Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and fascinating facts and
figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music and more.
Where your new order of Nerds, your post punk of
provable trivia, your gloomy Englishmen of entertainment. And we're talking
about gloomy englishmen. I'm Alex Heigel, and I'm Jordan run

(00:31):
Tug and Jordan. Today we're talking about a debut album
that defined an era, helped launch a new subgenre, and
most importantly, created an entire cottage industry in T shirts.
That is right, we are talking about Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.
I discovered this album in high school, presumably after seeing
the T shirt, and it was such a revelation to me,

(00:55):
you know, because prior, like most of the other punk
rock bands I knew about, I also learned about from
T shirt. It's like The Ramones, Misfits, Kennedy's Black Flag,
and when you get those four T shirt bands out
of the way and then you progress to another T
shirt band, Joy Division. I don't know why I pronounced
it like that. I was like Matt Berry, I enjoy
the works of Joy Division. Un Known pleasy is it's

(01:21):
such a departure. It sounds like a new, horrifying alien world.
And that's that's the gateway drug of post punk. And
then you're you're you're playing single note guitar lines and
and jagged atonal bass, and then drums suddenly get dancier
and the drawls become more disaffected, and then you're then
you're cooking with gas baby, getting a gang four wire,

(01:44):
you get a geometric haircut. You have to buy a
jazz master obviously.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Anyway, I do not gather this band as your cup
of tea.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, you were in a T shirt bands. I was
into cardigan bands.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Well, I mean Neahyja bands.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
And you know, I I assume there's things that you
find in it, right, Yeah, I mean I I like
them now.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
But my Joy Division origin story is not especially interesting
or unique. They were, you know, as you alluded to earlier,
one of those bands that I was more aware of
rather than actually had listened to, because their oriconography is
so strong.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Sure, it's just it's funny to me because like I
got you know, I grew up in Central Pennsylvania much
to my own tragedy, and I feel like I regret, yes,
so much of my own regret. I was born and
then grew up in central Pennsylvania. No, but I remember
seeing Joy Division and nothing about New Order like until Wikipedia.

(02:46):
I think the only place I ever saw New Order
glancingly mentioned was in like Rolling the Rolling Stones that
I were reading, and it was never enough to even
be like, what is this? What is this band?

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Like?

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I was, you know, honestly entirely old to be a
music nerd and find out that New Order came from
Joy Division. But I'm sorry I cut you off.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
No, I mean, growing up in the early two thousands
was a funny time to be a burgeoning music fan,
I think, because so many of these classic groups had
been canonized already as T shirt bands, but since this
was the pre streaming era, it was an investment to
actually investigate their music further. So I think this was
the prime era for band as fashion statement or social signifiers,

(03:26):
at least in my high school. So to me, the
Unknown Pleasures graphic was like the Nike swoosh for moody
depressed people at my school, and honestly, the little bit
of it that I had heard was kind of frightening
to me. I mean that doom and gloom of that
haunted voice was then magnified tenfold when I learned about

(03:47):
Ian Curtis's history. And then there's that story of his
girlfriend saying that she had a hard time listening to Closer,
his last album, because I think in her words she said,
he means.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
It, Oh it sounds like me that was his mistress,
and she yeah, that was her mistress. She contends the
relationship with platonic, which I don't think anyone else does.
But I said girlfriend, yeah, well without mentioning first that
he was married with a daughter, but yeah, yeah, but
you know what I do, I'd like listening.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
To this it suddenly takes on, yes, a level of
gravitas that it's perhaps the level of gravitas that any
band could get from.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Like you listen to Jim Morrison, but he's like all
he's just singing about being horny and thinking and how
cool he is, and then like I don't know, you
listen to Janis and it's like, ah, what jois de Vivra,
you know? Or Jimmy Hendrix and you're like, yeah, man,
but he was just too far out in this guy
and then you listen to Joy Division find out the
guy killed himself and you're like, yes, that seems exactly right.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
I mean, it's kind of how I feel about Elliott
Smith too. I find him hard. I mean, I love
Elliot Smith, I love you and Curtis, but I find
it difficult to listen to those albums for pleasure. Frankly,
I mean I feel that way to a certain stend
by Toamy Winehouse and Janis Joplin because of the pain
that they were so clearly in led them down the

