Manchester's music scene has long been dominated by oddballs, eccentrics, misanthropes, depressives, villains, and grotesques. The Buzzcocks, Magazine, the Fall, John Cooper Clarke, the Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Oasis. What a parade of impenetrable accents, incompetent dental work, unruly eyebrows, surly attitudes, and black, black hearts. But no Manchester band better embodied their rain-spattered, concrete environment than Joy Division. The year 1979 was a banner one for bleak, nightmarish post-punk classics, like Gang of Four's Entertainment, Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box, and the Cure's Three Imaginary Boys. These records were made to be moped to in the confines of a predominantly (but not exclusively) adolescent male suburban bedroom. That same year, Joy Division's debut, Unknown Pleasures, dealt with similar themes—the ever-popular alienation and despair—but it did so in a transcendent fashion. The combination of Ian Curtis's disembodied growl, Peter Hook's brutally melodic bass, the band's machinelike precision, and producer Martin Hannett's desire to make a record that sounded both spacious and terrifying turned Unknown Pleasures into a ghost train ride to hell. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" offered a glimpse of a group capable of forging an emotional connection with a larger audience. But by then, Joy Division were already frozen in time.
JB: You know why I liked Joy Division? Because other people did. No point in lying about it: I was a sheep. If I read about a band in the NME, and John Peel was playing them, and their records were stocked in one of Glasgow's indie-friendly stores, I would buy them and take them home and play them continuously until either I genuinely liked them or a post-punk version of Stockholm syndrome set in. The 1979 version of me was devoid of a mind of my own—to the degree that I purchased an olive-green thrift-store raincoat that flapped down around my ankles because that was the requisite uniform to properly appreciate the existential anguish of Joy Division. (Having said that, the skies of Glasgow are gray and overcast approximately 11 months out of the year, so that raincoat turned out to be a smart and practical investment.) You know why I eventually came around to liking Joy Division? Because they sounded like disco. They sounded like the Teutonic disco records I bought along with the post-punk indies: Silver Convention, Donna Summer, Munich Machine—stuff I didn't need to make an effort to enjoy. Joy Division's music was gruesome, claustrophobic, unpleasant disco, but it had a pulse that I recognized, and that caused me to respond.
LM: As embarrassing as it is to admit, the first time I heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was Paul Young's 1984 cover. I liked his version then, as I still do now. But I can understand the horror with which it was received by Joy Division's army of gloomy fans, not to mention the surviving members. The band, their legend, and that song are precious and seem to remain unexploited, no matter how many T-shirts they sell at Hot Topic. It wasn't until I heard the original that I understood how desperately sad a song it is. This isn't my favorite Joy Division song—that would be the even more haunting "Atmosphere"—but I get why "Love Will Tear Us Apart" universally tops so many best-songs-of-all-time lists. It's a living document that details the hopelessness Curtis felt in his dead-end marriage before he took his own life. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" marked a real turning point for Joy Division…and we'll never know what could have come next.
BERNARD SUMNER: Ian almost died making that song. It was the story of his demise. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was kind of Romeo and Juliet for real, put down in lyrics. I think the reason for that being a hit [in the U.K.]—apart from the melody, which is brilliant—is that it was such a romantic story. You can't get more real; you can't get more surreal.
PETER HOOK: I would not want someone to write a song about me like that. The lyrics are so poignant and so hurt, it really is shocking. And I never realized for years. When Ian used to sing it, it looked to me like he was having a great time; when Bernard was singing it [years later, with New Order], same. Then, when I came to sing it [with Peter Hook and the Light], I thought, Oh my god, these lyrics are really dark. It's a very sad love song—it's an anti-love song—but it sounds like a joyous love song. And I suppose that's its secret. If your heart's broken, you need to fight your way through it.
Ian always had a bag of lyrics with him, scraps of papers with ideas written on them. As we were playing, he'd just delve into this bag and pull something out, mumble it—at least, that's what it sounded like to us—and then he'd elaborate, and it built up from there. The next minute, you had a song. The great thing about Ian was that you didn't really need to hear what he was saying; you could just look at what he was doing and know that he meant it. That fire, that passion in his body language and his delivery, let you know that everything was okay.
