1993 09 Joy Division Re-issues Select Review

That was the bleak that was

I say, I say! What do you call a band who embodied life without meaning where love is an illusory goal?

JOY DIVISION
Unknown Pleasures
■■■■■
Closer ■■■■■
Still ■■■□□
Substance ■■■

CENTREDATE/LONDON

This is the way; step inside. Bearing in mind the crucial contribution of producer Martin Hannett, these records are essentially the work of five men. Of these five, two are dead; one by his own hand. Ian Curtis’ suicide one bright May day in 1980 casts a long, meaningful shadow over all of Joy Division’s canon. Listening to the songs of The Cure, whether we like them or not, we are always aware that these seemingly agonised tales of rejection and failure are the handiwork of a rich, successful, well-fed, happily-married English professional. When we hear the lyrics of Ian Curtis - fractured, oblique commentaries on a life without meaning, without hope, where love is an illusory goal fraught with disappointments, and shadowy forces beyond our understanding flank the long road to the grave - we think... he wasn’t bloody joking either.

To all intents and purposes, Joy Division’s appearance on the world stage came with ‘Unknown Pleasures’. As debuts go it was, shall we say, significant. Remember that young London was still drawling on about how boring it was on the dole. Now listen to this. Disembodied whooshes and clatters, ghost traffic and unearthly echoes, a bassline obeying only its own tortuous internal logic, the drums, now a lead instrument, simultaneously inhumanly precise and nakedly vulnerable, a guitar somewhere between a road siren and a particularly dolorous bell. And then that voice. “I've been waiting for a guy to come and take me by the hand..."

In context or out of context, then or now, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ is one of the greatest first albums ever. It owed seemingly nothing to anything that had gone before. Stark, forbidding, fathomless in its self-absorption, music without a past or a future but with the muscularity of all great rock. If not exactly hopeless - there was something strangely moving about that “I’m not afraid any more" on ‘Insight’ - the mood was one of total disarray; the narrator at the centre of a world that no longer made any rational sense. “And she's clinging to the nearest passer-by" he sings on ‘She’s Lost Control’ but the “she” is clearly a projection of his own crumbling self. It ends with ‘I Remember Nothing’. Amid the splintering of glass, blank incomprehension.

In 39 minutes Joy Division’s immortality was assured. But as their star ascended so Curtis’ world shrank and darkened. Had he already made up his mind during the recording of ‘Closer’?
Certainly, resignation suffuses this beautiful, terrible, ageless record. At least that's how it ends. It begins in a mesmerising swirl of Can-influenced drums and a kind of fetid steam, full of tractor noises and unattributed scrapings. “For entertainment they watch his body twitch" sings Curtis on ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ in what may be a grotesque allusion to Joy Division’s own gigs. The record progresses through the black, biblical ‘Passover’ and the harshly militaristic ‘A Means To An End’, further still through the weirdly intimate ‘Heart And Soul’ until we come to ‘The Eternal’: funeral music, basically. Lovely, grave and seemingly a thousand years old. Even the closing ‘Decades’ suffers by comparison.

These, then, are the records to own. ‘Still’ was widely seen as a piece of tasteless opportunism in the wake of Curtis’ death, and in truth has little to recommend it beyond some variable studio off-cuts. The live version of ‘Decades’ is a sick joke. ‘Substance’, even with some lousy punk tunes from the ‘Warsaw’ era, is a strong compendium... Here you will find ‘Transmission’, the serene and despairing ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ a mighty song cradling one of the finest lyrics ever written.

They may have been lads and pissheads, but they were also imperious, austere, even noble. They were called “fascists" by the kind of enfeebled SWP nitwit who probably also found them "depressing". What is truly depressing is that Joy Division probably wouldn’t get a deal now in these days of "positivity".

And then they became New Order. But that’s another, wonderful, story.

STUART MACONIE