(05:07):
road of of vices that ended up cutting their live short.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
I guess I just mean, like upawn, immediate blush, Like
you are like, did this guy kill himself horribly? Oh yeah,
oh sure, and you're OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, No, that
makes sense. I got that immediately.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
I found it hard to to confront as a young
music fan coming up, you know, for somebody who existed
in the Beach Boys, Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Zombies, honey
Soaked Harmonies, realm. Yeah, going to Ian Curtis was just
not a place I wanted to even visit. No.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Well, from the famous Sex Pistols concert in Manchester that
launched several prominent bands and was attended by the members
of Joy Division. To the borderline abusive recording situation that
produced Unknown Pleasures, to the sad demise and rebirth of
a band that made it. Here is everything you didn't
know about Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. The album begins with

(06:11):
what is generally considered to be the big bang of
punk in the northern part of the UK. And I
actually asked you this while I was writing it. But Jordan,
where does the Northern UK start? The North as they
refer to it.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
I personally always thought it was the line demarketed by Liverpool,
Manchester and Sheffield. That's kind of on the same latitude.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
They're north of Birmingham, right, Yeah, they're north of Birmingham,
so I think I think it's Birmingham. You think it's
Birmingham because they all talked about being you know, strong
industrial Northmen.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
But we have some I just want to shout out
our British fans and addition to our friend John we
mentioned earlier, we had a very lovely person who left
us a review. Knackered head teacher, British and proud, she says,
so thank you. Please get in touch, find us on Twitter,
let us know where the North of England starts.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yes, I would genuinely be interested in learning that. Yeah,
thank you for because mostly because the other thing that
I brought up was was because there's a scene in
one of the Trip movies where Steve Coogan is arguing
to an aghast Rob Brydon the culture of the northern
part of Britain is more distinct than that of Wales.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, that's a thousand true.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Whoah buddy.

Speaker 1 (07:25):
Oh I'm a Beatles guy, come on, and an Oasis
guy and the Joy Division. Well I'm not Joy Division guy.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
But yeah, but I mean, don't tell the Welsh that
they will to Johns while drinking more than you could
even conceive what was possible.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
Oh, I don't think you want to challenge like Liverpoodlians
or Manx.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
To a drinking content. I'm not saying they're not formidable.
I'm just saying that, Like, I don't think you can
say that the cult you might, it's more recognized. Probably,
I just don't agree that it's a more distinct culture
than that of an entire island with its own language.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Wales isn't an island. Shut up.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Anyway. So yeah, the hardest music that they'd had up
until this was probably Black Sabbath.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah yeah, well.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, maybe is it Zeppelin come through there? I can
see a bunch of Northern people like, well Leeds, come on,
that's not that's not true. I guess that. Yeah anyway,
so uh, the Sex Pistols came up and played the
Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. Which does that presuppose the
existence of a greater trade free Trade Hall?

Speaker 1 (08:45):
You know, I was googling this before we came on
because the Free Trade Hall is where Bob Dylan had
his famous Judas concert when he went electric and one
of the fans shouted Judas at him for betraying his
folk leanings. I couldn't figure out if there was a
greater free Trade Hall. I don't think so. But again,

(09:06):
BRIT's listening, please get in touch.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah let us know. So this happened on June fourth,
nineteen seventy six, and so in a roundabout way, we
actually owe Joy Division and many other Manchester bands existence
to another Manchester band, the Buzzcocks Joy Division and New
Order guitarist Bernard Sumner Barney, as he does not like

(09:31):
to be called but I will call him that. Yeah,
so you're a Peter Hook guy. I imagine, of course
I'm a Peter Hook guy. He's disputed this. He said.
He'd already started playing guitar and was looking around for
a band before the Lesser Free Trade Hall show. But
sex Pistles and punk in general had yet to become

(09:51):
a universal concern in February of nineteen seventy six, but
they had gotten enough press in the UK the UK
Trades that these two young gentlemen from Manchester named Howard
Devoto and Pete Shelley decided to go down to London
to catch this band, and sufficiently repulsed odd inspired, Devoto

