1983 12 24 New Order, Joy Division NME

CRIES & WHISPERS

a retrospective on the vinyl pain and pleasure of joy division and new order

Richard Cook returns to the spirit world of Joy Division, explores the new order of their
successors and concludes . . .there is no conclusion. Photos by Anton Corbijn

A BALANCE has been struck between two sides over this series of records: between the view of Joy Division/New Order as merchants of doom and singers in the sepulchre that is now ‘traditional’, and the protesting counter-argument that this is music that confronts that despondency and is finally exhilarating, almost ecstatic.

New Order are good, ordinary blokes/ New Order mope and moan. Joy Division elevated tragedy to glory/Joy Division wallowed in a futile sadness.

This is a complex story. I will not recap history too well-known, just make some observations.

The records aren’t dealt with in a strict chronology, but in the order which they best make sense. Listened to at a stretch, the achievement unscrolls into a profound and humane record about living, it starts at a convulsive and virulent birth.

WARSAW

An Ideal For Living EP: Warsaw/No Love Lost/Leaders Of Men/Failures Enigma PSS139 (7"), Anonymous (12").
The Ideal Beginning EP: Gutz/At A Later Date/The Kill Anonymous (12").

JOY DIVISION

At A Later Date (live track recorded at The Electric Circus 1977)
‘Short Circuit’ Virgin VCL 5003 (10" LP).

An ugly, scarred new wave of music in which only Peter Hook’s bass booms to nudge hindsight that this messy group was on the verge of Joy Division. The demos that make up ‘The Ideal Beginning’ are the basest matter of rock: Ian Curtis sings them in a voice of rage bordering on exhaustion. 'An Ideal For Living’, their first proper record, is a poor transcript of four stubby, cartoonish songs that take a fashionable discontent with form and rock it up. It sounds like a Buzzcocks reared on disgust instead of love. The second version of ‘At A Later Date’ is the first music by 'Joy Division' but the song is a ruin of fury. None of this material is currently available.

JOY DIVISION

Digital/Glass (two tracks on ‘A Factory Sample’ double EP).
Produced by Martin Hannett.
Factory FAC 2

A staggering advance and the first real Joy Division music. Achieved, mainly, through a cropping of directions and a reversion to self: Curtis sings in the first throes of his true voice, Bernard Albrecht, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris begin to play a rock that is self-renewing and more than a release into space The two songs develop from motifs—Hook's bass for sound, Curtis' rigorous lyrics for image—and their speed and shape is already breathtaking. Recorded on 11 October 1978 ( Glass’ was subsequently included on the ‘Still’ compilation; this version of Digital’ is otherwise unavailable.).

Unknown Pleasures: Disorder /Day Of The Lords / Candidate / Insight / New Dawn Fades / She’s Lost Control/Shadowplay/Wilderness /Interzone/ I Remember Nothing.
Produced by Martin Hannett. Factory FACT 10.

The words that begin ‘Unknown Pleasures ’— "I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand"—define the complexion of this most disturbing set of songs and performances. It’s a precise, almost drilled delivery of ideas and explorations that affixed the group’s position for good and all. No matter how humorous and generous they may have been outside, in this inflexible, unflinching play on rock they were as sombre and unforgiving as darkness.

All the songs are tautened by the quality of the music: guitar and bass lines are never developed, they only thicken around a core that always threatens to devour the singer. The drums are either unsmiling and martial or electrically frenetic. Curtis sings in a discoloured, unmelodic voice that freezes and refuses the simple release points of chorus notes; and yet he is singing about matters of emotion that involve hysteria, and the most frightening states of despair. It’s that dichotomy that charges the record.

Martin Hannett’s role is crucial, for the music had to be made as coldly beautiful as it is devastated. Hook's bass is cast as mournfully opulent; there are devices of distance and undiscovered prettiness, such as the electronics that decorate 'Insight' like a buzz of bees in the cortex. But the sound is an illusion of physicality. ‘She’s Lost Control' and ‘Disorder’ have the biceps of lust-driven rock, yet the impression is of a band heard through a luminous fog, seen through a prism.

