Released at the height of British summertime - June 1979 - the album caught the eye as well as the ear: the cover, designed by Factory's art director Peter Saville, was a matt-black void apart from a small scientific diagram of rippling lines whose crinkled crests and sharp slopes resemble the outlines of a mountain range. Joy Division's guitarist Barney Sumner had found the diagram in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Science: it's a Fourier analysis of 1000 consecutive light spasms emitted by the pulsar CP 1919. Left behind when a massive sun exhausts its fuel and collapses in on itself, a pulsar is highly electromagnetic and emits regular flashes of intense energy, like a lighthouse in the pitch-black night. Perhaps that's how Ian Curtis was beginning to see himself - as a magnetic star sending out a signal, a beacon in the darkness.
With its vast drumscape, permafrost synths and cascading chimes, "Atmosphere", Joy Division's breathtaking next single, sound like nothing else in rock, except maybe some dream collaboration between Nico and Phil Spector.
Joy Division - Atmosphere 1980
The image on the single - a hooded monk, his back turned to the viewer, stalking a snow-covered Alpine peak - captures the moment when a certain religiosity began to gather around Joy Division.
A 'strange social climate' (as Hannett put it) surrounded the March 1980 sessions for Closer, Joy Division's second album. Hannett described the record as 'kabbalistic, locked in its own mysterious world'. The sleeve featured a photograph taken in a Genoa cemetry, a sculpted tableau of the dead Christ surrounded by grief-stricken mourners.
Compared with Unknown Pleasures, the textures of Closer are more ethereal and experimental: bassist Peter Hook often used a six-string bass, for more melody, while Sumner built a couple of synthesizers from kits. Morris had acquired a drum synth and fed it through 'the shittiest fuzz pedal you can imagine' to generate the slaughterhouse of hacking and shearing, metal-on-bone noise in the background of "Atrocity Exhibition", Closer's opener.
Joy Division - Atrocity Exhibition 1980
Listening to Closer, it's like you are inside Curtis' head, feeling the awful down-swirling drag of terminal depression. Side one is all agony: the swarming knives of "Atrocity"; the ice-shroud glaze of "Isolation" - Curtis swathed in a barbiturate haze, his voice mineralized by Hannett's effects. The treadmill motion of "Passover" sounds like the group's batteries are running down. It's followed by the tough, punitive rock of "Colony" and "A Means to an End", in which the drums finally decelerate like a dying machine.
Joy Division - Isolation 1980
Joy Division - Passover 1980
Joy Division - Colony 1980
Joy Division - A Means to an End 1980
Closer's second side is even more disturbing, but this time on account of its serenity. It's as though Curtis has stopped struggling altogether: the numb trance and narcotic glide of "Heart and Soul"; the alternately desperate and resigned "Twenty-Four Hours", its beautiful bass like the pulse of a heavy heart, Curtis's voice disconcertingly deep, like the microphone is right inside his chest; the epic colonnades of "The Eternal", seen through misty eyes, as if Curtis is watching his own funeral procession; finally the listless, clip-clop beat of "Decades", its synths eroded and washed out, like aged Super-8 home movies of happy childhood memories.
Joy Division - Heart and Soul 1980
Joy Division - Twenty-Four Hours 1980
Joy Division - The Eternal 1980
Joy Division - Decades 1980
The last lyric Curtis ever finished, "In a Lonely Place", featured a death-wish reference to 'caressing the marble and stone'. The crisis came on 18 May 1980. After visiting his estranged wife and asking, unsuccessfully, for her to drop the divorce, Curtis stayed up all night, watching a movie by his favourite director Werner Herzog and listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot. Finally, he hung himself as 'that awful daylight' ("In a Lonely Place") approached.
Joy Division - In a Lonely Place 1980
Saville gave the posthumous single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" an exquisite abstract cover that looked like the lustrous stone interior of a cenotaph. The song became Joy Division's first chart hit.
Curtis's crooning vocal, Hook's bass and Sumner's keyboard trace in unison the same shy, crestfallen melody, while Morris's drumming skitters with feathery unrest. On "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and its savage B-side, "These Days", the singer and the music both sound raw and exposed, like they've got no skin. The words are laceratingly candid glimpses into a dying relationship, snapshots of bad sex and broken trust. Although the marriage break-up was only one factor, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was taken as Curtis's suicide note to the public: the official explanation.
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart 1980
Joy Division - These Days 1980
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