Bernard
Sumner: I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of
thin air, we never, any of us, were interested in the money it might make us.
We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to and stirred
our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career, or any of that. We never
planned one single day.
Peter Hook:
[Ian Curtis, the late lead singer of Joy Division] was the instigator. We used
to call him the Spotter. Ian would be sat there, and he’d say, “That sounds
good, let’s get some guitar to go with that.” You couldn’t tell what sounded
good, but he could, because he was just listening. That made it much quicker,
writing songs. Someone was always listening. I can’t explain it, it was pure
luck. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. We never honestly considered it, it
just came out.
Stephen
Morris: He was pretty private about what he wrote. I think he talked to Bernard
a bit about some of the songs. He was totally different to how he appeared
onstage. He was timid, until he’d had two or three Breakers, malt liquor. He’d
liven up a bit. The first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage, I couldn’t believe
it. The transformation to this frantic windmill.
Deborah
Curtis: He was so ambitious. He wanted to write a novel, he wanted to write
songs. It all seemed to come very easily to him. With Joy Division it all just
came together for him.
Tony
Wilson: I still don’t know where Joy Division came from.
Mark
Reeder: I met Ian when he was working at Rare Records. They were very elitist
in that shop: all beards and long hair, tweed jackets, and they all thought
they were something else. I always thought if I ever worked in a record shop,
I’d never want to be like them. Totally unhelpful, ignorant of the people
coming into the shop. If you made a mistake in the pronunciation of a track,
you’d be ridiculed to death.
Ian wasn’t
like that. He was always trying to sell me reggae records. This was about 1974.
Ian was totally into reggae music. Dub. He wasn’t there very long—about a
year—and he was the youngest one in the shop, and he was the only one you could
talk to. We talked about all kinds of stuff, and usually the topics would cross
over from music to history and the war. He was fascinated by the war.
I started
working at Virgin Records when I was about 14. Just part-time initially, and I
got paid in records. They needed someone to stock up the records on weekends,
while they were all in the shop. Just helping out, and then I ended up working
there. It was back in the 70s. Real hippie days: lots of long hair and ’staches
and stuff.
There was
this seating arrangement, because people kept stealing headphones. They’d
either break or they’d be nicked. So somebody came up with this idea where
they’d have this seating arrangement at the back, covered in this vomit-green
bri-nylon carpet covering, and the loudspeakers were put in the headrests. And
people would sit, obviously, next to each other, and it was impossible to hear
anything. You could move these speakers, put them next to your ears in the hope
that you could not hear the person next to you.
But Virgin
was a place where people just liked to hang out really. That’s why it stank of
incense in there as well, to disguise the smell of marijuana. It was more rock
music than disco then. In 1973, they’d just had this massive success with
Tubular Bells, and then came Tangerine Dream, and they were the kind of records
that put Virgin on the map and made the Virgin shop in Manchester special. All
the other record shops were a bit elitist.
I was
captivated by the idea of electronic music. I remember in 1968 when you had to
have a stereo. We’d seen some bloke offering them in the paper, so one Saturday
afternoon we went round to this bloke’s house to look at this stereo. It was
this massive thing stuck in the middle of the room, like a cabinet, a sideboard
with loud-speakers at each end and a drinks bit in the middle, and to
demonstrate this stereo he put on Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos, and I was
like, “What is that?”
Before
that, my only exposure to electronic music had been Doctor Who. And “Telstar.”
Then, for years and years, I didn’t hear anything synthetic at all, until I
came to this bloke’s house and he put on Switched on Bach. Which was like the
Brandenburg Concerto played on a synthesizer. I’d been exposed to classical
music cos I played violin at school, but this was something completely
different, and it was in stereo. From that moment I was captivated by the idea
of electronic music.
In the
Court of the Crimson King came out when I was about ten, and I was just
overawed. It was avant-garde, ambient, and I’d sit in total silence, listening
to this record. Looking at the cover, absorbing it all. And that was my
background to working in Virgin. When they started releasing the early
Tangerine Dream records, German music didn’t sound like British music at all.
And the weirder it was, the more fascinated I was. The first Kraftwerk albums
were like jazz rock, with flutes and stuff, totally unlistenable to for all my
mates.
I knew Tony
Wilson from very early on. He’d come in at weekends, just before closing time.
I was the person designated to unpack the boxes in the morning and then write
up all the records and put them into stock. So I knew every single record that
was coming into the shop, even more than the people who actually worked there.