(10:13):
and Shelley made two epical moves. They invited the sex
Pistols to come to Manchester and play the aforementioned Lesser
Free Trade Hall, and they formed their own band called
the Buzzcocks or just Buzzcocks. I've never been entirely sure.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
I think it's just Buzzcocks. Well wait a minute, no,
there's the great because there's a TV show British TV.
He never mind the Buzzcocks and my favorite shows Simon
Amsels hilarious. Look it up on YouTube.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
News of the Sex Pistols show in Manchester spread by
word of mouth, so it was a very unattended gig.
I believe legend holds that around forty people showed up
for it, But much like the classic Velvet Underground quote
about everyone seeing them forming band, not many people saw them,
but everyone who did formed a band. A handful of

(10:57):
people in attendance at this forty strong gig did change
the course of music history. Devoto and Shelley obviously having
the Buzzcocks Going, they're basically described as one of the
architects of pop punk and or power pop, them, along
with a big Star, arguably the most melodically skilled and

(11:18):
arrangement wise skilled of any of that era except for
maybe the Clash. But I would argue that like the
Buzzcocks on singles Going Steady have like already a precocious
grasp of like pop songwriting and melody in a way
that the Clash at the same time did not. Man
Buzzcocks are great. Marky Smith was also in attendance there

(11:40):
and he formed The Fall, one of the UK's longest
lasting and influential punk bands, with a roster that swelled
to sixty six members before Smith died in twenty eighteen.
He was famous for saying, if it's me and your
granny on bongos, it's the Fall. And he was an
awful person. He was a real piece of and I

(12:02):
can I find the Fall unlistenable. So there's that.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
But he's hilarious, which is funny considering he's the lead
in for another prodigious Solen rock named.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Steven Patrick Morrissey. Uh. Yeah, you know, just a guy
who co founded the Smiths with another man Cunion, far
more talented than he and interesting and nice name. Oh
Johnny Marr, I love Johnny Mark. I've often said that
if I could get if somebody wanted to put together

(12:34):
isolate non vocal versions of the smith songs as a
as a box set, I would buy it.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
Oh wow, I'm sure and he could like do that.
I'm sure there's somebody on YouTube audio engineer wants to
do that for me.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
I will venmo you five bucks, Morrissy, No, dude, since
I was like nineteen, I decided I never wanted to
be in a room with that man. No Johnny Marr,
Oh Johnny Martin, No, No, I would love to, but
it would just be like forty minutes of me being like,
so how close were the four amps that you used
to record as soon as now what were their exact

(13:07):
micing placement that actually might be there's a light that
never goes out. I forget my Johnny mar guitar apocrypha.
Tony Wilson, the Manchester TV news presenter who'd go on
to launch the careers of Joy Division and also start
the record label Factory Records, which is the label that
is basically you know, responsible for the Manchester music scene

(13:29):
right throughout the eighties nineties. I mean short order they
produced Joy Division and order the Drudi column I believe.
I think later Happy Mondays.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
All the Hawcienda stuff played by Steve Coogan in twenty
four hour Party People in front of the Pod Steve Coogan.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
And of course four of the subjects of this podcast
Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, who would buy his
first base the day after seeing this concert, and Martin Hannett,
the producer who would help Joy Division craft their inimitable sound.
This was returned to the North a month later, visiting
Sheffield with two other bands. You may have heard of
theatrical punkstures, The Damned and a scrappy little band of

(14:09):
upstarts called the Clash Uh. And then they would play
the lesser Free Trade Hall three weeks after that, now
drawing hundreds to the venue. It is important to note
just how damned depressing Manchester was in this era. Until
the Great Depression, it was a known hub for textile,
chemical and electrical production. And then during World War Three,

(14:29):
Mancunion factories were repurposed to produce aircraft world War World
War three and.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Then getting something in my ear right now, wait a minute,
take shelter, and.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Then during UH and then during World War Two the
Mancunian factories were repurposed to produce aircraft, which made them
a very attractive target for the German Luftwaffe. During the Blitz,
the city sustained incredibly heavy damage and many of its
factories moved overseas after the war, and things got worse
during the seventies thanks to good old Maggie Hatcher, who

