Joy Division: Here Are The Young Men

It’s hard to imagine my life without Joy Division. By my calculations, however, at least half of my life was spent “joyless” while the last twenty have been under their depressive spell.
The initial exposure came on the turntable of a friend who fortunately brought a tremendously influential record collection with him to college. He tolerated my fairly milquetoast catalogue and unpretentiously advised me on how to make some necessary changes towards my perception of what alternative music really was. What I found out was that there was an “alternative” to my own “alternative” and a history that I still needed exposure to.
My knowledge of Manchester, England started and ended with The Smiths. But there was another Mancurian band as equally influential that the collegiate mentor introduced me to. The introduction came while he meticulously made mix tapes for other eager music students on campus. On many of these cassettes, he frequently included a song called “She’s Lost Control.”
Initially, the sparse arrangement and heavily reverbed vocals didn’t do it for me. It probably had something to do with the context of the song in relation to the other tracks on his compilations. Plus, the knowledge that New Order, a band I wasn’t really appreciative of at the time, actually formed from the ashes of Joy Division, it probably triggered my obligatory Midwestern mathematics of England + Synthesizers ≠ Rock. But when he made a mix tape that contained nothing but Joy Division tracks, it finally registered in me that this was a band of seminal importance and an unprecedented dark streak.
It might have helped that he told me about the circumstances surrounding Joy Division’s lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. After all, the idea of a young man committing suicide days before his band’s first U.S. tour seemed positively cool to a similarly aged college student without a clue on how he planned to handle to confines of adulthood.
While the appeal of Jim Morrison might indeed be a phase that every high-schooled kid goes through, the story of Ian Curtis should be required listening to any college student who’s a fan of real rock ‘n roll pathos.
Because the band only released 3 albums (1 posthumously), there was a challenge for my friend to fill a full 90 minute cassette of only Joy Division music. To make matters worse, we had both foolishly ingested a large amount of L.S.D. making simple tasks like pausing the tape and placing the needle on the track dividing grooves the mental equivalent of an algebraic equation.
Motor functions aside, the music provided a perfect soundtrack to the experience; within the grooves of those imports (Joy Division’s catalogue had yet to find a domestic label to release them) was a voice, perfectly captured by Martin Hannett’s outstanding production that seemed to legitimately live in the shadows it created.
“This is the crisis I knew had to come/Destroying the balance I kept” became the first Joy Division lyrics that I memorized. It happened because my friend put the song that those lyrics came from (“Passover” from Closer) on the Joy Division compilation tape no less than three or four times in his lysergic state. He did manage to juggle the source material, however (one version came from Closer while the other, a live version, came from the posthumous Still release), so perhaps it wasn’t an oversight, but an intentionally metaphoric gauge of our mental state that evening.
He wisely kept the completed results for himself and, years later, provided me a perfectly suited low-fidelity dub of it that challenges any compilation that Factory Records has put out.
There have been numerous examples of music that sound positively brilliant under psychedelic states (Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma being one that comes to mind) only to have the reality of their flaws come out after sobriety takes hold.
Joy Division wasn’t like that. In fact, they’re a band that most people can probably figure out without the addition of entheogenic substances, although a slight case of depression would most certainly aide in a listener’s comprehension of them.
It’s important for me to explain that, although the actual story of Ian Curtis and Joy Division certainly attracted me to the band’s music, the greater influence came from how honest the music was.
This is important to consider, particularly when examining bands that travel a fairly gothic path. Does Siouxsie Sioux look like that every day? Did Bauhaus really lament the death of Bela Lugosi? How does Sisters of Mercy adequately distance themselves from the Goth culture when they regularly make appearances in gothic festivals? Joy Division seemed to be the only band that was cut from the same cloth as their subject matter.
Curtis’ topics were dark because his opinions were fairly bleak. The day before he was set to tour America with his band for the first time, a dream that most bands would (metaphorically) die for, he quietly stayed home, watched Herzog’s “Stroszek” on TV, listened to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, and then hung himself in the kitchen.
The band itself was comprised of fairly weak musicians, so they complemented the drawbacks with their strengths: bassist Peter Hook became the primary source of melody, drummer Stephen Morris used an array of percussion sources to widen the band’s tonal pallets, while guitarist Bernard Sumner expanded the group’s shadows by incorporating synthesizers into the mix which increased their insular imagery. These limitations may have produced some fairly dismal results in the wrong hands, but for Joy Division, the end result was an honest representation of a fairly bleak outlook on living during the end of the twentieth century.
All of this was helped with Ian Curtis perfectly executing his haunting baritone and evocative lyrics. To this day, I am taken at how he consistently amazed me as a songwriter and how he was able to do it at such a young age.
With everything combined, the end results are perfectly captured on their two studio albums (Unknown Pleasures and Closer) and various outtakes (available on the Heart And Soul box set), but what is sorely lacking is live material that eloquently captures how good the band could be on stage. I’m going off of personal accounts here, as some of the live recordings (a lot are of extremely poor fidelity) do capture the band in peak performances, but they don’t transcend the band much.
Perhaps it’s a case of “you had to be there,” and eye-witness accounts certainly point to this. From them, one can only imagine of the band, dressed in almost business casual attire, plugging away with efficient precision allowing your eyes to focus on Curtis.
And what a vision that must have been:

“Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy, would often have onstage tonic-clonic seizures that resulted in unconsciousness and convulsions, or absence seizures that would cause brief trance-like pauses.”

Unfortunately, video footage of Joy Division is hard to come by, so fans like me have to settle on written recollections and (perhaps) the upcoming biopic from Anton Corbijn to help satisfy the desire to learn more about this incredibly mysterious band.
As it stands, live audio proof is frustratingly limited and the quality of it is quickly diminishing.
Like that has ever stopped me before.