JOY DIVISION
An Eyewitness Special on the making of Unknown Pleasures, extracted from Jon Savage’s five-star oral history. Plus: Stephen Morris with news of his memoir.
Forty years ago this month, four young Mancunians hunkered down to make a world-changing debut album. In this extract from JON SAVAGE’s new oral history of the band, we discover how ‘bing-boo’ and ‘psssst psssst’ inhabited its grooves, with the ghosts of their city and the shadow of singer Ian Curtis’s ill-health in the ether.
MARCH 1979: entry in Joy Division manager Rob Gretton’s notebook
Germanic One – Exercise One – very good – like new feedback Lost Control – excellent – nice + simple and also builds up well – drums very important – build up – beat emphasised Shadowplay – good lyrics – very good lead guitar Melodic One (Insight) – don’t think that all the breaks will come across well – but I like it Wilderness – no – don’t like the disjointedness Ice Age – good fast one – memorable but lyrics a bit simple – don’t like the guitar bit at the end Transmission – very good – maybe screams too much? New One – possibility? Day Of The Lords – good lyrics
APRIL 1979: Strawberry Studios, Stockport, Unknown Pleasures sessions
Bernard Sumner (guitar): Unknown Pleasures took about six months to write and was the second or third set of material that we’d got. The first set, we were just having fun really, learning where to put your fingers on the guitar and what sort of guitar picks and amplifiers to use. Unknown Pleasures was our first outing into the real world. It was our first effort, really; the rest of it was just practice. The first memories of Martin [Hannett] are from Unknown Pleasures: of him being on the one hand fantastic, a catalyst really for experimentation, in that he really made it fun in the studio in that way. On Unknown Pleasures we’d laid all the tracks down, we’d played them all live many, many times, so I think we had three weekends to record and mix it. So the first thing we did with Martin was to get them recorded in the studio, and then it would be experimentation time and we’d start putting wacky noises on it. Like he recorded the lift shaft, and he brought this machine that you could do this
thing called sampling into. Now in 1979 that was quite amazing, so I think we recorded a ‘dink’ off my guitar into it, and then it gave me a keyboard and it was a delay unit and you could play the sound on the keyboard, so I did overdubs with that. It was fantastic experimentation, and very, very creative, and I loved that aspect of working with Martin. Straight recording bit, he could be very strange.
Tony Wilson (Factory Records co-founder): I was there the very first day, I was there the day when Martin made Steve take his drum kit apart. We’re now doing an album, and somewhere during the second day he says, “Right, Steve, disassemble your drum kit.” Martin’s great ability was to unsettle musicians.
Stephen Morris (drums): The studio was Martin’s, and when you were in the studio you were working for Martin and his whims. There was an awful lot of pot smoked: whether Martin was completely stoned or did have a different outlook on what he wanted, he would be obtuse. He wouldn’t say to you, “I want you to do it like this.” It was, “Great, do it again, but a bit more cocktail party” or “a bit more yellow”. Whether it was pot or whether it was the Zen school of production, it was definitely interesting, because he turned us on to the studio being a musical instrument. I think we managed all right. It wasn’t a completely pleasurable experience. I know Bernard and Hooky didn’t enjoy working with him, because what Martin wanted to do was some sort of a soundscape, whereas what Joy Division played on-stage was very aggressive, it was very raw and very passionate. Bernard had a very strange but raw guitar sound, and Martin took it and turned it into something else. He didn’t mean it personally, he’s trying to make the best record he possibly can, but we did have numerous run-ins with him. We used to take it in turns, it was like Punch And Judy: “Go on, you tell him, you tell him.” “Martin, Martin, can you turn the guitar up a bit?” “You tell him, you tell him.” “Have you turned the guitar up?” He’d just go, “Phhhh, yeah,” and then he’d be gone again, you know: “These fucking musicians.” We were expecting it to be raw and rocking. It was live, but he’d taken our sound and made it into something else, psychedelic. What I gathered from him on numerous spaced-out conversations was, he saw what he was doing as Factory’s producer was creating a Factory sound akin to Elektra. The Doors, the early West Coast stuff had this specific kind of sound which he said was all boom and zizz. As well as establishing an identity for himself as a producer, he was trying to make one for Factory.
