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The Aesthetic & Social Roots of Joy Division

This is the introduction to a series of essays and video essays*. In them I’ll be exploring some of the factors that gave rise to Joy Division. Not only the music they listened to but the society they lived in. Their aesthetic feel was influenced by the liminal spaces they occupied. All these played a part in the formation of the hive mind that was Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris. Each brought attitudes and influences shaped by life in what could have at that time ironically be called ‘Greater Manchester’.

*You may have already seen the video I did on Joy Division & Martin Hannett’s production methods

The aesthetics, philosophy and psychology of Joy Division could only have arisen at a particular point in space and time. 

Here are the Young men

A band is the product of it’s members. Each brings their own, experience, influences and energy into the equation. The members of Joy Division were all quite distinct personalities. The chemistry of a band is essential. So lets have a look at the different personalities that made up the band.

Two type of Joy Division member.

As shorthand we can consider two seperate subgroups: Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, working class beer loving Salford boys. We’ll refer to them from now on as ‘the lads’.

 Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook of Joy Division
The Oddballs and the Lads; (L-R) Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook.

The other group I’ll call the ‘the oddballs’. Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris went to the same school a year apart. They never associated during school despite sharing interests.

Their town, Macclesfield was green and a few social levels above Salford. It was well connected by train to the centre and suburbs. Both are remembered by the former book and record shop owners of Greater Manchester as an inquiring teenage presence.

MANCHESTER IN THE EARLY 1970s.

Birthplace of Joy Division

The north of England in particular suffered during the economic nightmare of the 1970s. Factories closed, dole queues grew.

Manchester, along with Salford, was the home of the industrial revolution. It’s difficult to overstate how central to the history of the western world the city has been. Aside from being the birthplace of industrialisation it’s where unionisation was born. 200 years ago Manchester mill workers refused to work with cotton harvested by slaves. It was a progressive place. The Communist manifesto was conceived in Manchester (Engels was a mill owner there). Smiths fans will no doubt rejoice in the fact that that the modern vegetarian movement started there too.

Going to Work by L.S. Lowry. A depiction of working class Manchester life in 1943

It had been a vibrant, busy city. Made famous by the paintings of L.S. Lowry who depicted the hordes of factory workers. Families lived in row houses, close up and personal. Whole families worked in the same jobs. Whole communities worked and lived together. Once production was moved out of town there was nothing left but poverty.

Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson described Manchester in the mid 70s as being like a piece of history that had been spat out.

The centre of the city was much smaller than it is today. It was surrounded by a ring of decaying industrial wasteland. The city centre was a purely commercial zone. There was nothing open on a Sunday and no one lived in the centre itself.

If you weren’t buying something or working there you had no business being in the city centre. Joy Division’s music evoked those empty spaces full of memories.

God’s Cop

1976, the year that the Sex Pistols played their famous Lesser Trade hall gig in Manchester James Anderton was appointed Chief Constable of Greater Manchester. Anderton was a moralist, deeply authoritarian and wielded great power.

Anderton was staunchly religious. A pious man who believed he spoke to God each evening. As he saw he was doing God’s work. He hated pornography, or rather what he saw as pornography, seizing and burning all that he could find.

For criminals his proposed punishment was corporal punishment, torture essentially, until they ‘beg for mercy’ and ‘repent their sins’. Nice Guy,

He also waged war in nightlife and social culture. 24 nightclubs were closed down. Of those that remained closing times were strictly enforced. Anderton was a puritan. He was doing whatever he could to drain the life out of this once great city.

Dirty Old Town

It had been the worlds first industrial city. Now along with a much of northern Britain it was post-industrial.

Bernard Sumner has spoken multiple times about the sense of loss he felt growing up. It was a loss of community he was describing. The substandard housing he grew up in was destroyed, neighbours split up and sent to different estates.

Manchester seemed like a vacant set. Some kind of neutron bomb had been dropped, leaving derelict buildings. There was no centre of gravity; it was the cradle of capitalism and was rapidly becoming its grave.”

Richard Boon, manager of Buzzcocks.

You’ve Never Had it so Bad.

Joy Division’s post-industrial wasteland.

Hulme, Manchester in the early 1970s. These brutalist buildings were an aesthetic influence on the music of Joy Division.

Cosy ‘Coronation Street’ communities were no more. Brutalist tower blocks and wasteland in their place. There was nothing to drive the economy for the residents. The lucky few worked for the government, NHS or local council. They existed, often supporting whole families.

For the others there were the rapidly growing dole queues.

Before Joy Division: Little Joy, lots of Division

In the 60s then Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously declared that Britons had ‘never had it so good’. Nobody could say that now. The 70s was a long slog of shortages, strikes and protests. Nearly nobody was saying they had it good. 

