Punk rock took a while to filter out of London into other parts of the UK, but when it did the results where often more interesting. Take Joy Division, for instance. The band had come together in the wake of the Sex Pistol's gig at Manchester's Free Trade Hall in 1977. Initially trading under the suitably doomy moniker of Warsaw, they recorded a debut album in 1978 for RCA, but production problems led to it being scrapped. They reconvened with producer Martin Hannett in April 1979, and recorded Unknown Pleasures in less than a week.
The band, relative novices in the studio, were treated as a blank canvas by Hannett, whose production swathed the instruments in his trademark harsh metallic reverb and augmented Steven Morris' metronomic rhythms with drum machines. The overall mood of darkness is powered by Peter Hook's driving bass lines and Bernard Sumner's jagged guitar, apparently influenced by the decidedly non punk Black Sabbath. Above this eerie soundscape floats the spectral baritone of the late Ian Curtis, whose lyrical themes dealt in existential dread and pessimism, the darkness at the heart of the modern urban experience. Ironically for a band so associated with the recession hit post-punk years, Curtis was a Tory voter.
Enormously influential, not least on U2's early sound, Joy Divison would only record one more album, the glacially monumental Closer, before Curtis' untimely suicide. With Unknown Pleasures they created a template that would spawn hordes of angst ridden, black clad doom merchants in long overcoats, but few of its imitators matched its disturbing power, which still sounds defiantly strange and vaguely unsettling today.
No comments:
Post a Comment