Unknown Pleasures

***Unknown Pleasures*** is the debut studio album by Joy Division, released on 15 June 1979 by Factory Records. The Collector's Edition features live recordings from their performance at the Factory, Manchester, 13 July 1979. In honour of the 40th anniversary, the group released a series of music videos for each track, making a total of ten by different filmmakers.

## Description

You don't always know when you've made a masterpiece. In April 1979, Joy Division—singer Ian Curtis, bassist Peter Hook, drummer Stephen Morris, and guitarist Bernard Sumner—convened at Strawberry Studios in Stockport with producer Martin Hannett. Three weeks later, they'd recorded an enormously influential cultural landmark. However, Hook and Sumner in particular were unconvinced. Hannett's singular, haunting vision for their music was in keeping with the bleak melodrama of Curtis' lyrics, but some of the punk intensity of their live shows had been lost. "Martin had definitely toned down—or twisted—the rawness into another kind of rawness," Morris tells Apple Music. "It wasn't amped up. Martin gave the music a depth and put it in a setting that it was made for. It was just a setting that we'd never imagined our music being in, so it was like, 'Wurgh, what have you done?'" What they had done was create 10 songs whose frostbitten grandeur, minimalist aesthetic, and unflinching introspection continue to manifest themselves in literature and cinema and on catwalks as well as countless dark-souled indie, synth-pop, and goth bands. To get there, Hannett's eccentric methods included messing with the studio heating so that the band regularly suffered extreme temperatures and ordering Morris to completely disassemble his drum kit and play the parts separately. Here, Morris takes us track by track through a process of isolation, very few choruses, and an experiment that almost destroyed the studio in a fireball.

**"Disorder"**
"Quite a frantic song. The three songs that should never be played together are 'Disorder,' 'Interzone,' and 'Transmission' because I collapse at the end. So of course that happened quite a lot. I really liked the lyrics. Going in the studio was really the first time that we'd been able to hear them properly. Before then, the only bit that I was certain about was the spirit/feeling bit ['I've got the spirit but lose the feeling']."

**"Day of the Lords"**
"I always think of 'Day of the Lords' and 'I Remember Nothing' as a pair. They've both got that iciness, but they're both nail-you-to-the-wall numbers. We did it in an afternoon probably. We were doing it in isolation, cut off from the rest of the Manchester music scene. We had this nobody-would-give-us-a-gig thing, so we were just stuck in the rehearsal room, writing songs: 'Well, this will show them—we'll write the best song ever.' We certainly didn't think that what we were doing was going to be something that would stand out 40 years later, at all."

**"Candidate"**
"This was made up pretty much on the spot. We were sound-checking the drums and bass, jamming with Hooky, and Martin recorded it. Ian went away and wrote the words pretty quickly. He got ideas from films and TV as well as books. I can't remember what the film was, it might have been *The Manchurian Candidate*—there's someone in that who gets assassinated. I think that's where the title came from."

**"Insight"**
"This has my first drum synthesizer sound. I discovered that if you turned the filter knob right up, you could turn it into the sound of a *Star Wars* Imperial Stormtrooper laser battle, which was always a highlight live. I didn't understand that the volume increased exponentially as you turned the knob up, so when we did the break, it was deafeningly loud. It's another typical Joy Division song in that it doesn't really have a chorus. It's just two moods—it goes from quite reflective to very, very sort of angry, then back to being reflective. Ian's lyrics are absolutely perfect. We knew this one definitely didn't sound like anything else, and again, it just arrived one Sunday afternoon."

**"New Dawn Fades"**
"I remember thinking, 'Oh god, this is really, really fantastic.' And then, yeah… Martin accidentally erased the cymbals. I am absolutely amazed at how the album still sounds modern. We were very interested in the future, but we weren't aware that what we were doing was something that would end up there."

**"She's Lost Control"**
"The version on *Unknown Pleasures* is pretty much the same as we'd been doing it live, but after that we got taken with the idea of a 12-inch disco remix. In order to embellish the drum synth rhythm on it, Martin sent me into the tiny vocal booth to spray tape head cleaner in time to the drums. I think we went through two tins in half an hour. I should really have noticed the picture of the flames on the side of the can—it was highly inflammable. When we'd finished, I was going to light a cigarette, but fortunately [manager] Rob Gretton had run off with my lighter. Otherwise the whole thing would have just gone bang."

