History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (4 page)

Curtis—Riley—raises his left arm, points a finger in the air, singing now about the primacy of silence, because it’s superior to anything that might be on the radio, or because
in the world the song is making, the radio has lost the capacity to broadcast anything else. Even as Riley—Curtis— follows the slides in the rhythm, catches the dying fall at the end of each passage, the drumming increases in force, in an affirmation that you’re going to be listening to a story you might not want to hear. Riley comes off of that, too. The words get heavier. As if to lift them, or strengthen his body against what it’s being forced to carry, Curtis, dressed in well-pressed trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, the clothes loose but determinedly respectable, begins to pump his arms. Then again he lifts one arm and points, and then begins a chant.

Though the music made by the band gains in precision, takes on muscle and shape, finds a quality of insistence that makes it seem as if the tempo has increased even though it hasn’t, the music also continues as it has; there is an increase in pressure inside the body the song has inhabited from the first. For Curtis everything has changed. What was, no matter how convincing the little drama of weight and obligation, simply a song, a number, a TV appearance, is now a cauldron, and in that cauldron all songs, the band’s songs, every song they’ve ever heard, every song that has ever been played, the impulse to make sound, the desire to sing and play itself, is boiling over. Curtis is boiling over. Riley is boiling over—or he is simply playing someone who’s boiling over, but that’s hard to credit as you watch. Curtis’s arms begin to windmill in tight circles. His shoulders jump. He’s
a marionette who has just discovered that his movements are not his but can’t remember a puppetmaster; he’s a man turning a large piece of machinery with arms that don’t belong to him. His eyes dart over here, over there, bulging with horror at what he’s seeing, what he’s seeing far beyond the studio, outside its walls, maybe in the streets as they were when the four walked into the studio and as they’ll be when they leave, maybe in the past, maybe in the future; he doesn’t want to be here but he has no choice. He is almost screaming now, his face breaking up, his words weirdly holding their shape, perfectly clear in the absolute panic that, musically, is putting the words across—“Language is sound, that’s all we need know”—the panic that on the level beneath the plane of musical communication has rendered his words, any words, irrelevant, a bad joke, a lie. His arms jerk, but with such intensity they carry their own grace: you can’t take your eyes off them, you don’t want the movements to stop. The music breaks, slows down, comes to a halt as if the music is physically coming apart, instrument by instrument, piece by piece, idea by idea. Sitting in the theater, watching the movie, I realized that half a minute had passed and I hadn’t taken a breath.

In real time, with people walking into a room to hear the band play, the same thing happened throughout 1978 and 1979, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, in Manchester time and again. Watching Corbijn’s movie now, you can notice,
near the end of the song, a shot of the actor playing Peter Hook leaning into a microphone, adding a backing vocal to Curtis’s “Dance, dance, dance—to the radio”—which as a line in a song is precisely what the Beach Boys were doing in the car in “Dance, Dance, Dance” in 1964, but something else as a line from Jeremiah, which is how Curtis is delivering it, or how the line is delivering him—and be stopped cold. What? Another band member putting in a rehearsed effect to give the performance a little more impact? You mean this was a show?

Over and over again, this is what happened in “Transmission.” There would be nights when the song froze, when its gestures lost their language and the rhythm reached a point where it could no longer tell the band anything it hadn’t heard before, when the audience demanded to hear it, which told the musicians that the audience knew exactly what to expect, and they could no longer give the audience, even the song, the lie. Then on another night the song would return to claim what it rightfully deserved. As a typically elegant Joy Division song it was the most unstable song they could play.