I’d have to tell them what had come in—they had no idea. They’d just look at
the list, and they had no idea if things that they’d ordered had actually come
in or not.
Tony would
ask me to put a record aside for him so he could have a listen, then I could
put it back in stock on the Monday if he didn’t want it. He’d come in, and it
would be all, “Darling!”—and that’s how I got to know him. I got to know Rob
Gretton because he used to come into the shop all the time and just hang
around. It’s what I would do as well—go into record shops and just hang around
there all day, talking about records and about music.
Ian would
come into Virgin when he started working in Manchester and just hang around,
complaining about things. He said, “You can smell the drugs in Virgin.” I told
him that’s why we burn incense to disguise it, but he thought that was the
smell of the drugs. He was always joking, very funny, playing tricks and stuff.
Paul
Morley: We had head shops like Eight Miles High, the Manchester Free Press and
the Mole Express, and the lefty end of things. That was your great salvation at
the time—music and the lefty press and weird bookshops where alternative
culture seemed to be thriving. Down in London obviously there was Compendium,
and we had weird little versions of that where you might find some sanity and
discover things. Everything was not easily available; you had to search it out
and find it.
I worked in
this bookshop in Stockport, and the shop sold all the great Pelican blue books,
which were my education. I didn’t get educated at school, I got educated in
this bookshop, and they had a science-fiction section—Harlan Ellison’s
Dangerous Visions, all the J. G. Ballard novels—they would have really weird
magazines, underground magazines, and weird folk singers from the backwoods of
Derbyshire would come in to get their weekly fix of odd alternative culture.
But we made
money in the bookshop out of the soft porn and the Mills & Boon, so you had
a weird kind of strange thing where old ladies would totter in every month to
get their ten Mills & Boon, and men would come in to get their soft porn,
which we had to order off a van that came in every week. Then I would be
selling second-hand records. I would go into Manchester, buy bootlegs for £2,
bring them back to my bookshop and sell them for £2.50.
You’d get
the people coming in to buy war books, all those Sven Hassels. Of course, if
you were going to open that kind of independent bookshop in the northwest at
that period, you would have lefty tendencies, so you’d be pushing that, but to
make your money you would have to sell Whitehouse and Mayfair, and the dreadful
thing is you could bring them back to exchange, so these grubby copies of this
soft porn would come back glistening with some suspect substance.
But what
was interesting were the creatures that would come in to check out the weird
combination of books, which sounds fairly standard now but at the time was
unformed and raw: Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Burroughs. William Burroughs
was definitely part of it. They were prophets of something that we were about
to enter, this weird commercial entertainment landscape that would become where
we are now sat, but at the time it was very odd, and it was a beautiful
attachment to your love for weird music. There was no doubt that it was
connected. There didn’t seem to be any difference between reading Ballard and
Dick and Burroughs and listening to Faust and Velvet Underground and Iggy and
the Stooges: you were constantly curious to find out strange things that might
explain your situation, even though it didn’t directly have anything to do with
where you were.
And there
were characters. There was a guy that used to come into the bookshop called
Paul, and he did the first fanzine I’d ever come across. It was called
Penetration and it was basically obsessed with Hawkwind. He used to come in and
he always used to wear all black. He had the whitest skin I’d ever seen, and
his girlfriend would always wear white lace, and they used to float in bringing
ten copies of Penetration every so often. In fact, that’s where I first wrote.
I wrote a piece about Lenny Bruce for Penetration, which Paul pasted up in the
wrong order, incidentally. I think it’s influenced my writing ever since,
because I quite liked it being in the wrong order.
But there
were lots of characters like that floating around and, obviously, Ian Curtis. I
get the sense wherever he was at the same time—’74, ’75—he was coming across
similar sorts of routes, similar source material out of which he could piece
together his vision.
Stephen
Morris: I’d get the train and go in to Savoy Books—before it was Savoy Books it
was called The House on the Borderlands—and we used to have a right laugh at
the old blokes looking at the porn. There was science fiction, weird books, and
over in a corner there’d be naked ladies, and surprisingly enough the science
fiction had little appeal for the vast majority of the clientele, who were
going over to the naked-lady corner. I’d just be trying to negotiate some sort
of discount on a large, expensive book: “Yeah, have you got Michael Moorcock’s
new book?”
Ian had The
Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, and also a
collection of Jim Morrison’s poems. I seem to remember that you could go to W.
H. Smith’s and they had a lot of Burroughs and a lot of Ballard, and it was
just mixed in with the rest of the stuff.
