Lose Some Sleep and Say You Tried
Facing down my own late-20s intimidation in this 1988 review of Joy Division's Substance.
Ian Curtis would have turned 70 on July 15, and I covered the Substance compilation about eight years after he died at the age of 23 in 1980. I sense my intimidation in this essay, how hard it was to nail down how small the music made me feel at 28, and how big its implications felt. By the time I started at the Phoenix we thought of punk in the past tense, but it still held on somehow; like high school, it’s never over. Contains minor tweaks and updates…
Substance, Joy Division (Factory, 1988), originally ran in The Boston Phoenix, August 26, 1988
WHEN JOY DIVISION’s singer and songwriter, Ian Curtis, hanged himself at his Manchester home in 1980, he had attracted an adoring but minor cult on both sides of the Atlantic. The act capped the band’s three-year recording stretch—a brief yet suddenly dense prologue to a suicide driven by the lure of what Timothy Snyder calls “historical inertia” (Kurt Cobain had just turned 13)—yet, the shock lingers. The remaining members (drummer Stephen Morris, bassist Peter Hook, and guitarist Bernard Sumner—keyboardist/guitarist Gillian Gilbert joined up shortly after) continued on as New Order, served best by last year’s two-record anthology (also called Substance) that highlights the group’s trendsetting knack for a giant reversal: pop song forms that bleed anguish. This stylistic swerve felt necessary. When Curtis finishes singing the wrenching entreaties in a verse of “Warsaw” (“All this talk made no contact/No matter how hard we tried”) and the band compresses the song’s already clinched patterns into a wad of unrepentant despondency, his words are punctuated even as they’re choked off.
Substance plays up Joy Division’s considerable strength as a hook-oriented outfit, swift and sturdy (the CD format includes seven lesser extras, such as “No Love Lost,” which is from their debut EP, An Ideal for Living). The sequence condenses key Joy Division moments, and those moments loop on echo.
Relistening to Joy Division alters the way you hear and think about punk: more than a doomed shout now wrapped in nostalgia, it reaches out through more channels than abrasion and disarray.
At the beginning of “Digital,” Hook’s bass figure holds the entire song in its opening three-note statement, Morris’ stuttering drums join in with a lurch-and-wait rigidity, and Sumner’s guitar riffs soon spar from above like chopper blades cutting the wind. The distant guitar clicking in “Autosuggestion,” along with the rapid snap and echo of drums, surrounds Curtis’s voice like a slow-motion maelstrom. Bathed in thick reverb and lingering on his words to increase ominous atmosphere (“So lose some sleep and say you tried”), Curtis suggests Jim Morrison without the jaded self-pity. As he repeats those words with the stubborn gait of one who no longer fears even terror itself, the band surges into double time for a characteristic injection of end-song fervor.
“She’s Lost Control” is Joy Division’s enduring exploration of encroaching madness, a dour and robotic documentation. Turning at right angles from the free-fall rage of the Sex Pistols, the song is claustrophobic and oppressed, as if Joy Division were trying to push it uphill, slowly edging these dark, hungover feelings toward the light. The noise gives off the numbing awareness of the capacity for human despair—for others, as well as for ourselves—that doesn’t require any more spelling out. “She’s Lost Control” tromps forward with determination wrapped around dread.
Another potent track marbled with contradictions—hopeful melody supporting hopeless lyrics—is also the most familiar through college radio play: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” chains a synthesizer and bass melody around Curtis’s most overtly pained vocal (“Why is the bedroom so cold/Turned away on your side/Love, love will tear us apart again”). Along with “Transmission,” another pleasant-sounding facade with a grating monomaniac’s refrain (“Dance, dance, dance, dance/Dance to the radio”), Joy Division snags their listeners just long enough to insult them; they cloak their defiance in what now sounds like plainly commercial synth-pop.
Punk redefined the way we hear and think about rock, a process that Substance continues. Relistening to Joy Division alters the way you think about punk: more than a doomed shout now wrapped in nostalgia, it reaches out through more channels than abrasion and disarray. It’s a dark, ambivalent assurance almost foretold by Curtis in “Warsaw,” where he warns of unguarded fawning on lost hopes: “Just to live in the past tense/To make believe you were right.” No one can go back, but Joy Division still dwells in a substance beyond time.
more
This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division, the Oral History, by Jon Savage (Faber & Faber, 2019), and don’t skip his The Secret Public:
How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream (Liveright, 2025).
Joy Division page on Apple Music
Rock’s Back Pages Joy Division page, do the oodles
“Still,” on Youtube
joke of the year
Props to Tamar Rubin’s impression of Sigmund’s Freud’s mother, with this juicy kicker: people approach her after shows to ask her who Freud is.
we get gear
The Leapwell L-CD202, and its vertical cousin (213) don’t rank with hifi, but for portable units with decent BT options, optical outputs, battery power and remotes, it’s a solid entry into the consumer space for the budget class. The lights give good groove, and you can mount the vertical model for audio taxonomy.
noises off
From the archives: Rick James attempts a late-’80s "Wonderful" comeback under the commercial shadow of Prince’s stolen spotlight (1988); Buffalo Tom kicks up a heavy-fuzz, SST-era storm, gallops through a Bob Dylan classic (1988); and Wichita’s The Embarrassment head-fakes punk-rock anger for horn-rimmed hooks (1989).
Coming soon: Los Lobos at Groton Hill Music; Michael Sokil compares Ringo’s drumming to Paul’s; The People’s Historian, Howard Zinn, still upsets the academy; David Thomson revisits film history
Can’t Stop Won’t Clicks: riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link