I started buying and playing records as a child, but my “formative years” as a music fan were during high school. It was then I started hanging out with a more “alternative” crowd and discovered a lot of new bands through them, including New Order who became and remained one of my favorite bands through most of college.
Upon arriving at Berkeley in 1986 it was hard to throw a rock without hitting a pale, skinny guy wearing stove pipes and a Joy Division t-shirt. Conversations about music at parties would frequently lead to the topic of New Order vs. Joy Division with the more serious music fans typically aligning themselves with the latter.
I was squarely in the New Order camp. I’d been weened on 80’s new wave music and wasn’t attracted to the darker, grungier sound of Joy Division and other late 70’s post punk bands who were starting to lose ground in the 80’s to the techno pop sound that bands like New Order pioneered. Nonetheless I did leave college with an Italian pressing of Joy Division’s Closer that I didn’t play a lot but was never seriously tempted to sell off.
A few years ago I went on a jag to create a playlist with “the best 80’s music,” mining my vinyl collection and acquiring several albums new to my collection in the process. Closer was released in 1980 and therefore it barley qualified, but after creating more than a few digital copies of songs from a variety of records, recorded in real time and often requiring do overs when I failed to start and stop the recording device at the right moment which meant listing to many tracks multiple times in a row (a great way to test how much you really like a song!) I came to the conclusion that the best record in the pile was Closer and my favorite “80’s” band was Joy Division. In the end, it wasn’t even close!
Just recently I was in the process of ordering yet another copy of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane from a seller in England, hoping this one would be “the one” and I saw that he had a pretty reasonably priced UK first pressing of Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, in his inventory. I added it to my order and I’m really glad I did.
One of the thrills of making upgrades to my system is revisiting records I’ve not played for a while and hearing the music in a fresh way that gives me a new appreciation for the artist. In the case of Unknown Pleasures it appears I owe much of my renewed appreciation for Joy Division to Martin Hannett, producer of this album as well as Closer. When the album was finished, the band members were initially upset with results. Hannett had drastically altered their live sound, rooted in punk, and essentially created the Joy Division sound that makes them, in my mind, so compelling.
A key feature of the sound that Hannett captures is the depth and space of the studio. It gives the music a sense of place that marries perfectly with the austerity of lead singer Ian Curtis’ vocals and the themes of struggle and isolation in his lyrics. The instruments on Unknown Pleasures present more like machinery and make for an industrial sound that references the working class roots of JD’s home town of Manchester.
No where on Unknown Pleasures is this more apparent than on “She’s Lost Control.” The drum beat that opens the song at the back of the sound stage sounds less like a drum a more like Stephen Morris is whacking at a metal drum with a rubber mallet. As this beat drives along mechanistically and Bernard Sumner’s guitar grinds in the distance, Peter Hook’s bass rumbles through the room and the band sounds like their playing in a machine shop, and it’s fantastic!
Curtis based “She’s Lost Control” on a woman he knew from an occupational rehabilitation center where he worked as an Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer. The woman was very eager to find work but like Curtis, suffered from Epilepsy and would have seizures when she came for her meetings at the center. Curtis later discovered she had died of a seizure, a dark foreboding of his own death by suicide when his struggles with the disease became too much for him to overcome.
As the album closes we hear the sound of smashing glass at the back of the studio. It’s a harsh sound but a fitting one. Unknown Pleasures is not an uplifting album, but the artistry is undeniable and the listening experience, at least with this copy, beyond engaging.