Although reviewers praised its sense of result,‘Unknown Pleasures' is a group in a waiting room, en route minus credentials.

The most singular point about it evaded attention. The Doors came into use as a reference point about this time, but the comparison is ludicrous. Joy Division were making music that was entirely white and European, which owed almost nothing to any rock past: that was their break with tradition. Sex has disappeared from these unknown pleasures; it is an aftermath of passion where everything's (perhaps) lost.

'Candidate'. played to a deathly slow beat tells of a man "who worked too hard for this" a reward of nothing. The song hangs in the air and finally stops in a stasis—poised between the gothic and the fatalistic, balanced on the edge of melody.

Transmission/ Novelty Factory FAC 23
Atmosphere Dead Souls Sordide Sentimentale 33002 Produced by Martin Hannett. 
('Atmosphere' was reissued as a 12 single of Factory FACUS 2 with a re-recording of 'She's Lost Control' as the coupling. 'Dead Souls' was reissued on 'Still')

These four songs, recorded at the same sessions, bind together the different strands of rock that Joy Division investigated.

The adhesive layers of ‘Transmission’— the soul’s answer to the petty nihilism of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ — measure off against the brutalised vision of 'Dead Souls'; ‘Novelty’ is a hard pop intermission; ‘Atmosphere’ is a requiem for their music. Together they show a strength gathered and articulated in a way the group never entirely matched again.

‘Transmission’ is like an anthem by accident, by virtue of its declamatory “dance dance dance dance to the radio”, the most resurgent inspiration in Curtis' writing; its controlled spurt in the studio would explode crazily in live versions. It conceals a prayer for silence that we might hear better afterwards: the language is a bitter, runaway dance-rock embodied in the singer's stage jerks.

But in ‘Dead Souls' that velocity has congealed into the most crushing oppression, a vernacular of iron. Melody is dead—there is only a chord pattern like a cruel avalanche under which Curtis speaks to his ghosts. The song is impossible to decipher. Its awful power to exhilarate—from which some have aligned JO as the intellectual's heavy metal band—derives from its brazen, thoughtless disregard.

'Novelty' sounds like a relic from some hard rock mausoleum. Its story of dismissal flirts with the loaded canon of sexual slap-down songs that have fed older generations, shrinks from testing its own convictions.

And ‘Atmosphere’: in some ways this is the last Joy Division song.

In its reconciliations of soft, glistening melody and an undertow of remorse it meets the crossing point they searched for obsessively on 'Closer'. It sounds symmetrical, pristine in detail, entirely finished. A synthesiser curtains the space, the drums beat sensuously and the vocal steps regretfully across the scene in a lyric of accusatory and gentle discord. The electronics that only decorate their earlier work are now a basic emulsion. The tremble in the closing chord brings a shiver as one recalls the sleeve of the reissued 12": a snow scene, empty, virginally white. All that remained was—an atmosphere.

Auto Suggestion /From Safety To Where? (included on ‘Earcom 2’) Fast FAST 9
Incubation /Komakino / Then Again Factory FACT28 (flexidisc).

Flotsam from the group’s archives. ‘Auto Suggestion' is a skeletal drone figure that prefigures their last music, leaning towards the psychotherapeutic; 'From Safety To Where?’ is an unremarkable shuffle of some leftovers. The Factory flexidisc offers a blunt instrumental, a siphon of synthesised exotica ('Komakino') and a brusque fragment of reflection—slivers never polished, backroom notes.

The copies were free / priceless. None of this material is otherwise available.

Love Will Tear Us Apart /These Days /Love Will Tear Us Apart (second version)
Produced by Martin Hannett.
Factory FAC 23

Curtis died on May 18, 1980. 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' entered the charts after his death and went on to top the NME Critics' Poll for the year.

