Unknown Pleasures Track by Track
I really recommend listening to the record while you read.
“DISORDER”
I’ve got the spirit, but lose the feeling . . .
Because we recorded Unknown Pleasures so quickly, there wasn’t the time to rerecord much (with the exception of Steve’s drums, obviously) so there are a few bum notes on the album, most of which are courtesy of yours truly. The ones that are most noticeable—and these are the only ones I’m going to point out—are on “Disorder,” where it sounds like it could be Bernard’s guitar but it’s not, it’s me. The funny thing is, though, they’re now part of the song, even though they’re bum notes. It’s where I was playing the lower string and catching the A and D with my plectrum, which has given it that guitar sound. Playing it back, I can’t imagine “Disorder” without those sounds. Some of the low notes are a bit wild too but, hey, we were young. Like Pete Saville’s theory, now we’d stop and go, “Hold on, Hooky’s played a wrong note. He’s caught the strings, we’ll have to fix that!” It’s a mistake, but it ended up being a good mistake; to me it sounds really interesting.
“DAY OF THE LORDS”
This is the room, the start of it all . . .
We’d only ever played these songs live before, never demoed them. I think the only ones we’d demoed were “She’s Lost Control” and “Insight.”
“Day of the Lords” is a slow song, but it’s a great song. The guitar’s loud and swept along by the bass. Martin overdubbed the keyboards. At the time we were all like, “What? keyboards? If we want fucking keyboards we’ll get a fucking keyboard player.” So he overdubbed them when we weren’t there. We didn’t even hear it until he’d done the mix. He played us the mix and me and Barney were pulling faces behind his back because he was putting keyboards on things. He was right, though, Martin. The keyboards sweeten it and make it better. Bleeding keyboards, soon to be the bane of my life. Great snare sound.
“CANDIDATE”
I campaigned for nothing, I worked hard for this . . .
Martin needed two more songs so he said to me and Steve, “You’ve not got enough songs. You need to go in and write more songs.”
We were like, “ ‘Go in and write’? We can’t ‘go in and write’! What do you mean?” That just wasn’t the way we came up with songs. We jammed them as a band; we didn’t write them like that.
“Just go in there and write two more songs.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
So we took ourselves off and started “writing”—well, jamming. We got “Candidate” immediately—and also “From Safety to Where,” which ended up not making it on to the album. If you listen closely to “Candidate,” it has that feel of a song that’s not quite finished—well, it does to me, anyway, because I know that it’s a jam that Ian went and put a vocal on. A great song, yes; but, like I say, not completely worked out. Great for that reason, though.
So we had these two tracks and Martin said, “Right, Bernard, go and put some guitar on those songs; they’re really good, these.” So Bernard went and was sitting there with his guitar for ages, not playing on the tracks—well, hardly playing at all—because he didn’t like them. This was the guitarist’s equivalent of a huffy teenage strop. Like when you tell a kid to tidy their room and two minutes later they go. “Happy now?” That’s what I mean when I talk about his “economical” playing. He’s a brilliant guitarist but woe betide you if he didn’t like the song; he’d either refuse point-blank to put guitar on it or do such half-arsed guitar you wish you hadn’t bothered.
Martin decided to turn the twenty-four-track tape over and play the track backward, pushing him to play over it forward, which he seemed to quite like; he perked up a bit and we did actually get some good guitar. Martin then spun the tape back over so the guitar’s backwards. It actually worked. “From Safety to Where” was Barney’s economical guitar playing at its very best.
“INSIGHT”
Reflects a moment in time, a special moment in time . . .
“Insight” is one of my favorite songs and also one of my favorite bass riffs. I mean, the great thing about Joy Division was that we used the bass to write the songs. Most bass players are just used to back up a song, to fatten it up: to “follow the root notes,” as they say. I don’t do that. I remember, very early on in our career, Barney turning round to me and saying, “Can’t you just follow the guitar?”
“No, I can’t. You follow me. Ha!”
The lyrics are wonderful and there’s no chorus. There’s repetition in the lyrics, but no chorus. That sound at the beginning is the creaky old freight lift in Strawberry that Martin had miked up and recorded, adding fantastic atmosphere to the track. Steve’s snare has such great presence. It’s well known that Martin used a lot of echo plate and digital delays on Unknown Pleasures, which gives it a very unique sound. The very sound me and Barney hated for years—that was “his” sound. There was a rumor that he’d recorded the lead vocal down a telephone line to get the distortion just right, but I doubt that’s true; in those days it would have been very difficult to achieve. I reckon he would have “pumped” the vocal. This was a technique he pioneered, where you used an external speaker in a very ambient room. Using a fader on the desk, you’d send the signal out into the room at a suitable volume and bring it back through a microphone into the control room to mix in with the original track. A great trick. Martin used it on the piano on “Transmission,” putting a speaker underneath the strings and recording it back, then adding it into the track as ambience. We also used it to great effect on the bass drum on “Blue Monday” at Britannia Row.