**"Shadowplay"**
"This always reminded me of 'Ocean,' the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed song. Ian's lyrics are fantastic, a science fiction landscape thing. I remember listening to it for the first time, you could see this place, like out of a J.G. Ballard book. I've always played it exactly the same, because it's just like a reflex action, a muscle memory thing. But the other day I sat down and tried to work out what the hell I was playing, and it's like... God, you would never really play that. It was just a reaction to what everybody else was playing, and when I tried to analyze it, I just got lost."

**"Wilderness"**
"The stop-start-y one. I can remember Ian going on about an old '60s black-and-white film about pirates who get marooned in the Sargasso Sea and cross the ocean with balloons on their feet… This sounds like I'm making this up, like some sort of psychedelic nightmare I once had. It was the idea that these people were just sort of stranded somewhere, and I think Ian got some lyrical inspiration from it. It's a very peculiar song, very unusual rhythmically: I had one more drum than was strictly necessary for a drum kit, and I couldn't figure what to do with it, so I wrote a pattern using this drum which otherwise would never get hit."

**"Interzone"**
"We all wanted to do something that was a bit like 'The Murder Mystery' on the third Velvet Underground album. Two lots of vocals going on; one's on one side and one's on the other side of the stereo. Ian wrote two lots of lyrics for it. He's singing one and Hooky's singing the other. In the end, when Ian's epilepsy became really bad, 'Interzone' became the song that we had to do because Ian couldn't sing anymore, Hooky could sing it."

**"I Remember Nothing"**
"This was probably the biggest step that we took on our own into technology. Bernard had brought the Transcendent kit synthesizer, which he made himself, and Rob and Ian had this idea that we should do this jam—unimaginatively called 'The Synthesizer One'—at the end of the [live] set. It's a brooding thing, it's malevolence in a tune. It was the beginning of Ian turning into a singer/guitarist, because when we did it live, Bernard would have to play the synth. Ian wouldn't go near the synth: He was frightened he'd break it."

## Background

In an interview with *GQ*, Bernard Sumner reported, "It's a popular myth that it all started with the Sex Pistols at Manchester Free Trade Hall. It didn't start with that. I'd already bought a guitar. We found it difficult to pick up girls and thought it would be easier if we were in a band, to be brutally honest." Originally they formed as Warsaw in August 1977, though later that year changed it to Joy Division. After the release of their self-produced extended play (EP), *An Ideal for Living*, they were approached by manager Rob Gretton to record an album for his label, Factory Records. Despite this, there was never a contract for the album, Hook recounting, "We had a sheet of paper saying that the masters would revert to us after six months if either of us decided not to work with each other. That was it. It was amazing that the agreement lasted so well." Initially he hated it, but grew to love the album.

The band recorded *Unknown Pleasures* at Strawberry Studios in Hillgate, Stockport over three weekends between 1 and 17 April 1979. Stephen Morris recalled, "It was only when we were recording that I could actually hear Ian's lyrics. He kept them to himself. He had them all in a plastic bag in loads of notebooks, but he never showed them to us and said, "What do you think of this?"" Sumner added, "When you did hear his lyrics it wouldn't really marry up with the person because the person was quite lighthearted and jovial, but obviously with a bookish side to him. When you heard these lyrics which sounded intensely personal it felt like you were intruding on something that was really private to him. Some of them came from a very dark place, which I didn't quite understand to be honest." Engineer Chris Nagle reported how Curtis only needed to listen to a song once before doing his vocals in on take. Nagle stated, "sheets with his lyrics on, but he always recorded with the lights off."

From April-June 2010, Hook toured the United Kingdom with the headline "An Evening of *Unknown Pleasures*". On May 18, 2010, he commemorated Curtis by playing the entire album at Manchester's FAC251 club.