(15:08):
is now shoveling coal in Hell. And then many of
the iconic musicians from this era grew up amid the
literal rubble of the Blitz because a lot of this
stuff just didn't get repaired or fixed, so they were
like playing amongst the bombed out ruins of their city
and grew up in the government subsidized council housing aka
the council flats.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Never tell you you're going to burn any bit of
good will we have with the UK. Audience went out.
I ever tell you my aunt was friends with market Thatcher.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Ha, that reflects poorly on your bloodline. My favorite quote
about her is from a Scottish comic who I forget.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
But it was gonna be Frankly Boyle, was it.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
It's gotta be Frankie Boyle.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
He was like her state cost her state funeral costs
sixteen pounds. For the price of that, you could have
bought every Scotsman a shovel and you would have dug
a tunnel so deep you could have handed her off
to satan him.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah. I think that's gotta be Frankie Boyle. He's so good. Yeah,
she sucks. Uh what was that we are talking about?
Ian Kevin Kevin URTIs Curtis the anti Margaret Thatcher, known
to his friends as the anti Margaret Thatcher. He was
born on July fifteenth, nineteen fifty six. The first of

(16:21):
two children in a working class Macklesfield household. He quickly
showed an interest in the life of the mind. That's
a beautiful statement. Thank you for writing that.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
That's from Barton Fink.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Oh yeah, I will show you the Life of.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
The mind running down on Fire Hallway with a shotgun ring.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Go watch Barton Fink. It's a great movie. It is
one of my favorite com Brothers movies. He was particularly
fascinated by poetry, and by age eleven, he'd snagged a
place in the Macklesfield Boys grammar school called the King's School.
He picked up several awards at the school while developing
his interest in philosophy, literature and poetry, and also began

(17:01):
some of his more stereotypically punkish tendencies at this time,
like shoplifting records and stealing pills from the elderly he
was visiting as part of a school program, the result
of which necessitated hospitalization at least once. Well, that kind
of stuff, hanging out at old people's homes in the

(17:21):
late sixties in England.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
I find the Joy Division story compelling because they were
all like involved, and they all had day jobs until like, yeah,
six months before they stopped being a band. Like they
were all involved in various like council hall and like
city hall government programs, just these like nice quaint Little
Manx going down to the pub after nine to five

(17:46):
and then going to produce like some of the most
sepachoral music ever suppulcher L. Suppulcher L sad.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
After a brief sit in college and dropped out and
began working at a record store in Manchester, later joining,
as you mentioned, the civil Service. He also managed to
get married to his childhood's sweetheart at age nineteen, and
the two had their only child, Natalie, a few years later.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yes, and that brings us to guitarist Bernard Barney Sumner
born six months before Curtis. Grew up in the Manchester
suburb of Broughton. Educated at the Salford Grammar School, he
would join the minorly famous Manchester based animation studio Stop
Frame then it was called Cosgrove Hall Films as an animator.

(18:34):
That was an early day job for old Barney. He
was an animator on children's properties such as Jamie and
The Magic Torch. The company is best known today for
the spy parody Danger Mouse, which was a James Bond
parody starring a mouse, a stop motion version of The
Wind in the Willows, and, perhaps more appropriately for a
future member of Joy Division, Count Duckula.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Here, I feel bad taking Peter Hook. I know he's
your I take Peter Hook next.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
Oh man, I mean Peter Hook. What do you say
about him? An iconic rock star, like a bastard, A
world class grouch as a soup, A laddish man. Nonparell
born in nineteen fifty six. He was in the same
outlying Manchester suburb as Sumner. His given name was Woodhead.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Now.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
His parents divorced when he was three years old, which
is no mean feat in nineteen fifty nine England, and
Peter wound up taking his new stepfather's surname. I was
just reading. How Also, thanks to his new dad, he
got to spend some time in Jamaica, and I cannot
imagine a harder come down than returning to sixties seventies
Manchester after seeing Jamaica.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Like, good Christ, why was he taking to Jamaica?

