The Glacious Beauty – 40 Years Of Unknown Pleasures (1979)

On June 15, 1979, a totally unique, enigmatic and disturbing album was about to see the light and leave its mark as one of the best albums ever made. Unknown Pleasures is the debut album by the English band Joy Division.

Today, the album continues to receive constant praise from the critics and the public, it is considered a pioneer of the genre known as “post-punk”, the influence of the album has been gigantic for many people around the world, including myself. I remember that this album caused a totally chilling and disturbing effect in my life when I listened to it with 16. I could not believe to what I was listening, it wasn’t possible that so much darkness and human desolation was condensed in such a heartbreaking and effective way. Everyone who has ever heard the music of Joy Division must know what I’m talking about.

We go back to June 4, 1975 and the concert of the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. This is where Bernard Sumner (guitarist), Peter Hook (bassist) and Terry Mason (drummer), decided to form a band. Once formed, the band put up an announcement in which they searched for a singer, and that’s when a mysterious and highly introverted young man named Ian Curtis, decided to join the band as the lead vocalist.

Ian Curtis already knew the three members, and claimed to have also been at the mythical concert of the Sex Pistols at that night. Ian was a young devotee of the music of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, and a fan of Franz Kafka’s literature.

At the time when they were about to play their first concert, the band would now be called “Warsaw” (in honor of the song “Warszawa” from the legendary album Low by David Bowie). By then, the drummer Mason had left the band, which led to a series of changes in drummers, including Tony Tabac and Steve Brotherdale, to finally settle with the band’s official drummer, Stephen Morris.

The band recorded 5 raw punk songs under the name “Warsaw”. Later, to avoid confusion with a band called “Warsaw Pakt”, Warsaw changed its name to “Joy Division”. This controversial name refers to a group of Jewish women used as sex slaves in the Nazi concentration camps, as described in the novel The House of the Dolls (1955) by Ka-Tzentik. In June of 1978, Joy Division would release its first EP titled An Ideal for Living, full of extremely crude punk songs. 3 months later, the band made its debut on television thanks to Tony Wilson, founder of the record label “Factory Records”, which later signed them.

In 1979, the magnificent Unknown Pleasures was released, recorded in only 3 weekends under the production of Martin Hannett.

During the recording of the album, Hannett used several strange and unusual sound effects and production techniques, including the sound of a bottle being smashed to pieces, the sound of someone eating potato chips, and the sound of the recording studio elevators. Over time, Hannett would be considered as mainly responsible for the gloomy atmosphere and sound that enveloped the album.

The famous album cover is the work of graphic designer Peter Saville, who took the illustration from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy of 1977 (where they did not give credit to its illustrator). Saville saw its potential as “a wonderful and enigmatic symbol”, and reversed the colors of the original drawing. The album cover does not show a mountain range (as many thought when they first saw it), it represents the signals received by the first pulsar recorded by science. The image represented the discovery of astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell, who with the help of a radio telescope detected a short radio signal duration originated outside of Earth, that was repeated systematically every 1337 seconds.

With his enigmatic presence and his chilling voice, the young singer Ian Curtis was able to raise the skin of the audience at his concerts, and even more when performing his eccentric dance steps, that were very similar to an epileptic attack- an illness he would be diagnosed with later. Throughout Joy Division’s career, Curtis suffered from several epileptic seizures on stage that were mistaken for dance moves.

Ian Curtis was an excessively introverted and lonely young man, he locked himself in his room and wrote all day, his life passing between music and poetry. According to his friends, he was highly sensitive, obsessed with Nazism and psychoanalysis, and an avid reader of writers like Jean Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs for example. Curtis suffered from depression, epilepsy, and was tormented by the possibility of ​​divorce, with which his wife threatened him. Later, his wife Deborah would say: “Ian had a divided personality that he wanted to understand: he desperately needed someone to advise him, but he was not going to act for others by becoming what they wanted him to be.”

Unknown Pleasures begins with a song called “Disorder”, we start listening to Morris’ quick and exciting drumming and Peter Hook’s infectious but warm bass. The baseline alongside percussion sounds as if it is being played in a huge and dark empty room, with a memorable echoing effect backwards. We find some sonic swoops until we hear Sumner’s strong and heavily dramatic guitar; all the instruments seem to live together with a synchronicity that sets the tone for the anxious and fearful mode that is coming:

“I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand,
Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?
These sensations barely interest me for another day,
I’ve got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away….

With these lyrics, Ian Curtis makes it clear that he cannot feel the pleasures of a normal person, those are unknown to him. The lyrics of “Disorder” tell us about the general idea of the whole album and about Curtis’ feelings, “to have the spirit but lose the feeling”: the protagonist has the spirit of an artist, and he can not fit into the normal world . The protagonist can not stand the banality of everyday life while his depression, epilepsy and his personal demons torture him and make him lose his mind.

The second song, “Day Of The Lords” is a slow, dense and dark song, it is mainly composed by a jangly-droning guitar and a threatening ascending bassline, here we emphasize on the heavy atmosphere and musical density. The first synthesizers of the album begin to create a vibrant and chilling tone, as the song climbs a constant climax to its end. The lyrics tell us about birth, and the agony of growing and living:

“This is the room, the start of it all,
No portrait so fine, only sheets on the wall,
I’ve seen the nights, filled with bloodsport and pain,
And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained…

The next track “Candidate” is mainly composed by drums and bass, but the most memorable point of the track focuses on the sound of the guitar, it sounds like it is really far away from you (thanks to Martin Hannett’s production). The song seems to be about someone in love who passionately declares his feelings, leaving his heart uncovered, only to be rejected by the beloved in the end.