Michael
Butterworth: Bookchain was opened in 1977. It was alternative and youth-culture
stuff, both second-hand and new. I must clarify, though, that this was the most
famous of our shops and the one everyone remembers, but it is not the shop Ian
Curtis first came to. There were two Savoy shops before this one, and David
Britton’s most vivid memories of Ian are of him coming into the first shop.
All three
shops were modeled on two London bookshops of the period: Bram Stokes’s shop in
Berwick Street, Soho, called Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed—which sold comics,
sci-fi, drug- related stuff, posters, etc.—and a chain called Popular Books.
David Britton used to visit a branch of the latter in Camden Town when he was
living in London in the late 60s. They sold everything from Private Eye, girlie
books, pin-up stuff and Penthouse to film stills, posters and any sort of media
ephemera.
These two
bookshops inspired David (with his then partner, Charles Partington) to open a
bookshop on Port Street, off Newton Street, in Manchester centre. The shop they
opened was called The House on the Borderland (after the William Hope Hodgson
novel), and they had all this kind of stuff in the window. There was a strong
emphasis on alternative culture and American imports. The window looked very
exotic, and this is what probably attracted Ian and Steve Morris inside, once
they had followed the yellow-brick-road poster trail leading to the shop. The
attitude radiating from the shop was, “Fuck everybody in authority,” and that’s
what they responded to. The shop played loud rock’n’roll over the speakers,
which sounded out into the street years before other shops were doing the same
kind of thing. And I mean loud.
They were
disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted
something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They
probably saw the shop as being a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the
early 70s. Ian was interested in counter-culture and science fiction. David
remembers them being enthusiasts about Michael Moorcock, whose hard-edged
fantasy writing and lifestyle were a great influence, very rock’n’roll.
Ian bought
second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by
Moorcock, which was doing something very different, promoting Burroughs and
Ballard, and it’s possible Ian picked up his interest in these writers from
these magazines. In exchange for their help in the shop they were allowed to
take whatever books took their fancy. They came in every couple of weeks,
sometimes more often. Steve was the most frequent. This close contact came to
an end gradually, as Ian and Steve’s interest in a band was getting more
serious.
Stephen
Morris: Once I started going out, my first concert was Hawkwind and Status Quo.
I was into psychedelic music really. Apart from Hawkwind, the first two groups
that I got into were Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and the week
after that it was the Velvet Underground, and that was it. I liked collecting
groups and I remember I liked Alice Cooper until everybody else started liking
Alice Cooper, then I decided I didn’t really like Alice Cooper that much.
That’s a bit pretentious really, but that’s the way it was.
After that
glam happened. Actually, after saying that Macclesfield was a cultural desert,
once a year there was a discotheque—there were two discotheques, one at the
rugby club, where you could go and dance to the Faces and Jeff Beck and get in
a fight, or you could go to Boddington Civic, which was later on, where there
was a big glam-rock following and you had the Sweet and Bowie and Roxy Music,
and so we went from psychedelic to glam rock—again, till everybody started
liking it.
I
discovered Krautrock about that time, and Can—I was into Tago Mago. I should
say we were forming a band, me and this other guy from school—Mac, he was
called. We were going to form this avant-garde jazz combo called the Sunshine
Valley Dance Band. Everyone thinks it was just going to be like a dance band,
and Hooky thinks it was jazz, but no, we were going to be avant-garde, and
people would book us on the strength of the name and we would shock them with
our appalling performances.
It never
got off the ground, but through Mac’s elder brother I got into Can and then,
after Can, Amon Düül and Neu!. I was into the punk rock before punk rock, which
was the MC5 and the first Stooges album, which I bought from Kendals in
Manchester. Anything that wasn’t disco. I later came to regret that opinion,
but at the time disco was shit, and so it was anything that was a little bit
long-haired but not like the boys in the year above me, who would wear RAF
greatcoats and walk about with copies of Disraeli Gears or The Best of Cream. I
wasn’t too mad on anything bluesy; it was just anything a bit unusual that was
not Eric Clapton.
Paul
Morley: You were looking round to see if there was anybody like you. There was
nobody like me at school. Eventually we all found each other at a particular
show, but for two or three years before that happened we didn’t really know
where each other was. If you went to a Pink Floyd or David Bowie concert at the
Free Trade Hall, you didn’t really find anybody else. They were probably there
somewhere, but you didn’t find them because there was a bigger disguise going
on.
