Hardcore for Nerds

Swing Kids - ‘Warsaw’ (Joy Division cover)

(previously)

A couple of days ago I finished reading Touching from a Distance, Deborah Curtis’s memoir of her life with Ian Curtis, the singer and lyricist for Joy Division who killed himself in May 1980, shortly before the band were due to embark on a tour of the US. At the back of the book are a full set of his lyrics, and after finishing the story of his last days and death, as well as the reaction of some of those around him, I turned the page to this song, the earliest lyric from 1977. “I was there in the back stage, when first light came around” stood out as an image of isolation and separateness.

I

I was drawn to read the book from seeing Anton Corbijn’s Control, which is based on it, and from reading this interview in the Guardian, which I saw shortly after reading a similar interview with David Foster Wallace’s widow on the publication of The Pale King. Given that I’d just seen the film and wasn’t otherwise a huge Joy Division fan, I tried to find out a bit more about the book and if it was an interesting read in itself. The Amazon reviews were a study in contrast, between those deeply touched and impressed by the book and those strongly critical of what they saw as a one-sided depiction of an artistic hero. In the end, I sided with the positive responses: partly because they seemed more reasonable; and partly because I had, after all, already seen the film and had found it convincing, so I was interested to read the story from the first-person perspective.

The first thing that struck me was how, removed from the distance and the certain stylisation of the biopic, Ian’s behaviour seemed so reprehensible: controlling, forceful, illiberal, and irrationally hypocritical towards his girlfriend, then his wife, and the mother of his child. On the one hand, I’ve read a lot about deeply unpleasant men who produced great work - namely the three varyingly critical biographies published about Arthur Koestler - and while that certainly doesn’t excuse or necessarily explain such personal behaviour, it only colours and doesn’t really constrain the reading of it, given the numerous sources of suffering in the world other than men’s needs to dominate in relationships with women (yes! there are others!). Yet on the other, it’s hard not to be affected by the account of the experience - relived as much as lived - while also wondering what that account would look like from the opposite perspective.

That perspective - Ian’s point of view - doesn’t really seem to exist, which is unsurprising given that he died by suicide aged 23. Critical defences on his behalf exist, so it’s not about him being some much-maligned figure: rather the opposite. I’m perhaps biased by never particularly liking the music of Joy Division - I like it, but don’t love it - and as such I can’t understand the constant lauding of Ian Curtis you see under every YouTube video of the band, which I suspect comes from seeing him as a tragic figure and perhaps a troubled one, but never outright dislikeable. All these people touched by Joy Division’s music, how do they rank against those touched personally by Ian Curtis’s suicide?

Generally I believe that it’s a fallacy to rank art and life together like that, but it’s hard not to when you see people who find in his lyrics something deep and meaningful, and then you read a story which portrays an unpleasant personality - not without a caring side, which is also emphasised, though it’s frequently suggested here that the epilepsy or the epilepsy medication exacerbated the harsher, more controlling, more distant side of him - of someone who took themselves out of the lives of those around him with little warning. Deborah Curtis writes with a committed hope that had he been able to properly engage with professional psychiatric help it could have been different - “I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t taken into hospital where he could be put under the care of one professional person, rather than be pulled in different directions by a bunch of amateurs”. Two attempts are recounted - the first time he misread the appointment card and arrived on the wrong date, but not before telling his by then estranged wife “how unhappy he was in the music business” and

“that when ‘Transmission’ and Unknown Pleasures had been released, he had achieved his ambitions. Now there was nothing left for him to do. All he ever intended was to have one album and one single pressed. His ambitions had never extended to recording ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ or Closer.”

The second time he did get to see a psychiatrist, and although Deborah went in beforehand to try and impress on the doctor the seriousness of the situation and of his behaviour she felt too emotional to be coherent and ultimately as if she, rather than Ian, was the one in need of help. Though as a whole the book takes a measured view of love and loss, with moments of foreshadowing explained away by the charm and naivety of youth, this is one of the cruellest moments in the tale. “I was sorry for him and felt completely helpless.” 