Like the Buzzcocks, like many other Manchester bands, some never going beyond fantasy, some heard around the world, Joy Division had its genesis in the show the Sex Pistols played in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976. Depending on which story you believe, there were forty people there—some of them, well before the Sex
Pistols had released an actual record, already calling out for favorite numbers—or maybe sixty, even a hundred; no one has ever said there were more than that. It was a fearsome, thrilling show; from an audience tape of that night, it sounds like an initiation into a secret society. Halfway through, with “No Feelings,” relentless, the song building on itself with every beat, with every iteration of its idea, you can physically sense how shocking it all must have been. “God, what the fuck is this?” Tony Wilson wrote in 2002, looking back to that night, when by his count he’d been one of forty-two people in the crowd:

Bloody hell, it’s Stepping Stone. And in the next sixty seconds, hearing the Pistols violently murder and then resurrect this simple pop classic, all was made clear as all was destroyed. Only in hearing the old was the new revealed. I will destroy the temple and in three minutes I will rebuild it, sayeth the Lord, sayeth Johnny Rotten. Clarity for the one academic arsehole in the audience. The tune, the song, the lyrics, the beat of this Monkees gem were assailed with utter confidence, utter anger. In its complete indifference to the niceties of technique and respect, they restored to the popular song the spirit that is the only fucking reason it exists in the first place. Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads. He sold it for this. Good deal.

Two of the people there were Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” Sumner would say. “They
were terrible. I wanted to get up and be terrible, too.” They pledged themselves as a band that night; their first name was Stiff Little Kittens. Curtis, who Hook and Sumner had met at a second Manchester Sex Pistols show two weeks later, answered a singer wanted ad they put up at Virgin Records. They changed the name to Warsaw. Running through various drummers until they found Morris, they were an indistinguishable punk band, trying to be frantic, reaching for a screech (“‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah fuck off fuck off,’” as Sumner would sum it up), more than that reaching for a no that they themselves could believe, even if they couldn’t get anyone else to believe it. In 1978 they found it. “We were doing a soundcheck at the Mayflower, in May,” Hook said in 2007, “and we played ‘Transmission’: people had been moving around, and they all stopped to listen. I was thinking, what’s the matter with that lot? That’s when I realized that was our first great song.” “Now, finally, he understood the straightforward filter in his head,” said Tony Wilson, who founded Factory Records for Joy Division and other Manchester bands.

He had chosen artists who “meant it.” More than meant it. Had no choice. The stuff was forcing itself up and out of their psyches whether they fucking liked it or not. 99.99% of bands are on stage ’cause they want to be in the music business, they want to be on
Top of the Pops,
they want to be rock and roll stars. The very few are on stage because they have absolutely no fucking choice. Whatever is demanding to be expressed pushes them forward. No choice. And that night Warsaw had no choice but to be up there playing this searing music.

“None of us were interested in any kind of achievement, in a success, celebrity form, or money,” Peter Hook said in 2013. “It was the drive to play. Just to be heard.”

“The unearned euphoria of
Henderson the Rain King;
the shapeless piety of
A Fable;
the sentimental self-indulgence of
Across the River and into the Trees;
the maudlin falsity of
The Town;
the heavy-handed symbolism and religiosity of
The Old Man and the Sea,
destined from its inception for the pages of
Life
—such failures make over and over the point that the contemporary American writer can abjure negativism only if he is willing to sacrifice truth and art,” Leslie Fiedler wrote in 1960, in the introduction to
No! In Thunder.

For major novelists and minor, the pursuit of the positive means stylistic suicide. Language itself decays, and dialogue becomes travesty; character, stereotype; insight, sentiment. The Nobel Prize speech destined for high-school anthologies requires quite another talent from that demanded by the novel; and the abstract praise of love requires another voice from that which cries
No!
to the most noble temptations, the most defensible lies.

Yet one must not forget, in the face of their recent decline, the success of Bellow and Hemingway and Faulkner: the terrible impact of
The Victim, The Sun Also Rises
and
The Sound and the Fury.
The last, in particular, remains the exemplary American novel, perhaps the greatest work of fiction produced in the United States in the twentieth century. And it is no accident that its title comes from the bleakest passage in Shakespeare, or that its action begins inside the mind of an idiot. The point is insisted upon bluntly, almost too obviously: life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Here is the ultimate negation, the Hard No pressed as far as it will go. Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void. Having endured a vision of the meaninglessness of existence, he retreats neither into self-pity nor into a realm of beautiful lies. He chooses, rather, to render the absurdity which he perceives, to know it and make it known. To know and to render, however, means to give it form; and to give form is to provide the possibility of delight—a delight which does not deny horror but lives at its intolerable heart.

