Little Joy, Plenty Of Division

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 29, 2006

Reviewed by Guy Rundle, Guy Rundle is European editor of Arena.

Torn Apart: The Life of Ian Curtis

By Mick Middles and Lindsay Reade

Omnibus Press, 376pp, $49.95 (hardcover)

SOME BOOKS, FILMS and bands run like a firebreak between the generations, rendering all explanation superfluous to those on one side, while no amount of scholarship can explain to those left behind what all the fuss was about. Joy Division and New Order might be the acid test of that principle.

To say these two bands created an epochal sound combining the energy of punk with the cool distance of electronic music barely hints at the mordant other-worldiness of their style, as dark and precise as a Durer; while for anyone who's staggered around a share-house living room at four in the morning, with She's Lost Control on ceaseless rotation, such a description will only detract from the memory of a music which seemed to offer a cold austerity as unattainable as it was irresistible.

To say "bands" is misleading; it was one band with two names. New Order was the later incarnation and the more commercially successful - its hard-edged dancebeats now so mainstream that one of its tracks is the theme for Sports Tonight on Channel Ten. But it was Joy Division and its extraordinary singer and lyricist Ian Curtis (whose 1980 suicide prompted the name change) whose tunes and 'tude are tattooed on a million speed-shrunk hearts, a memory of a time...

Like many of the bands that came to dominate the next decades of music, Joy Division were formed following an encounter with the Sex Pistols. In this case it was a mid-1976 Pistols gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall. Curtis, a young clerical worker for the Manchester Manpower Services Commission, and recently married, was yet to meet his future band members. When he did they all would date their realisation that there was nothing to stop them being in a band from that occasion.

Throughout 1976 and 1977, first as Stiff Kittens, then as Warsaw, they worked their way from musical ineptitude through imitation pogo-punk to the beginnings of a more distinctive style, influenced by the hard-edged and disciplined industrial music of bands such as Throbbing Gristle.

Their penultimate name-change was an indication of themes to come - taken, by Curtis, from the slang term for Nazi SS brothels, where the girls were forced to smile on pain of death. This was tasteless, but in a Sylvia Plath rather than David Irving kind of way - a remnant of punk's somewhat overblown critique of consumer society, a Frankfurt school of rock.

Looking for a record deal in an era still utterly dominated by major labels, they were doubly lucky - first to come to the attention of Manchester journalist Tony Wilson, who built the Factory label around them and kick-started independents in Britain; and second, to be produced by Martin Hannett, one of the five or six key figures in the history of rock music.

Hannett, a pioneer of digital technology, transcended punk by separating the sounds of each musical part - individually recording not only each instrument, but each separate snare drum, cymbal, guitar line, and so on. The resulting album, Unknown Pleasures, with its staccato drumbeats, lead bass and drowsed vocals, sounded like nothing on earth.

Hannett's production synched with the lyric and performance style Curtis had developed - minimal imagery and a rigid, teeth-clenched, semi-automaton style: Tristan Tzara at the disco.

One of the two or three surviving filmclips of the band performing on a regional TV show has, through repetition, acquired iconic status - three young men in neat short hair, polyester shirts and cheap slacks powering away with a professional cool, while Curtis's taut, sweat-bathed performance is the epitome of a man at the mercy of great forces.

Looking back, the clip presents a figure for whom death is dwelling at the heart of life. Curtis's suicide on the eve of the band's 1980 US tour became the black hole around which their legend formed. It seemed, in rumour and in legend, the free act of a man more than half in love with easeful death.

The truth, as this book sets out in detail, was rather more prosaic. Curtis was a far more forlorn figure than the persona he developed - a working-class northern lad, before that category became ultra chic, who married and had a child too young. His reading was of the sort that tests the unsettled soul - Sartre, Camus, Dostoyevsky - and he shared with the last of these the affliction of epilepsy and the melancholia that would follow the attacks. However, unlike Dostoyevsky, he was subject to the various versions of anti-epileptic drugs, which settled a thicker and less yielding depression on him.

These states undoubtably contributed to his art - witness Love Will Tear Us Apart, the extraordinary record of his marriage break-up during a passionate affair - but they magnified the standard chaos of a rock'n'roll life. Since his death, a shelf of books has been written on the music, the movement and the city. This is the second biography and a more complete portrait of the man than that provided by the first, his widow Deborah's Touching From a Distance.

However much one wants to hang on to the legend, the man deserves to be known in full, and the effect is to give the music a new and most improbable character, that of pathos.