The following “Insight” has a catchy , albeit terrifying and strange nature. It starts atmospheric with spooky sounds, and throughout the song electronic noises are heard and Curtis sounds as if he is scared to death. The song is about giving up on life, losing interest and hope, looking back on the past and wishing to have done something productive with your time instead of wasting it:

“Guess you dreams always end.
They don’t rise up, just descend,
But I don’t care anymore,
I’ve lost the will to want more,
I’m not afraid not at all,
I watch them all as they fall,
But I remember when we were young.

Song number five, “New Dawn Fades” is a pulsating and depressing song, that begins with a strange, looped instrumental towards the rhythm section’s appearance, Hook’s bass has a kind of sepulchral sound, Sumner’s guitar sounds like it is trying to slowly scale an impossible height, trying to rise above where it was. Ian Curtis’s vocals reflect on trying to escape a poisonous entropy, he is searching for an unknown feeling.

The next song, ”She’s Lost Control”, has a simple, peculiar, and repetitive drum beat. That’s because producer Martin Hannett let Stephen Morris play on the roof of the studio. Hannett was obsessed by drum sounds, and wanted the drums to sound as perfect as possible. The drum beat is repeated through the entire song, and the bass-guitar riff carves a sick feeling. After each verse, there is a short guitar interlude. The song was about a woman with epilepsy that Curtis had met at the Macclesfield job centre where he worked. Curtis saw the woman had an epileptic fit, and when a few days later the same woman died, this had a profound effect on Curtis. 

“Confusion in her eyes that says it all.
She’s lost control.
And she’s clinging to the nearest passer by,
She’s lost control.
And she gave away the secrets of her past,
And said I’ve lost control again,
And a voice that told her when and where to act,
She said I’ve lost control again….

We continue with the song “Shadowplay”, that enhances the balance of the band: the gloomy and melodic range of Ian, the snorting and creaking of the guitars which also carve rusty melodies, the bass of Hook with the guitars of Sumner giving excellent results for the subliminal and toned composition of the keyboards, the constantly decreasing and increasing drumming. The alienation and abandonment of Curtis became visible, Ian felt alone in the audience, since most of the people attending his concerts did not understand the brutal emotional charge of what he was singing.

The song “Wilderness” doesn’t stand out by its sound, but it’s interesting lyrics about organized religion being a roadblock to progress in many instances throughout time. It makes references to Jesus Christ and his execution for being different and preaching something that was new at the time. 

The penultimate song “Interzone” features Peter Hook doing backing vocals. Here we have a quite catchy guitar riff, the drums aren’t that fast but they strangely fit the song. The song is a tribute to the novel “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs.

Finally, the song that closes the album is titled “I Remember Nothing”, which is the darkest and most disturbing track of the album. The atmosphere here is very different to all the previous songs, we have a low bass and slow drums, so that later the guitar enters gradually. Curtis’ voice is very emotional, and it seems that it sounds like a voice that doesn’t leave your head. There are creepy sounds (like a glass bottle breaking into pieces). Curtis says goodbye to the record with his asphyxiating and lugubrious voice that intones the following:

“We were strangers, for way too long.
We were strangers,
We were strangers, for way too long.
For way too long…

The negative effects of epilepsy on his health along with his personal problems (including his divorce and his drug-addiction) were perhaps some of the causes that contributed to Ian Curtis committing suicide at the age of 23. Joy Division played more and more concerts and Curtis’ epileptic attacks occuring on stage had become uncontrollable and his medication did not work properly. The stress of presenting himself to the public pushed Ian to take an overdose of phenobarbital shortly after finishing the recordings of the second album “Closer”.

A few days before the group went to begin its first tour in the United States, on the night of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis committed suicide in his house following a ritual: he took a pitcher of coffee, poisoned the food of the pigeons that he fed regularly on his terrace and which, according to him, were the reflection of his overwhelmed (but free) soul.

He watched the movie “Stroszek” by director Werner Herzog (a film about an aspiring street musician who commits suicide), finished a bottle of whiskey, listened to Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot, and finally hung himself on an old clothesline he had in the kitchen.

Curtis was cremated two days later and his ashes were buried in Macclesfield, with the inscription “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on his tombstone. This epitaph, chosen personally by his wife Deborah Curtis, is the title of Joy Division’s best-known song. After Curtis’ suicide, the remaining members of Joy Division formed the legendary new wave band “New Order”.

Unknown Pleasures and the post-punk movement laid the groundwork for the style of upcoming legendary bands like The Cure or The Smiths, and new Wave bands like New Order, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, etc… In this regard it is not surprising to discover an amazing and pioneering quality to it when we listen.

This is an album that you may have discovered in 1979, 2009, or 2019, and that will always keep its powerful, unforgettable and terrifying impact on your mind. The legacy of Unknown Pleasures will continue as long as there are industrialized cities, isolation, loneliness, confusion, sadness, courage, youth and disenchantment.

by Octavio Carbajal González