Joy Division

27 years ago today, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis took his life at the age of 23. It was by all accounts a sad end to a bittersweet life, leaving a child behind and a wife already devastated by an eroding marriage.

I come not to celebrate Ian Curtis the adulterer, or to glamorize his suicide—there’s been quite enough of the latter and the first part is shameful no matter what brand of morality you ascribe to. I come to celebrate the amazing and beguiling music of Joy Division who, in two proper studio albums and a smattering of singles, helped to rewrite the rules of making rock music. The group who, with producer/mad scientist Martin Hannett, made music rife with intrigue and uncertainty.

I’ve made a short list of my absolute favorite JD songs, in no particular order, with some notes on why, exactly, these songs resonate with me:

1. "No Love Lost" – This was on the flipside of their first release, the An Ideal For Living EP. This was a Joy Division walking in the brisk, rainy Manchester night, slowly walking away from punk’s speed and single-mindedness and toward what would become post-punk’s lurid narrative style. It starts with all four bass strings strummed then melts into a persistent rhythm, stops again after Bernard Sumner’s guitar slices across the stereo field, and pounces into a mutant surf groove that borrows its lyrical inspiration from The House of Dolls.
2. "Insight" – Also known in my head at least as The Birth Of Peter Hook’s Bass Playing Style. A brooding little bastard of a song with that disco drum break (the synare, as it is more accurately known), a part of that gorgeously depraved first half of Unknown Pleasures.
3. "Transmission" – One of the better-known Joy Division tunes, this one makes beautiful use of a synthesizer (perhaps the ARP Omni, though I’m not certain) and features one of Ian’s most impassioned studio vocal performances. Low do a gorgeous (and yes, slow) version of this song.
4. "Passover" – I see very little written about this particular tune from their second, the ironically named Closer, but this is probably my favorite song on that album. It’s the missing link between that album’s extremes: the somber "The Eternal" and the spritely-but-torrmented "Isolation".
5. "Atmosphere" – THE most gorgeous song composed in the late Seventies, by anyone (narrowly edging out Wire’s "Outdoor Miner" and Bowie’s "Heroes"). The flipside of the "She’s Lost Control" twelve-inch single, and if Joy Division had a manifesto or statement of purpose this song would capture it succinctly.
6. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" – Is there anything that has not been said about this song? Has there ever been another interpretation that does it justice? I don’t know that I could ever add to the near-endless journalist’s dialogue concerning this tune, which became a hit, an epitaph, has steadily ensnared new listeners and made fans of them. This was their future, stillborn, a self-fulfilling prophecy and a million other things all rolled into near-four minutes of heaven.

There is no way of knowing what could have followed. What did follow, what grew from the remains—that became a pop sensation. New Order, as sublime as they could be, as perverse and wonderful as their story was…they could never be the fly in the amber that Joy Division is and will always be. Joy Division will remain special for so many people because we will never know what could have been if one sad little man had not taken his life.