“NEW DAWN FADES”
A change of speed, a change of style . . .
“New Dawn Fades” is the track that most people say is their favorite. This seems an odd choice to me, because it’s very, very, simple and very economical, certainly from my point of view, because the bass is pretty much constant all the way through.
This riff reminds me of my old amp. I had a hundred-watt Marshall Lead Amp, wired for bass. I don’t know what the difference is—something to do with the frequencies—but it had a fantastic rich, warm sound, especially when you played high. All the songs on Unknown Pleasures were written and played on it; it sounded great. It used to sing to me, that amp: such sweet distortion. It was wonderful. I had to sell it because I needed to pay the gas bill. Rob said we didn’t have any money, so I advertised it in the MEN and this kid answered. I even took the amp round to his house in its flight case.
He said, “You in a band?”
“Yeah, we’re called Joy Division.”
“Never heard of you.”
I went, “Yeah, well, you know, we’re up and coming.”
“I’m in a band,” he said, gloating. “Six hundred quid a week, on the cruise ships, on the liners. Fucking great. It’s full of old biddies; knuckle-deep in Lily of the Valley, me, mate. Hundred and sixty-five, yeah.”
I was like, “Whatever.” He took my amp off me, my beloved amp. Me and Iris were going to have our gas cut off otherwise.
So I went back to Rob. “Right, you’ll have to buy me an amp now, out of the group’s money, because I haven’t got one. I’ve sold it.”
“You stupid twat,” he said. “I would have bought it off you. I would have given you the money.”
“Well, I asked and you wouldn’t give it to me.”
“Oh, don’t be so fucking soft, Hooky.”
What the fuck was “soft” about that, I don’t know and never will. But anyway. That was the story of the amp. It really did contribute to the sound of the album, without a shadow of a doubt. I wonder where it is now. While we’re on the subject of amplifiers a mention must go to Barney’s acquisition of the Vox UL730, a wonderful find. This amp has a fantastic sound and was his pride and joy, and again added a lot to the album. Even Martin loved it. It famously took over a whole PA at Liverpool Eric’s once. We’d all been complaining about how loud it was, so Barney had bought an Altair power soak, which supposedly enabled you to have the same sound only quieter. I don’t want to get too technical, but the idea was you used the Altair to quieten the amp then took a DI from it to the PA. This we did, but the UL730 obviously had ideas of its own and took over the whole sound system. You could hear nothing else. This amp was stolen with all the gear in America on the first New Order tour. Even I grieved.
“SHE’S LOST CONTROL”
She walked upon the edge of no escape . . .
They used an aerosol to create some of the drum effects—another of Martin’s many innovations. He liked to record different sounds that he’d work on to sound like drums but different. For one of the tracks he recorded us kicking a flight case in time. Also I suspect a ring modulator on the real damped snare. The other thing you hear on this track is Steve’s Synare, which was a drum synthesizer with a white-noise generator that he used on both “She’s Lost Control” and “Insight.” He was one of the first drummers to use them, if I’m not mistaken. That was one of the great things about him—and Barney, actually. They’re both very experimental, always wanting to try out new things, which I must admit I resisted because I was always like, “Let’s just play. We play great together. Why do you want to add stuff for?” In Barney’s case it was a bit of a two-edged sword because, while it was great that he was always on the lookout to do things differently, you did tend to feel that he wasn’t entirely happy with you. He loved all this new technology, and always did the whole time I knew him, but the technology was reducing the need for players. They say that’s why drum machines were invented, so the lead vocalist didn’t have to talk to the drummer. Bass synths so that the singer doesn’t have to talk to the bass player. You could just program them yourself and find yourself in your own little world while we’re all hanging on for grim death. I never believed in any of that. I always believed that in a group the strength comes from the camaraderie, the chemistry, the people playing together. You should never exclude anybody; you should encourage rather than exclude. No song is worth alienating a group member.