There was a general disquiet in the air, something had to give in such a run down, dirty country. Salford itself had a reputation for being unclean long beforehand. Ewan MacColl wrote his famous song ‘Dirty Old Town’ (brought into the mainstream by the Pogues) in its dubious honour. It was also, by all accounts, a violent town, full of thieves and gangs. Peter Hook particularly was primed and ready for violence from a young age. This carried over into Joy Division and later New Order. The city of Salford did not experience regeneration for decades.

It was not an environment that encouraged anything seen as pretentious. Students were very much encouraged to stay in their lane. Bernard Sumner for instance had an interest in the visual arts*

A teacher said to me “Creativity won’t do you any good where you come from. You’ll just end up in a factory.” recalled Bernard Sumner, “He was wrong, by the time I was leaving school there were no factories. There was no industry. We didn’t make anything any more. We still don’t.” The teacher was wrong on both counts anyway. For one thing Bernard Sumner’s eye for the aesthetic would lead him to one of the most iconic images in music history. The ‘Unknown Pleasures’ pulsar.

It’s probable that in more optimistic times at least one of Joy Division would have gone to university. Instead they all left school at 16, wanting nothing to do with further education. In great part it seems all were put off by the demands for conformity from what they saw as the establishment. Only Stephen Morris didn’t leave school of his own accord, being thrown out for his youthful zeal for slurping cough syrup for fun on school grounds. 

*Sumner worked in a non creative visual arts job for a time. He was a colourist on the children’s cartoon series ‘Jamie & the Magic Torch‘. Great theme tune which, as a child thought was by the Who. John Squire of the Stone Roses did the same job a few years later. I believe he worked o the series ‘Duckula’.

Ian Curtis’ formative years

There are many different aspects of Ian Curtis’ personality I’ll be honing in on in this series. He had a generally happy childhood, loved to joke, please people, a lifelong dog lover.

His father was an officer for the railway police. A thoughtful man who himself wrote*. His mother a housewife.

Ian Curtis was eager to leave school and get into the job market. It was a contrary move, he was considered a bright student and was a voracious reader from an early age. This is the first of the contradictions that make Ian Curtis for me, such a fascinating character.

Here was a young man whose form of rebellion was ultimately to conform to society. He left school, joined the job market got married because it was the right thing to do as he saw it. He wanted his wife to stay at home, tend to the house, raise children.

At the same time he was obsessed with transgressive culture, shocking books like Burroughs and Ballard. The

As near to a faith for him were Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost who would influence so many Punk upstarts. His first date with his soon to be wife Deborah was to see Bowie on his Ziggy Stardust tour.

He had a need for more books, more records. It’s possible feeding his cultural habit was one reason he left school so early. Having a real wage, buying those Stooges import bootlegs.

Having a policeman as a father didn’t stop the teenage Curtis from shoplifting books and records. He used his long ‘greatcoat’ jackets to do this.

Almost every detail of his life is contradictory. The traditional lower middle-class breadwinner. A thief with Jim Morrison daydreams. At some point the stress of these harbouring these different aspects would have to give.

As we’ll see throughout this series Ian Curtis was a chameleon. He changed according to his surroundings. If the going was boisterous, he could be as much of an oik as anybody. He was a devoted family member, diligent civil servant. And he could discuss Dostoyevsky and the finer points of German History with the best. Like Joy Division themselves he was an enigma.

*You can find an example of his work published in the appendix to Mick Middles and Lindsay Reade’s biography of Ian Curtis.

The Lads

Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook met at age 11 so they didn’t quite grow up together. Once they met they were inseparable though.

Sumner in particular had a somewhat gothic childhood. Salford was of course underprivileged. Breathing the air was equivalent to smoking 70 cigarettes a day. It was classed as one of Europe’s biggest slums at the time. There was an outside toilet and air raid shelter to play inside in the small yard. The water was so impure he says there were ‘little fish in it’.

His father had left when he was one. And so he lived with his grandparents and mother. Being a single mother in that time was considered scandalous. This was only made worse by the fact that his mother suffered from cerebral palsy. A condition which will no doubt have attracted cruel taunts.

Peter Hook also came from what was then called a ‘broken home’ but his story is less dramatic. He was raised by his grandparents from the ages of 3 to 6. Such was the stigma of bringing up a child solo his mother only took him back in after remarrying. He took his stepfather’s surname (as did Sumner a little later in his childhood). A curious detail of Hook’s childhood is the years he spent in Jamaica. His stepfather was working there and took the family before returning to the dirty old town.

