5. Joy DivisionUnknown Pleasures
This made an impact on me big time. I had the pleasure of seeing them live before the album came out. I would frequently go over to London via boat and train, or to Liverpool or Manchester, and rough it. The only place you could get records was to go over to England, because they’d take months to come over to Ireland, and they’d be taxed. In Manchester, I didn’t know what I had seen because it was like the guy was in a trance, this mesmeric performance. People mimic Ian Curtis’ dance, but to actually be in the room and see it was quite impactful.
‘Transmission’ came first and was followed by this album. You’d read later that it was a bunch of lads that had wanted to go in and make a punk album, but the real force there was the producer, Martin Hannett. He saw what they had in them, and what Ian Curtis had as a lyricist, and brought in this otherworldly thing – the production, the sound of the drums. He was recording doors closing and lift shafts to create this cold, futuristic, dark thing.
But then the tunes! The opening song, ‘Disorder’ just pulled you right in. And you felt, here was real punk. Post punk, without all the clichés. I’d formed a band by then, and you have this sort of naive dream that you’re making something that no one had ever made before musically, but when you hear Unknown Pleasures it felt like no one had ever made this before. It was something totally new. Yes, it was using bass, drums, guitars, with keyboards here and there, but it felt like you were seeing right into the soul of darkness of this man. As a kid you’d need a thesis to understand what he was trying to say, but you felt this enormous connection with somebody that was lost and felt different to the rest of the world.
It still sounds like the future. The word “bleak” comes up, but it’s like everything is tuned to this intensity, almost like it’s foreign. That feels fucking great when you’re 19 and you hate the world. Like when you were 13 and Bowie made you feel normal, Ian Curtis and Joy Division made you feel normal with that angst that you can’t even explain, coming out in such a powerful and emotional way. There was nothing American about this. There was nothing old school about this. And then you go, “And they’re from Manchester?” which isn’t a million miles from Dublin in its stance of being seen as a poor brother of the big city of London. The album they follow this up with, Closer, is just as breathtaking. But this had this urgency and a new language. Their name isn’t even on the cover. That gave it a real uniqueness.
