The Ministry Of Truth

Synthesizer and peal of chimes
(4:01-4:03)

It is one of the spooky coincidences of iPod ownership that my iPod’s shuffle function should this morning have played me SMIP #3, the day on which Anton Corbijn’s movie biography of Ian Curtis, Control, is released. (Another was my previous iPod’s unnatural attachment to Suzanne Vega’s Luka, something I was delighted changed when Apple had to replace my unit under warranty when its hard drive failed. I absolutely refute any suggestion that I threw that iPod against a wall when Ms. Vega’s voice piped up once too often.)

Atmosphere – initially entitled Chance – is perhaps not the best track to play to oneself while driving up the A1(M) to a job you despise at 6.45am on a dark, misty and chilly autumn morning, but there you go. It’s either that or I take the backroads and pass a road sign for a place called Souldrop. One way or the other, it’s hard to get fired up for another ten hours in the office…

It is practically impossible to separate Joy Division’s music from Ian Curtis’s mental illness: it is too easy to read into every line that Curtis’s lyrics and their Voice Of Doom delivery were a prolonged cry for help that went unheeded. The typical images of Curtis – monochromal, swathed in industrial shadows, or sweating and maniacally wide-eyed, lost in his music, on stage – reinforce the impression of a soul far deeper and darker than his bandmates or friends ever seemed to notice.

Curtis’s Wikipedia entry has it that “Many of Curtis’ writings were filled with cavernous-deep imagery of emotional isolation, death, alienation and urban degeneration.” Atmosphere is no different:

“My illusion, worn like a mask of self-hate, confronts and then dies. Don’t walk away. People like you find it easy…” (1:49-2:39)

It’s another Curtis lyric about desolate isolation. When a 23-year-old father hangs himself, how can lyrics like this have been anything but a desperate plea?

Shortly before his own recent death, Tony Wilson told a BBC documentary about Factory Records that two weeks before Curtis’s suicide he asked Curtis’s mistress, Annik Honore, what she thought of the band’s just-completed second album, Closer:

“She goes, ‘I’m terrified.’ I said, ‘What are you terrified of?’ She replies, ‘Don’t you understand? He means it.’ And I go, ‘No, he doesn’t mean it – it’s art.’ And guess what, he fucking meant it.”

Even had Curtis’s life not ended as and when it did it would be difficult to imagine a band whose output – lyrical and musical – so comprehensively introduced its audience to life’s bleakest aspects and enraged alienation. My Chemical Romance don’t know they’re born.

For me, Atmosphere‘s appeal has remarkably little to do with Ian Curtis’s lyrics or his performance (which is nevertheless one of his best). This record’s chief appeal lies in its arrangement, production and, in particular, the shimmering keyboard flourishes (played by Bernard Sumner) that bookend each verse – “produced to sound like rays of light from the heavens, a beautiful contrast of light against the heavy rhythmic doom down below”, as allmusic.com’s Ned Raggett would have it.

The fondly shambolic presentation of Factory Records’ in-house producer, the late Martin Hannett, in Michael Winterbottom’s movie 24 Hour Party People and as the butt of countless documentarised anecdotes suggests just another producer in the “mad genius” vein of Phil Spector and Joe Meek. But, by Christ, he knew his way around a recording studio and a mixing desk. The bands may not always have liked Hannett’s finished product or the methods by which he achieved his recordings, but it is unthinkable now to imagine that he was anything less than a fifth, unofficial member of Joy Division, the midwife assisting the birth of Factory Records and a thousand legends and urban myths.

The surviving (rarely satisfactory) live recordings of Joy Division showcase aspects of the band that appear only infrequently in their studio work (thought both demonstrate that Morris merits serious consideration as one of the best drummers in rock and pop history – it’s perversely delicious that the song with which he is most associated, New Order’s Blue Monday, utilises a drum machine; how I would love to believe that the story in 24 Hour Party People of Hannett once making Morris play his drum kit on the studio roof was true), but Hannett’s studio work adds a dimension to the band’s songs that a more conventional producer would surely never have achieved.