II

‘Warsaw’ is an enigma, like most Joy Division songs; but an enigma of cruelty. The numbers called out refer, as is clearly established in the internet age, to the prisoner of war number of Nazi Rudolf Hess following his capture in Britain during the war after a botched attempt at peace negotiations in 1941; later, he was an inmate in Spandau Prison in Berlin, and from 1966 the sole remaining occupant - this bizarre situation, which continued until his death by apparent suicide in 1987, made him an object of political controversy around the time this song was written and first performed, as well as a subject of various conspiracy theories then and after. The lyrics, with lines like “I can still hear the footsteps/I can see only walls” can be fairly easily matched up with a retelling of the Rudolf Hess story and perhaps his relationship with Hitler (in which case the “back stage” becomes the backdrop to the biggest drama of the Western 20th century); references to reason, talk, contradiction, faith tests, being right all take on an extra cryptic dimension.

Whatever its exact meaning may be, it’s a fucking weird subject for a song. There’s a strain of Nazi fetishization in the early Joy Division which is both of its era and somewhat beyond it (I can always remember knowing that the band name was a reference to concentration camps, but it was only recently that I became aware of what that reference specifically was) and there’s another part in Touching from a Distance which records that fact from a personal perspective, and one that makes the whole thing seem rather Odd Future-esque (sorry - but not really):  

“The release of the EP [An Ideal For Living] in January marked the change of name from Warsaw to Joy Division after the disappointing news that there was already a London-based band called Warsaw Pakt. The essential ingredient for any band at that time was to have a supposedly shocking name. Names such as Slaughter and the Dogs and Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds were guaranteed to conjure up the image of a group who just might resemble the Sex Pistols. Most young hopefuls completely missed the sad fact that all they could ever be were pale imitations jumping on the inevitable band(!)-wagon. Ian told me that Joy Division was what the Nazis called female prisoners kept alive to be used as prostitutes for the German Army. I cringed. It was gruesome and tasteless and I hoped that the majority of people would not know what it meant. I wondered if the members of the band were intending to glorify the degradation of women. Telling myself that they had chosen it merely to gain attention, I gradually became accustomed to the provocative moniker and concentrated on the music.”

Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 54-5.

Joy Division - ‘Decades’ from Closer (1980)

I really like dub, although I don’t listen to that much of it - a couple of albums each from Horace Andy and Augustus Pablo, basically. The originals are great, but its the dub influence on other bands, specifically punk and post-punk, that most interests me. It’s there in Fugazi, in Joe Lally’s bass which the Rolling Stone album guide describes as “three parts Joy Division to one part dub” on Steady Diet of Nothing; or in Hoover, whose guitarist Joseph McRedmond I asked to account for the influence, and he simply explained it as ”deep late night party music with your friends” and, perhaps referring more to the reggae side of it, “usually with a message”.

If the style is not perhaps very far below the surface on most Joy Division tracks, on this song it pretty much is the surface. Not so much in the bass which is usually associated with dub, but in the treble, the tinny melody and percussion that sits on top of a typical dub track, creating an epic contrast with the undulating subterranean rhythm; a kind of aural chiaroscuro, or Ansel Adams. Heavy skanking, gothic style. But just as dub creates an alternatingly oppressive and glorious atmosphere, so it is with this Joy Division album finisher.

willthenight:

Low

“Transmission”

Transmission EP

1996

If I’m going to talk about how Joy Division inspired bands to explore extremes of minimalism, slow tempo, and emotional focus, the discussion has to begin with Low. Low created the template, one of the greatest and most instantly recognizable “sounds” in the post-punk era.  Yes, I would argue that Low belong to the post-punk era, musically at least, but that’s another post.  “Transmission” is one of the best demonstrations of how Low were able to use this formula not only to make songs from disparate sources their own, but also how in the best cases this type of formalist exercise can combine with outstanding performances to bring out different shades of meaning in the original. 

