Category Archives: musings

Musings. Brain dump. Uncategorized.

These Days, Still Influence of Joy Division

On the fortieth anniversary of the death of Ian Curtis (15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980) [this blog post has been edited to mark the occassion in 2020], the inevitable articles will be written and social media posts will abound honoring the memory of Joy Division’s lead singer and lyricist. Many will romanticize Curtis’ suicide, misunderstanding the real contribution Curtis made to culture and modern music. Most will simply mourn the life of a talented frontman and artist that helped usher in what is now known as post-punk or proto-goth.

Joy Division were formed in 1976 in Manchester, England. They began as a punk band inspired by The Sex Pistols, but through an evolution of  dogged determination to transcend punk and a desire (actualized by producer Martin Hannett) to experiment with sound, grew to become a band unlike any previously heard in the history of popular music.

Love Will Tear Us Apart 12" single
Love Will Tear Us Apart 12″ single

In the end, Joy Division produced only a handful of singles (most notably “Transmission” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), and two official studio albums: the groundbreaking Unknown Pleasures (June, 1979) and the hypnotic Closer (released July, 1980 [after Curtis’ death]).

Although a number of compilations were produced in the wake of Curtis’ death, it is the two seminal albums and the aforementioned singles that would secure the band — consisting of Curtis, guitarist and keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris — their place in music history.

Part of a movement that has since been labelled post-punk, Joy Divsion helped usher in a new age of popular music. The band that would rise from its ashes as New Order —with Sumner, Hook and Morris surviving — would go on to produce the 1980s dance hit “Blue Monday” along with alternative / college radio hits like “The Perfect Kiss” and “Regret.” Their longevity lasted well into 1990s with disbandment and reunions pretty much up to the present-day.

The influence of the Joy Division sound on New Order was short-lived. After recording material begun with Curtis and finished without him (the formidable single “Ceremony” with its haunting b-side “In a Lonely Place”) , New Order would turn to up-tempo electronica.

With the exception of tribute concerts by Peter Hook and occasional live performances of Joy Division songs performed by New Order and sung by Bernard Sumner over the past decade, New Order and its members clearly distanced themselves from the specter of Joy Division, especially in the early days (understandably, as the loss of Curtis profoundly affected his bandmates).

Other artists, however, so admired Curtis that they would go on to record songs alluding to him — U2’s 1980 “A Day Without Me” most notable among contemporaries. U2 had worked with Joy Division producer Martin Hannett on Boy and been given a tour of the studio when Joy Division was recording “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Bono was so enamored with Curtis that he would go on to tell Tony Wilson (founder of Factory Records, Joy Division’s label) that he thought Curtis was the best vocalist of his generation.

A number of artists have covered Joy Division songs over the years. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” alone has been covered numerous times (although not by David Bowie as once incorrectly reported). Moby, long a Joy Division devotee, recorded “New Dawn Fades” for the soundtrack to the 1995 DeNiro / Pacino movie Heat.  The Killers covered “Shadowplay” in 2007. The list goes on.

Joy Division songs have even found their way into more recent pop culture. Britain’s “East Enders” television drama continually used an uncredited version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” throughout the series (2010, 2011…); NME would go on in 2012 to name it the #1 song of the last 60 years. Then there’s the recent Lady Gaga vehicle “American Horror Story: Hotel” (2015-2016) which featured both “The Eternal” from Closer and New Order’s aforementioned “In a Lonely Place.”

All these years after Curtis’ death, the influence of Joy Division is as ubiquitous as ever. Bands like Interpol, The Editors, and The Killers are evidence that the influence of Joy Division is alive and well these days.

And then there are the truly bizarre inheritors of the spirit of Ian Curtis: those that go beyond standard rock and roll arrangements and introduce sounds that Curtis himself (a fan of so many genres, including Reggae) would have at the very least found interesting. Yann Tambour, from Stranded Horse,  a Frenchman who has been making his own versions of koras — the 21-string West African lute-bridge-harps, for years — covers “Transmission” in what has to be the most “out there” interpretation of a Joy Division song ever.

36 years on, and Joy Division is still inspiring experimentation.

The Gothic Staircase: From Piranesi to Harry Potter

Of the many influences upon the progenitors of Gothic fiction —the German and British Romantics of the eighteenth century — was the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an artist known for etchings of Rome and labyrinthine “prisons” (Carceri d’Invenzione). With arches, vaults and staircases that lead nowhere, Piranesi’s prisons were visions of the impossible.  To the Romantics, he was a virtuoso of the imagination.

“I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.” — Giovanni Battista Piranesi, as quoted by an early biographer

Plate 14 of Piranesi's Prisons
Plate 14 of Piranesi’s Prisons

The first edition of Carceri d’Invenzione was published in 1750; a decade later, Piranesi would return to his imaginary prisons, revising the existing and adding two more (click here to see all 14 of the original Carceri in order). By the late eighteenth century, his work was known throughout Europe.

