Upon the Edge of No Escape: Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’ at 45

Forty-five years after its release, Joy Division‘s Unknown Pleasures still sounds unlike any other album in the history of popular music. Encompassing Ian Curtis’ ominous vocals, Peter Hook’s cutting basslines, Bernard Sumner’s metallic guitar, and Stephen Morris’ meticulous drumming, Joy Division’s debut album helped spark the post-punk period in music. More significantly, it defined much of what would become alternative music in the 1980s and 1990s – from the somber moods of goth and darkwave to the cathartic emotions found in grunge and alternative metal.

Unknown Pleasures is also a stark reminder of lead singer Ian Curtis’s suicide at age 23, 11 months after the release of the record. Just two years separated the release of Joy Division’s debut EP, An Ideal for Living, in June 1978 and their second and final studio album, Closer, in July 1980. During that period, Joy Division transformed themselves from the nondescript punk band of the EP into the startlingly original group heard on the two studio LPs. Curtis’ voice, initially high-pitched adenoidal drawl, seasoned into a deep, rich baritone – the perfect instrument to deliver lyrics of almost lurid intensity. An idol of both Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop, Curtis developed an equally compelling onstage persona. Dressed in industrial grey with severely cropped hair, Curtis’ frenetic dancing often resembled the epileptic seizures he began having regularly towards the end of his life.
 
Even before his epilepsy worsened, Curtis was already prone to bouts of depression. In her memoir Touching from a Distance, Deborah Curtis, Ian’s widow, documents various incidents of self-harm and morbid obsession by the young Ian Curtis. Growing up in Macclesfield, a working-class town near Manchester, England, did not help matters as Curtis railed against the grim conformity of 1970s suburbia. While bandmates Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, from the even grimmer suburb of Salford, channeled their angst into punk fury and open rebellion, Curtis seemed to lock his emotions deep inside himself.

Like so many musicians of their generation (Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, and Bernard Sumner were all born in 1956; Stephen Morris a year later), Joy Division initially took inspiration from the British punk rock boom of the mid-1970s. Hook and Sumner were among the 40 or so attendees of an early Sex Pistols gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976. Curtis, along with Granada Television presenter and future Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson, a central figure in Joy Division’s saga, attended the next local Pistols show in July.

By the spring of 1977, Curtis, Hook, and Sumner, along with various short-term drummers, took their first halting steps in Manchester’s punk scene. Billed initially as Stiff Kittens, then Warsaw (after the track “Warsawa” from David Bowie‘s album Low), the future Joy Division learned to hold their own against other local bands – Buzzcocks, the Fall, Penetration, Slaughter & the Dogs – amid the spitting, often brawling audiences attending punk shows of the day.   

Stephen Morris, like Curtis, a Macclesfield native, joined the group after early experience as a pickup drummer with local cover bands. Morris added his fascination with progressive and experimental music – Can, Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, Van der Graaf Generator, etc. – to the other members’ love of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music, and the Velvet Underground. Although Joy Division’s debut EP, An Ideal for Living, largely evoked the punk fury then in vogue, the group would gradually adopt the slower tempos and experimental textures heard the following year on Unknown Pleasures.

A major catalyst in this transition was Martin Hannett, a musician-turned-producer who became aware of Joy Division around the same time as other key figures, including Tony Wilson and manager Rob Gretton. In early 1977, Hannett produced Spiral Scratch, Buzzcocks’ incendiary debut EP, released shortly after the first punk singles by the Damned, the Sex Pistols, and the Vibrators. Like Joy Division, Hannett craved broader musical horizons, channeling his technical wizardry and “difficult” personality (a famous trick involved cranking up the air conditioning to freeze meddlesome musicians out of his workspace) into a preternaturally futuristic production style. 

