“Unknown Pleasures seemed to have arrived through a slipstream, from another time and place. And though it could be enjoyed as both a bleak pop revue and an ultimately unsuccessful exorcism of singer Ian Curtis’s demons, the LP was above all profoundly mysterious. All these decades later there’s a case that it remains fundamentally inscrutable. You may think you’ve got its measure – but you’re never quite there, never really all the way in.”
Not my words, but those of Ed Power of the Irish Times.
Meanwhile John Doran, editor of online music and pop culture journal The Quietus, says “It is a perfect intersection of time, place, form, design, personality, fashion, innovation and subconscious future divination. Lazy idiots always refer to Joy Division as depressing, which is not to say that there isn’t an element of crushing anhedonia to what they do. But if they were just some second-tier goth band moaning about death, vampires and zombies they wouldn’t have the temporal resonance that they clearly still possess.”
So already we can see that emotions run high when it comes to Unknown Pleasures, the debut album by Joy Division. The subject matter covered on the album was a quantum leap from the messy finger pointing of punk rock from a couple of years before. The songs were about illness, religious guilt, domestic violence and urban decay as well as relationship problems. And those are in a sense, the first thing you should know – some of these themes had barely been covered in rock music before. But if that had been the sum of the album’s contribution, it would still have been an excellent record. But it wouldn’t account for, to quote, its fundamental inscrutability.
Let’s start by taking a medium-sized dive.
THE MEDIUM-SIZED DIVE
Unknown Pleasures is the debut studio album by the English post-punk band Joy Division, released on 15 June 1979 by Factory Records.[2] Joy Division comprised the singer Ian Curtis, the guitarist Bernard Albrecht, the bass player Peter Hook and the drummer Steven Morris. The album was recorded and mixed over three successive weekends at Stockport's Strawberry Studios in April 1979, with producer Martin Hannett contributing a number of unconventional recording techniques to the group's sound. Hannett would have liked longer working on the songs but they ran out of time and money.
The cover artwork was designed by artist Peter Saville. It’s quite likely that you’re familiar with this image if you’ve attended any gig in the last ten years, or indeed walked down any city high street. More on this later. Unknown Pleasures is the only Joy Division album released during lead singer Ian Curtis's lifetime, as he died through suicide the following May shortly before the release of the band’s second studio album, Closer.
Factory Records did not release any singles from Unknown Pleasures, and the album did not chart despite the relative success of the group's follow-up single a few months later, "Transmission". This is largely down to the threadbare operation their record company ran at the time – in fact only 5,000 copies were sold on the first production. Subsequently however it has come to be regarded as the high-water mark of the post-punk genre and frequently crops up as one of the most influential albums of any era in the music press.
But, you may ask yourself, what is it about Unknown Pleasures that makes it so special? It’s time to turn you into an instant expert.
UNKNOWN PLEASURES IS FIRSTLY A CONSEQUENCE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Growing up in industrial cities in the 1970s meant growing up with parents who had survived a world war.
This in fact happened to my own parents. My father had experienced the Newcastle Blitz – he remembered the battery of anti-aircraft artillery on the Tyne. My mother, growing up in Coventry, was evacuated to nearby Leamington Spa each night during the Coventry Blitz and just as well. She came back one morning to find her house had been destroyed. She was ten at the time and the effect of such a traumatic event was evident in her nerves and anxiety as an adult.
Bernard of Joy Division makes the point in one of the documentaries about the band that memories of the war were everywhere in Manchester and Salford. Children still played in bomb craters. There were missing houses in streets everywhere. People grew up with stories of the war in their households and every week on TV there were war movies and series such as Colditz.
Ian Curtis, according to his wife Deborah, spent most of his spare time reading about war and suffering. The band were originally called Warsaw, named after a Bowie track, but which at the time had inevitable warlike associations as well. Joy Division was the name of the sexual slavery wing of a Nazi concentration camp mentioned in the 1955 novel House of Dolls.
For many this association with the war and with Nazis has become the most notorious strand in the Joy Division mythology. Their first EP had a member of Hitler Youth banging a drum on the cover, and they make a flippant remark about Rudolf Hess, captured from a live concert. It is however broadly clear, with tracks such as Warsaw, Leaders of Men and Atrocity Exhibition that Ian Curtis sided with the oppressed. But in their very early days, at least, they laid themselves open to come misinterpretation.
Next, let’s talk about the year 1979.
UNKNOWN PLEASURES IS BOTH TIMELESS BUT ALSO TIME-STAMPED AS AN ALBUM FROM 1979
Mark Fisher in his 2005 essay collection Ghosts of My Life wrote “If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times. Listen to Joy Division now, and you have the inescapable impression that the group were catatonically channelling our present, their future.”
Life in Britain in the 2020s has a late ‘70s vibe to it. A country that has lost its way and people who are losing hope within it. There are specific reasons for that now, but why did things feel so bad in the late ‘70s? And even worse in Manchester?
