In the early days, the Fall were regarded as heavy-duty politicos. Songs like “Hey! Fascist” and “Race Hatred” got them briefly tagged as New Wave Commies, a misunderstanding partly based on the fact that bassist Friel had once been a member of the Young Communist League. But while Baines says she and Smith did attend “loads of political meetings—things like the International Marxists,” she points out, “We were never members, just interested in checking out the range of opinions.” Baines was also a forthright feminist who’d rejected her Catholic upbringing while still at her girls-only school, because the Bible was so anti woman. “There was a lot going on in Manchester with feminism then—the first rape crisis centers and women’s refuges, abortion rights were hotly fought for—and we were right in the middle of that.”
In 1977 and 1978 the Fall played numerous Rock Against Racism benefits, but like many postpunk groups they became disenchanted with RAR’s treatment of music as a mere vehicle for politicizing youth. They soon distanced themselves from anything remotely resembling agitprop or right-on trendy leftism. Instead, Smith developed a way of writing about “the real world” that was increasingly elliptical and nonlinear. Equally important as subject matter was rock culture. Songs like “It’s the New Thing,” “Music Scene,” “Mere Pseud Mag Ed,” “Look Know,” and “Printhead” skewered the platitudes and pieties of hipsters. In interview and song alike, Mark E. Smith took on the role of metapop specter, stalking the periphery of the postpunk scene and maintaining a scathing running commentary on the failings of the Fall’s peer groups.
One of Smith’s most famous pronouncements was his description of the Fall in “Crap Rap 2” as “Northern white crap that talks back.” “I don’t fully understand it myself,” Smith admitted to
Sounds
when asked about that line. “It’s meant to be, like, mystical.” The attitude still came through clear enough, the basic Fall stance of surly intransigence. In a way, Smith just added a kind of shamanic mystique to standard-issue Mancunian cockiness, which is itself a sort of residual attitude from the city’s industrial heyday, when Manchester “kept all the machinery going for the rest of the country,” as Baines puts it.
Being proud of the city’s industrial might, though, didn’t mean that one sided with the factory boss. Throughout the nineteenth century, Manchester was a stronghold for working-class radicalism, from the machinery-wrecking Luddites to the vote-demanding Chartists. Friedrich Engels, coauthor of
The Communist Manifesto,
lived in Manchester for a time and was inspired to write
The Condition of the Working Class in England
by his observations of the textile industry there.
Punishing work in hostile conditions forged a kind of Mancunian mettle, tough as new nails. “Fiery Jack,” the Fall’s fourth single, offered a vivid portrait of one of Manchester’s finest sons, the hard-bitten and indomitable product of five generations of industrial life. Fiery Jack is a forty-five-year-old pub stalwart who’s spent three decades on the piss, ignoring the pain from his long-suffering kidneys. Surviving on meat pies and other revolting bar snacks, Jack is an inexhaustible font of anecdotes and rants. The music sounds stubborn, incorrigible, a white-line rush of rockabilly drums and rhythm guitar like sparks shooting out of a severed cable. Speed might just be another of Jack’s poisons, judging by his refusal to go “back to the slow life” and lines such as “Too fast to write/I just burn burn burn.” Based on older blokes Smith had met in Manchester pubs, Jack was “the sort of guy I can see myself as in twenty years,” he told
Sounds
. “These old guys have more guts than these kids will ever have.” Jack was the lad who grew old, battered by hard work and harder pleasure, but who never gave up and never gave in.
WHEREAS THE FALL
seemed to spring into existence fully formed and with an utterly distinctive sound, Joy Division took a while to find their identity. They began life as Warsaw, a fairly undistinguished punk-inflected hard-rock band. Listen to the early demos that survive, squint one’s ears, and a gleam of difference is audible. It’s a metallic quality, with “metal” referring to both the material substance and the musical genre. “Digital,” the group’s first recording as Joy Division, sounds not a million miles from Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”: a dark, fast pummel, a full-tilt dirge fusing pace and ponderousness.