At that
point—’74, ’75—music fundamentally came to Manchester. We used to think of the
local bands as not being right. Even bands that were local, like 10cc or Sad
Café, didn’t seem to be Manchester. They seemed to be more LA, they were
already in Las Vegas. There were a couple of kind of strange heavy metal clubs
in Manchester where local bands would play, but you wouldn’t take them seriously
at all because they just seemed like bands you’d see at school. There was just
no way that that music would ever come from Manchester.
Excerpted
from This searing light, the sun, and everything else: Joy Division: An Oral
History by Jon Savage. Published with permission from Faber & Faber.
“I Still
Don’t Know Where Joy Division Came From” By Jon Savage. LitHub , May 17, 2019.
Other excerpts here :
‘Ian Curtis
wanted to make extreme music, no half measures’ The Guardian , March 24, 2019
Music
journalist Jon Savage, 65, has wanted to write a book about Joy Division for as
long as he can remember. But the spark for his new oral history of the band,
This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, is easier to pinpoint. He
assisted on Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary film Joy Division and knew how much
material had been left on the cutting-room floor. Lead singer Ian Curtis was
long dead of course (he killed himself in 1980), but there were in-depth
interviews with the remaining members of the group – Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook
and Stephen Morris – as well as material that Savage had compiled over four
decades following, thinking and writing about Joy Division. The result feels
like a definitive account of one of the most exciting and enduring bands of the
post-punk era.
Why did you
want to do an oral history? In some ways, it’s a more ego-less approach for a
writer.
JS : That
was an attraction for me because I’ve written a lot about Joy Division. And
people tend to get superheated about the band, so I thought: “Oh God, let them
speak!” Besides, I like the cadences of the way that they speak, there’s a kind
of poetry. And it’s very immediate.
Did
compiling the book change how you feel about the band or the personalities?
JS : Well,
yes. There is disguised autobiography in the book: it’s about me moving to Manchester
from London in 1979 and working with [Factory co-founder] Tony Wilson and
becoming friendly with Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager] and Martin Hannett
[the band’s producer] and seeing Joy Division a lot. And me trying to make
sense of how powerful Joy Division were: they are probably the most powerful
live group I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen hundreds.
And I
really got a sense finally – which I haven’t before – of why what happened with
Ian happened. It’s a combination of pressures. Also the severe nature of his
illness, and the poor treatment he was getting for his illness, and it all just
suddenly really made sense to me. He was actually having fits on stage, and
that’s not sustainable. So in a way it was the laying of a ghost.
What do you
remember about when Ian Curtis died in May 1980?
JS : I have
no memory. It’s a blank. In a way, keeping on at this subject is a way of
filling in the blanks. And I think that was just being young. I was 25 and I
hadn’t really encountered death before, and so I just didn’t know what to do.
Also back in the day there was not really the language to talk about it, and
people say that in the book. And I was only on the periphery, so I think it was
a completely shattering event.
How would
describe your relationship with the band during the time you were writing about
them?
JS : I was
quite rigorous about not becoming that friendly with groups, because it could
be a bit embarrassing; you don’t know whether they’d turn round and make a crap
album and you’d have to say so and there would be trouble. That happened to me
with Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of other people and I just got fed
up with people coming up to me and calling me a cunt because I’d actually told
the truth about their lousy art in that particular case. So I’d say I was an
acquaintance.
It’s been
40 years since the band released their debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures.
What’s the enduring appeal of Joy Division?
JS : The
main thing about Joy Division is that they were great. The music really stands
up; I still listen to Joy Division with great pleasure and it’s not just
nostalgic. Also I had a very interesting experience: I did an event at the BFI
and they showed [Anton Corbijn’s film] Control and the Joy Division documentary
to a bunch of inner-city kids, 16, 17. They were slightly bored, polite but
restless – as you’d expect. Then Ian came on in one of the bits of live footage
and oh, they tuned right in. They immediately snapped to attention, because of
his total intensity, total commitment. He was, in that degraded phrase, “for
real”. So there is something about Joy Division that transcends their time and
place.
Is this the
end of your journey with them?
JS : I
certainly won’t do another book about them, but I do feel that I’ve got a
greater understanding of what happened then and why it’s continued to nag away
at me until now. A very good friend of mine said to me once: “Jon, sometimes in
life, you have to do the obvious.” Actually that’s very good advice and this
book is an example of that, I think.
Jon Savage:
‘Something about Joy Division transcends their time and place’. By Tim Lewis.
