Closer

***Closer*** is the second and final studio album by English rock band Joy Division, released on 18 July 1980 by Factory Records. Produced by Martin Hannett, it was released two months after the suicide of the band's lead singer and lyricist Ian Curtis. The album reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Charts and peaked at No. 3 in New Zealand in September 1981. It was remastered and re-released in 2007, followed by a 40th Anniversary 2020 Digital Master.

## Synopsis

Joy Division bassist Peter Hook was at a wedding when producer Martin Hannett began mixing the band's second album, *Closer*, in March 1980. By the time Hook returned to London, where they were making the record at Pink Floyd's Britannia Row Studios, a couple of tracks were ready. "Barney [bandmate Bernard Sumner] took great delight in taking me in to play [them]," Hook tells Apple Music, "because he knew that I'd be as pissed off as he was. It was like, 'Ohhhh... Martin.' And Martin would just be, 'Shut up, you pair of morons.'" This wasn't a complete shock. A year earlier, Hook and Sumner had been similarly peeved when they first heard Hannett's austere, haunted treatment for their debut album, 1979's *Unknown Pleasures*. And Hannett was equally unmoved by their protests. Despite that record restating the sonic ambitions and emotional richness of British rock in the wake of punk, Hook still yearned to sound like the Pistols and The Clash on *Closer*. "I wanted to rip people's heads off with my guitar," he says. "And I was absolutely wrong. Thankfully, Martin Hannett recognized the maturity of our songwriting and the strength in our songs that he felt needed playing down, making more seductive."

The Manchester band arrived at Britannia Row with firm ideas for *Closer*'s nine songs, the product of jamming sessions fuelled by what Hook calls a "wonderful chemistry" between himself, Sumner, singer Ian Curtis, and drummer Stephen Morris. Any enduring tension with Hannett—"He just thought Barney and I were a pair of idiots, but he felt very, very in tune with Ian"—was counterbalanced by what the studio offered in terms of sound, equipment, and catering. "I think we had £1.50 a day to spend, so, literally, you could either have a pint or a sandwich, and that was the whole day," says Hook. "If Britannia Row hadn't put sandwiches out at teatime for free, I think we probably would've starved to death, to be honest."

Hannett helped the band detach themselves from punk's compressed rage by plugging in a growing arsenal of synths. With techniques cribbed from Motown's recording processes, the producer explored the space within the music. Thrumming with reverb and ghostly tones, *Closer* is colder and more brutal than *Unknown Pleasures*, yet also more melodic. From the grotesque industrial clatter of "Atrocity Exhibition" to the doom-disco urgency of "Isolation," it set new standards in bleak-hearted music—ones that legions of bands chase through the gloaming to this day. "To be cited as an inspiration for bands as varied as The 1975 to anybody is absolutely amazing," says Hook. "And we didn't even know what we were doing. We had no idea. We were just a bunch of fucking idiots, all of us. It just shows you the magic of rock 'n' roll."

Like Hook and Sumner, Curtis was seemingly unimpressed with what he heard when *Closer* was done. In a letter to the band's manager Rob Gretton, he called it "a disaster" and took aim at Hook and Sumner as "a sneaky, japing load of tossers." "We were still being very, very boisterous as a group, young boys," says Hook. "We drove Ian and Annik [Honoré, Belgian journalist and friend of Curtis] mad, because they were in the flat opposite us [where the band were staying near Marylebone], so there was still a lot of boy japes going on, a lot of playfulness, which was sometimes misinterpreted, particularly by Annik. She just didn't get our northern sense of humour at all. But it was a wonderful experience recording *Closer*, apart from Ian's illness. And it came to such an awful end."

Curtis took his own life shortly after the album was completed, and these songs of disillusionment and despair have inevitably been seen as windows into his anguish. "You would say, taken in isolation, 'Oh my god, this guy's crying for help,'" says Hook. "It's a very melancholy end [to the album]. Looking back now, you could say, 'Look at "The Eternal." Look at "Decades." This is a great band, a great man, disappearing.' But these lyrics are hidden in such beautiful music for the most part—positive, angry, strong music—that you just listen to this LP and go, 'Oh my god, this is a great record. Fantastic.' He hid it well–which pretty much sums up his attitude to everything." While making *Closer*, Curtis' marriage was becoming increasingly strained, and his epilepsy was so severe he was afraid to hold his baby daughter. As a consequence, he was being prescribed a debilitating regime of medication. "The most telling thing was when they did the documentary Joy Division [2007], they took Ian's prescription to a modern-day epilepsy expert and asked him what he thought," says Hook. "The guy said it was guaranteed to kill him."

*Closer* deserves to be regarded as more than a final statement, though. It's a towering testament to the artistry of Curtis and Joy Division. Watching Curtis contend with his illness left the band with "an awful, awful feeling, the helplessness," says Hook, but the singer's drive often masked the depths of his suffering. Hook recalls finding him bloodied in the studio toilet one night after suffering a seizure and hitting his head. As Hook helped him clean up, Curtis insisted on getting straight back to recording. "He fought it tooth and nail, every moment," says the bassist. "Ian was so ambitious, and he was so positive about Joy Division. Every gig that he had a fit and was carried off, in the dressing room afterwards, he wouldn't want to go to hospital or go to bed. He wanted to go out and party. We were like, 'Oh well, so do we.' In an odd way, as a youngster, as a group member that looked like they were on their heady way to stardom, him turning round and letting you off the hook was what you wanted most."