Speaker 2 (19:50):
I don't know, Oh no, I mean that was he
was doing some kind of petrochemical or maybe destabilizing the government.
I don't know, Like what was the UK's what would
have brought an Englishman to Jamaica? Any number of things.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
I love this. Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, who would
go on to become some of the fiercest Peter rivals
in music history. Yeah, so so much. They first cross
paths at Grammar School as students, and they were drawn
together initially by a love of scooters, which actually played
a role in their first falling out. According to Peter

(20:24):
Hook's hilarious and absurdly vindictive memoir Unknown Pleasures, he and
Bernie were on a scooter trip in southern France as kids,
and one of their friends crashed his bike and needed
some extra cash to make it home. Hook writes, let's
just say when it came to helping out, Barney wasn't
very helpful. After that, I couldn't really look at.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Him the same way.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Have you read this book.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
I haven't, actually, Ah, I know one of your favorites.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
It's up there with like Levon Helm's memoir in terms
of just pure venom. And my favorite part of the
book is when he describes Bernie Sumner. Thus, whoever it
was that said no Man is an Island never met Bernard.
It's so good. Everyone checked that book out, though Someder
and Hook formed what would become Joy Division with a

(21:11):
different drummer, Terry Mason. The band went through a number
of replacements until cementing their classic lineup with drummer Stephen Morris,
the baby of the group, having been born in nineteen
fifty seven, a year after everyone else. Stephen Morris grew
up in nearby Macclesfield with a dad who helped organize
concerts in the area, and when a young Morris expressed
his interest in drumming, Morris Senior told him drummers, Steven,

(21:35):
I've never met a sane one yet. They all end
up taking morphine and drinking absinthe rotting their brains. Spot
the lie. Are there any bands where the drummers like
the stable member, I mean Flip Side, Keith Moon, No,
John Bonham, No, yeah, you know Dennis Wilson's Beach Boys.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Know who it's Don Henley? Oh yeah, like, okay, a
tremendous piece, so like the guiding hand behind that at
all times.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
But yeah, you know Ringo was pretty stable in the eighties.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
Oh yeahs like that. Yeah, I don't know. I I
have this theory that it's because in developing the limb
independence to play the drums, they like they lose a
part of their brain like impulse control or wo like
it's I don't know. We got to crack one of
them open and do some tests.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
So like an Oliver Sacks book on that? Did he
write a book like musicalia?

Speaker 2 (22:31):
That's tremendous. Yeah, Like the guy who was struck by
lightning and developed an insatiable urge to play and compose
concert piano despite never having touched the instrument in his life.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
That's cool. Is that the same book that has the
story about the guy who had some kind of a
phasia where his he had some kind of traumatic brain
injury and the speech portion of his brain was damaged,
so he learned how to speak again through singing because
it was a different part of the brain. Oh, I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
That's that that doesn't come to mind, but that is
very interesting. I believe I've traumatized you before with one
of my favorite avant garde vocalists, Diamanda Galley or Galas.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
I don't I don't remember that.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
I don't know how to pronoun he name because I've
only ever seen it printed. But she is sort of
a proto lingua ignoda, I would say, or Kristin Hater.
She performs on piano and has like the most insane
outrageous like extended range and extended techniques with her voice,

(23:29):
Like she's got a tremendously like beautiful traditional voice, but
she also goes into like roars and snarls and like
almost glossal alia, like speaking in tongues kind of stuff.
And I mean she's like literally contributed to soundtracks where
she is playing a demon. But she's a fascinating artist.
I really do go look up her cover of I

(23:51):
Put a Spell on You.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
It is what's her.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Name, Diamanda Galley yea with like an accent over the a.
She's Greek, so I don't know how you pronounced that.
And so she actually studied a lot of techniques from
this guy, this this Austrian guy named Alfred Wolfson, sorry German,
and he worked with a lot of World War One
veterans who were like haunted by everything that they'd seen

(24:17):
or they'd actually had their vocals damaged by mustard gas,
and so he developed all of it. He was actually
a stretcher bearer when he was eighteen, which is horrifying,
and so you know, part of his PTSD was like
hearing people scream persistently, and he cured himself of that
by like having these moments of tremendous vocal catharsis where

(24:41):
he was just like scream singing, and he you know,
put this into codified this as like a system and
a method, and he became a singing teacher and a psychotherapist.
And you know, when he was working with people and
it was therapeutic for soldiers and everything, but when like
actual singers started to learn this stuff, it would like
unlock on that registers in their voice and let them

(25:02):
do all these things that were like kind of not
traditionally thought capable essentially the way that they were using
their voice. So she was big into him. And then
how did we get into that?

