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:
Atmosphere? Isn’t that Russ Abbott?
Sorry. I’ll just shut up and actually read it now.
For that, I should ban your access to the Ministry.
Okay here’s where I get off the bus. First of all, some of the things I will not seek to deny:
a) vast amounts of people of my generation, many of whom are either from, went to University to, or desperately wish they lived in, Manchester, connect to the music of Joy Division and New Order as if it spoke to them directly;
b) there is a certain unique lyrical and romantic quality associated with Ian Curtis and he certainly has his place in the pantheon of rock’s tragic figures alongside the likes of Syd Barrett, Nick Drake and Stuart Sutcliffe (and God knows rock leans on its young-dead heroes as much as any art-form);
c) the music of Joy Division, and in particular Atmosphere, is a fusion of synth-pop with the punk ethos and is thus of considerable fascination to music enthusiasts and historians; and
d) Atmosphere, unlike its Russ Abbott counterpart, is a sincere, thoughtful and well-crafted piece of installation art with a dream-like quality absolutely befitting the lyrics and no doubt helping teenagers all over the world overcome their terrible problems.
But COME ON. This isn’t pop and, unless the 4 minutes that went before transfixed you into a dream-like state, it isn’t sublime. Or does SMIP now stand for “Subliminal Moments in Post-Punk”?
Just as we have John Ford to blame for the hundreds of crappy westerns made in America over the last half a century, so it appears we have the Sex Pistols to blame for inflicting upon us vocalists who can’t sing. And boy do we get that with Ian Curtis. But at least the Pistols rocked out – their music, however nihilistic, was uplifting in its rage and liberating in its apathy, and above all, it was the power of the music itself that appealed (to me, anyway). Listening to Joy Division is like being trapped with some self-important wanker in his university halls of residence bedroom telling you about his experiences with mushrooms whilst Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” plays on an endless loop in the background (don’t ask me why I went up there in the first place – I think he had a bootleg copy of Clockwork Orange he was going to lend me).
The opening bars of Atmosphere sound eerily like the opening bars of that musical monument “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by titans Midge Ure and Bob Geldof. The remainder of the song, whilst possessing of a little more dignity that the Band Aid smash, has about the same amount of appeal to me. At least Band Aid had Bono singing a couple of bars – he might have made a better fist of hitting whatever notes it is Ian Curtis is purporting to hit.
It comes to this: the 80s was one of the worst decades in British history and it got the music scene it deserved. It was a terrifying coagulation of all the worst elements of British culture we’ve even seen – bad clothing, bad hair, bad (or no) movies, betamax, Dynasty, bad telly, bad attitude, confused politics, zero appreciation of beauty and art and above all, a really screwed up sense of what is actually fun. People might think Joy Division was an antidote to all of this, but Atmosphere fires them and their successors New Order right into the cultural heart of that slurrilous decade. With due respect to him, the most tragic thing about Ian Curtis is what it says about us that he’s what experts hold up as evidence of Britain’s pre-eminence in songwriting.
Oh, and if all of that hasn’t made you want to send the boys round already, can I also point out that the jawas in the video are extremely distracting?
I’m not being deliberately provocative or willfully perverse, but I’m struggling with the proposition that great moments in pop music must necessarily involve great, or even just good, singers. If that’s the case we can immediately write off any music involving Jarvis Cocker, David Bowie, Ray Davies, Buddy Holly, Liam Gallagher, Ian Brown, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain, Paul Weller, Michael Stipe, Morrissey, Sting, Marc Bolan, David Byrne, Joe Strummer, Patti Smith….
Very few of the greatest rock and pop stars have been great singers – neither McCartney nor Lennon were but both had individual, readily identifiable styles and both could carry a tune.
Off the top of my head I’m struggling to get much further than Scott Walker, Steve Marriott, Karen Carpenter, Art Garfunkel and Elvis. (As an utterly irrelevant aside, my late grandfather used to maintain that Elvis Presley couldn’t sing for toffee and that, apparently, was why Colonel Parker never let him perform outside of the States. I loved my granddad but we never quite saw eye to eye on that particular theory; I can only assume his auditory canal was affected by coal dust.)
Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Julie London (among many others) were all wonderful singers, but none of them sang rock and pop. And we can all rattle off a seemingly endless list of jaw-dropping soul singers – Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Levi Stubbs, Wilson Pickett, David Ruffin, Ronald Isley, Sam & Dave, Al Green, Dusty Springfield, Gladys Knight, Mary J. Blige… – but I’m talking for now about pure rock and pop.
I deliberately tried in my post to emphasise that my love of Atmosphere was precisely because of the mesmeric effect of its arrangement and production – essentially Martin Hannett’s contribution, as can be very tangibly discerned by comparing the final release with the Heart And Soul compilation version of Chance that the band first assembled (and which prominently features something that sounds like an emphesemic didgeridoo) – and that Curtis’s lyrics and performance were very much secondary considerations.
(That said, the Minister and his wife were not the only people to emerge from the 12.10pm screening of Control yesterday blubbing like babies, the final scenes being accompanied – entirely predictably but no less powerfully – by an edited version of Atmosphere.)
I’m clearly not a Curtis obsessive because the movie revealed to me a number of things about Curtis’s life, illness, personality and death that, if true, make him less a tragic figure, more like a bit of a twat. I recommend the movie very highly – the photography is superb, some of the tracking shots astonishing and the attention to period detail is without fault. Some of the dialogue is rather clunky but it feels as though you are watching documentary footage from the 1970s rather than a recreation 30 years on. It almost certainly helps that Corbijn met, photographed and knew Curtis instead of only idolised his legend.
I don’t like Joy Division and New Order because I want to be a Mancunian anymore than I love Stax because I’d like to have been poor and black in Tennessee in the 1940s . I like Joy Division and New Order because their sounds appeal to me.
Apparently, I’ve currently got 17,449 tracks in my iTunes Library, artists from A-Ha to ZZ Top, genres from ‘Alternative’ to ‘Soundtrack’ via ‘Classical’ and ‘Jazz’. I won’t defend every single one of those recordings because some are, naturally, album fillers, compilation tracks and/or bobbins, but I’ll defend everything I love – there are 833 tracks in the My Top Rated playlist – on the basis that it sounds good to me and makes me feel, regardless of the abilities of the singer (or, in the case of the White Stripes, the drummer). Joy Division is not my everyday choice of listening – they have just the two, predictable entries in My Top Rated – but I listen to their output (particularly the Substance 1977-1980 compilation) once in a while and enjoy almost all of it.
I also can’t accept as legitimate criticism that Atmosphere should be dismissed because its introduction sounds a bit like Do They Know It’s Christmas?, written five years later, but I think you may have been yanking my chain on that point, so I’ll let it slide.
Whether or not you like Curtis’s singing, I’m not going to dismiss any band that can produce, in the first 26 seconds of Love Will Tear Us Apart, one of the most arresting introductions in the history of pop music. I find it inconceivable that someone under the age of 45 would not insist upon hearing the remaining three minutes of that song after that introduction – which is up there alongside A Hard Day’s Night (yes, just that one chord), Bittersweet Symphony, A Town Called Malice and Smells Like Teen Spirit (none of which feature sensational singers) alongside the very best introductions ever recorded.
As for Curtis’s songwriting, I’ll grant you it’s not all that difficult to write the lyric, “Isolation, isolation, isolation,” – the chorus to Joy Division’s song, er, Isolation – but have you actually read the lyric to Love Will Tear Us Apart? Lennon, Costello, Leonard Cohen – in fact, anyone – would have cut off an ear to write that lyric. http://www.iancurtis.org/songs/lovewilltearusapart.html
I’m a million miles away from claiming Curtis could hold a candle to Otis Redding, but if you think bad-but-successful singing began with John Lydon, you might want to listen to the back catalogue of Bob Dylan. People like Dylan (who couldn’t carry water, much less a tune) laid the foundations for Lydon, Curtis et al.
Back in the early days of rock and pop, there were independents, mavericks and trailblazers like Phil Spector and Joe Meek, like Dylan and Chuck Berry, who helped establish the first (and only) rule of pop – that there are no rules – the rule exploited most and best by The Beatles and Sir George Martin.