The Guardian , March 24, 2019.
Another interview :
Joy
Division and Jon Savage's Latest, 'This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything
Else' By David Chu. PopMatters, April 2,
2019.
Jon
Savage’s “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” documents the
formation, brief life and sudden end of the phenomenal Manchester, England,
band Joy Division.
Much has
been written about this band; some of the sharpest music writers have given
their best trying to capture its essence. As brilliant as some of this work is,
Joy Division seems to remain in the shadows, just out of reach of critical
assessment. Joy Division’s music doesn’t “rock” in the classic sense as much as
shudder, roar and convulse. The songs are readings of temperature, light and
lack of light. They walk silently for hours on city streets and return alone to
small rooms with full ashtrays and no messages on the machine. It’s a
fantastically difficult question to answer: Why do you like Joy Division? The
more dedicated the listener, the more likely you’ll get an inhaled breath held
for a few seconds, an exhale and a shrug.
Savage is
one of those aforementioned very talented scribes, who perhaps understands all
too well how difficult it would be for any one person to create a clear picture
of Joy Division. What better way to tell the story than to ask others to tell
its story? By interviewing remaining members and those who bore witness,
Savage’s oral history of the band carefully connects the dots.
Joy
Division was Peter Hook on bass, Bernard Sumner on guitar, Stephen Morris on
drums and Ian Curtis on vocals. The band’s first release, from summer 1978, a
four-track 7-inch record called “An Ideal for Living,” could be labeled
functionally as post punk, one of the best results of punk music’s exhilarating
flash-pot bang. The songs are great but show a band only somewhat in control of
its talent. Hearing what came next, you wonder if at that time, the four had
any idea of what they were capable of.
The
following year, the band released its first full length album, the brilliant
“Unknown Pleasures.” None of the demos or surviving live recordings hints at
what the band would bring to bear with this record. The music seems
uninfluenced by any music that came before it but instead by the sheer fact of
existence, the sound of your blood rushing through your veins.
The band
became immensely popular. The group performed live and recorded new material.
On May 18, 1980, Curtis took his life at age 23. A month later, in June,
perhaps Joy Division’s most well-known song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was
released. In July 1980, the band’s second album, “Closer,” came out. Joy
Division would reach its peak posthumously. Hook, Morris and Sumner carried on
as New Order to great success all over the world.
I became a
fan, never having heard “Unknown Pleasures.” Many years ago, I was playing my
current favorite record for someone, who said I should cut out the middleman
and listen to the band it was desperately trying to emulate: Joy Division. I’m
not aware of anyone in any of the bands I was in having any interest in Joy
Division’s music. I knew of the band but had heard only “Love Will Tear Us
Apart.” Then I remembered that in the remaining space of many of the tapes I
had received in trades from a fellow cassette enthusiast, he had put on tracks
from Joy Division shows. I listened to them and was knocked out by the
incredible intensity of the band. There’s no way you would want to go on after
Joy Division.
A key
moment for Joy Division happened at a Sex Pistols show at Manchester's Lesser
Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976. Reportedly attended by fewer than 50 people,
the show proved to be quite a night. In the audience were future members of the
Fall, Joy Division and two men who would prove to be of great importance to the
group: Factory Records partners Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett. The Factory
label was almost a perfect reflection of Wilson; rebellious, innovative and
fiercely independent. Joy Division — and other post-punk art-bands like A Certain
Ratio and the Durutti Column — found great support at Factory.
Post-punk
music delivered on punk’s detonation of rock music’s predictability. Joy
Division wasn’t the only band that started at some point in the punk din and
evolved by leaps and bounds. Gang of Four, Killing Joke, the Fall, the Birthday
Party and Wire were a few of the great bands that fell under the post-punk
heading. (If you want to know more, the go-to book is Simon Reynolds’ excellent
“Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.”) And one of the greatest acts
of punk-to-post-punk morphing was John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) going from
perhaps the most well known punk band of all time, the Sex Pistols, to the
completely different Public Image Limited.
Yet what
has baffled many a Joy Division listener is the band’s own evolution; how its
members, all novice players, went from rudimentary bashing with songs like
“Gutz” and “You're No Good for Me” in 1977 to utterly brilliant tracks like
“Transmission,” “Atmosphere” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” just a few years
later.
Without
Wilson and Hannett, it could be argued, Joy Division's potential would have
been greatly compromised. Wilson believed in the band completely, allowed it to
flourish. But in “This Searing Light,” Sumner describes an isolated and
workman-like environment at practice, where each player was in his own world.