What a quiet, serene song it is—the 'tear' in the title should perhaps be pronounced a different way—and with what subdued melancholy is it sung. Presented in a sleeve that looks like a graveyard slab, the record opens like a clap of thunder before slipping through a simple series of changes in which the singer's voice is compressed.

The words are hard to make out: Curtis sounds uninterested in crying them forth, for the song's emotion is coloured in chalks, a sorrow for a love that only brings regret and heartbreak. The paradox between that sadness and the proud muscularity of the group's playing was by now the Division trademark; but instead of the customary tension this distracted and over-exposed record is in a state of suspension.

The title is less important as a valediction for the group than as the only Joy Division song with'love' in its name.

‘These Days' is a subterranean roar, immaculately sculpted by Hannett, and the alternative mix of a track that enormous amounts of time and money were spent on is a blueprint in a different tone.

Closer: Atrocity Exhibition / Isolation/
Passover /Colony/ A Means To An End / Heart And Soul /Twenty Four Hours / The Eternal/Decades. Produced by Martin Hannett.
Factory FACT 25.

The world of 'Closer' is one of misplaced trust (‘A Means To An End’) and barren, inevitable horror ('Atrocity Exhibition’); and because it’s displayed in music of this fortitude and fabulous intensity, Joy Division found themselves labelled as either vicarious fanatics or perfect deities. Once the smoke of Curtis’ death cleared the record was almost disavowed, often by the very people who'd hailed it as a masterpiece, and it has since languished in some disrepute.

Parts of it are suspiciously duplicit. Isolation’ is a charmed, glittering episode that makes alienation seem gorgeous, and as the record progresses (the sequencing is crucial) it registers a slowing of a world's pulse until the smell of death is palpable. There is nothing uplifting about the second side - ‘Heart And Soul' is its only glimmer of light, and a synthetic pall looms in the background even there.

It scarcely matters because the raw matter of the record is so unique. The absolute sureness of their best singles is absent—and in its place is a slow, churning experiment with relationships, with the idea of a song and its execution. 'Colony' is some of the most upsetting metal music on record, an ordered violence of amazing force: it could suggest either a cold embrace or a white-hot damnation, and Curtis offers no pointer in his vocal. The closing songs—'Twenty Four Hours', 'The Eternal' and 'Decades’ — seem to come from another world: certainly not from any ‘rock’ music.

Because Hannett was making Joy Division sound like no other group.

The guitar seemed to shout from inside the skin of the rhythm—in fact, everything sounds 'inside', as if we were hearing them through a shell. Synthesisers surround them like massive drapes. The song seem to have no propulsion, no movement forwards: they revolve, go round and round a single heart, develop on themselves. 'Decades’ aspires to high tragedy, with its impenetrable wash of keyboard drama, but this is the beauty of a machine. It’s the one moment where Joy Division actually disappear inside their music, to a fading murmur of “Where have they been?”

That, of course, makes it the perfect exit point for both Curtis and the group.

Still: Ice Age / Walked In Line / The Kill / Something Must Break (all previously unreleased) / Exercise One/ The Sound Of Music (John Peel session) /Sister Ray (live at The Moonlight, London 3.4.80) /Dead Souls / Glass (previously released as above). Ceremony / Shadowplay / Means To An End /Passover /New Dawn Fades / Twenty Four Hours / Transmission / Disorder / Isolation / Decades /Digital (live at Birmingham University 2.5.80). Produced by Martin Hannett. Factory FACT 40.

Except they wouldn’t let them die. Once the cult had opened it had to continue.

Hannett and the group assembled this double collection which was eventually released in 1981. Although it imparts nothing that the previous records hadn’t told us, the studio tracks make up a disjointed and engrossing encore. Some of it is classically savage: 'The Sound Of Music’ has Curtis’ improbably affirmatory lyric tom and beaten by music of steamroller insensitivity, and 'The Only Mistake' is a constantly recycled scale that blurs into a matt grey torrent.