By the mid-70s that rule had been forgotten: it became more important to be technically proficient enough to perform a 17-minute freeform flute solo while spunking a quarter of a million bucks up a rope in studio time and cocaine bills. If anything, the punk movement reminded the world that the greatest thing about pop music is that anyone with half an inch of creativity and/or talent can make it.
Punk wasn’t a wiping of the slate – ABBA (lovely singers, of course), The Bee Gees and Fleetwood Mac were the most popular bands throughout the whole of punk – and relatively little of genuine merit emerged from the genuine punks (The Jam, Joy Division, Elvis Costello, etc, were New Wave acts, bridging the gap between punk and – gawd ‘elp us – New Romanticism), but it was a re-levelling of the playing field enabling the likes of Joy Division and The Jam (who would never have been signed by Columbia Records in 1974, for example) to emerge.
I, for one, am fucking glad it did. The alternative would have been unbearable – we’d be left listening to nothing but technically proficient but antiseptic singers like Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and virtually anybody ever associated with a television series involving Simon Cowell. Give me Paul Weller and Ian Curtis any day.
I actually agree with the vast majority of what you say here, and the point I was trying to make has been missed. I count a significant majority of the people you namechecked at the start as good, if not great singers, in their field. Okay, Bowie couldn’t play the part of Calaf in Puccini’s Turandot, but as a rock vocalist he had few equals. Michael Stipe and Liam Gallagher are superb singers and their vocal performances are thoroughly musical.
I’m not calling for everyone to be Russell Watson, Cliff Richard or even Mariah Carey and that wasn’t the point I was trying to make, and I understand what makes a great rock vocalist. My point about Curtis is not that he refused to sing in tune (a la John Lydon), but that he didn’t know what a tune was and had absolutely no musicality. Jarvis Cocker, who barely sings at all, is intensely musical. There is a fundamental difference which ought to be recognised because a lack of musicality makes for an unpleasant listening experience.
I write not as a critic (I am not qualified) but as a classically trained singer and A Level music student, who has also sung with rock bands (mostly at other people’s behest, doing covers of the likes of Deep Purple and Rainbow, which vocally is more demanding than you might think).
You are not the only one who has recommended the film to me, and I feel sure I will love it. I find the whole Manchester scene fascinating and culturally undeniable, I simply don’t like the music and don’t subscribe to its elevation in the grand scheme of things. For example, I feel sure Buddy Holly (or his component parts at any rate) would be turning in his grave to even be mentioned in a blog about Joy Division.
There you go and, baby, here am I.
Well, you left me here so I could sit and cry.
Golly gee, what have you done to me?
Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anymore…
I’ve done everything
And now I’m sick of trying.
I’ve thrown away my nights,
Wasted all my days over you
You go your way, baby, and I’ll go mine
Now and forever ’til the end of time…
Bearing in mind cultural and sxeual revolutions took place in the 22 years between the composition of these two lyrics, I think Buddy Holly would actually have a reasonable amount in common with Ian Curtis.
Why is the bedroom so cold,
Turned away on your side?
Is my timing that flawed,
Our respect run so dry…?
Do you cry out in your sleep,
All my failings exposed?
There’s a taste in my mouth
As desperation takes hold…
Just can’t function no more.
When love will tear us apart again.
Oh, poor Buddy’s corpse is at 155 rpm now!
We should have a dead singers’ death match.
For me:
Buddy Holly:
Lyrics – 7
Music – 10
Performance – 7
Total – 24
He was to rock-and-roll music as J S Bach was to the baroque movement, terrific singer/performer, died young, probably under-rated.
Ian Curtis
Lyrics – 9
Music – 7 (for originality)
Performance – 4
Total 20
He maybe edges the lyrics, interesting rather than beautiful music, terrible singer/performer, died young, probably over-rated.
Come on bearders, what does the only true Mancunian think? And Dom de Plume I know you agree with me.
I think the Minister blew his cover when he said, “I don’t like Joy Division and New Order because I want to be a Mancunian”.