That style first bloomed on “Digital” and “Glass”, two tracks by Joy Division included on A Factory Sampler, a double-EP issued by Factory in January 1979, soon after Wilson and actor Alan Erasmus formed the company. While both songs retained the accelerated tempos of An Ideal for Living, Hannett isolated the instruments from each other and Curtis’ ever-deepening voice to broaden the musical spectrum beyond the usual punk fare. For music critic Simon Reynolds, the sound of “Digital” was “not a million miles from Black Sabbath‘s ‘Paranoid’: a dark, fast pummel, a full-tilt dirge fusing pace and ponderousness.”

Comparisons between Joy Division and heavy metal are common, even though Ian Curtis’ vocal style has nothing to do with the helium wail of Ozzy Osbourne or the operatic bluster of Judas Priest‘s Rob Halford. However, Reynolds’s comparison remains apt as a statement about the essential heaviness in Joy Division’s music. Both Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were from Birmingham – like Manchester, one of England’s central industrial hubs. Joy Division’s musical path was different, but all three bands embodied the concentrated rage of post-industrial alienation expressing itself through music.  

Not everything in Ian Curtis’ world conformed with the myths surrounding his legacy. According to Peter Hook, Curtis seldom resembled the “arty and conventionally pretty” figure depicted in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 feature film Control. Hook’s, Morris’, and Sumner’s memoirs characterize Curtis as the unifying force in Joy Division. It was he who solicited many of the group’s gigs and badgered Tony Wilson into giving the group their first television exposure on “Granada Reports” in September 1978. Curtis participated in the japes and camaraderie the group shared while on tour, and in surviving radio interviews, he sounds enthusiastic about Joy Division’s newfound success.

Still, there was something almost psychically oppressive about Ian Curtis’s songwriting. The lyrics to the songs on Unknown Pleasures reveal a songwriter predisposed to defeat and death: “I’ve seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain,” “It’s creeping up slowly, that last fatal hour,” “A loaded gun won’t set you free,” “In the shadowplay, acting out your own death.” These and other lines like them form patterns of bleakness throughout Unknown Pleasures.

Of course, plenty of artists write and sing about death without taking their own lives or dwelling on the macabre outside of their art. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle understood the power art can have in “effecting through pity and fear the purification of… emotions”. Evoking suicide or death in a song lyric is not the same as wishing it upon oneself or others. For Ian Curtis, the tragedy of his early demise was personal and physical – residues of an unhappy love life and overmedication due to epilepsy – not an indictment of his art or evidence of any prophecy it allegedly contains.

Unknown Pleasures begins at a brisk tempo with “Disorder”, a sonic template of nearly the entire album. Like several other songs, it begins with Stephen Morris’ frenetic drums, processed by Martin Hannett to sound almost like a drum machine. Peter Hook’s bass, played high up the neck and pushed forward in the mix, occupies the space usually reserved for a lead guitar. Bernard Sumner’s guitar warbles in with dark sonic color, as sound effects added by Hannett in post-production evoke an eerie sci-fi landscape. Above it all, Ian Curtis’s haunted voice evokes a swell of imagery: flashing lights, crashing cars, and lonely stairwells in an urban “no man’s land”.

The British critic Paul Morley likens Unknown Pleasures to “a subtle, extreme rerouting of the sonic possibilities of rock”. He notes how Hannett’s production, in which live takes by the band got slowly replaced by instruments overdubbed in isolation, made Joy Division sound like “they were in their own zone, miles away from each other, and yet on top of each other”. The 1980s would be filled with other examples of music similarly sparse in conception, from the dreamlike atmosphere of early Cocteau Twins to the stark minimalism of Talk Talk‘s 1988 masterpiece Spirit of Eden. But in 1979, Joy Division – alien against the fury of punk and bounce of new wave – sounded like nothing else on the planet.

The rest of Unknown Pleasures varies the mix to include gothic heaviness in “Day of the Lords” and “New Dawn Fades”, electronic manipulations in “Insight” and “I Remember Nothing”, and open catharsis in the Velvet Underground-inspired “Shadowplay”. Ian Curtis’ voice veers from the restrained narration of “Candidate” (a rare track conceived and semi-improvised in-studio) to the howling intensity of his vocal duet with Peter Hook on “Interzone”.