On more than one occasion, Tony Wilson asked Ian to refer to Frank Sinatra. [Before recording "Love Will Tear Us Apart," Tony] gave [Ian] a double LP [of Sinatra's] and said, "Listen to this." It's plainly ridiculous at first sight, but now that I'm a fan of Frank Sinatra—as these things happen as you get older—I can see what Tony meant. He was referring to Sinatra's soul and passion and the delivery. But I think Ian had that anyway, unless maybe he did get it from Frank.
The lyrics always came afterwards. The music always came first, and Ian was very, very involved in orchestrating the music and telling us what sounded good. He didn't tell us what to play; he just told us that what we were playing was great. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is very simply written. It took us something like three hours from start to finish. Ian went away, thought about the vocal, came back the next day, and we had the song. It came very, very naturally, very easy.
You didn't write songs with a view to recording them in those days. You only wrote songs with a view to playing them [live at a gig]. The first chance you got to play it, you would play it, and judging the audience's reaction was quite a delight, really, because it was the best way to tell if you're going in the right direction. And they loved ["Love Will Tear Us Apart"]. It's very up-tempo. It's very, very in-your-face—you could say it has like a punk ethic to it. It went down great every time we played it. "Atmosphere" is also a favorite with many Joy Division fans. The reason it's not my favorite song is it's always associated with funerals. Every funeral I go to, they play bloody "Atmosphere." The most popular song at weddings is "Angels" by Robbie Williams, and the most popular song at funerals is "Atmosphere." When I went to [Factory Records boss] Tony Wilson's funeral and they put "Atmosphere" on at the end, I wished we had written fuckin' "Angels."
The thing with Joy Division's music is that each member was playing like a separate line. We hardly ever played together; we all played separately. But when you put it together, it was like the ingredients in a cake. When you eat the ingredients separately, they don't taste very nice, but when you mix them together, they taste wonderful—if you do it right, of course. And in Joy Division, you got that right very easily. Once we got to New Order, we had three of the ingredients, but there was always an ingredient missing.
The only problem with Joy Division was Ian's illness. If Ian hadn't been ill, he'd probably still be here today. The degenerative effects of the drugs he was taking for the illness heightened his depression and made him unable to cope with all of the other things in his life, I think.
But the thing is, I was dealing with Ian on a day-to-day basis, and even though he wasn't well, he looked like he was coping. I know it doesn't seem like that now, and that's one thing I realized when I'd written [the memoir Unknown Pleasures]: It really was plainly obvious that he wasn't coping. But the problem was that whenever you asked him, he always told you he was okay, and in your heart, that's what you wanted. You wanted this guy, whom you loved and cherished and revered, to tell you everything was okay. You'd ask him, and he'd say, "Yes, Hooky, everything is fine. Don't worry. Let's carry on." And you'd go, "Phew. Thank God for that." I've seen friends of mine who've been ill succumb to it and just go into a pit, and it's very, very difficult. But with Ian, it was never like that. He fought it so well, and his whole reason for living seemed to be to make sure you heard what you wanted to hear.
Most of the time that you spent with Ian, though, was relaxed, and we used to have a lot of laughs. It was just us in the back of a van, playing great music. And just when you're getting to the point when it could have been poisoned [by success], it stopped. There weren't wild parties; there weren't drugs, particularly; there were no girls. I wasn't drinking that much, because we had no money—we couldn't afford it!