Speaker 1 (25:17):
I mean, that's so interesting though. I Mean I had
a really good friend who who would go to vocal
coaches basically as a form of therapy to heal you know,
emotional trauma essentially, and they're they're studying to be a psychotherapist.
Now it's interesting the link between I mean, obviously we
know the link between mind and body is so strong,

(25:38):
but I hadn't really thought much about the link between
voice and psychological healing. It's really interesting to me. I
hadn't really made that connection until very recently.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
There's all this crazy stuff about focal dystonia. Have you
ever heard no about that? That is a like I
think it's neurological. This is like the nerdiest thing that
I will could could possibly ever say to you. But
I know it because of an online based teaching website
that I am a member of, not to teach, but

(26:10):
to like take lesson Scott's bas lessons.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Oh hell yeah, I know Scott's base lessons.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Oh yeah yeah, Scott Devine pluk slide. Anyway, he wears
a glove while he plays bass, and it's like people,
for before he became like truly famous, people were always like,
why do you wear that glove? And he's like, well,
I have focal dystonia, and like it's a neurological condition
that they don't really know what causes it. And it

(26:39):
just like misfires your muscle contractions. So it causes involuntary
muscle contractions that obviously make it very difficult for musicians,
in particular with their voice and with with hands. It
could have to do with overtraining and stressing, but they
also think it could be genetic. Like they really don't know,

(26:59):
and there just like sometimes they're like, well, yeah, you know,
sometimes your body just stops working that certain way, and
like there's no real cure for it other than like
a lot of therapy and learning to work with it.
Fascinating and horrifying the ways in which our bodies work.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yep, yep. Anyway to the theme of this episode, the
ways that your body can sort of fail you in
spectacular ways.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, I really should have taken that out of him
before this. Morris, Sumner and Hook placed a want ad
for a singer in the Manchester Virgin Records store in
Curtis was a known quantity from sort of the local
music scene, responded and was hired without an audition based
on his vibes. That's not an exaggeration. Bernard Sumner literally said,
we would just hire people based on whether or not

(27:46):
we got along with them. While both the Buzzcocks manager
Richard Boone and the frontman of that band, Pete Shelley,
have been credited with suggesting the band's original name Stiff Kittens.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Pretty good, I mean it was just chase the whole vibe.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
Oh yeah, it's one hundred and ten percent like a
pretty first wave UK punk name.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
I mean imagine like the Closer album cover with like
the tone sniff Kittens with Stiff Kittens listed, but like
it just it doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Yeah. They initially decided on Warsaw, which was a reference
to David Bowie's song Warszawa, which is off Low. It's
an instrumental track, which, yeah, bummer song. Is that the
one that they parody in that animated thing where Brian
he knows, like, h David, I've just come up with
this an instrumental thing. Uh, while we're producing your record Low.

(28:39):
If you don't like it, I'll just stick on one
of my weird albums or something and uh. And then
he plays it for David Bowie and he says, uh, well,
it's a riveting, pressing piece of music. Brian, I'll probably
just free associate some made up language ubbish over the
top so people won't think I've stolen it from you.
It was that, Yeah, guys, Bowie impression is so good.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
It is?

Speaker 2 (28:59):
What is it? I have to find it now? Just
so no, it is that because what it's called you know.
Also co producer Tony Visconti probably doing a lot more
than people realize on this record. Adam Buxton is the
comedian who oh.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
Another great great British panel show veteran. Yes, this is
a very good podcast too.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Oh okay, good for him. Friend of the pod Adam Buxton.
Warsaw Wall played their first show in May of nineteen
seventy seven. They were an early They were first wave punk,
basically short a few days of being exactly one year
after that Sex Pistols gig, and they were supporting the Buzzcocks,
and their drummer for the night was a guy named
Tony Tabac or Tabik, who joined the band two days earlier.

