This Is Yesterday

You want doom? You want gloom? Welcome to Manchester’s post-punk legends Joy Division, laysungennulmun, entertaining fer you tonight one night only! So get up on your feet and dance the night away because they’re going to start their set with a little number for all you lovers in the front row called… ‘Dead Souls’!

So to Joy Division. A big one to tackle. My mum, an avid reader of Q Magazine, Mojo and the music section of the Sunday Times ‘Culture’ section (where Stewart Lee recommends obscure forgotten punk bands to the middle class masses to this day) found out about the Heart And Soul box set and snapped it up. A quick Google shows it was released in December 1997 and so this was the Christmas we first got a CD player when I was 14, the year I’d coincidentally had my first epileptic seizure.

The box set had 4 CDs. Disc 1 was their first album, Unknown Pleasures, with singles and B-sides from the same period; Disc 2 was their second album Closer, again with all the singles etc; Disc 3 was demos, lost recordings and so on; and Disc 4 was live stuff which I hardly ever listened to because generally I’m not interested in live albums at all. And because of Ian Curtis’ suicide just as Closer had been finished, it’s pretty much ‘The Complete Joy Division’.

I didn’t feel some sort of connection to Ian Curtis or his lyrics because he had had epilepsy. I constantly have to make that disclaimer to people. He wrote one song, ‘She’s Lost Control’, which was inspired by seeing someone he worked with have seizures. His epilepsy didn’t cause his angst or depression although it – and the treatment for it with barbiturates –

probably made his mental health much worse. His lyrics are on the whole opaque and mysterious… You can’t identify with them without hearing them sung in his voice. The meaning comes in his expression of words rather than any literary sense. Reading “A house somewhere on foreign soil/Where ageing lovers call” doesn’t really mean very much, hearing Curtis’ voice softly boom them on ‘A Means To An End’ makes the couplet spooky, dark, heavy with meaning. He was the greatest and only possible interpreter of his own lyrics. That’s what attracted me to Joy Division as a teenager. 

And it wasn’t, you know, Ian Curtis and the Joy Divisions. They were a proper tight band playing together. They were the first band I got into where the bass was the lead instrument. I made a half arsed attempt to learn an instrument at one point but only had a normal guitar, so I tried putting bass strings in it. Which made an interesting sound. Not in a sarcastic way, try it. If I’d had more courage I’d have tried to do something proactive about it but instead went back to unsuccessfully (very unsuccessfully) learn rhythm guitar. Peter Hook on bass had a massive influence on me though because I’d never really even noticed it as an instrument before; it sent me down the rabbit hole of Trojan Box Sets from Nottingham’s finest Selectadisc and really listening out for what the bass could do by itself. 

Bernard Sumners scratchy guitars really are something else when he gets the chance to let rip – they’re like sheets of metal on Unknown Pleasures and splinters of glass on Closer but either way they penetrate. Stephen Morris’ rhythm feels either impersonally or sarcastically brutal. It’s a dynamic that’s spindly but robust at the same time – it comes together at so many different times in their discography to different effects so where in ‘Colony’ the sawing guitars and abrupt beat deliberately cuts you off as if mid-sentence, the earlier ‘Transmission’ sounds like it wants response in kind from anywhere.

Joy Division’s music is dismissed by some (probably by people who haven’t bothered to listen to much of it or don’t like it very much) as music to kill yourself to, even before Ian Curtis killed himself. In that very weird and twisted way that  a certain kind of music culture works, some people felt that the lyrics had been ‘validated’ by his death; we could see that he really meant them ‘For/4 real’ – (see also Richey Edwards and Kurt Cobain). What is it with people? Obviously I came to Joy Division long after his death had been turned into tragedy. But before he died were people walking round saying ‘yeah if he really wants to die so much why doesn’t he just do it already?’ Yes, actually, I can fully believe that. Welcome to humanity. That’s partly what makes it impossible to talk about Joy Division without making it ‘about’ Ian Curtis. Toxic masculinity in general, but the toxicity of a rock scene specifically where a lot of emphasis was put on the importance of authenticity meant that killing himself probably felt like ‘an option’. I don’t believe for one moment this was his main reason for wanting to end his life, but it probably contributed. And toxic masculinity lives on, with male suicide rates sky high, young men with the weight on their shoulders thinking that their only option is to do as Ian Curtis did.

As someone who has attempted suicide (happily I failed miserably), I can say that Joy Division was not my idea of music to kill yourself to – I needed something with a bit of energy to psyche myself into the right mindset. It’s too introspective, too thoughtful – it is not music that inspires taking direct action. Even Ian Curtis listened to Iggy Pop. Instead Joy Division is my music to listen to when needing to feel comfortable indoors in Autumn and Winter. I used to listen to it curled up by the gas fire at home with a dog by my side. Now it might be cocooned on an early morning bus or on a sofa in the evening when I can’t feel my body. I think it makes me feel safe, certainly there’s a massive degree of nostalgia in there as well. Maybe just nostalgia for being a teenager, or just for when listening to Joy Division was the most important thing I had to do in a day. A weird sort of thing to find comfort in maybe. But it’s kept me going.