[After Ian died], we couldn't replace him. That would have been absolutely 100 percent impossible. There was no chance, and we all knew that. We knew that immediately. It's not like when INXS got that guy [J.D. Fortune] in. We could have gotten someone who sounded like Ian, but it wouldn't have been the same.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from the Cold, Dark, Rain-Soaked Streets of Manchester 1. "Hand in Glove," The Smiths 2. "Homosapien," Pete Shelley 3. "Time Goes by So Slow," The Distractions 4. "A Song from Under the Floorboards," Magazine 5. "Beasley Street," John Cooper Clarke
SUMNER: We were New Order for 10 years before we played any Joy Division songs [in concert]. We didn't want people to say, "Oh, they've only made it because of Ian's death—that's propelled them along, and they're living off their heritage." We wanted to make it on our terms, so we spent 10 years doing that. Then one night, I think it might have been Irvine Meadows in California, it was Ian's birthday—not the anniversary of his death, which I don't think is something to celebrate—and we decided to play "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and another Joy Division song. People were like, "Are these new songs?" They didn't get much of a response. When we play them now, people go wild.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
"Love Will Tear Us Apart" was a posthumous U.K. hit. The surviving members of Joy Division went on to form New Order (see this page). Aside from their not-insignificant contribution to Manchester's musical heritage, the band poured a ton of money into the city's legendary nightspot, the Haçienda. While the club was the epicenter of the city's vibrant rave culture, its financial mismanagement drove the band to the brink of bankruptcy. Tony Wilson's easy-come, easy-go approach to the finances of Factory Records drove them the rest of the way there. Joy Division's story, as well as the rise and fall of Factory and the Haçienda, were wittily chronicled in Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film, 24 Hour Party People. Curtis's biography was handled in more somber fashion in Anton Corbijn's 2007 film, Control. Peter Hook published a memoir of his Joy Division years, Unknown Pleasures, in 2012.
HOOK: Paul Young's was the most famous [cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart"], and at the time, I hated it.[1] But then, we made more money off of that rendition than we ever did as Joy Division. It's quite painful, isn't it? It was smoochy, and it was everything we didn't want to be—cabaret.
SUMNER: New Order was a more commercial success than Joy Division, but Joy Division just keeps selling and selling. It's kind of a self-propelling brand. I hate to use the word "brand," because Joy Division was not a commercial product, but it's kind of a self-regenerating brand. A friend brought his daughter around to my house; she was like 13 or 14, and she had an iPod. I said, "Oh, what are you listening to?"—expecting her to say "Justin Bieber" or something. No: "It's this band called Joy Division." I didn't tell her I was in Joy Division, but her father told her, and next time she came around, she was like, "Can I have your autograph?"
HOOK: Joy Division were an absolutely unique group. We stayed independent, on an independent record label; we didn't go to London like everybody else—we stayed in the place that made us and stayed true to it. We actually entertained a whole fucking city at our own expense for 16 years. I think that is changing the world of musical and world culture.
We wrote fucking great music. The chemistry between the individuals [in the band] was absolutely fantastic, and the individual playing styles of each one of us has been much emulated. Some groups will be like, "I really like Stephen Morris's rhythms," or "I really like Bernard's melody lines and his lead guitar style," or "I really like Peter Hook's melodic bass playing." That actually is very unusual in a group, and everybody tries to emulate that. I hear U2 rip off Joy Division even now. If you look at bands like White Lies or the Editors, some of them take the fixation a little too far. I don't think they capture the naturalness, the relaxed fitting-together that Joy Division had. They have a very manufactured sound; it doesn't sound very natural. One of the most natural-sounding bands I've heard that sound like Joy Division is the Chameleons.
When you're writing music, it's like you have nothing but this blank canvas. You use the influence and the inspiration to create something. That's what people do with Joy Division. They love the songs. They love the story of the band. The tragic ending is very rock 'n' roll, very alluring, very romantic—that "live fast, die young" story. It's like the perfect ending to your life to go out in a blaze of glory, blowing up on stage at Glastonbury in front of 125,000 people. Rock 'n' roll, man!
Notes
[1] PAUL YOUNG: Somebody said, "Why don't we find a new song and throw it back into the soul idiom?" Which ended up being "Love Will Tear Us Apart." We asked ourselves: How would Levi Stubbs sing "Love Will Tear Us Apart"? Normally people are like, "You can't do that." But there's me on the first album saying, "I'm going to do a punk song and imagine the Four Tops doing it."
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