Martin Hannett & Joy Division: A match made in Heaven

Martin Hannett was the pre-eminent post-punk producer. With Unknown Pleasures and Closer Joy Division and Hannett created new types of sounds. Those records have gone on to be vastly influential. Their production was informed by a wild imagination and the application of the latest technology. Hannett had a hand in the very devices he was using and was lucky enough to work in very advanced recording studios.

This blog post is a counterpart to a two part video I made last year. The first talks about what Hannett was doing in terms of production. You’re reading an expanded version now.

The second video talks about some practical ways to use these techniques in your productions if you make music.

Martin Hannett: Early Life

Martin Hannett kind of fell into production work. He was born into a working class Catholic family in Manchester in 1948. As a kid he started playing bass at the time of the beat boom of the sixties. He studied Chemistry but did not pursue a career in it. Chemicals were one thing he would pursue though and they’d ultimately lead to his downfall.

He played in bands a little but drifted into doing live sound for bands. This was how he learned the basics of his craft as a record producer. He was, by all accounts a wizardy presence. Surrounded by a cloud of smoke. Often tripping his proverbials off. He resembled Tom Baker’s Dr Who with his heavy overcoat and curly hair.

Spiral Scratch

When Punk came around he took the suitably nihilistic pseudonym Martin Zero. He was in the right place and the right time to record Buzzocks’ profoundly influential Spiral Scratch EP.

Spiral Scratch was the first independent Punk record. Buzzcocks were the third UK Punk band to release a record but the first to do it independently. They themselves organised the wildly spoken of and lionised Sex Pistols concerts at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall.

After setting himself up as a producer and taking back his given name he was in exactly the right place to indulge his whims, to start injecting unworldly atmospheres into the records he was making.

The beauty of Buzzcocks’ record lies in it’s simplicity. The records Martin Hannett would become famous for were very different.

Martin Hannett’s musical influences

He was a little older than the Punk crowd he had fallen in with. As a consequence he had a bigger pool of musical influences to draw on. He’d come of age during psychedelia, loved dub, krautrock and records going back to the 50s. Records from all genres, rockabilly, surf, doo-wop, easy listening all used artificial spaces as part of the production. These are all things the young Martin Hannett will have heard and soaked up.

In House Producer

His next major job was the first Joy division album. It wasn’t his only work but it’s definitely what he’s ben known for. In his capacity as house producer for Factory Records he did great work with A Certain Ratio, The Durrutti Column and my favourites, ESG. Aside from Factory his own personal favourite production was Magazine’s The Correct Use of Soap.

Here’s Factory band A Certain Ratio with some scratchy doom funk. A Certain Ratio, were, according to Factory Records main man ‘The New Sex Pistols’. They were anything in reality but especially after the addition of Drummer Donald Johnson made some great post-punk records. The band is to the forefront but you can clearly hear Hannett’s input in the spaces between the instruments.

Martin Hannett’s Production Style

The hallmarks of his work are the creation of artificial spaces which deceive the ear. Rather than faithfully recreating the sound of a band in a room he went out of his way to create a surreal sound-scape. He chose to invent new worlds.

Useful Idiots

In more than one way what Martin Hannett did with Joy Division is similar to what George Martin did with the Beatles. he let them out of their box. He was musically sophisticated enough to communicate ideas they were not.

Their music lent itself to his production techniques. Rhythmically it was regimented. There was space between the instruments too. Space that Hannett could fill with atmosphere.

‘Digital’-Martin Hannett and AMS Systems

Hannett again: “The Factory Sample was the first thing I did with them, I think I’d had a new AMS delay line for about two weeks. It (the song) was called ‘Digital’, it was heaven sent.”

Around this time digital components were getting easier to find for electronic engineers. One company that was starting to use these devices creatively was AMS systems. They were based not far away in Burnley.

Hannett would meet the two owners of the company in a supermarket car park halfway between them at night. Hannett would dominate the conversation. He wasn’t there to learn. He would describe the sounds that he heard in his head, the sounds he wanted to hear on record.

So Hannett had creative input on the functions of the same sound toys he was using. It helped that he had access to a world class studio too.

Strawberry Studios

The band 10CC were themselves innovative in the studio. Songs like ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’ and ‘I’m not in Love’ were highly polished. They were successful too. Their impressive sales allowed them to invest in a state of the art recording facility.

Here’s an ITV news report of the device Godley and Creme of 10CC used on their album ‘Consequences’, recorded at Strawberry Studios.

Godley & Creme-ITV news report

Mancunian Potheads

the ‘Consequences’ album was a huge folly. 18 months in the making in the making it was massively indulgent and just about the apotheosis of punk. Journalists were flown to Amsterdam, plied with strong weed and promptly fell asleep during the test hearing.

Martin Hannett was what they called a ‘dope-head’ too. Journalist Paul Morley says he was the first person he saw smoking it. By all accounts he was high basically all of the time in the studio. All this tripping and smoking doubtless had an effect on the audio worlds that Martin Hannett sought to create.

Surreal Sound Stages

Martin Hannett and Joy Division in the studio

“They were a gift to a producer because they did not have a clue, they didn’t argue.”

Martin Hannett

For the recording of Unknown Pleasures Martin Hannett had many of the sound-toys that 10CC themselves had used. As well as all this technology and the AMS delay systems Martin Hannett engaged in psychological warfare with Joy Division.

He would not allow them in the control room. He infamously demanded that drummer Stephen Morris deconstruct his drumkit and play each part bit by bit.

