John Lydon summed up in three words what punk had actually been about. Creativity, originality and empathy. Where others saw anger, challenge and destruction he saw it differently. Why The Sex Pistols morphed into PIL. Joy Division had started in their early days with venom and iconoclasm. Their very earliest songs (‘Gutz’, ‘Inside the line’, ‘At a later date’) are cartoon punk. They'd seen the symptoms but not understood the cause.
But Joy Division were always different. A group in which each of the members were technically highly skilled (like The Sex Pistols if we ignore Sid). And before long (by the end of 1978), highly creative and original. Not only that, they had a radical producer, a radical designer and a radical label owner as well. The stars aligned, as they sometimes do. But the cultural context was a vital ingredient in their success too.
Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare at any other time other than late Tudor/early Stuart England. He was the son of a glovemaker who saw the appetite for theatre and tapped into the millennial succession anxiety gripping the country. Joy Division were working class lads who similarly saw their musical opportunity but also understood that the social contract could not hold. They thrived during the Winter of Discontent. And for the equivalent of the Globe Theatre, there's Martin Hannett's technical bag of tricks which created a new framework in which the band, uniquely, existed.
However technically proficient they might have been, nobody's making documentaries about The Stranglers or The Only Ones forty years later. What Joy Division had in addition to talented musicians was the X-factor of their singer. In terms of Lydon's three pointed value charter, he had the empathy: too much empathy; the horrors of the world overwhelmed him in the end.
A very important factor with Joy Division is the link to literature. This was a unique time. Punk had shown anyone could form a group. But the kids forming groups were the bored arty kids in the suburbs. The ones who read books. Back then you could go in any Oxfam or art bookshop and find really good secondhand literature for 50p or a quid.
So we get Mark E Smith becoming the President of The Arthur Machen Society; Howard Devoto and Kafka's ‘A song from under the floorboards’; Paul Haig and Camus; Ian McCulloch's obsession with A Clockwork Orange. They were the ragged trousered philanthropists - or readers at least. Robert Forster, Thom Yorke and Nicky Wire took their cues from these predecessors.
So with Joy Division we have Ballard and Kafka, the Bible and Dostoievsky.
‘Closer’, continuing ‘Unknown Pleasures’ ' blueprint, is the sound of a band fighting to step outside of convention and limitation. Has there ever been a more unorthodox opener to a classic album than ‘Atrocity Exhibition’? The bass player clearly wants to stay inside rock. In fact, ’24 Hours’ is still holding onto the riff from ‘I wanna be your dog’ which he's using for the third time (after ‘Insight’ and ‘Warsaw’). The drummer's going with the flow. But the guitarist has embraced synthesisers. The singer's been listening to dub reggae, as has the producer. As Joe Strummer says, he listened to reggae because it was about things that really mattered to the people who wrote it, unlike the music he grew up with. The producer wants to create space within rock music and has found the technology to do it (he doesn't always master it either: by the end of ‘The Eternal’ the sampler has got out of sync - but somehow it works).
As for Ian Curtis, he's taken the lesson from reggae about singing about what means most to him. Up until his epilepsy and his deteriorating marriage he had sung about abstract things with the luxury of distance, though they did matter to his over-anxious heart. Inner city decay, domestic violence, the military, machines, books. But by the time of ‘Closer’, only two things matter. His mental health and his intimate relationships.
If we add another value on top of Lydon's we might get to authenticity. ‘Closer’ is the least ironic, most authentic statement in rock music to place alongside Nick Drake, Billie Holliday or Robert Johnson in their spheres. It's the view of a man with days left to live. It's the end of many journeys: for him, for music, and for the country. No wonder he felt he didn't write these songs but that he was the vessel through which they emerged.
Any John Peel show between the start of '77 and the end of '80 is an adventure in musical experimentation. Joy Division's own journey mirrors that path almost exactly. From the earliest street howl of Warsaw to ‘Atmosphere’ and beyond. The album itself takes a journey pivoting around ‘24 Hours’ after which ‘The Eternal’ and ‘Decades’ calmly accept the inevitable.
The journey that started with punk ended four years later with ‘Closer’. Post-punk ended there as well. No more albums worth hearing from the post-punk pioneers with one or two notable exceptions. The next few years is the wake of kids dressing up and dancing and trying to forget about anything other than the weekend. ‘Closer’ brings everything to a stop. But even now, we listen to that music.
Tracklist:-
Twenty four hours, Joy Division
Insight, Joy Division
Procession, New Order
Candidate, Joy Division
Something must break, Joy Division
Transmission, Warsaw
Transmission, Joy Division
It’s kinda funny, Josef K
Disorder (live version), Joy Division
Missing boy, The Durutti Column
Decades, Joy Division
Love will tear us apart, Joy Division
Dead Souls, Joy Division