Joy Division’s live sound depended largely on Sumner’s jagged guitar assault to create an industrial soundscape, augmented by Morris’s imperious timekeeping and crisp snare. Hannett’s studio recordings push Peter Hook’s bass and Morris’s drums more to the fore, bathing the latter in particular in reverb and echo. Sumner’s guitars were softened and quietened in the mix, complemented by his synthesiser work in a manner that, as a man with just the two arms, he obviously could not emulate on stage.

Atmosphere – recorded in October and November 1979, before the Closer sessions, but only released posthumously – represents, alongside Love Will Tear Us Apart, the first signs that Joy Division’s sound was evolving from its post-punk roots into (or at least making the occasional concession to) more mainstream rock.

Opening with Hook’s haunting bass line and Sumner’s layered synths, the record quickly combines Hook’s twists with ritualistic bursts from Morris’s drum kit (from 0:03), building to create an etheral aural canvas on which Curtis laid down an atypically controlled baritone performance (from 0:25). Sumner’s guitar is not even introduced until 3:21.

By the final, scintillating release of synthesizer and peal of chimes (4:01-4:03), those listeners to Atmosphere prepared to submit to its mesmerising meanderings should be crying, smiling or – best of all – both.

Drink, drugs and obesity did for Hannett, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1991, aged 42. With the benefit of hindsight it is difficult to claim that he achieved anything of substance (pun intended) other than produce Joy Division’s studio work and New Order’s first album – but as Mr. Baby would have it: “Fuck it, that was a good life in the office.”

Hannett’s outstanding achievement, Atmosphere was voted by listeners to John Peel’s show as the best song of the millennium. There are higher accolades, but that’ll do.

Read a lovely anecdote about first discovering Atmosphere by blogger Lee Rourke on writer Laura Hird’s website.

This is Anton Corbijn’s 1988 video for Atmosphere:

Grrrrr, come right back – I just can’t bear it.
I’ve got some love and I long to share it!
(0:32-0:40)

Some things just shouldn’t work – for example, the aerodynamics of a bumble bee; OJ Simpson’s defences; Patrick Kielty.

A record with slightly-out-of-tune guitars, vocals that sound like they were recorded with a bucket over the singer’s head and drums that somehow manage to be simultaneously both a yard in front of and a metre behind the beat recorded by a band whose members included a professional hairdresser and produced by an emotionally unstable megalomaniac should definitely be one such thing.

And yet, and yet…  The sum is so extraordinarily greater than its parts – the very thing that makes pop music so wonderful – that we have our second Sublime Moment In Pop.

Have I The Right? was an August 1964 number one for The Honeycombs: beginning life as The Sheratons, the band comprised drummer Ann “Honey” Lantree, lead guitarist Martin Murray (day job – coiffeur), Honey’s older brother John on bass, Alan Ward on rhythm guitar and lead vocalist Dennis D’Ell (born Denis Dalziel).

They were spotted playing in a London pub by the pioneering and unconventional independent producer Joe Meek, who became their manager.  At a later gig as part of their residency at the Mild May Tavern in the East End, they were seen by songwriting team Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley – the closest thing to Stock Aitken Waterman early 60s Britain could offer, the duo wrote hits for Lulu, Petula Clark, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and their song I’ve Lost You was recorded by someone called Elvis Presley – who sent them back off to Meek with their new song Have I The Right?

The words “troubled” and “genius” might have been struck for Joe Meek, whose life and death have been the source for at least three biographies, a stage play (now being turned into a movie) and a raft of documentaries.  The Tornados were the first British band to top the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1962 with the Meek produced and composed Telstar (a record inexplicably chosen by That Bloody Woman as one of her Desert Island Discs).  Meek wrote or produced for artists as diverse as Lonnie Donegan, John Leyton (the number one Johnny Remember Me) and Humphrey Lyttelton while harbouring an unhealthy obsession with Buddy Holly and repressing a gay lifestyle that would not be decriminisalised until 1967 and accepted until much later.