“We were not bouncing off each other,” he says, “we just completely ignored
each other, we were all on our own island, and we just made sure that what we
were doing sounded great, and we didn't pay any attention to what the others
were doing, not consciously anyway.”
While this
might sound like the members didn't get along, it is a quite Mancunian posture,
when you consider that the greater Manchester area was infused with factories,
warehouses and remnants of World War II. It's not surprising that being raised
in this environment might engender a somewhat stark outlook and utilitarian
work ethic.
“You were
always looking for beauty because it was such an ugly place, whether again on a
subconscious level,” Sumner says. “I mean, I don't think I saw a tree till I
was about nine. I was surrounded by factories and nothing that was pretty,
nothing.”
Manchester
bands like Joy Division, the Fall and Buzzcocks were greatly distanced from the
outrage and fashion that fueled the London punk scene, a little over 200 miles
south, and while their surroundings could be grim, it made for quite a creative
setting. In “This Searing Light,” you get the idea that it was a “resist or
submit” proposition.“It gave you an amazing yearning for things that were
beautiful,” Sumner says, “because you were in a semi-sensory-deprivation
situation because you were brought up in this brutal landscape, but then when
you did see something or hear something that was beautiful, you would go, 'Ooh,
new experience,' and really appreciate it.”
Still, how
do four young men from the working class, in one of the toughest parts of a
tough country, almost suddenly create not only some of the most enduring music
from the late 1970s and early 1980s but also easily one of the most astonishing
debut albums ever, “Unknown Pleasures”?
In the
pages of “This Searing Light,” we get many clues from the testimonies of those
in close proximity to the band.
Peter
Saville, Factory co-founder and art director, is responsible for the “Unknown
Pleasures” cover, one of the most recognizably reworked and repurposed
music-related images of the last century. Saville isn’t the originator; it is a
found image, part of the materials in a folder given to Saville by the band’s
manager, Rob Gretton. There are, no doubt, people all over the world wearing a
version of this pulsar spread out on a T-shirt who have no idea what it’s
relating to. That being said, if you had to describe “Unknown Pleasures,” the
image works perfectly; separate, straight lines randomly disrupted; peaks and
valleys and then flat again. Such is life.
Hannett,
who produced “Unknown Pleasures,” was a true visionary. There is no way the
album would sound anything like it does without him. At times, Hannett seemed
almost dismissive of his young charges: “They were a gift to a producer,
because they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue.”
Hannett was
notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult, and the band members endured him as
much as worked with him. Hannett was obsessed with isolating and manipulating
sound — the studio was his world; Joy Division was just hanging out in it for
awhile.
“The studio
was Martin’s,” says Morris, “and when you were in the studio you were working
for Martin and his whims. There was an awful lot of pot smoked: whether Martin
was completely stoned or did have a different outlook on what he wanted, he
would be obtuse. He wouldn’t say to you, ‘I want you to do it like this.’ It
was, ‘Great, do it again but more cocktail party’ or ‘a bit more yellow.’
Whether it was pot or whether it was the Zen school of production, it was
definitely interesting, because he turned us on to the studio being a musical
instrument.”
Kevin
Cummins, the great photographer who took some of the most recognizable images
of Joy Division, was witness to the band’s rapid growth and the mesmerizing
stage presence of Curtis. “It always felt dangerous, because you always felt he
was slightly out of control, and I’d not really experienced that with any other
band,” Cummins says. “I’d seen the Clash and the Jam and all these bands, and I
never felt that they were more than the sum of their parts. But with Ian, it
was dangerous. The only other person who was that dangerous onstage was Iggy
Pop.”
These are
some of the nearly 40 people from Joy Division's inner circle whose accounts
Savage, who was also there at the time, has deftly woven into an almost
detective-style MRI of the band and the forces and factors that formed it.
Almost particle by particle, from descriptions of Manchester's industrial
beginnings to the area's cultural void, Savage makes you understand that the
members of Joy Division were driven to create something of immense beauty, as
if there were no other choice.
As
matter-of-fact as the interviews are, and as carefully as Savage has laid out
his case, the "how" of the band's amazing music is all but impossible
to put your finger on. Liz Naylor, a writer at the Manchester fanzine City Fun,
captures the band's close distance: “My thing about Joy Division is that
they're an ambient band almost: you don't see them function as a band, it's
just the noise around where you are.”