## Artwork

> I was aware how a single image could evoke an entire train of thought. The group asked for it to be white on the outside and I just couldn’t see it. I was afraid it might look a little cheap. I was convinced that it was just sexier in black. This is a radio energy from space. Space is black.
>
> Peter Saville

The artwork was an image Sumner found in *The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy*, at the Manchester Central Library. It was a black-and-white photo of radio waves from the first recognised pulsar, CP 1919, and he thought it would be "a really great album cover". Graphic designer Peter Saville modified the cover by reducing its size and colour-reversed it. Saville said, "Obviously it is an immediately intriguing image. It is ambiguously provocative and open to multiple interpretations. I thought it perfectly evoked the sensory reading of the title. I thought of the cover as an object and felt this would be best achieved through black—and after all the data represented a pulsar signal captured from deep space." Saville told *Rolling Stone*, "The diagram itself is a cutting of the continuous read out and then a stacking. So what you're seeing is this comparative chart of the frequency and the accuracy of the signal." There is no name or title, Saville explaining, "I made the decision to not put the name on the front, and they were okay with that. We were all the age that bought records, and you don’t need the title. It's patronizing to its audience."

The image was originally created by radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 doctoral dissertation, where he diagramed the stacked waves, now known as PSR B1919+21. He recalled, "It was a complete surprise. In fact, I didn't know anything about it, and a colleague in the space sciences department, who is now a professor of astronomy at Cornell, Jim Cordes, saw me on the street—he's been a long time friend—and he said, “oh, by the way, did you know that your image is on the cover of Joy Division?” And, I said no, I had no clue. So I went to the record store and, son of a gun, there it was. So I bought an album, and then there was a poster that I had of it, so I bought one of those too, just for no particular reason, except that it's my image, and I ought to have a copy of it."

## Critical reception

Retrospective critical writing on the album has been virtually unanimous in its praise. *Rolling Stone* wrote in their review, "...sepulchral rhythms, minor-mode melodies and mordant truths" and continued, "Why bother then with music so seemingly dead-end and depressing? Maybe because, in the midst of a movement overrun by studied nihilism and faddish despair, it's somehow affecting to hear someone whose conviction ranged beyond mere truisms. Maybe because Ian Curtis' descent into despair leaves us with a deeper feeling of our own frailty. Or maybe even because it's fascinating to hear a man's life and desire fading away, little by little, bit by bit." *BBC* wrote, "*Unknown Pleasure* borders on nihilism, but is pregnant with expectation."

Ned Raggett of AllMusic gave a full five stars, writing, "Bernard Sumner redefined heavy metal sludge as chilling feedback fear and explosive energy, Peter Hook's instantly recognizable bass work was at once warm and forbidding, and Stephen Morris' drumming smacked through the speakers above all else. Ian Curtis synthesizes and purifies every last impulse, his voice shot through with the desire first and foremost to connect, only connect..." He concluded, "All visceral, all emotional, all theatrical, all perfect—one of the best albums ever." *Pitchfork* wrote, "a conflation of tribal primitivism and sophisticated art-rock that set the template for those twin poles of post-punk," while *NME* said, "simply one of the best records ever made".

## Track listing

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

## References

1. ↑ Bloom, Madison (June 13, 2019). "Joy Division's *Unknown Pleasures* Honored With 40th Anniversary Music Video Series". *Pitchfork*.
2. ↑ "Joy Division: things you didn't know about 'Unknown Pleasures'". *NME*. 18 May 2019.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Perry, Kevin (16 June 2019). "Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures: an oral history". *GQ*.
4. ↑ Breihan, Tom (April 6, 2010). "Peter Hook Takes Joy Division's *Unknown Pleasures* on the Road". *Pitchfork*.
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lipez, Zachary (June 14, 2019). "How Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures' image went from underground album cover to a piece of cultural ubiquity". *Washington Post*.
6. ↑ Grow, Kory (February 20, 2015). "Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures' Cover: The Science Behind an Image". *Rolling Stone*.
7. ↑ Christiansen, Jen (February 18, 2015). "Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover [Video]". *Scientific American*.
8. ↑ Gilmore, Mikal (May 28, 1981). "Unknown Pleasures". *Rolling Stone*.
9. ↑ Goldring, Susie (2007). "Joy Division *Unknown Pleasures* Review". *BBC*.
10. ↑ Klein, Joshua (October 29, 2007). "Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures / Closer / Still". *Pitchfork*.
11. ↑ "*Unknown Pleasures* Review". *NME*. 19 September 2007. Archived from the original on 23 December 2007.