Sabbath’s Bill Ward claimed that “most people live on a permanent down but just aren’t aware of it. We’re trying to express it for people.” Ian Curtis’s harrowed voice and words offered an equally “heavy” vision of life. Looking at his lyrics, certain words and images appear over and over: coldness, pressure, darkness, crisis, failure, collapse, loss of control. There are countless scenarios of futile exertion, purposes “turned sour,” and doom “closing in.” Above all, there are terminal words, endless
end
s and
final
s. But Joy Division’s reference points were less lumpen than heavy metal’s. Instead of pulp superhero comics or bastardized blues, it was J. G. Ballard and Bowie’s
Low
. Rather than the invulnerable “Iron Man,” Sumner’s guitar evokes the wounded, penetrable metal of
Crash,
twisted and buckled, splayed and torn.
Joy Division’s originality really became apparent as the songs got slower. Shedding punk’s fast, distortion-thickened sound, the music grew stark and sparse. Peter Hook’s bass carried the melody, Bernard Sumner’s guitar left gaps rather than filling up the group’s sound with dense riffage, and Steve Morris’s drums seemed to circle the rim of a crater. Curtis intoned from “a lonely place” at the center of this empty expanse. All that space in Joy Division’s music was something critics immediately noticed. It would have been hard to miss, even if Curtis hadn’t put up signposts in the form of titles like “Interzone” or lyrical references to “no-man’s-land.”
Although the initial inspiration was “Warszawa,” a haunting instrumental on side two of
Low,
the group’s original name, Warsaw, was chosen mainly because of the Polish capital’s associations with World War II (the uprising of the Jewish ghetto, the razing of the Old City) and the Eastern Bloc (Soviet totalitarianism, the cold war). Like the word “Berlin,” “Warsaw” conjured mind’s-eye imagery of desolate urban space: a city rebuilt rapidly after wartime devastation, all spartan apartment high-rises, government ministries straight out of Orwell’s
1984,
and disquietingly wide streets designed to allow for the passage of Russian tanks. But the band’s replacement name had even more dismal connotations. “Joy Division” came from
House of Dolls,
a 1965 novel written by a concentration camp survivor who took the pen name Ka-Tzetnik 135633 from the prisoner number branded on his arm. The novel is written from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl sent to Auschwitz’s “Camp Labor Via Joy,” the “joy division” where females were kept as sex slaves for German troops fresh from the Russian front.
Steve Morris argues that the name indicated identification with the victims rather than the tormentors. “It was the flip side of it, rather than being the master race, the oppressed rather than the oppressor.” Sumner has often claimed that the group’s obsession with Nazism came from their desire to keep alive memories of the Second World War and the sacrifices of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations in the struggle of good against evil. Still, there’s no doubt that Joy Division played with fire when it came to dabbling in Nazi imagery. On the minialbum
Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus
—a document of the Manchester punk scene—Ian Curtis can be heard screaming at the crowd, “You all forgot Rudolf Hess!” In June 1978, the group self-released their first record, the EP
An Ideal for Living
. The sleeve featured a drawing of a blond-haired Hitler Youth drummer boy and a photograph of a German storm trooper pointing a gun at a small Polish Jewish boy. In the early days, Sumner used the Germanic-sounding stage name Albrecht, and the group’s image—gray shirts, very short hair, thin ties—had a monochrome austerity and discipline redolent of totalitarianism.
At a time when neo-Nazis were marching through the streets of Britain’s major cities and racial attacks were on the rise, there were those who believed that
any
ambiguity in one’s allegiances was irresponsible. According to Morris, the flak the group received (“We knew we weren’t Nazis but we kept on getting letters in
NME
slating us for harboring Eichmann in the coal cellar!”) just encouraged Joy Division “to keep on doing it, because that’s the kind of people we are.” But the flirtations went a little further than just a “perverse joke.” Years later, Hook and Sumner talked candidly about the fascination with fascism. Sumner enthused about the beauty (the art, architecture, design, even uniforms) that emerged despite “all that hate and all that dominance,” while Hook admitted the dark allure of “a certain physical sensation you get from flirting with something like that. We thought it was a very, very strong feeling.”
For his part, Curtis’s obsession with Germany stemmed partly from the Berlin chic of his glam heroes Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie. He was also intrigued by the mass psychology of fascism, the way a charismatic leader could bewitch an entire population into doing or accepting irrational and monstrous things. The early song “Walked in Line” is about those who just did what they were told, committing crimes in a “hypnotic trance.” An explorer of literature’s darker precincts, such as Conrad and Kafka, Curtis
enjoyed
contemplating humanity’s bottomless capacity for inhumanity. Like Una Baines, he also had a keen interest in mental illness. One of his relatives worked in a psychiatric ward and brought back grim stories, while Curtis himself briefly worked in a rehabilitation center for people with mental and physical disabilities. As Deborah Curtis notes dryly in her memoir about her marriage to the singer, “It struck me that all Ian’s spare time was spent reading and thinking about human suffering.”