Or,
I read Faulkner
—or Sartre, Nietzsche, Hesse, Ballard, Dostoyevsky, as Curtis did.
He said that life was terrible. I wanted to get up and tell people life was terrible, too.
That was the idea of the band. They had named themselves Joy Division after brothels in Nazi concentration camps filled with prisoners. “The oppressed, not the oppressors,” Hook insisted. “Quite punk,” everyone said: “Great name.”
Their first record, a four-song EP called
An Ideal for Living,
featured a drawing of a boy who looked all too much like a member of Hitler Youth banging a drum. Their songs, taking them through Fiedler’s labyrinth of self-betrayal and weakness of nerve and coming out the other side, told them how much richer the idea was than such a picture, and how much more dangerous. As Tony Wilson would say of Joy Division when their real songs began to arrive, “Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you. Someone was going to want to say, I’m fucked.”

Anton Corbijn could have called his film after Joy Division’s song “Atmosphere”—shooting in black and white, without dragging his camera over such punk antiurbanism clichés as blocks of rotting council housing or dead-end streets, he pictured Manchester as a place that in giving birth to the Industrial Revolution gave birth as well to an immiserating poverty so ingrained, so close to nature, that it foreclosed all possibilities of vanity or style. As the band members meet in apartments, as Curtis, working for a government employment office to find jobs for disabled people, talks to people who will never have a job, even the rooms seem to have clouds in them. “I found it very difficult to listen to,” Sumner
said of the first Joy Division album,
Unknown Pleasures,
released in June 1979, except for “She’s Lost Control” all of the most memorable songs carrying titles of a single word: “Disorder,” “Shadowplay,” “Wilderness,” “Interzone.” It wasn’t that it didn’t make sense to Sumner, that he wondered where it all came from. That he could explain where it all came from so specifically, to the point of reduction—

It was because the whole neighborhood that I’d grown up in was completely decimated in the mid-sixties . . . When people say about the darkness in Joy Division’s music, by the age of twenty-two I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realized then I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s this void. For me Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood. It was absolutely irretrievable.

—suggested that there were far more threatening specters in the music. As the critic Jon Savage wrote in a review of the album, “the song titles read an opaque manifesto.” There were matters that could be shaped into songs—coherent, interlocking patterns that did affirm form and the possibility of delight—but which were not subject to merely personal, psychological, or sociological explanations. “There is always a social explanation for what we see in art,” Albert Camus
said in 1947. “Only it doesn’t explain anything important.” The songs were art, which by definition escapes the control, the intentions, and the technique of the people who make it.

Art doesn’t explain itself. “He was Ian, Mister Polite, Mister Nice,” Sumner would say, “and then suddenly onstage, about the third song in, you’d notice that he’d gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart, ripping up the floor-boards and throwing them at the audience. Then by the end of the set he’d be completely covered in blood. But no-one would talk about it, because that was our way; we didn’t think he knew why he got himself worked up that way.”

At the end of 1978, Curtis had his first epilepsy attack, in a van; his bandmates took him to the hospital. The next April, he began having fits on stage. “Some nights to the end of the set”—some nights lasting only through the end of “Transmission”—“Ian would scatter the mike stand, stagger speedily sideways and be rushed off the stage by Hooky or Barney or Terry their road manager,” Tony Wilson would write. “Holding him down was tough. Terry was best at it. ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘What?’ ‘You OK?’ said Rob. The van was quiet. A little aftershocked. ‘It’s nothing, shut up,’ replied Ian curtly.”