If one song transcends the song cycle implicit in Unknown Pleasures, it is surely “She’s Lost Control”. According to Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis wrote the song after counseling a young woman suffering from epilepsy during his day job as a junior official with Macclesfield’s Employment Exchange. The woman’s sudden death from a seizure traumatized Curtis even before his epilepsy became common knowledge. Lyrical references to the woman “clinging to the nearest passerby”, “kicking on her side”, and walking “upon the edge of no escape” are part of the intense character study Curtis provides. In hindsight, they also allude to the singer’s desperation and despair as his personal life spun out of control.

“She’s Lost Control” is also a track where Martin Hannett’s production imposes strict order over the music. Stephen Morris’ painstakingly tracked drum-by-drum percussion created what Simon Reynolds describes as the song’s “mechanodisco drum loop” pitted with “tom toms like ball bearings”. Morris himself recalls the experience of feeling “naked and exposed” as he toiled away on a single drum hour after hour. In a reworking of the song for the B-side of “Atmosphere”, a non-album single, Hannett had Morris squirt an aerosol can of tape-head cleaner in front of a microphone, creating the track’s distinctive “chi-chi” percussion effect.

Hannett’s heavy-handedness as a producer initially split opinions within the Joy Division camp about the quality of Unknown Pleasures. Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner claimed the record “didn’t sound like us”. Peter Hook, the member most predisposed to hard rock, claimed he “hated it”, wishing for the sound “to be miles heavier”. Conversely, Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson, and Rob Gretton accepted the groundbreaking nature of the sound, anticipating the critical praise Unknown Pleasures garnered upon release. In time, Hook, Morris, and Sumner all came to appreciate the “timelessness” of the LP, lavishing belated praise on Martin Hannett for his unique production.

Joy Division, Martin Hannett, and engineer Chris Nagel recorded and mixed Unknown Pleasures over three weekends at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, a facility owned by the band 10CC. Along with the ten songs chosen for the album were six outtakes, all of them eventually released on one of two compilations, 1981’s Still and 1988’s Substance. “Episode One”, an unsettling dirge drenched in feedback, was the nearest miss from Unknown Pleasures. “Autosuggestion”, “From Safety to Where”, and “The Only Mistake” were all less distinctive examples of the Joy Division/Hannett sound. “The Kill” and “Walked in Line” were holdovers from the group’s punkier beginnings.

Another postscript to Unknown Pleasures was “Transmission”, a single released in October 1979. Conceived at the same time as songs on the album, “Transmission” seemed brighter, at least on paper, with its lyrical urging to “synchronize love to the beat of the show” and “dance, dance, dance to the radio.” Once again, though, the urgency of Ian Curtis’s delivery turned “dance” into something manic-sounding and violently intense.

Issued on LP by Factory Records on 15 June 1979, Unknown Pleasures transformed Joy Division from scrappy upstarts on the Manchester scene into a seminal group widely respected. NME writer Paul Morley, witness to Joy Division’s progress since their time as Warsaw, referred to Unknown Pleasures as “the sound of resolution of four idealists produced by a north-western Phil Spector, a post-punk George Martin”. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, an early convert in the US, claimed it was Ian Curtis’s “passionate gravity that makes the clumsy, disquieting music so convincing”. Joy Division largely remained a club band, but appearances on BBC’s John Peel Show and the cover of NME put them in the vanguard of Britain’s rising new acts.

The unique packaging of Unknown Pleasures was as iconic as the music, designed by Factory graphics man Peter Saville. Using minimalist typography on textured paper, the album sleeve signified a kind of art object in miniature. The cover image, a graphic representation of radio waves from a pulsar, found in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, evoked the same kind of enigma as the prism on the cover of Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon or the mysterious object on the cover of Who’s Next. This sense of cosmic mystery helped trigger the mythos of Joy Division, as the image garnished t-shirts and became an apt metaphor for the group’s haunting persona.