(29:45):
A month later, they replaced him with a guy named
Steve Brotherdale, who hilariously spent the entire tenure in the
band trying to get Ian Curtis to join his other
band called Panic. Because of this ironic lack of brotherhood,
the Nascent Joy Division fired Brotherdale in a cruely non

(30:06):
confrontational fashion. On the way back from recording some demos,
they pulled over asked him to step out of the
car to check a flat tire. And drove away.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
Is that like basically what Metallica did the Dave Mustaine.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
I think you would know that better than I would
from your work on Rivals. But I think they just
like left him something they read to stand a bus backus.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yes, that was what it was.

Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, I mean it's that's only slightly less humane than
the Sid Barrett move of just like not picking him
up at his house one day or like, well.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
That's what Neil Young did to Bruce Barry, right, He
like shipped him home with like pay in the middle
of a tour and Barry overdose like three days later.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, but I think that was like a year not
in any condition to be playing. Right. Now here goes
do it? Well?

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, take all this cash and go back to your
home base where you score your drugs.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Which was LA.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
I believe surely this will turn out well for you.
I'm Neil Young.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
There's definitely like a listicle out there of like worst
ways bands of Fire A member.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think of
what else. I don't care. Things happened quickly for the
band after that. Stephen Morris, who would go on to
earn the nickname the Human drum Machine for his unerring
precision and Verve responded to their ad in August of
nineteen seventy seven, which is fortunate because I have read
that he was the only person who did so, and
the band changed their name in early nineteen seventy eight

(31:34):
to avoid confusion with the London punk band Warsaw Pact.
They went with a pretty dire source for the new
One Joy division was, as is often mentioned, a sexual
slavery wing connected to the Nazis concentration camps. They essentially
abducted or just took women from within the camps and

(31:55):
put them into forced sexual slavery, largely servicing other camp
members who were all non Jewish, who were like co
conspirators or like had been somehow elevated in the ranks
of prisoners. They were at Auschwitz, Bergen, Buchenwald and Docou,
so you know, all the worst ones. And according to
Joseph Kohout, an Austrian Nazi concentration camp survivor imprisoned for

(32:19):
being gay, Himmler mandated weekly visits to the Freuden Freuden
a Tailungen for gay prisoners, which Himmler intended to cure
them of their homosexuality with the band learned about this
via Camp survivor and author Yehiel Feiner's nineteen fifty five

(32:42):
novella House of Dolls.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
This is somehow not the worst Nazi related British band
name of the era.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, educate us about Spandau Ballet.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah, I well, let me. I was doing this off
the dome. I want to make sure this is actually right. Okay,
it has been scrubbed from their Wikipedia page. Yes, spandout
Ballet I have heard referred to the final jerky moments
of Nazi prisoners of war being hung for their crimes.

(33:17):
That was their bodies dangling, spasming in their last moments
of life.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Spandau Ballet. I know this much.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Is true.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
The Joy Division recorded.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
There's something Happier Joy Division Quick.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
I was gonna say, imagine if they'd gone with Freud,
Di Nied, Pudentia and NuGen. They recorded their debut apep
An Ideal for Living in December of nineteen seventy seven,
and played their first gig under their new name in
January of nineteen seventy eight. The cover of the EP,
with its illustration of a Hitler youth member, did not
e tensions over their name, things continued to happen for them,

(34:04):
though truly one of the most rocket ride you know
to fame a band by nineteen seventy seven, famous by
like late nineteen seventy nine, and done by early nineteen eighty. Anyway,
in April of seventy eight, they had caught the eye
of the aforementioned TV presenter Tony Wilson, along with another

(34:26):
men Cunian named Rob Gretton, who had become their new manager.
And it's usually important part of why they became successful.
This guy was like their biggest champion. According to legend,
a drunken Ian Curtis berated Tony Wilson for not putting
them on so it goes. I have also heard that
he wrote a scathing letter and Wilson responded and said
that Joy Division would be the next band that he