Martin Hannett (producer): Unknown Pleasures was half of the classic Hannett patch. I didn’t have enough to do it on both left and right. It’s a very controllable space. I can take it up from a cardboard tube to a cathedral. Syndrums were just coming out then, and Steve bought one and had a good look at it.
Stephen Morris: Why I started using syndrums was a mistake. What happened is, I’ve got the British cover of [Can’s] Tago Mago – it only works on the British cover, the German one is different – there’s Jaki [Liebezeit]’s drum kit and there’s this thing next to it, and I wonder what that is. My brother says, “Oh yeah, that’s a drum synthesizer, that’ll be what they used to get that sound.” “Drum synthesizer, you say? Mm, right, OK.” So I lock that away. And then I’ve seen these adverts and they say drum synthesizer. “Yes, this is what I want to sound like.” At the time there was a spate of these records which had that bing-boo noise on them. There was Dancing In The City by Marshall Hain, and Rose Royce’s Love Don’t Live Here Anymore. It was a fad. “Of course, these people don’t know what you can do with a drum synthesizer, so I’ll get one and I’ll show them what you can do, ’cos obviously they’d never heard Can.” I’ve still got the receipt for it. Two nine-volt batteries, and you whack it and it goes bing-boo. I got over the initial disappointment, and
“THE STUDIO WAS MARTIN’S, AND WHEN YOU WERE IN THE STUDIO YOU WERE WORKING FOR MARTIN AND HIS WHIMS.” Stephen Morris
decided that though it was probably the best noise you could get out of it, there was more to it than that, yeah? So we got She’s Lost Control out of it, we got the tide coming in and going out, bing-boo on Insight. Probably the reason why I’m going deaf in one ear was when Martin turned it up and it turned into a flock of marauding pigeons. The drum riff on She’s Lost Control was stolen off a Phil Spector song: the same beat, but played with different sounds. It’s just a classic Phil Spector beat. If you listen to it and imagine it played on a big drum kit, it’s the same thing really. See, I’m not original at all.
Bernard Sumner: On She’s Lost Control, Martin had a great idea of getting Steve in a vocal booth doing the hi-hat pattern with an aerosol spray. Unfortunately, I think it was fly spray or something, it nearly killed Steve – you know, psssst, psssst, all the way through the track. Poor Steve, he had it in for Steve, definitely.
Peter Hook (bass): There must be only me and Bernard in the whole bleeding world that don’t like Unknown Pleasures, because it doesn’t sound like we did live, it’s purely one-dimensional. I didn’t want it to sound melancholic, I didn’t want it to last.
Stephen Morris: I was happy with all of it, absolutely all of it. With Martin it was like you were going on some sort of strange science fiction-based journey, and you weren’t quite sure how it was going to end up. When you got it, it was nothing like you’d heard, because when you were recording it was all pretty raw, and then there were all these things he put on afterwards. I thought Unknown Pleasures was a very futuristic-sounding record and I was very proud of it.
Peter Saville (Factory art director): I got an envelope of elements that Joy Division would like for their album cover. I mean, the wave pattern is just brilliant. I mean, it’s unquestionable, it’s great. It was the graph from a pulsar. It was the jazziest one in space at that time apparently, according to this book. The rest of the brief was really free. I mean, I think I probably asked the obvious questions: “Does anybody want the title on the front? Do you want ‘Joy Division’ on the front?” “Not really.” I think that’s the most revealing. It’s not very cool putting your name on the front. And it’s a funny combination of shyness and arrogance. It must have been early summer, I took the artwork for Unknown Pleasures to Rob’s house, and the afternoon that I did that he had received a test pressing of the album, and he said, “I have a test pressing, do you want to listen to it?” All I knew of recorded Joy Division were the two tracks from the Factory Sample, which
were kind of listenable, more listenable than the rest of [it], but it was tough going, and I was a little bit anxious. I didn’t know if I could sit through 40 minutes of Joy Division, especially in front of their manager, but I couldn’t really say no: I was delivering the artwork for the cover. So I sat down on Rob’s sofa, and he put the test pressing on. And within moments I knew that I had a part in a life-changing experience. Minute after minute was beyond anything I could have expected, I think beyond anything that most people expected. Joy Division with Martin was just beyond… it was the most developed thing that I had heard in the brief canon of the new wave… It was perfectly its own thing.