Curtis died on May 18, 1980, at age 23. It would be a while before his bandmates could bring themselves to listen to *Closer*, having resolved to carry on as New Order. "All we were interested in was being together, and making sure New Order, in any way we could do, survived, flourished," says Hook. "And we managed to do that by ignoring Joy Division completely. When you're [that age], every minute, you keep thinking someone's going to take everything off you, like a child, because you are no more than a child. It was important for us to carry on, to throw ourselves into what we were doing and push that painful memory away." Hook says it was two or three years until he listened to *Closer*: "I found that I didn't have the connection with it that I had with *Unknown Pleasures*. I was able to listen to *Closer* and actually enjoy it—it became one of my favourite records. That's how divorced I felt from the reality of what it was: I could listen to it and think it was somebody else."

## Background

The band began recording at Britannia Row in London on 18 March 1980, where they "worked long hours" in the album's creation, residing in a flat near Baker Street. Peter Hook noted that working with producer Martin Hannett at times put a strain on their relationship, as Hannett referred to them as "three idiots and a genius", and liked to work alone with Curtis.

Following Curtis' suicide on 18 May, *Closer* was released two months later. The album was a commercial success, considered to be better than their debut. However, Curtis thought differently, where he had written a letter to the band's manager, Rob Gretton:

>
> Rob.
>
>
>
> Judged purely on my own terms, and not to be interpreted as an opinion or reflection of mass media or public taste but a criticism of my own esoteric and elitist mind of which the mysteries of life are very few and beside which the grace of God has deemed to indicate in a vision the true nature of all things, plus the fact that everyone else are a sneaky, japing load of tossers, I decree that this LP is a disaster.
>
>
>
> I K Curtis.
>
>
>
>

In 2007, Bernard Sumner noted to *The Independent*, "While we were working on Closer, Ian said to me that doing this album felt very strange because he felt that all his words were writing themselves. He also said that he had this terrible claustrophobic feeling that he was in a whirlpool and being pulled down, drowning". Hook also took dissatisfaction at the time, wanting them to sound like the Sex Pistols or The Clash. He added for the *Backspin* feature in 2017, "It was a great LP, and one of my greatest regrets, when we finished with Joy Division and moved onto New Order, was that we never got to play *Closer*. It really was such a beautiful LP. Martin Hannett did a great job again".

While Hook retrospectively thought they should've took time off to deal with their grief upon Curtis' death, they created the band New Order. Gretton had faith in them: "He actually must have looked at us and thought, 'You know, these twats can do it again'. And we didn't think we could so, thank God, he was there to push us. The fact that we carried on is a miracle, but I do think the only reason we did carry on was because we cut it dead, absolutely cut Joy Division off and just *ignored* it'".

## Critical reception

Ned Raggett of AllMusic called the opening track, "Atrocity Exhibition", "arguably the most fractured thing the band had yet recorded". He opined that *Closer* was better than their debut and concluded, "rock, however defined, rarely seems and sounds so important, so vital, and so impossible to resist or ignore as here". *Rolling Stone*'s Mikal Gilmore wrote, "The music of Joy Division—an art-minded English postpunk band that initially struck reviewers as a tuneful version of PiL—sets forth an even more indelible vision of gloom. In fact, it's a vision so steeped in deathly fixations that it proved fatal". He added, "The music turns leaden, gray and steady because it means to fulfill a vision of a world where suffering is unremitting and nothingness is quiescent".

## Track listing

All tracks written by Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner.

The original vinyl disc only contained a small etching on the disk marking the A and B sides.

## Personnel

**Joy Division**

* Ian Curtis – lead vocals, guitar (track 6), melodical (track 9)
* Bernard Sumner – guitar (all except tracks 1 and 6), bass guitar (track 1), synthesizers (tracks 2, 6, 8, and 9)
* Peter Hook – bass guitar (all except track 1), guitar (track 1), six-string bass guitar (tracks 3, 6, and 8)
* Stephen Morris – drums (all except tracks 2 and 8), electronic drums (tracks 2, 4, 8, 9), percussion (all except track 2)

**Production**

* Martin Hannett – production, engineering
* Michael Johnson – engineering assistance
* Jon Caffery – engineering

## References

1. ↑ Conrad, Anna (14 July 2020). "How Joy Division Made Closer: 'We Were Really Tight As a band; There Was a Lot of Telepathy Going On'". *GQ*.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Potter, Jordan (18 July 2022). "'Closer' in the Words of Joy Division". *Far Out Magazine*.
3. ↑ Wright, Jonathan (13 July 2020). "40 Years Later: Closer & The Last Days Of Joy Division". *The Quietus*.
4. ↑ "Closer Review by Ned Raggett". *AllMusic*.
5. ↑ Gilmore, Mikal (28 May 1981). "Closer". *Rolling Stone*.
6. ↑ Barker, Emily (25 October 2013). "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: 100-1". *NME*.
7. ↑ Jackson, Josh (1 February 2012). "The 80 Best Albums of the 1980s". *Paste*. Archived from the original on 4 February 2012.
8. ↑ Jackson, Josh (13 July 2016). "The 25 Best Albums of 1980". *Paste*
9. ↑ Jackson, Josh (13 July 2020). "The 25 Best Albums of 1980". *Paste*
10. ↑ "The Top 100 Albums of the 1980s". *Pitchfork*. 21 November 2002.
11. ↑ "The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s". *Pitchfork*. 10 September 2018
12. ↑ "100 Best Albums of the Eighties". *Rolling Stone*. 16 November 1989.
13. ↑ "500 Greatest Albums List (2003)". *Rolling Stone*. 31 May 2009.
14. ↑ "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". *Rolling Stone*. 22 September 2020.
15. ↑ "The 80 Greatest Albums of 1980". *Rolling Stone*. 11 November 2020.
16. ↑ "red". *Slant Magazine*. 5 March 2012.