'Ice Age', Walked In Line’ and ‘The Kill’ are ancient songs given a later polish, unfolding at a furious pace. They have a straight motorik power that implies the different course the group could have chosen instead of ‘Atmosphere’, something the enormous, flooded clutter of ’Something Must Break’ also tells of.

The live record is documentary, blotched and disfigured. Their purity wasn’t the besmirched innocence of a Velvet Underground, so 'Sister Ray' is protractedly ugly; it depended on great accuracy and care, which is why the out-of-tune synth ruins ‘Decades’.

What the Birmingham music—the last appearance by Joy Division—shows is the bones of this material running red and raw. Dragged outside the focus of their studio incarnations the music is exhaustively visceral, in rags, all its energy splaying in any rock direction. Without the presence of the group the live recording is half-alive: a spectre.

NEW ORDER

Ceremony /In A Lonely Place Produced by Martin Hannett.
Factory FAC 33.

After a year the group returned under a different name with two songs written in the lifespan of Joy Division (‘Ceremony’ is prototyped on ‘Still’). It was a brilliant comeback.

‘Ceremony’ is balanced between the cold dimensions of JD and a prophetic richness that would be the present NO: from its opening bass salvo it sounds gigantic, a music that had suddenly burst out of its reticence. It builds to Albrecht’s shy, almost diffident vocal that is nearly hidden by the noise of the song—a rock trio structure that recalls the ecstatic melody of Television.

Three separate peaks bridge the music which, for the first time since ‘Transmission’, actually communicated exultation. Without missing the flicker of doubt and spiritual malaise that always pricked JD.

‘In A Lonely Place’, a sequel to ‘Atmosphere’, is as bleak as the moon. If the song is windswept by electronics it is virtually airless, a polar region witheut footprints. But Hannett’s mix is a superlative feat of evocation. This is a single that stands with the greatest examples of the form.

Everything’s Gone Green /Procession Factory FAC 33
Everything’s Gone Green /Cries And Whispers /Mesh Factory FBNL 8 Produced by Martin Hannett. Temptation /Hurt Factory FAC 63

New Order took singles as particular events., and each of Hannett’s five productions here display a singular facet. ‘Green’ is a flawless orchestration of synthetics, rhythm guitar, bass as counterpoint, voice as slipway, hugely crashing drums: the instruments are all ‘effects' that bond and seam, inevitably. It's just this side of a dance track, whereas ‘Procession’ is distant from all that—a sudden, momentary drama courted by a beat that is all rock.

‘Cries And Whispers’ edges perceptibly towards a movement that is influenced (for the first time) by something like black music, and it’s from this strain that such drudges as Tears For Fears and Endgames have pilfered their whole act. ‘Whispers’ and its slower brother ‘Mesh’ are workshops of theory: to make an emotive point sounds are interchanged and mixed like so many chemicals—and both are terrific slugs of flinty, percussive rock noise.

‘Temptation’, their first self-production, is an epic that draws on ‘Ceremony’ for its dynamic and an array of fresh insights for its form. The song is about failing prey to desire and having to cry for help: Albrecht’s voice captures that vulnerability just as Curtis used to grasp his muse, although it’s a display of weakness Hannett would never have permitted.

The synths bubble at the back of the song, the guitar and bass at the centre—or so it seems, until you realise that space has dissolved. Everything is democratic, of equal importance. Distance disappears and rock is reorganised, again.

Movement: Dreams Never End / Truth /Senses/Chosen Time /ICB / The Him /Doubts Even Here / Denial. Produced by Martin Hannett. Factory FACT 50.

Exactly why ‘Movement’ fails where New Order previously succeeded isn’t immediately clear. It may be that the songs are intrinsically weak, although ‘Dreams Never End’ and 'The Him’ can stand with anything in their writing; it may be that Hannett, in his final duties with the band, has simply drained his energy for one group.