It's not up
for debate. Joy Division was one of the most original bands of the last century
and an influence on countless others that came afterward. “This Searing Light,
the Sun and Everything Else” brings us a little closer to understanding the
band and its incredible music. But still, even after the careful examination of
almost every aspect of the band’s brief existence, its music still lurks deep
in phenomenon and shadow.
Why Joy
Division? Henry Rollins examines Jon Savage’s oral history of the post-punk
band. By Henry Rollins. Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2019.
Inside a
catalog of forthcoming books, Faber & Faber refers to Jon Savage's This
Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History as
"the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in
Macclesfield on May 18, 1980." It seems a little presumptuous to say that
this book will be the "last word" on the subject of Joy Division, not
that some closure wouldn't be welcome at this point. Between Peter Hook's
memoir, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (It, 2013) Bernard Sumner's
memoir, Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division, and Me (St. Martin's 2015),
Deborah Curtis's memoir, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
(Faber and Faber, 2005), both a biopic (Joy Division, Gee, 2007) and a
documentary, and some repackaging of the same songs fans have known and loved
over the decades, it feels as if Joy Division has been discussed into the
ground, sucking all of the mystery out of a band that was once shrouded in the
stuff. Is there any marrow left in that bone? Or is This Searing Light just
another way of giving people their Joy Division fix when the cupboards are all
bare?
Author Jon
Savage (interviewed with David Chiu, here on PopMatters), the compiler and
editor of all the interviews here, was a source close to the band as well as
the Factory Records team that helped launch a musical movement in Manchester.
Given all of the front line accounts during this furtive punk moment in the
late '70s, it appears that Savage was able to come away with some new angles to
the old story -- Ian Curtis's personal dilemmas in addition to his epilepsy,
the severity of said epilepsy, the band's inability to understand it all, the
manager and the label boss's failure to act properly, and the multitudes that
witnessed it first hand and have never forgotten the impact it left on them. As
much as the story of this band has been pillaged, This Searing Light proves
that there were still more Joy Division stories to be told. As far as I'm
concerned, it's perfectly okay if there's now nothing left to tell.
This
Searing Light pulls together recent interviews with the surviving Joy Division
members, members of their contemporary bands such as the Buzzcocks and Cabaret
Voltaire, photographers, and eyewitnesses, and is supplemented with past
interviews with the now-departed Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, record
producer Martin Hannett, the band's manager Rob Gretton, and journalist Annik
Honoré. Surviving Factory players Alan Erasmus and Peter Saville are there to
round out the picture, with a few rare reproductions of Saville's distinctly
cryptic graphic designs. Photographers including Kevin Cummins, Jill
Furmanovsky, Daniel Meadows, and the legendary Anton Corbijn describe snapping
pictures of the band, both onstage during their mesmerizing sets and offstage
when no one knew how to pose like a rock star. Music journalists Mary Harron
(now a director) and Paul Morley share stories of interviewing the band and
reviewing various shows. Eyewitness accounts from fans like Jon Wozencroft and
writer Liz Naylor provide a surprisingly reliable narrative to compliment the
professional angle.
Unlike
other oral histories, Savage lists the interview subjects and their roles in
the story in a table of contents at the start of the book rather than giving
them the full description as they are introduced. As a result, a reader not
equipped with an iron-clad memory may find themselves flipping to the beginning
of the book quite often when they come across a new name. It's a minor detail,
but it certainly disrupts the flow of the book, something that it sorely needs
in its early pages. The first chapters are where everyone is setting the scenes
of '70s-era Manchester with its urban decay and lack of natural beauty. This is
also the moment when the interview subjects begin to chronicle their individual
childhoods, something that can only be of interest to people from Manchester,
seeing as how they are constantly peppered with geographical tidbits and some
local color. The differences described between Salford and Manchester don't exactly
leap off the page.
It isn't
until the third chapter when the story begins to move. Tony Wilson was looking
to expand his musical influence outside of presenting cutting-edge rock bands
on his Ganada Television program So It Goes. This included activities such as
giving Manchester gigs to the Bolton-based punk band the Buzzcocks and sprucing
up the town venue known as the Lesser Free Trade Hall. The Sex Pistols played a
set there in 1976 that proved to be serendipitous for Manchester's forthcoming
music scene. Despite the fact that this fortunate gig has gone down in the
record as a turning point in the history of British rock 'n' roll, Joy Division
guitarist Bernard Sumner and Joy Division bassist Peter Hook don't seem to
recall it being all that great of a show. Memorable, yes. But great?