Ian Curtis’ suicide on 18 May 1980 precluded whatever further success Joy Division stood to achieve as an active group. As Chris Ott points out in his 33 1/3 series book on Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division were barely professional artists, performing sporadically around England as each member kept their day job. Only towards the end did the group tour England as full-time musicians, opening for Buzzcocks and allegedly upstaging them every night. Eleven concerts on the European continent were the only shows Joy Division played outside the British Isles. A brief tour of the United States had been planned to begin just days after Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen.

Joy Division’s swan song was their second studio album, Closer, and the non-album single “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. Released posthumously on 18 July 1980, Closer continued the dark affiliations of Unknown Pleasures, albeit with a greater reliance on the keyboards Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris had begun collecting. Closer furthered the personal catharsis Ian Curtis had first exhibited on “She’s Lost Control”. His lyrics to songs like “Isolation” (“I’m ashamed of the person I am”) and “Twenty Four Hours” (“A cloud hangs over me, marks every move”) struck everyone around him as a cry for help – only after his death alerted those who, in Stephen Morris’s words, had “put it down as great art”.

Few bands survive the death of a key member, but the forward inertia of Joy Division’s final months allowed Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, and Bernard Sumner – all of them non-singers at first – to survive as a group. As New Order, with Sumner gradually assuming the role of lead singer and Gillian Gilbert joining to fill out the sound, the group morphed from Joy Division soundalikes into the dance-pop purveyors of massive hits like “Blue Monday”, “Bizarre Love Triangle”, and “True Faith”. As the New Order sound grew brighter and more mainstream, Peter Hook’s piercing basslines remained sonic motifs linking the two groups.

Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, R.E.M., the Smiths, Sonic Youth, and the Stone Roses carried the influence of Joy Division into the 1980s and 1990s. For U2’s Bono, Ian Curtis was “the number one singer of his generation”. Robert Smith of the Cure, for whom Joy Division opened at London’s Marquee Club in March 1979, called his on-stage rivals “the best thing I’d seen” (notwithstanding Bowie and the Stones). The influence of both Joy Division and New Order inhabits a broad swath of pop and alternative music: darkwave, dream pop, electronic dance, industrial, metal, synthpop, and shoegaze.

At the same time, Ian Curtis – like Jim Morrison before him and Kurt Cobain after – embodies what Jon Savage calls “the romantic notion of the tortured artist, too fast to live, too young to die”. His grave in Macclesfield has become a shine not unlike Morrison’s grave in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Attributing visionary status to his lyrics fulfills a certain urge to romanticize the dead. Yet, at the same time, it is worth remembering that other artists of Curtis’ generation – Robert Smith being a key example – cut into the darkest emotional veins without taking their own lives at age 23.

Unknown Pleasures remains Joy Division’s – and Ian Curtis’ – major artistic statement. Forty-five years after its release, the album continues to attract new listeners, beguiled by Curtis’s magnetic persona and the group’s deconstruction of rock music conventions. Because it sounded so out-of-step with the trends of 1979, the record retains a uniqueness rare in the history of recorded music. Almost accidentally – against the group’s wishes at the time they recorded it – Unknown Pleasures became the harbinger of a musical future its lead singer, sadly, never lived to enjoy. 

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Works Cited

Aristotle. The Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. Penguin Books, 1996.

Curtis, Deborah. Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. Faber & Faber, 1995.

Hook, Peter. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Morley, Paul. Joy Division Piece by Piece: Writing About Joy Division, 1977-2007. Plexus, 2015.

Morris, Stephen. Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist, Volume 1. Constable, 2019.

Ott, Chris. 33 1/3: Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Bloomsbury Academic, 2004.

Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk, 1978-1984. Penguin Books, 2005.

Savage, Jon. “Foreword.” Touching from a Distance by Deborah Curtis. Faber & Faber, 1995.

Sumner, Bernard. Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division and Me. Corgi Books, 2014.