Unable to read or write music, Meek nevertheless produced and/or wrote 40 UK chart hits between 1957 and 1964 creating a style as distinctive as Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound but via the use of overdubbing, echo, reverb and intense compression rather than the cavalcade of musicians Spector favoured.  Installing The Honeycombs into his three-floor flat/recording studio complex at 304 Holloway Road, Islington (above a “leather goods shop” – it must be a euphemism, though I’m not sure for what), Meek set about crafting what would transpire to be his last big hit.

The band’s USP was its female drummer, so Meek – naturally – set out about burying Honey’s drumming beneath a wall of percussion, handclaps and thumping “bass drums” that were actually a recording of the band members stamping their feet on the staircase of 304 Holloway Road while Meek stood at the same time with one foot in his bath and the other banging out the rhythm on his bathroom’s floorboards, microphone wires trailing the height of the flat to a two-track recorder in a top-floor bedroom.  Compressing the “drums” track to within an inch of its life created a sound that remains unique and beguiling, despite not all band members being quite as adept at keeping steady time as the fragrant Ms. Lantree.  How Honey felt about her drumming going virtually unheard on her band’s number one single is unrecorded.

D’Ell’s vocal technique reminds the listener of Gene Pitney on amphetamines, a double-tracked tremulous vibrato, straining – not always entirely successfully – for some of the chorus’s higher notes.  Murray’s guitar (almost certainly manipulated electronically by Meek during the recording) forever teeters precariously on the brinks of flat and sharp.  The keyboard runs in the verses (played by Ward) represent Meek’s only obvious nod towards his beloved electronica.

Individually, there remains relatively little to commend this recording – the final sound as the track fades out (2:54) is of fingers lifting from a fretboard – but its collective vibrancy stands as a headlong rush through the sort of lyric that simply couldn’t be written today.  If read as a plain love song, long gone are the days when one might first stop to consider whether or not one’s advances might be welcomed; if read as the coded gay rights anthem many believe it to be, that fight has thankfully been won.

But that victory came too late for Meek.  Having been charged with “importuning for immoral purposes” in 1963, Meek was subsequently blackmailed.  In January 1967, police in Suffolk discovered a suitcase containing the mutilated body of Bernard Oliver, an alleged rent boy who was known to have associated with Meek.

His musical career all but over and his mind affected by drugs and the stress of the police investigation, on 3 February 1967 – eight years to the day after Buddy Holly died in a plane crash – Meek murdered his landlady Violet Shenton before turning the shotgun on himself.

Surfing the wave of the British Invasion that overwhelmed America in 1964, The Honeycombs took Have I The Right? to number five in the Billboard chart, lasted a couple more years and managed a handful of further, minor hits on both sides of the Atlantic before disbanding.  Dennis D’Ell died in 2005 but a new version of The Honeycombs, led by Martin Murray as the only original member, still performs in cabaret.  Have I The Right? and D’Ell’s growled introduction to its chorus resonates to this day.

Legend has it that Joe Meek turned down, at various times, the chance to produce Rod Stewart, David Bowie and The Beatles, but the list of those with whom he did work is almost as impressive – Tom Jones, Gene Vincent, Billy Fury, Frankie Vaughan (for whom he produced the legendary lesbian-chic chart-topper Green Door), Shirley Bassey, Tommy Steele…  Today, a blue plaque rightly hangs on the wall of 304 Holloway Road and Meek is recognised for having developed recording techniques that would soon propel The Beach Boys and The Beatles to artistic heights that could not have been reached without his pioneering genius.

This footage of The Honeycombs miming to Have I The Right? is taken from the 1965 film Pop Gear: