What are you prepared to forgive for beauty and art? Picasso’s misogyny? Warhol’s nihilistic cult? Lennon’s abuse of his wife?
How about naming your band after the company of female slaves kept as prostitutes for the German nazis? And then naming your next band after the description the nazis gave themselves in the event they managed a world-wide third reich?
It’s weird, right? Then there are the other elements, from Barney Sumner’s nazi youth/commie pioneer haircut and shorts during a brief fashion period to Ian Curtis’s lyrics apparently referencing a kind of noble fighting man, a throw away comment here and there (‘where’s Rudolph Hess?’) and a very non-committal attitude in interviews to definitively give a reason for this and the other, sometimes subtle messages that reference fascism.
I understand the fashion of the times - I was there and got it. But Siouxie moved on from the swastika armband - Joy Division embedded their fascinations in their group name(s) and their lyrics and even their sleeve art.
Which makes it all the stranger that I remember hearing their second album, Closer and being absolutely, immediately in love. As an anti-racist, right-on young post-punk. It’s not so much that I forgave them it’s more that I ignored the signs, in the way you ignore a racist comment from a mate on a night out so as not to have an argument and upset a beautiful friendship. And, by the way, I point you to a Specials AKA song* if that has happened to you, as it has to me, for the correct response.
But Closer.
I listened to it again recently and, still, somehow, it transcends its context. How is that? My theory is that, like so much wonderful pop, it’s a combination of luck and stupidity. I do, very much believe, that Joy Division and later New Order, were a bunch of dumb ass young men trying to provoke but, still, were briefly, tapped into some kind of special glory, despite themselves.
The sound of the album is intriguing. I used to think it was incredibly loud. But I realise now that it was probably recorded rather quietly, even the bass. The drums on Atrocity Exhibition are almost jazz-like in the way the sticks skate over the skins. The percussive bass clicks on Isolation are probably the result of the bass being fed directly into the mixing desk. The guitar is seldom close to feedback. The bite is provided by masses of chorus and pitch shift over nearly everything at some point or other, possibly from the MXR harmoniser and Roland chorus.
Curtis’s voice, again misremembered as soaked in reverb, is actually largely dry and the singing quiet, crooning in the way that Sinatra used the mic. The famous delicate, vulnerable quality of his voice I think is simply a combination of the proto-emo lyrics, his lack of singing ability and nerves.
There is an element of flock wallpaper, chip fat burning, stout and gardening shed that gives them a distinct UK feel
Those lyrics - having read the autobiography of Ian Curtis wife, Deborah Woodruff, they were thrown in a new light, as were his moral choices. Singing about what a pain in the ass it is to hang out with kids is probably not the best legacy for his own daughter, but, beyond that, so much of what he’s singing about seems to reflect feeling stuck in a suburban existence whilst yearning for something more bohemian. Maybe he should have just moved to London. How do they compare with Camus or even Jim Morrison? There is an element of flock wallpaper, chip fat burning, stout and gardening shed that gives them a distinct UK feel. Viewing the world through the lens of ITV’s The World At War and Iggy Pop. Dreaming. Stuck.
The track that meant and means the most to me remains Heart and Soul, where Ian Curtis’s voice is doused in a small tiled room reverb, as if he is trapped in the basement toilets of a Salford pub, singing drunkenly to himself, the reverb allowing the flat note of ‘burn’ a pass into your ears as an intentional deviation, to set off the rest of the wobbly sounds. Google the lyrics ** and you will get a hacked version which is hilarious but not so unrealistic as those of us still in thrall to their apparent profundity might think. (‘Anyone from Birmingham, car is going in five minutes’).
It could be a song that fits into the album’s long, dark night of the soul but it could also be a drunk bloke musing on his life.
Everything is so familiar on Closer that it can be hard to realise how it almost single-handedly invented a decade’s worth of alternative music that is still resonating today, including Goth - the ham-fisted disco boomp-stomp, the chorussed, angular bass, the chorussed, spiky, transistorised guitar chords, the dark cloak lyrics. There are connections to the past, Johnny Ray’s Cry from 1951, for instance, is an early bit of Emo with lyrics that could be JD, the Shangri Las/Shadow Morton’s fascination with glamorous death and depression, obviously The Doors.
But it’s the dumb-assness of the whole thing that makes it original and of its time. The bitterness of limited visions and the luck of bumping into Martin Hannett, someone who could add the transforming, shiny, black vinyl gloss; the living in a suburb next to Manchester and the pure, bloody minded, stubborn insistence of four blokes on being taken more seriously than they took themselves.
Essential Information
* Racist Friend
** Heart and Soul lyrics