Listen to Tim Riley’s narration:
Joy Division, Substance (Factory, 1988)
One of the few drawbacks of attending Oberlin College between 1979-1983 had to do with that small Ohio town’s lack of a record store. The bi-annual student vinyl swaps were both heavily attended and fiendishly idiosyncratic. But it’s still embarrassing to think that this 1988 Phoenix review was my first exposure to Joy Division, and how catching up made me sound daft. So this marks my first stab at the topic, and seeks points for historical transparency. July marks the 35th anniversary of this CD collection, and Ian Curtis would have turned 67 on July 15 (b. 1956).
WHEN IN 1980, Joy Division’s singer and songwriter, Ian Curtis, hanged himself at his Manchester home, he had attracted an adoring cult on both sides of the Atlantic who were scarcely surprised that the band’s three-year recording stretch was one long prologue to his suicide. The remaining members (drummer Stephen Morris, bassist Peter Hook, and guitarist Bernard Sumner—keyboardist/guitarist Gillian Gilbert joined up shortly) continued on as New Order, served best by last year’s two-record anthology Substance that highlights the group’s trendsetting flair for pop song forms that seem to bleed anguish. When Curtis finishes singing Joy Division's wrenching entreaties in the verse of “Warsaw” (“All this tug and no contact/No matter how hard you try”) and the band compresses the song’s already clinched patterns into a wad of unrepentant despondency, it’s punctuating his words even as they’re choked off.
Re-listening 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.
But 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 what moments they are! 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 are soon sparring from above like so many chopper blades cutting the wind. The distant guitar clicking in “Autosuggestion,” along with the rapid snap and echo of drums, surrounds Curtis’ voice like a slow-motion maelstrom. Bathed in thick reverb and lingering on his words to increase the 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…
—from the Boston Phoenix, August 26, 1988
also
An Ideal For Living (Enigma, 1978), on discogs.com
Still (London, 2007), with outtakes, “Sister Ray” cover, and final live tape
Jon Savage’s cardinal oral history, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else (Faber & Faber, 2020)
Peter Hook’s frank and lucid memoir, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (It Books, 2013), reminds you of the tension between how young they were and how wise the music sounds.
album of the month
Janelle Monae, Age of Pleasure (Wondaland, 2023)
team substack
“It was easy for people to be derisive about our music because they saw what we were doing as retro” [The Raspberries’ Eric] Carmen says. “But we were like barbarians trying to crash the gates of the bloated progressive rock that we despised…”—from Front Row & Backstage, includes a link to Pop Art Life, a live set with “I Can’t Explain” and “Ticket to Ride.”
team vanna
Ryan S*acrest As Hank Kingsley, continued: “We’re talking about another privileged white male, taking over a privileged white male. It’s the same old story. They went through this with Jeopardy. They could’ve easily upstaged Jeopardy: hired a female, hired a person of color. They would’ve made huge news and it would’ve been transformative…” Hey now! (cue to 1:37)
noises off
substack archive: interview with Mozart in Motion author Patrick Mackie, surfing those Steely Dan clicks, and where does the Boss get off? Browse the archives here
more links at the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites
@timrileyauthor “Kelly Sings Hank” got a rise from Willis herself, see also
on the radar: documentaries on Peter Case, the Embarrassment, and Harry Nilsson; Throwing Muses on tour; Bob Dylan, Welder; and how streaming bumps refrain up to first twenty seconds of most new hit songs…
beacons.ai: absolute elsewhere
yes deeply honorable, too, about how he brought his whole self to the stage...
Daft maybe, but great writing nonetheless. Has to be if it's interesting over 30 years later. Makes me want to read Deborah Curtis's biography. Hard to know how to interpret an artist who suffered from epilepsy and depression. But, to me, Ian looks like someone who took his failing marriage and inability to break with Honore so seriously that he hanged himself for it. There's something deeply honorable about that (however misguided the expression). And it's in his music also.