Apparently, the Sex Pistols had set the bar so low, musically speaking, that
more than a few people left the showing thinking "I can do that!"
Sumner and
Hook ride their scooters through the city, searching for an outlet for their
newfound "skill". Ian Curtis makes an unassuming and paradoxical
entrance on the Manchester music scene at around the same time. He wore a
jacket with the word "HATE" scrawled on the back, yet he was very
polite to everyone he met. He was drawn to William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard
just as strongly as he was pulled to the titans of glam and punk, namely David
Bowie and Iggy Pop. He was married yet wanted to ingratiate himself into a
scene that marriage (and subsequent child-rearing) went against punk rock
ethics. If Curtis ever struck you as a larger-than-life enigma that you
couldn't wrap your mind around, everyone's personal accounts logged in This
Searing Light helps to humanize him without demolishing the myth. The skeletons
residing in his closet are easier to forgive once you remind yourself that he
was only 23-years-old at the time of his death.
Indeed, it
would be more difficult to imagine a rock band from this time that didn't stay
up too late at night, drinking themselves silly while engaging in reckless
mischief. He became very close to the Belgian journalist Honoré, an affair
that, according to everyone concerned, never led to anything physical. This was
more a matter of intellectual fulfillment, as Honoré was always giving Curtis
the accolades his wife Deborah could never supply. At one point in the book,
Deborah admits that she doesn't blame him for thinking this [NOTE: Savage lifts
passages from Curtis's memoir to round out parts of the story]. Having epilepsy
certainly wasn't his fault. The members of Joy Division and their manager take
themselves to task for being ignorant of Curtis's physical as well as mental
state. Crippling depression and grand mal fits? How are a bunch of 22-year-old
men supposed to handle that? Somewhere in the second half of the book, you're
reminded that there's hardly any adult supervision in the equation of constant
gigging, constant traveling, poor health, and marital difficulties. Wilson and
Gretton were older than the members of Joy Division, but not that much older.
Everyone would have to come to grips with their maturity the hard way.
Depending
on whose account you believe, Curtis's personal problems were exacerbated by
the prospect of Joy Division touring America. According to Peter Hook, he was
excited about leaving for the States. According to others, he was dreading the
trip. The truth is, likely, a combination of the two. Curtis is portrayed as a
people-pleaser, a man who would say whatever it was you wanted to hear, not
least for his wife, his band, or his label boss. Rather than reconcile all of
the differing promises he made to others, he let it all build to a painful
tipping point. The night before Joy Division were to leave for America, Curtis
hung himself.
Not
surprisingly, everyone's recollection of that day is vivid. Tragedy certainly
has a way of burning itself into your memory. Deborah Curtis was angry at Ian
for having the "last word". Stephen Morris, Joy Division's drummer,
had a reaction that was not dissimilar to the rest of the band: anger towards
Curtis and disappointment in himself. He and everyone else are perfectly
willing to admit that all of the red flags were there in hindsight, but they
just couldn't bring them into focus at the time. The reader even gets the
impression that Curtis's previous attempt at suicide didn't ring the alarm
bells loud enough. To their credit, Curtis's need to please came through even
during the worst of times. A simple "I'm fine" from him was enough to
keep everyone rolling along, despite the fact that he was certainly not fine.
On page
304, Deborah Curtis admits that her late husband was "a very good liar, he
was very convincing." It was at this point that I realized that there's
room in the Joy Division universe for a book like This Searing Light, The Sun
and Everything Else (the title comes from a series of words Tony Wilson throws
together in a state of euphoria when describing Joy Division's sound, in case
you were wondering) -- one that brings Ian Curtis back down to the status of a
human being. She and many others close to Ian Curtis take turns chipping away
at the Jim Morrison-sized myth that of Ian. Not to bring him down a peg, but to
tell it as it was; Ian Curtis was a young man with a romantic angle, looking to
channel his love of writing into a musical outlet. Life then became very, very
tough as his band went on to surpass his expectations. The crowds grew as the
reviews improved. Road manager and founding drummer Terry Mason puts it this
way on page 316: "Everyone thinks there's some deep, dark, mystical
secret, and there's not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and
the only way that he would think of out at that time was to kill himself. Sorry,
no secrets. Cut."
There's
Room in Joy Division's Expansive Universe for Jon Savage's 'This Searing
Light...' By John Garratt. PopMatters ,
April 19, 2019.