JUNE 15, 1979: Unknown Pleasures released
Bernard Sumner: Two things Ian said. One, he never wanted to get any bigger than The Kinks ever got. Two, that what he wanted to do was to get onto the heavy metal circuit in America, which was really weird. He really loved The Stooges, and he wanted to get into what The Stooges were into. So the music was quite loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars, taken out the more raucous elements of it. We resented that, but Rob loved it, and Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the public loved it, so we were just the poor stupid musicians who wrote it. We swallowed our pride and went with it.
Peter Hook: Everything I’ve read about Unknown Pleasures says that the first pressing was 5,000, and it wasn’t 5,000, it was 10,000, because Rob and I carried them up the stairs into [Factory office location] Palatine Road.
Alan Hempsall (singer, Crispy Ambulance): Crispy Ambulance supported Joy Division at the Russell Club, July 13. It was one of the first gigs they did after the album came out. Joy Division started with Dead Souls, which I don’t think I’d heard before. They were never ones to pander: if they had any new material, they would play it. Dead Souls is still one of my favourite tracks. I like the way it builds and the way Ian holds back and doesn’t launch in until the song’s halfway over. I always thought, “That’s a clever trick, there’s not many singers with that self-discipline.”
Liz Naylor (writer, No City Fun): When Unknown Pleasures came out, I went to Palatine Road and was given a free copy, but I didn’t have a record player, so I took it to the Mayflower [pub]. I played it over the PA, so that was the very first moment I heard the album sort of booming through this bad PA in this huge damp room, and of course it was absolutely perfect. You fell in love with it, it just meant everything – “This is the ambient music for my environment.” They were like an extension of me.
Bernard Sumner: Ian had a desire to explore the extremes. There’s two types of people in this world: there’s people who are extremists and they want to taste the extremes, get extremely drunk or not drink at all, and there’s people who take the middle way. I’d say I’m pretty much the middle way, but Ian wanted everything to be extreme: extreme music, manic performances. So the music was extremely dark. Even after we recorded Unknown Pleasures I found it quite difficult to listen to because it was so dark. I don’t think the production helped because that made it darker, even darker still, but I felt, “No one’s going to listen to this, it’s too bloody heavy, too impenetrable.” Also, I think in our lives we’d all had very dark experiences. We were only 21, but for me, say, I’d had a very difficult upbringing and I had a lot of death and illness in my family: my mother had cerebral palsy; my grandmother, who we grew up with, had had an operation on her eyes that went wrong, so she’d lost her sight; my stepfather got cancer from smoking. My grandfather was ill as well – he had a brain tumour – and all this had been going on when I was very young. I had all this tragedy within my family. I’d had to witness a couple of them dying at quite a young age, and that definitely had an effect on me. To experience such things at a young age makes you quite a serious person. I was 16 when it started, when my grandfather died. And being an only child makes it worse. I know Hooky had had a few troubles at home. For me, life was serious, so I guess that came out in my music, subconsciously… For me, Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood.
Bob Dickinson (writer, New Manchester Review): Joy Division sounded like ghosts and seemed spectral at the time, and their music still does have that quality about it, of something that’s dead but it’s alive, something that’s there and it’s not there.
AUGUST 2, 1979: Joy Division play the Prince of Wales Conference Centre, YMCA, London
Jill Furmanovsky (photographer): They were compelling. Ian looked like a schoolboy in his grey shirt and trousers. Then there was Hooky, with that low-slung bass. He had a particular way of playing that was quite unusual. Bernard, too – they just looked very un-rockstar-like. More like The Fall, from that point of view. I was very struck by Ian Curtis: he looked like he’d bunked off school and gone to join a rock ➢
“ROB PUT THE TEST PRESSING ON. AND WITHIN MOMENTS I KNEW THAT I HAD A PART IN A LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE.” Peter Saville