division at least set a course in the present with contrails for the future - perhaps you can’t ask for much more. Indeed, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ may very well be one of the best, white, English debut LPs of the year” - Jon Savage, Melody Maker

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PETER SAVILLE

THE ART

Only Che Guevara, Betty Blue and flecklets of Bombay Bad Boy sauce can lay claim to have graced more dorm wails than ‘Unknown Pleasures” stark, striking and iconic album cover. Taken from an edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia Of Astronomy, the image comprises exactly 100 electro-magnetic pulses from PSR B1919+21, or in layman’s terms, the first pulsar ever discovered. As you well know, a pulsar is a rotating neuron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation whose pulsation regularities are known to be as precise as an atomic dock. Legend has it that the image was given to designer Peter Saville by Bernard Sumner and he decided to invert the colours, from black lines on a white background to the iconic image we know today. But the real beauty of the image doesn’t lie in the science; it’s in the ambiguity of it all. There’s no band name, no album title, not even a tracklisting on the other side, only an empty table where the song titles should be, set against the calming black vaccum of space. It’s open to whatever interpretation you wish to put on it And it looks cool as fuck on a T-shirt.

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IAN CURTIS

THE LYRICS

“I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand/Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?” So run the opening lines of ‘Disorder’, the first song on ‘Unknown Pleasures’, and the first clue of many that all was not well in the world of Ian Curtis. When questioned by a fanzine on their meaning, Curtis himself once said, “We haven’t got a mesage really; the lyrics are open to interpretation. They’re multidimensional. You can read into them what you like.” 

Nonetheless, viewed through the prism of his tragic suicide, it becomes difficult to read anything but profound sadness into the lyrics. Stephen Morris admitted a couple of years ago it was only after his death that the band studied the words.

"I'd look at Ian’s lyrics and think how clever he was,” said Morris. “Putting himself in the position of someone else. I never believed he was writing about himself. Looking back, how could I have been so bleeding stupid? Of course he was writing about himself. But I didn’t grab him and ask, ‘What’s up?’ I have to live with that” 

Yet while the oppression of Curtis’ words can make for morbid listening - “violent, more violent”, goes ‘I Remember Nothing’, “His hand cracks the chair/Moves on reaction, then slumps in despair” - he’s also one of the finest lyricists ever. There’s heart and depth among the gloom. It's a word that should be used carefully when talking about music, but Curtis was a genuine poet.

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BEHIND THE MIXING DESK ON UNKNOWN PLEASURES

Remembering Martin Hannett: the man who shaped the band’s innovative sound

Even in their earliest incarnation, Joy Division wanted to push things forward. The very fact that they initially called themselves Warsaw in reference to David Bowie’s ambient experiment ‘Warszawa’ (from 1977’s ‘Low’) showed their circle of knowledge wasn’t limited to the filth and fury of punk. But while they were edging towards more adventurous realms mentally, physically they were lagging behind. 1978’s debut EP ‘An Ideal For Living’ is a case in point; dark, agitated and uncomfortably sinister though the songs were, that hint of something special was flattened by club-footed recording. But with the depth and sophistication of‘Unknown Pleasures’ (released just 12 months later), Martin Hannett took them into a future so distant even the Pro-Tools geeks of the early 21st century are still playing catch up. Perhaps Joy Division would have got to that highly evolved state eventually, but Hannett, with all his studio trickery, technological experimentation and demanding personality traits, opened up a musical wormhole.

In many ways, Hannett needed Joy Division as much as they needed him. Born in 1948, he went to Manchester Polytechnic to study chemistry but sound and technology was always his main fascination, to the point where he would even starve himself in order to save money for the kind of speakers he wanted. After leaving, Hannett made inroads into the Manchester music scene by playing bass, being an occasional roadie, writing reviews and operating Music Force, a co-operative for local musicians.

Over the course of the 1970s Hannett began to focus on production. Key to this were two engineers from Burnley who would meet with him and listen as he described the otherworldly sounds he imagined in his head in the hope that they could create a machine that would realise them. The result was the AMS Digital Delay machine, which materialised just before Hannett went into the studio with Joy Division for the first time in 1978 to record the songs ‘Digital’ (named after the machine) and 'Glass’. The nifty little gizmo placed a haunting echo on the drums to create what was then a largely unheard sound. By the time they worked on‘Unknown Pleasures’, Hannett had three AMS machines to play with. “They [Joy Division] were a gift to the producer because they didn’t have a clue,” Hannett later recalled of the naive young punks who nervously let him indulge his experimental streak.

It wasn’t just his new toys that gave Joy Division that uniquely sinister and spacious sound either. On ‘Insight’ he recorded Ian Curtis in the Strawberry Studios lift, giving the track its forbidding opening, while the breaking glass on ‘I Remember Nothing’ is the group’s manager Rob Gretton smashing milk bottles with a replica gun. On numerous tracks, he also insisted Morris play his drums one by one instead of as a full kit - an arduous process but one that made the band stand apart from anyone else around. 

The trouble was, the band were less than happy about what Hannett had done to their punk rock cacophony - but the autocratic producer was prepared for that too. As someone who disliked musicians at the best of times, Hannett had no qualms about responding to the band’s mixing suggestions by tutting or just telling them to fuck off. If that didn’t work, he’d literally try and freeze them out. “Martin and the engineer Chris Nagle would keep the air conditioning in the mixing room on the ‘Arctic’ setting,” remembers Morris. ‘He kept the room deliberately cold because he didn’t want us there. It was like a war of attrition and eventually we’d go downstairs to have a cup of tea and leave him to it.”

It was these genius strokes that ensured Joy Division were way ahead of their time, but also made Hannett himself a legend and led to him working with bands like Magazine, OMD and U2 soon after. But as heroin and later alcohol took its toll on the producer, Hannett’s visions of the future got left in the past. Although his reputation still attracted The Stone Roses for their first single ‘So Young', Ian Brown remembers “he was really, really deep into class As. He’d spend a couple of hours under the desk cross-legged... then he’d put on his old Joy Division [tapes], to remind himself how to do it.” During the same session, Brown also recalls how Hannett’s ballooning waistline spiled over the desk and pushed the dials forward in the shape of an arc. But when an engineer tried to fix the levels, he insisted it should be left that way because it was “the curved sound of Martin Hannett.”

After one last slab of brilliance in the shape of Happy Mondays' 1988 classic ‘Bummed’, Hannett died in 1991 of heart failure. "The unfortunate thing was that he had been clean for a few years but he’d already damaged his heart,” remembers Hook. "He actually died moving house. So there hangs a moral for us all: don’t move house!”