Writing in his Italian Journey: 1786-1788, Goethe confesses that his visit to the ruins of Rome had failed to measure up to Piranesi’s images of them. Horace Walpole — author of the Castle of Otranto (1764), generally agreed upon by critics as one of the first Gothic novels —  urged his fellow artists to “study [Piranesi’s] sublime dreams.”

Coleridge was well aware of Piranesi; Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of An Opium Eater (1821) reminisces

“Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c.&c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overccome. Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.” 

Again and again, De Quincey comes back to the image of the staircase to the point where Piranesi’s labors are likened to unfinished stairs.

It is as if in the staircase itself, De Quincey and by extension, Coleridge (if the recollection is accurate) find in Piranesi’s etchings a potent symbol for the imagination itself. And for the authors of the Gothic novel, that symbol, consciously or not, plays out again and again.

Emily St. Aubert, the heroine Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) encounters many a supernatural terror on the staircase in a gloomy castle. In his Monk: A Romance (1796), Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis similarly situates his paranormal happenings on the stairs when in Voume II, Chapter I he writes “Occasional gleams of brightness darted from the Staircase
windows as the lovely Ghost past by them.” The aforementioned Castle of Otranto finds many a dastardly deed tied to the castle’s stairs. And as late into the nineteenth century in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the titular Count leads an unsuspecting Jonathan Harker “up a great and winding stair.” So prevalent is the image from Dracula that it is repeated again and again in film adaptations of the novel, from Carl Laemmle’s 1931 version with Bela Lugosi to Francis Ford Coppola’s with Gary Oldman (in 1992).

The stairwell in Dracula (1931)
The stairwell in Dracula (1931)

“Winding” “dizzying” “narrow” and “great” are just a few of the adjectives tied to the Gothic staircase. More than a means of moving from point A to point B, they are a mystery within the mysterious. They are architectural ruminations of at once possibilities and simultaneously dead ends. To the writer, they are ready made for metaphor.

No surprise then, Freud states that “staircases, ladders, and flights of stairs, or climbing on these, either upwards or downwards, are symbolic representations of the sexual act.” (Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners.  1921. Chapter 5). But Freud stops short of fully exploring the nature of the staircase as metaphor in the same way that the Judeo-Christian tradition mistakes original sin as some type of sexual awakening — when it is indeed all knowledge that the forbidden fruit affords.

Knowledge then, as it emerges from the path of imagination, is at the end of the staircase. Something Jung might see as Hermetic knowledge and light from darkness.

Winchester House and the stairs to nowhere
Winchester House and the stairs to nowhere

Sometimes it is knowledge of a truth one does not want to confront as in the curious case of the Sarah Winchester’s “Mystery” House in San Jose, California. Plagued by thoughts of the horrors her husband’s rifle had wrought, the widow Winchester spent the years following her husband’s death building a mansion with doors, windows and stairs to nowhere as a means, or so she thought, to confuse potentially vengeful spirits or hold off death itself. Hundreds of rooms with no sense or reason. An attempt to ease a guilty conscience.

More often, the staircase can be seen as a retreat or escape. A Jacob’s Ladder of sorts. A movement toward reward. It is interesting, for example, that a radical form of psychotherapy called Emergence Therapy uses the staircase as a metaphor. The patient ascends from darkness to light. Even in popular music, we find stairways to heaven. Where a “piper will lead us to reason.”

Piranesi’s etchings were born out of an Age of Reason. Knowledge, the promise of the Enlightenment, was believed within reach by men of science in the mid seventeenth century — providing the man of reason stayed the course and used a scientific mind to stay on point. But as Piranesi’s mind-boggling prisons reveal,  the imagination — the creative yet too often cruel tool of the inquisitive mind that was championed as much as reason by poets and philosophers of the early nineteenth century — can obfuscate more than enlighten. Or perhaps better put: enlighten through the challenge of obfuscation.

Stripped of its many layers of metaphor, it becomes clear that the staircase is the mind. Up into the light. Down into the dark. Knowledge. Fear of the unknown.

Hogwart's Grand Staircase (courtesy of harrypotter.wikia.com)
Hogwart’s Grand Staircase (courtesy of harrypotter.wikia.com)

It has been reported that among the many influences for J.K. Rowling’s depiction of the Grand-Staircase at Hogwart’s was a bookshop in Portugal called Livraria Lello. In its beauty and grandeur, one can see a model for Hogwart’s in Livraria Lello, but it is not until one really considers the bewildering movement and plot points served by Piranesi-like staircase at Hogwart’s that the real foundation for Rowling lay somewhere in the Gothic.

Not only is there an impressive architectural style in Hogwart’s, but also, even more so, a movement of the mind therein — from darkness to light. It is this very movement that for Harry Potter and company literally reveals hidden [i.e., occult] knowledge again and again across the novels each time the Grand Staircase comes into play, placing Rowling’s work (and the eerily reminiscent prisons of Piranesi) firmly within the Gothic tradition.