The band’s first two albums, I Could Live in Hope and Long Division, had been similar in sound, song structures and subject matter.  They had an idea, a great one, and they applied it rigorously and successfully.  The antecedents of this big idea are most easily found in the early albums of the Cure, Joy Division’s two albums, and to a lesser extent Galaxie 500 (at least partially through shared producer, Kramer) and the Velvet Underground (from whom all good things come).  Although it had been a part of their live set for some time, “Transmission” was released as the lead track of a stop-gap EP early in 1996.  The song had also appeared on the A Means to an End tribute compilation a few months previously (see also, Codeine). Coming just as they were about to take a great leap beyond “the template” on The Curtain Hits the Cast, it’s tempting to see the band’s adoption of this song at this particular time as serving two purposes: to pay tribute to a band that had helped them to discover their own unique sound, and to express “the template” in its purest form before moving into more experimental territory. They wanted to sound like Joy Division, but slower. And it was beautiful.

It’s beyond obvious to say explicitly, but Low’s “Transmission” is much slower than the original. The instrumentation is minimal, the propulsive bass line of the original becomes a slow pulse, joined by by Mimi Parker’s lonely ride cymbal and heavily reverbed snare, both played with brushes.  There are no obvious guitar overdubs, just Alan Sparhawk’s single guitar with all the telltale noises and tiny goofs of a one-take performance. Despite the slow tempo, the dynamic build in the song’s final third is just as thrilling and invigorating as in the original.  But clearly, this is not a rave-up, it’s a meditation.

And it’s not a particularly uplifting one at that.  Ian Curtis’s vocal on the original “Transmission” was a plea for connection—alone in a fragmented world, he reaches out for shared communal experience, imploring his audience to dance, dance, dance to a live radio broadcast.  “Touching from a distance, further all the time,” but still touching.  Alan Sparhawk’s vocal is layered in the same digital delay that Joy Division had used so well, but his tone is sneering, almost sarcastic.  Although Mimi Parker’s voice is human and beautiful, in the song’s climax the harmony between the two vocalists suggests only foreboding. There is no hope here, no distant community to reach out to, and the shared experience provided by radio broadcasts is only an illusion. The radio is just another automaton. 

The fragmented bursts of broadcasts sprinkled throughout the track further express this theme—the broadcasts are inhuman, random and communicate nothing. But those random radio transmissions have a story themselves, as they are most likely an homage to the 1967 Silver Apples track “Program,” which dealt with similar subject matter in a more oblique way. I would not make this connection so explicitly if I had not seen Low perform “Program” during an afternoon show in Minneapolis in the summer of 1999.  This was my introduction to the music of the Silver Apples, and further proof that while “the template” belongs uniquely to Low, they found great inspiration in the earlier work of others, and in cases like “Transmission” took that inspiration in new and impressive directions.

I’ve never been much into Low, preferring the more direct sounds of the likes of Slint or Codeine, but I very much dig the slowcore aesthetic. Another example is this far less polished and more straightforward cover of ‘Disorder’ by Bedhead, which still definitely translates the Joy Division song into slowcore terms.

I’m glad you mentioned the Velvet Underground in this, because I hear a lot of them in this take on Joy Division. As befits the genre, the song takes a long time to get anywhere, but the way the delivery of the vocals is slowed down, extending the notes being actually sung is very VU, as is the echoing chime of the chord changes in the final part; it’s the creation of space, part meditative, part rave-up (which occurs in some Velvet Underground tracks and which is left unspoken, but implied, on slowcore ones) which made their albums so beautiful. But beauty is just the flipside of ugliness, and my point would be that whether a Joy Division cover is spacious (like this one) or crowded out (like Xiu Xiu), it’s expressing something similar around the shared emotional beat.

Xiu Xiu - ‘Ian Curtis Wishlist’ from A Promise

it’s not really a Joy Division cover, at all, but it is another example of how that band played a part in inspiring all sorts of weird and wonderful music.

“the 20 hundred private loops
making up my AHHHHHHHHH!
Ian Curtis (I can’t believe I said it) Wish List”

(songmeanings)