But there is something listless about the record that makes it nothing more than a recital. The songs are merely played when they should be shaken, even pulverised. Too much is shadowboxing. Problematically, New Order has been anaesthetised by the traits of alienation and helplessness they’d previously drawn succour from.

The record mimics a passing of time, but its tension has been expurgated: the velvet spread of the drums, the frozen synth brocades are pretty but not very interesting or particularly useful. This is the one occasion to date that New Order have sounded out their imitation of Joy Division.

There is still a lingering attraction about some moments: the record is about moments, the space between them a movement that is sometimes too dull to take the trouble with. It’s the most abstract and disconnected music out of all these records.

Blue Monday /Beach Produced by New Order. Factory FAC 73.
Confusion /Confused Beats / Confusion instrumental/Confusion rough mix.
Produced by New Order and Arthur Baker. Factory FAC 93.

‘Blue Monday’, the points winner in this year’s NME singles chart, is the group finally admitting their interests for dance music. Its forebears are equal parts ‘Everything's Gone Green’ and the ACR of ‘Flight’ and ‘Do The Du’. After the bloodless pallor of ‘Movement’, ‘Blue Monday’ is all strip lighting and percussive stampede that needs each of its 12 inches to expand, outstretch and explode its ideas.

Rock was on hold in ‘Movement’; it is dismissed altogether here.

The drum and synth tracks have a sumptuous elasticity that isn’t quite the flexible slap of black music—New Order are still white, still European—and they establish the group back in an environment where cheap pop is everyday currency.

‘Blue Monday’ is head and shoulders above that floss while still short of masterwork status. Something is a little too ironic about it —a rock group using dance rhythms for cultural meditation—and ‘Confusion’ clouds the issue still further. Arthur Baker's four separate mixes frost New Order in a garish disco of the mind, a laboratory of synbeat techniques that bounces them between corners like dots on a VDU. It’s cleverly cycled and simply consumed: a pop doodle of no discernible character. A waiting game in progress.

Power, Corruption & Lies: Age Of Consent /We All Stand/The Village/ 586 / Your Silent Face / Ultraviolence /Ecstasy /Leave Me Alone.
Produced by New Oder. Factory FACT 75.

‘Power Corruption & Lies’ circles back through a body of work without comparison. It is New Order going public.

As late as ‘Movement’ they were so private and intimate that they stitched up their own case: you were either a believer or you weren’t. ‘PC&L’ opens out with a generosity and humour that bades anybody welcome. Its forbidding name and the severe titles of some of its songs are as much a crack in the collective visage as a serious statement.

Here they produced themselves as a pop group: the record is as shining as anything in the chart marketplace, all the dimensions that Hannett suppressed in the name of rock. Its parts are integrated into multicoloured mixes —the democracy of ‘Temptation’—which evolve in a linear way. In that sense they have approached the mainstream. There is even (even?) humour. “You caught me at a bad time, so why don’t you—piss off!’(‘Your Silent Face’).

To differentiate, they have scrupulously detailed and organised each compartment. Every flourish of sound is measured; each voice “has its line to say” (Godard).

If the improvised uproar of a Birthday Party offers more blood, New Order ensure that no sights stray from their vision. Only ‘Porcupine’ has a comparable onslaught of rock sound about it among this year’s records; but ‘ PC&L’ turns away from orchestral bombast. They have, of course, discovered dance—and the gnomic ‘Ecstasy’ for one is white man disco.

‘PC&L’ breathes between its beats. That it can accomodate music as different as the guitar rampage of 'Age Of Consent’ and the booming shroud through which comes 'We All Stand' proves it. '586' and ‘Leave Me Alone’, the closing tracks on each side (and neither side comes first), leave New Order, as ever, suspended: one is a chiming development of ‘Ceremony’, the other a close relative to ‘Blue Monday’.

They can take up either direction: that is the option of the record, why it is left incomplete.

And perhaps that is New Order: they are always, somehow, waiting.