2008 05 10 The Guardian - In Praise of Joy Division
Atrocity Exhibition. Dead Souls. Love Will Tear Us Apart. Do any of these songs sound even vaguely summery? Yet Joy Division, the band that produced such Frappuccino-unfriendly listening, are back in the public eye just as the UK gets its first serious sunshine of the year and teenagers across the land find it too hot to mope in their bedrooms. A documentary about the band is out, and Simon Armitage - a poet as likely to strum a tennis racquet in front of a mirror as he is to pen an ode to the Prison Service - has been on Radio 4 this week talking about the greatness of lead singer Ian Curtis. How very unseasonal. On the other hand, here is an opportunity to rescue Joy Division from the lazy tag of wintry miserabilism; they were more visceral than that. Listen to the classic song Transmission: its defining element is Peter Hook's bass. Isolation and She's Lost Control sound like Kraftwerk on a jolly in Salford. No wonder a whole raft of dance music makers, from Andrew Weatherall to LCD Soundsystem, has claimed the band as inspirational. With producer Martin Hannett, Joy Division created a sound that was spare, and more open-minded than the mass productions of punk. By their final album they were experimenting with synthesisers. There were doomy lyrics, of course, ("Cry like a child / though these years make me older" - fancy writing that when still in your 20s) and gothic cover art. And inevitably the band are still best known for Curtis's suicide. But there was more to them than darkness.
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