You should be so lucky to come from a city that’s done everything musical either first, bigger or better, from the first fully professional symphony orchestra, through Dylan being called “Judas”, the Sex Pistols gig that really launched them (and a hundred other bands. Well 99 bands. Simply Red don’t count), Morrisey and his retinue, northern soul before Wigan and house before London, Madchester, Take That (if you’re going to do modern boy bands, at least do it first and best…), world famous and genuinely influential superclubs, Britpop (at least we didn’t foist that pretentious twat Albarn on the country). Why are we not doing much at the moment? Because pop’s shit at the moment. Or should I say, pop’s shit because we’re not doing much at the moment.
As the genuinely late and genuinely great Anthony H. Wilson said, Manchester kids have the best record collections.
And on that note I feel I should point out I don’t own any Joy Division or in fact New Order (not even Love’s Got the World In Motion). They’ve just never floated my boat. Now where did I put my Showaddywaddy CD…
I should begin my overdue contribution to this long-cold debate by confessing that, despite my own musical training, I have never truly been able to tell the difference between the singing voices of Lennon and McCartney. When I really bother to think about it, I can tell maybe 50 per cent of the time. But I don’t often bother. I just listen.
I came late to pop music, but I came to it at a time in my life where I was not sure who I was and who I wanted to be. It was at this time that I was given a cassette, and for a while, it was all I had to play on my walkman. On one side, The Bends by Radiohead; on the other, Grand Prix by Teenage Fanclub. Not necessarily what someone enjoying the low of a confusing divorce should have been given, but we all have to start somewhere.
This thread has made me think about why I like the music that I do. Sometimes a melody just clings to me, but then so do the jingles that I hear every day while my son watches CBeebies. The music that has stayed with me tends to have been the music that helped me to understand what other people are like and how the world is. I often use music to remind me of a particular time or a particular feeling, or to put me in a certain mood. And it’s not often that I really need to remind myself whether Bob can fix it.
For me, music (but especially pop/rock music) is all about an interaction between me and the music. It may sound like I’m being simplistic, but it’s the reason why I don’t often think about who wrote the song, or whether the person singing it has received the undoubted benefit of musical training.
If the point is that I’m more likely to connect with a song performed by people who know how to play their instruments than I am with a song put together by people who don’t, then it’s true. But it’s also trite: pop/rock music is about so much more than getting everything just so.
I’m not aware that John Lydon ever deliberately sang out of tune. I thought his vocal manner had more to do with the fact that he really, really couldn’t sing for toffee in 1975, and he’s not much improved today. Any accusation that Jarvis Cocker cannot sing probably shows a general lack of familiarity with his work.
Nick Drake’s astonishing variety, Kurt Cobain’s screech, Mark Knopfler’s deadpan, Neil Young’s keening, Morrissey’s nostrilations, Joey Ramone’s mindlessness, Marvin Gaye’s heart, Mark E. Smith’s drawl: all have a place at my table. Does anyone care whether Flavor Flav’s music teacher would be proud of him?
“I’d always thought Damon Albarn was a wanker,” said [Dodgy's drummer Matt] Priest. “He’d say things like, ‘You’re looking very psychedelic tonight, Mathew’. I’m from Birmingham. What’s that about? He totally puts your back up. But I completely respect the cunt. He’s a genius.”
Put rather more succinctly, you don’t care if someone’s a good singer or not, as long as you like the music.
You certainly don’t pull any punches, but subject to the fact that I made it clear in Part 5 that classical training has precisely nothing to do with it but musicality has practically everything, I think we therefore agree.
Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Jarvis Cocker have particular singing styles which owe nothing to their music teachers (if indeed they ever needed them), but are all excellent singers, largely because they are musical people and the voice is integral to the overall sound being a pleasing one. John Lydon was a brilliant vocalist and there is a myth about punk that it was unmusical – that’s as untrue as it is about rap. But when someone cannot sing and caterwauls unmusically (a perfectly suitable example being Geri Halliwell on the track “Look at Me” or anyone who has ever heard the band PM Dawn live, and their are a dozen or so more we could all mention without too much effort), I will defend to the death someone else’s right to buy their record and even to hail their performance to the heavens, but on the basis that the music is ugly and displeasing to the ear as a result, I will neither part with the cash myself, nor support that person’s opinion.