Tag Archives: post punk

music, musings

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.

music

Listening to Sirens: Gary Numan and The Tubeway Army

Cover photo of Gary Numan's Splinter
Gary Numan: Splinter

With the release of Hesitation Marks  — Nine Inch Nails’ first album in five years — Gary Numan’s new work, Splinter: Songs from a Broken Mind — his first album in seven years — might easily be overlooked.

Numan, primarily known for the 1979  earworm “Cars” (a song used to advertise everything from automobiles to, most recently, Target stores) , rode the crest of the nineteen eighties new British invasion. His success was bolstered by a then burgeoning MTV — which following its launch in 1981 only had about 200 videos to cover its 24/7 rotation; the result: clips like “Cars” were shown at least once a day. It also helped that the single had one of the catchiest bass riffs ever, complemented by the then still relatively new technology of two moog synthesizers.

Numan, however, working in the late seventies with his band Tubeway Army, was no “one-hit wonder” in his homeland; previous releases were quite successful: 1978’s Tubeway Army opens with the unforgettable “Listen to the Sirens”; 1979’s Replicas, which includes the stark and sinister classic “Down in the Park” also spawned a #1 hit single in the UK with “Are Friends Electric?”

Combining the synthetic sounds of synthesizers with the acoustic punch of a solid rhythm section, Numan’s quite deliberate pop sensibility stood in stark contrast to the themes of a cold, dystopian future revealed in his lyrics and embodied by his often emotionless, robotic voice.

Inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard as was (the far superior band of the same period) Joy Division,  Numan and others found themselves in the wake of punk but before the dawn of “college” or “alternative” rock.  They were the “new wave” — a label rarely used by the bands themselves but quite appropriate seeing as how their literary idols Dick and Ballard were known as part of the “new wave of science fiction” in the late 60s / early 70s just as filmmakers  Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were referred to by critics of their time (the late 50s and early 60s) as La Nouvelle Vague. Seems there was always some new wave in art; why not let the critics assign the label. What did it matter?

Numan himself referred to his work as “machine rock” — a likely antecedent of  the “industrial rock” moniker applied to bands like Ministry, KMFDM and Nine Inch Nails a decade later. But even among contemporaries, these labels favored by critics were the stuff of comedy and competition among the artists themselves.

Ian Curtis, for example — the  enigmatic genius who fronted the brief but brilliant Joy Division — seemed unimpressed by any labels assigned by music journalists — as well as any forced comparisons among diverse acts; when asked by a reporter who compared Joy Division to Gary Numan and wondered what Curtis thought of Numan’s claim that “machine rock is the future,” Curtis replied:  “No disrespect to Gary Numan, but what we do is what we do.”

Perhaps the label that fits best, then, is the one used by writers for Sounds magazine in the mid to late seventies: post-punk. In the wake of the spirit of DIY, aggression and rebellion that was punk, a new movement emerged. To paraphrase an astute observation made by someone uncredited in an April 2005 issue of Mojo Magazine writing about Joy Division, this movement, instead of saying “fuck off” said “I’m fucked.” Thus is summed up the aesthetic for many of the British bands of the late seventies and early eighties (the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, and [the band that rose from the ashes of Joy Division] New Order — just to name a few) — an aesthetic even evident in the more accessible work of Gary Numan: the paranoid “here in my car, I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors” quickly turns to the lonely plea of “will you visit me, please, if I open my door?”

Intentional isolationism. Losing one’s self in the machine. These were among Numan’s major themes. And he’s still going strong. Go to garynuman.com to check out his latest work.