London Calling JOY DIVISION

Rip It Up, Issue 35, 1 June 1980, Page 19

London Calling JOY DIVISION

Jeremy Templer

Unknown Pleasures is the biggest selling album to date for Manchester independent Factory Records. It’s not an easy album to listen to yet it sold some 40,000 copies in the UK and was a critics’ favourite last year. It’s music to play while the world is ending and Joy Division, like fellow Manchester band The Fall, are very good at it. With the financial push of a major record company the single that followed Unknown Pleasures might have been a HIT. Instead it never broke into the top forty and Joy Division (lan Curtis, vocals; Bernard Albrecht, guitar Peter Hook, bass, and Steve Morris, drums) wasn’t heard over the nation's breakfast tables.

“One of the problems with being a small independent, says Factory's Tony Wilson, “is that you can’t play the chart game. I would love to get a hit record. I’d love to see Joy Division doing ‘Transmission’ on Top of the Pops, so that’s where the pressure comes in to go with a major on a pressing and distribution deal ..." Rob Gretton, the manager and fifth member of Joy Division, determined the band would stay independent of a major label.

"Transmission” and Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark's "Electricity” were big enough hits in the independent charts to earn Factory’s position as the most critically acclaimed of England’s independent record companies. House producer Martin "Zero" Hannett has been an important part in Factory’s success. As producer at Rabid he worked with John Cooper Clarke and Jilted John and has most recently produced Magazine's new The Correct Use of Soap LP. Hannett, the sixth member of Joy Division, describes his role as that of an "aural maximiser". "With Joy Division, he said in a recent Zig Zag interview, "there's an ideal acoustic environment where you would see them it’s probably not a place and you try and arrange it to create the illusion you’re in that place. It's probably a sinister place." "To me, wrote lan Wood in New York Rocker, "the most compelling aspect of Joy Division is the depth and tonal fluidity of their live sound far stronger than on the record allied with the absolute vulnerability of singer lan Curtis. Joy Division makes the stage an emotional trapeze wire; what holds me is the feeling, like a kid at the circus, that Curtis is going to break down and fall off." Last month, on the eve of Joy Division’s first US tour, lan Curtis hanged himself. Little else is yet known of the circumstances surrounding the death of the 23-year-old singer. Factory Records will in the meantime go ahead as planned with the release of a second Joy Division LP (Curtis had approved the artwork just before his death). There’ll also be the new single "Love Will Tear Us Apart."