Curtis’s doomy baritone and obsession with the dark side often got him compared to Jim Morrison. Indeed, the Doors were one of the singer’s favorite bands. Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” is like “L.A. Woman” turned inside out, the latter’s rolling, virile propulsion reduced to a bleak transit across a city that could hardly be less like sunbaked Southern California. Gaping yet claustrophobic, the space in Joy Division’s music is the opposite of the utopian kind you find in sixties rock: the freeway-as-frontier imagery and “explode into space” euphoria of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” the outward-bound cosmic surge of Pink Floyd and Hendrix.
All that space in Joy Division’s music needed room to breathe. Playing small clubs, they were “a bit of a racket,” says John Keenan, the Leeds promoter behind the Futurama festivals of postpunk music. “But the next time I saw them, in a big hall, with a bit of echo, it suddenly made sense. They weren’t a club band, they were meant to play stadiums.”
Joy Division first hooked up with Factory Records’s house producer Martin Hannett when they recorded two tracks for
A Factory Sample,
the inaugural release for the label that would soon become Manchester’s leading independent record company. Producing the band’s subsequent recordings for Factory, Hannett dedicated himself to capturing and intensifying Joy Division’s eerie spatiality. Punk records typically simulated the boxy, in-your-face sound of the small-club gig. The fast tempos and fuzzed-out guitars suited the tinny, two-dimensional sound reproduction of the seven-inch single. A sixties character, a “head” who loved psychedelia and dub, Hannett believed punk was sonically conservative precisely because of its refusal to exploit the recording studio’s capacity to create space. It was music for teenagers with transistor radios and cheap record players, not adults with proper stereo systems.
Factory’s Tony Wilson talked of Hannett’s genius in terms of synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses are confused. “He could
see
sound, shape it, and rebuild it.” This “really visual sense that most people just don’t have” was enhanced by Hannett’s being a major pothead. Hash, he told one interviewer, is “good for the ears.” Hannett also dug the psychogeography of urban space, talking about how “deserted public places, empty office blocks…give me a rush.”
“Digital,” Hannett’s first Joy Division production, derived its name from his favorite sonic toy, the AMS digital-delay line. Hannett used the AMS and other digital effects coming onto the market in the late seventies to achieve “ambience control.” He could wrap a song, or individual instruments within a track, inside a particular spatial “aura,” as if they came from imaginary rooms with real dimensions and sound reflections. Hannett talked of creating “sonic holograms” through layering “sounds and reverbs.” His most distinctive use of the AMS digital delay, however, was pretty subtle. He applied a microsecond delay to the drums that was barely audible yet created a sense of enclosed space, a vaulted sound as if the music were recorded in a mausoleum. Hannett also created near subliminal sounds that shimmered like wraiths in the innermost recesses of Joy Division records.
Punk bands, reversing the superslick seventies-megarock style of recording musicians separately and then reuniting them at the mixing board, were often recorded playing together in real time. Hannett took it back the other way to an extreme degree. He demanded totally clean and clear “sound separation,” not just for individual instruments but for each separate element of the drum kit. “Typically on tracks he considered to be potential singles, he’d get me to play each drum on its own to avoid any bleed-through of sound,” sighs Morris. “First the bass-drum part. Then the snare part. Then the hi-hats.” Not only was this tediously protracted, it created a mechanistic, disjointed effect. “The natural way to play drums is all at the same time. So I’d end up with my legs black and blue because I’d be tapping on them quietly to do the other bits of the kit that he wasn’t recording.” This dehumanizing treatment—essentially turning Morris into a drum machine—was typical of Hannett’s rather high-handed attitude toward musicians. But this had beneficial results aesthetically, because the disjointedness actually added to the music’s stark, alienated feel. You can hear it on one of the high points of the Hannett/Joy Division partnership, “She’s Lost Control,” with its mechanodisco drum loop, tom toms like ball bearings, bassline like steel cable undulating in strict time, and guitar like a contained explosion, as if the track’s only real rock-out element has been cordoned off.