Britain had spent the twentieth century going backwards. A hundred years before, they were top dogs, running an empire on which the sun never set. But two world wars had proved immensely costly. Financially, they had virtually bankrupted the country. The oil crisis of 1973 had sparked a recession which lasted for two years and seen the country reduced to three-day working weeks. Inflation surpassed 20%. In 1976 Denis Healy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund asking for a handout.
The months preceding Unknown Pleasures in 1978-79 had comprised the so-called Winter of Discontent. Everyone seemed to be on strike all the time. The north-west of England as an industrial powerhouse was especially badly hit as newly industrialised countries increased competition.
The brittle optimism of Thatcherism, big hair and New Romantics was round the corner. In the meantime, the time and the place were perfect for a lyricist of the calibre of Ian Curtis, coincidentally battling his own personal demons like a cop in a generic Netflix series, to take centre stage.
So much for 1979, now let’s put the album’s production under the microscope.
UNKNOWN PLEASURES IS AS MUCH A TRIUMPH OF PRODUCTION AS OF MUSICAL QUALITY
“Nobody expected Joy Division to change popular music – least of all Joy Division themselves,” says Ed Power of the Irish Times. “When the pasty foursome, a blur of student haircuts, slouching posture and melodramatic jackets, gathered at Strawberry Studios in Stockport over three weekends in the spring of 1979, their stated purpose was to knock out a warts-and-everything punk record.
In that regard they failed utterly. Instead Unknown Pleasures was the rock equivalent of Kubrick’s monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The album was bleak, unknowable, tuned – so it felt – to alien frequencies.
Whatever else one might say about Unknown Pleasures, it’s clearly not a punk album. The reason for that is down to one man. Martin Hannett, the producer of Unknown Pleasures, had invested in one of the first digital delay units which was the principal force behind the strange, claustrophobic sound on the album. His extreme panning of the drum tracks moved the snare – which traditionally occupies the middle – all across the mix, a prime example being the track Wilderness, creating a sound that has been described as uniquely cavernous.
Obsessed with percussion, he would often require the drummer, Steven Morris, to record each drum separately over laborious sessions. On one occasion the drums were channelled to a speaker perched on a toilet in the building’s basement bathroom, only to be re-recorded again through a single microphone, along with a din of spectral reverb.
Of the other instruments, Peter Hook’s extraordinary bass created the melody for many songs, such as She’s Lost Control. So, Hannett elevated the bass to the front of the mix and sent Bernard Albrecht’s guitar behind layers of reverb in a reversal of recording orthodoxy. Hannett’s non-music samples – notably the antique lift on Insight and shattering glass on I Remember Nothing – helped to create a dystopian urban landscape quite unlike their live rock set.
Take a listen to the early demo of their follow-up single to Unknown pleasures Transmission and compare it to the Hannett production a year later. The Happy website neatly sums up his contribution:
“Hannett’s greatest achievement with Joy Division was, arguably, taking the aggressive songs they had been toiling away at and realising that they were so much more than a bunch of short, fast punk tracks. And this touch ensured that the Mancunian 4-piece would not be lost to the mists of time.”
And finally let’s look at the one thing everyone knows about Unknown Pleasures. Its cover.
UNKNOWN PLEASURES ARTWORK IS INSEPARABLE FROM THE MUSIC
The image everyone knows of the album’s cover is a data visualization that shows a series of radio frequency periods from the first pulsar discovered, unearthed by Bernard, the guitarist, from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. The group’s designer, Peter Saville insisted it be flipped into black – because that’s what space is, black. Now there’s the ironic oven gloves, limited edition fashion house runs and official merch licensed through Warner Brothers, even a Mickey Mouse version.
But why?
Well, if we knew how these things worked, we’d all be millionaires. But we can have a go. First, the minimalism and ambiguity of the design means that people can generate their own interpretations. Second, the image hovers on the border of science and art, in much the same way that the music of the band hovered between the accessible and the unknowable. Third, it’s associated with a dark tragedy which, for better or for worse, holds an eerie attraction especially sometimes for young people. Then – fourth? It’s a known unknown. It’s not like wearing a t-shirt for an obscure Brooklyn band. It’s a cultural signifier which is readily understood.
And finally, it’s just the coolest design by a highly cool designer.
SUMMARY
So, there you have it. 4 instant expert opinions for you on why there Unknown Pleasures continues to appeal. To sum up:-
1. Ian Curtis’s literary narratives of illness, religion, violence and urban decay created an alternative universe for the band to excel.
2. The legacy of the war largely dominates the psychology of the musicians.
3. The themes, production and musical context time stamp the album as 1979. But this cultural specificity also contributes to its enduring allure.
4. The innovative production methods of producer Martin Hannett distinguished the record from all the other rock albums of the era and has underwritten its longevity.
5. The artwork is inextricably linked to the music, even for those who can’t name a single track.
There is one other reason we haven’t mentioned and that, of course, is the suicide a year later of the singer himself. A sense of what might have been does hover like a low fog over the tracks. But that may be the subject for a future podcast.