Ian was apparently moved to write this lyric after an incident at work. It’s about an epileptic young lady who was having problems finding and keeping a job, who eventually died while having a seizure. That must have been terrifying for him. The first I knew of that was when Bernard mentioned it on a Joy Division documentary. Again, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the lyrics. It’s teamwork. You just see your teammate doing his bit; he looks and sounds up to speed, so, great, that leaves you to concentrate on your own side of things. There’s no analysis going on. Nobody was going, “Let’s have a look at your lyrics, Ian. Let’s have a talk about them. Let’s dissect the lyric.” He probably would have just gone mad and told you to fuck off. He delivered his vocals with the perfect amount of passion and spirit, exactly what we wanted. Saying that, reading the lyrics now, his use of repetition and onomatopoeic delivery is startling.
Now, of course, Ian Curtis is recognized as one of music’s greatest lyricists, a fact that wasn’t established during his lifetime. In interviews all they seem to pounce on was the Nazi aspects. That just used to upset him. It’s a funny thing with interviews. When you’re a struggling band nobody wants to know, so you just live without the press. You don’t even consider it to be important. All of a sudden you’re popular and everybody wants to talk to you. Then it seems vital.
“SHADOWPLAY”
As the assassins all grouped in four lines dancing on the floor . . .
This was the song that Barney wanted to sound like “The Ocean” by Velvet Underground. Again, the lyric doesn’t repeat until the end and it has no chorus, which is something that I think Ian was very, very good at—the way he played with the structure of the lyrics but without ever losing what it was about the song that makes it strong. You don’t listen to it and think, Ah, what an interesting lyrical structure. But it’s all in the song. His love of art was showing here. The way he wanted to slightly subvert the normal conventions of rock and pop.
“WILDERNESS”
I traveled far and wide to Stations of the Cross . . .
I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but this is a fantastic bass line. I watched John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers play it acoustically at their gig at the MEN Arena. I think I can safely say that, of the 19,000 people there, 18,950 didn’t know what it was—but I did, and it brought a tear to my eye, definitely. Monster bass line. A bass line that every bass player dreams of and I got it, so thank you.
It’s Ian’s sideswipe at religion, the futility of religion, the things that are done and perpetrated in its name. It’s poetry. Once you unlock the meaning of the lyrics, or at least what you think are the meaning of the lyrics, you can lose yourself in them. Each one of his lyrics is like a wonderful little story in itself. Rob didn’t like this track.
Great guitar, too. The two instruments interplay very well. I do think that Barney’s guitar playing is underrated. He’s a fantastic guitarist. One of the things that puzzled me when he started working with Johnny Marr is why he gave up the guitar. I prefer his playing. Maybe it’s that thing about always wanting to move on to something else, whereas I’ve always been quite happy to capitalize on what I’ve got. This reminds me of when I got Donald Johnson of A Certain Ratio to teach me how to do slap bass. Everyone was doing it and I was feeling the pressure, shall we say. I tried once, one lesson; he just laughed, squeezed my arm and said, “Hooky, stick to what you’re great at!” Lovely guy.
“INTERZONE”
Four twelve windows, ten in a row . . .
Me singing the main vocal while Ian does the low, backing vocal. Ian was very good like that; there seemed to be no ego with him. He was perfectly happy to let you sing, to let anyone sing. In fact he’d encourage you to do it. He was very, very generous in that respect. Strangely enough we were always trying to get Barney to sing but he was never interested.
This was the song that they tried to get us to do at RCA. The cover of “Keep On Keepin’ On”—well, not the actual song itself but the inspiration for it—and you can hear the riff in it a little.
“I REMEMBER NOTHING”
Violent more violent his hand cracks the chair . . .
We had been playing this one for a while very loosely; it had no real order. So we jammed it in the studio and Martin added the shattering glass and other effects. This was also Barney’s first foray into using the Transcendent 2000. He’d bought Sound Engineer magazine, or Sound International or something, and you got a free piece of an electronic kit every week—the idea being to build your own synthesizer, which is what he’d done; he soldered together the Transcendent 2000. Built it himself: quite an achievement. It’s used a lot on the track. One of the interesting things about Joy Division is that people can never tell who’s playing what; is it keyboard or bass or guitar? This is a great, atmospheric track and came together very quickly. In the New Order days, especially toward the end, we’d hammer our tracks to death. Budgeting a month per track to record. You’d try everything bar the kitchen sink and end up mainly coming back to exactly what you started with. Then it was blighted by the huge waste of time and money. Ending up with everyone in the group hating one another. We should have just looked at Unknown Pleasures and made every album that way. We’d probably never have split up. But people change. Ah well, last thing is the notable use of the Frank Sinatra lyric “Strangers.”