Unknown Pleasures WB rating out of 100

Atmosphere is everything in music. Truly great songs are an immersive experience, something that the listener must saturate themselves in to the exclusion of all else in order to gain a genuine appreciation of a band’s musical greatness. Therefore, great songs must create an atmosphere that will allow and indeed encourage the exclusion of all sensory stimuli, and no record has ever achieved an atmosphere like Joy Division’s debut, Unknown Pleasures.

The band itself is steeped in mythology, for so many reasons. Guitarist Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook attended the now-legendary Sex Pistols concert at the Manchester Lesser Free Trades Hall, along with only about 20 other people, which inspired them to get the band moving. Their lead singer committed suicide after listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and just before embarking on their first US tour. Their biggest hit came after his death. A suicidal lead singer for a band that made famously depressing music, a band which then became New Order and had a massive hit in ‘Blue Monday’. The legend writes itself.

Unknown Pleasures is itself one of the most definitive debut records ever made; almost every facet of the album led to a seismic shift in the creation of music, from the redirection of punk’s vicious energy into an amalgamation of dance and rock, to the deeply layered, stark-yet-dense production and the ultra-minimalist cover art, the radio waves emitted by a dying star. This all came at a time when cover art was fashionably ‘busy’. Punk was slowly fading, unable to maintain its frenetic angst and production was either crisp (disco) and totally raw and low-fi (punk).

Disco, however, was dead – 'Disco Sucks' was the bumper sticker du jour at the time - but rock was no certainty to take its place. In Joy Division, it found its saviour. Joy Division were the progenitors of bands as diverse as The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Interpol, Primal Scream, even (regrettably) Bon Jovi, Poison and Def Leppard. Unknown Pleasures is the sound of punk dying. Painfully, reluctantly, and excruciatingly. But, from the ashes, Phoenix-like, rock music was reborn. Newer, better, modernized, electronic, and ready for the next 20 years.

Recorded over a single week, the revolutionary production techniques of Martin Hannett created an ambience that was second to none, particularly in his utilisation of drummer Stephen Morris’ innovative use of both acoustic and electric drums – creating a muted, unnerving feeling that pervades the entire record – along with his groundbreaking use of new digital effects, and obscure sound effects, like shattering glass and muffled screaming.

At the time, and still today, Unknown Pleasures is referred to as ‘post-punk’, but it feels patently unfair to label such an ingenious piece of music with such a derivative title. Joy Division did not make punk music, but were a by-product of punk’s energy. Opener ‘Disorder’ and ‘Interzone’ abound with nervous twitchiness, a testament to the band’s reputation as a fiery live act, with the demonic pots-and-pans drumming thudding under Hook’s staccato bass lines evoking images of a frenetic Curtis’ convulsive dancing.

But it is on the darker, more introspective moments that the real magic happens, and nowhere is this more evident than on the band’s finest track, ‘She’s Lost Control’, where vocalist Ian Curtis documents life as an epileptic. Converting the song into something of a mutated disco number, with a hypnotic, paranoid bass line sliding along the top of a filthily distorted guitar, sounding as though it was being strummed by a buzzsaw, the band created genuinely bizarre sounds as percussion, the sparse atmosphere perfectly complimenting Curtis’ icy baritone.

Ian Curtis died at the age of 23, but his, and his cohorts’, impression on the world of popular music remains nothing short of indelible. Irrespective of atmosphere, or mythology, or history, or even New Order, Unknown Pleasures stands as a watermark, a watershed, a waterline, to name a few aquatic metaphors. Some points in musical history are pivotal, and on Unknown Pleasures the raw, naked energy of punk was resurrected and redirected, and music was set on a new course.