Richard Byrne
DEATHLY CHILL

"Oh, Manchester! So much to answer for." Morrissey

Manchester is a dark, cramped and chilly city. It's no surprise, then that so much of the music that comes from Britain's second largest city has the same damp, claustrophobic sound. Just think about the most influential Manchester bands of the last two decades from the Fall to the Smiths to New Order and a cold tight hand grips your imagination. Even the more kinetic bands from the city bands like the Buzzcocks and Happy Mondays have a cramped density that renders them almost opaque. The most influential band to emerge from Manchester was Joy Division. They were, perhaps, the darkest rock band in the history of the genre, scraping charcoal-etched songs on blank white canvases. They took their name from squads of women that Nazi troops would keep as prostitutes a deliberate commingling of cruelty, death and sex. Their lead singer and lyricist, Ian Curtis, committed suicide in 1980, just as the band were about to become commercially successful, and two of their albums 1979's Unknown Pleasures and 1980's Closer are still bleak landmarks on rock's landscape. The band inspired a critic named Neil Morrow from New Musical Express to write the following lines that sum up the band better than anything that's ever been written about them. "Joy Division," Morrow wrote, "convinces me I could spit in the face of God."
     After Curtis' suicide, the other three members of Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Steve Morris regrouped and formed New Order with keyboardist Gillian Gilbert. That band went on to have the worldwide commercial success that Joy Division never had, but their influence on other artists was more limited.
     The reason for the long-lived importance of Joy Division can be found in Neil Morrow's prescient quote, linking the band with the dual forces of punk (spit) and a bleak, existential spirituality (the face of God). When you listen to Joy Division almost twenty years after they put out their records, the music that you hear is simple (even crude) and chilling. Sumner's guitar and synthesizers scrape and glide with cold calculation. Peter Hook's bass throbs like a frog caught underneath an icy pond. Steve Morris' drums have a foreboding echo that came (as Mick Middles notes in his book, From Joy Division to New Order: The Factory Story) from recording them from a speaker placed in a toilet.
As effective as the music was in creating that chilly feeling, it is Ian Curtis' deep, rumbling voice, and the words that it intoned that made Joy Division special. Curtis' voice could oscillate between an affectless groan and a sharp bark, filling up the space between resignation and anger. It is a voice like no other in rock, immediately recognizable.
     But even more compelling than Curtis' voice are his words. The lyrics that Curtis wrote for Joy Division were clipped and economical. Their simplicity adds to their power. But Curtis' words were anguished cries to God from an afflicted soul as well. They were perverted prayers from death camps, and massacres, and other places where the soul and body are destroyed:

You'll see the horrors of a faraway place
Meet the architects of law face to face
See mass murder on a scale you've never seen
And all the ones who tried hard to succeed
This is the way, step inside ("Atrocity Exhibition")

Directionless, so plain to see
A loaded gun won't set you free
So you say ("New Dawn Fades")
Mother, I tried, please believe me
I'm doing the best that I can
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through
I'm ashamed of the person I am ("Isolation")

     There is more than a hint in Curtis' words of another great poet of religious despair, Sylvia Plath, and particularly the late poems she wrote in the weeks before her suicide in February, 1963. Both Curtis and Plath have been assaulted by critics who believe that their unflinching look at horrors of this century like Auschwitz and Hiroshima are extreme. Both poets have also been deified by a cult that romanticize the tragedies of their suicides.
     But deeper, beneath the extreme images and the bitter biography, there is something scarier in both Plath and Curtis' work the utter helplessness of humanity in the face of a universe in which a God oblivious to human suffering and doubt demands worship. The courage of Curtis' words to catalogue the suffering and confront is creator is precisely that "spit in the face of God" that Morrow recognized 18 years ago.
     Considering the immensity of Curtis' achievement in four short years as a singer  and writer, it is not at all surprising that most of the books about Joy Division seem puny in comparison. The best account, but by no means complete, has been written by Curtis' widow. Deborah Curtis' Touching
From a Distance is a harrowing account of Curtis' life and battles with epilepsy and depression that is unromantic, and yet strangely touching. It also includes a number of Curtis' best lyrics, which makes it an invaluable resource. More widely varied is Mick Middles' From Joy Division to New Order: The Factory Story, which takes Joy Division's record label (Factory Records) as a starting point. Middles provides some helpful context for the reader, yet he often meanders into trivial detail, as if he was writing the story of Jesus and spending pages on the price of hay in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth.
     Middles doesn't capture that odd, chilly feel of Manchester, or its most famous band, but perhaps that's asking too much of him. Maybe only artists can provide that.

Books Cited:
Touching From a Distance, Deborah Curtis, Faber & Faber, 212 pages, 1996
From Joy Division to New Order, Mick Middles, Virgin, 310 pages, 1996

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