“I would have to record the whole song just playing the bass drum and nothing else. Then the snare drum and nothing else until I’d built up the part from all the individual peices. This took significantly longer than the conventional method of recording and was ten times more confusing”

Stephen Morris, ‘Record Play Pause’

This was of course no easy task. Morris ended up with Bruises on his legs from his muscle memory’s inability to separate parts. He hit himself with sticks instead of other drums. It made the drums mechanical sounding too.

But this approach worked. It interlocked perfectly with Joy Division’s music. Hannett took those songs and made something totally original sounding out of them.

Robot Rhythms

For ‘She’s Lost Control’ Hannett built up an otherworldly rhythm track. Acoustic drums, were layered with a Syn Drum; an early electronic drum pad. There was the sound of an aerosol can tape head cleaner being sprayed. Drummer Stephen Morris nearly passed out from the fumes.

There’s innovation in the other instrumentation too, Hook had started to play high on the neck in the rehearsal studio. His cheap amplification meant that low notes simply weren’t getting heard. High register basslines, often with a droning low note became a Joy Division trademark.

The guitar takes up a very specific place in the mix, a restrained Stooges type riff. No Solo. It feels boxed in, like contained rage. Above everything floats Curtis’ vocal, detached, a woozy echo simulating mental turmoil.

All of these sounds were processed through Strawberry Studios equipment and Martin Hannett’s personal arsenal of sound-toys.

An Incredibly Productive Period

Joy Division only existed for quite a short period of time. During that time they recorded 53 songs. They were very productive. Bear in mind that most of the band were holding down regular jobs. Out of four, three were married. One, Ian Curtis, had a child.

Despite these commitments Joy Division practiced a few nights a week. According to the website Songkick they travelled eleven thousand miles for for 138 gigs.

The band themselves had envisioned something more physical for their debut, more similar to their live act. Hook and Sumner were apparently very disappointed. They were probably too close to their own work. If you want to get an idea of how the band were as a live proposition then you could do worse than listen to ‘Les Bains Douche‘. It’s an excellent document of a Paris Concert from 18th of December 1979, right between the recording of their two albums

How Joy Division Composed

According to all accounts the rehearsal room is where everything happened. Morris was, like his hero, Jaki Liebezeit, of CAN, a human metronome. He provided a disciplined framework of insistent beats. On top of this Peter Hook on bass and Bernard Sumner would jam, making new shapes and sections. Joy Division would jam for hours. Ian Curtis would act as selector. He’d tell the other members what riffs he thought were good. He’d suggest how to construct the songs.

It seems that of the band Curtis communicated best with Hannett. None of the other members are idiots, they’ve all written books, but Hannett shut them out. He considered them subnormal and wasn’t shy in telling them that.

“The was Martin’s and when you were in the studio you were working for Martin and his whims”

Stephen Morris

The studio was Martin Hannett’s domain. He was in the driving seat. He would make the Band play separately, building records from the ground up.

Transmission and Atmosphere

After ‘Unknown Pleasures’ Martin Hannett and Joy Division recorded a pair of singles.

Transmission was a pop hit that should have been. It had echoes of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ and the Stooges ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ in it’s insistent high piano part. The refrain of ‘Dance to the radio’ was almost tailor made to break through commercially. But that wasn’t to happen. Through northern bloody-mindedness Factory refused to play the commercial game.

Their commercial approach to Atmosphere was even less commercial. It’s perhaps their most beautiful song. one that has taken on a far greater significance over the years.

The fact that ‘Atmosphere’ was released as a limited edition single on an obscure Belgian record label was typically contrarian. This was of course an anthem, or maybe a hymn, in the making. Tony Wilson knew this, a privately religious man he had ‘Atmosphere’ played at his funeral.

Each Joy Division song was a new canvas. It was a canvas for Ian Curtis to convey his increasingly intense feelings over.

The recording of ‘Closer’

For the follow up album Closer Joy Division used Pink Floyd’s London Studio at Britannia Row. As before he separated the instruments and placed them in their own psycho-acoustic spaces. Here’s ‘Heart and Soul’ from Closer Joy Division’s second and final album. The sue of artificial spaces can be clearly heard.

“You could send sound through piped speakers and P.A. Systems all over the building. There was one particular great big room, a snooker room, in which we put a massive P.A. set up with loads of microphones and it sounded amazing. There was no need to use artificial ambience, even if we wanted to, so many of the rooms sounded fantastic naturally”

Bernard Sumner ‘Chapter & Verse’

Of course being Martin Hannett, he didn’t only use natural spaces. He had his AMS delay. On hand at Stawberry and Brittania Row were plate reverbs, springs, tape-echoes. Along with echo chambers these were the building blocks of artificial reverberation in the 60s and 70s. Hannett would add all these flavours to the mix.

Of course, nowadays with impulse responses and VSTs this kind of thing is a million times easier to do. You don’t have to own a stairwell to put your drums in. You don’t really need to even own drums.

Martin Hannett, Mischief Maker

Hannett took his scientific background and mixed it up with illicit chemical influences. In the studio he adventurous, always wanting to push the boundaries of what was possible.

“His idea was ‘Good things come out of chaos’ So chaos is what he caused. He was like a little mischief maker.”

Peter Hook, Record Mirror interview.

In the second part of this post I’ll be going over ways that, if you’re a musician you can use some of the techniques that Hannett did in your own music.

Should you wish to dive straight in with doing that here’s my video where I talk you through some of the techniques.

Thanks for reading. Until next time take care.