Joy Division & the transition to Brutalism

Stephen Morris who would go on to be Joy Division’s rhythmic glue didn’t grow up around the social decay of Manchester but he did visit periodically. He describes first seeing row upon row of terraced houses. Then as the years wore on these old tenements were demolished, street by street. The place was more of a bombsite than after the second world war. As Morris reached his teenage years new concrete building sprung up. They looked clean, futuristic, alien.

Bernard Sumner says that he did not see a tree until the age of 9 years old. It was then that his community was ripped apart. When the old terrace slums were torn down. Sumner’s family were placed in a brutalist tower block. But he could see a tree from his window. Just one.

Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner went to the same school in Salford. It was what was called a grammar school. Meant to guide brighter students towards achievement. The teaching and teachers did nothing of the sort. It was at this school that they both adopted a proto-punk hatred of authority. It was a stubbornness that would go on to mark out the careers of both Joy Division and New order.

Rude Boys

At various points they were involved in the skinhead culture. It’s important to note that this is many years before skinhead became a synonym for ‘racist thug’ in the public imagination. The original skinhead movement was centred around ska and early reggae music. Perhaps Hook felt even more of an affinity with the island having lived there. Most probable he was just going with the flow with his mates.

Both were scooter boys, a subculture then and now centred around mobility and fun. Scooter boys tended to be into Black American soul music. A curious detail is while Joy Division came from Punk and prefigured Goth they generally dressed like soul boys. Short, tidy hair, shirts, jumpers and slacks. A fun detail is that Sumner’s scooter was named Abraxis after the Santana album*.

By this time there was more social infrastructure being invested in. There was for a start a youth club. Youth clubs allowed young people to essentially host their own parties legally. Their choice of music, no booze, of if there was it was on the downlow. Kids knew that making trouble would get the place shut down. So they, generally, didn’t fight. They were kept off the streets and got a taste for the discos and concerts many would centre their lives around. Joy Division themselves would go onto play Bowden Vale youth Club in South Manchester just before recording ‘Unknown Pleasures’.

Two working class kids, music fans, normal lads. Forming a band wasn’t a thing people like them ever thought of. Until they did.

*We’ll come to formative musical influences in a different piece. While I haven’t factored Santana into that equation perhaps there is something of his legato playing style in Sumner’s Joy Division work.

Stephen Morris

Stephen Morris, of the four was the one born in to privilege. His father was a salesman. Making good money from his commission on materials in all the new tower blocks that were springing up. Times were good for the Morris’, if a little quirky.

There was no shortage of trees in Stephen Morris childhood. Macclesfield lies on the river Bollin, to it’s east lies a forest. Technically in Cheshire, it lies just to the south of sprawling Manchester. It’s a manufacturing town. One that managed to stay alive during the horrific economic climate of the 1970s. Nowadays AstraZenic has it’s manufacturing hub there. Diverse paper, plastics and engineering companies too.

So things were much easier in Macclesfield all round. That didn’t mean that there was enough space in the house for him to have his own room. His father shared the bedroom with him and would rise bright and early and put on one of his Jazz LPs. I suspect his habit of doing this was the reason he was barred from the marital bed. In any case the young Morris came to associate Jazz with just wanting it to go away.

Still, Morris was it seems indulged as a child. His father organised swing band concerts on the side. He paid for instruments for his son. Firstly guitar and later drums. If we can take one marker of a tolerant, perhaps indulgent parent perhaps it is buying their child a drum kit. But not without warning him:

“Drummers, Stephen. I’ve never met a sane one yet… They all end up taking morphine and drinking absinthe, rotting their brains. You don’t want to end up like that, do you?”

That didn’t seem like a bad idea to him at all. And so he bashed away at a drumkit. Determinedly staying away from the intricate, showy style expected of drummers of the time.

Like Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris was an avid reader. Jon Savage commented that the 1970s were a golden age of paperback publishing. You can see this from the better second hand bookshops in Britain. There was a network of alternative bookshops in the Manchester area. Morris would skip school to go and rummage through the racks. He was into weird sci fi mainly. Michael Moorcock was at the time the Rock and Roll writer. His Jerry Cornelius books were popular at the time. Kurt Vonnegut with his witty absurdity too A little less cerebral than the tortured Russians beloved of Ian Curtis but a universe away from the lads in Salford.

This was the hinterland between the hippie era and punk. The counterculture wasn’t really sure where it was going. One thing it was doing was getting high. And so, as predicted by his father the young Steve Morris became a trainee psychonaut. These experiments led to his being kicked out of school. No second chances.

Joy Division in the Job Market

Whatever the reasons, all entered the job market at the age of sixteen and experienced the often brain crushing ‘reality’ of office and factory work. Experiencing the feeling of being the youngest person in the room, and thus ‘inferior’ at all times. It’s this hinterland between youth and adulthood which is the first of the liminal spaces we’ll be looking at…

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