(34:47):
would showcase on TV. They self released this troublingly titled
EP and in June of nineteen seventy eight, and made
their television debut that September. Joy Division's first encounter then
with the inf producer Martin Hannett. It's funny I actually
heard Martin Hannett's name first in a Dead Kennedy's song
in their song Nazi Punked Off, which is one of

(35:09):
their later later era songs. By later, I mean like
eighty or eighty one instead of seventy seven, but it
has a bit of studio chatter with Jellaby offer going
over produced by Martin Hannett. He was a hard, hard
ass in the studio anyway. Their first encounter with him
came via a compilation double seven inch EP from Tony

(35:30):
Wilson's new label, Factory Records, was in fact the first
release on Factory in October seventy eight. From this strength
of his TV appearance, they received a few offers from
major labels, but decided to opt for the nascent Upstart
label in promise of a better financial split and more
creative freedom. This would come back to bite all of
them in the ass, because Tony Wilson was an awful,

(35:50):
awful businessman. Martin Hannett was a self taught audio nerd
who had a degree in chemistry and came to engineering
from doing live sound for concerts. He landed his place
in punk history for recording the first independently released punk record,
The Buzzcocks Spiral Scratch EP, People People, forget that. For

(36:10):
all the punk's vying claims for independence. You know, the
Ramones were on Sire and sex Pistols were on em
I yeah, real, real hard scrabble lads there. God, I
hate the sex Pistoles.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah, Johnny Lyten's an edge case as far as like
p I l but he just sucks so hard. And
all of them sucked so hard. They were just like
the worst group.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
Of as musicians or people or both.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah, I find nothing interesting about them other than the
fact that they suck.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
But that sometimes that's enough, though, I mean.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
You were just they were you know what they were.
They were like the archetypal they were.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Like did they not suck? Interestingly?

Speaker 2 (36:57):
No, their music is it's like so bor it's pub rock.
It's just like boring ass Like it's not it's it's
pub rock. You know. They fired the only guy in
the band who was good at music, Glenn Mattlock, and
then literally hired a guy based on his image who
could not play bass period. Sid Vicious could not play bass.
They were all like violent men, possibly you know, like

(37:21):
all sexual predators. Given that the tenor of the times
and yeah, dude, they were just put they were a
boy band, like Martin Mclairin just shoved them together based
on thinking that he could sell them as an image,
you know. But yeah, yeah, Also they were directly influenced
by the Ramones, which forever settles the issue of the

(37:45):
US like like they learned from the Vermoness self titled debut,
So the US invented pug. I'm sorry to those of
the UK who were clinging onto that last thing. Oh
what your country did? Oh thanks to our listeners in
the UK.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
I was gonna say this is the episode especially for
our new UK friends.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
It was anyway, Yeah, his other stuff is super weird.
He a Manchester comic named Graham David Fellows had a
hit called Jilted John, which do you know anything about that?

Speaker 3 (38:23):
Nope?

Speaker 2 (38:23):
I think it's like a comedy record that Martin Hannett produced.
And he also did some records with this punk poet
guy named John Cooper Clark who was just doing like
spoken word over Martin Hannett's weird electronic sounds and like
bass playing sounds awful.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, even I can't put a good face to that.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
No. Also, I think at one point in is it
twenty four hour party. People that they he's like played
by Andy Serkis and when they they bury him, they're
like he was too fat for his coffin or something like.
They say something awful about him.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
But Martin Hannett, Yeah, because he died super young.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
His gravestone has the architect of the Manchester Sound engraved
on it. I think he died at like age forty
two or something, presumably of if it wasn't a direct overdose,
just from excessive alcohol and drug use. I believe. Yes,
we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
But before Jory Division stepped into the studio to record
Unknown Pleasures with Martin Hannett, three landmarks in the band's
history occurred.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
Number one.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
In December of nineteen seventy eight, Ian Curtis had his
first recognized severe epileptic seizure. Curtis had actually probably developed
a disease a long time before this. His wife Deba,
remember that as early as nineteen seventy two he would
report having sensation of floating. You wrote while sorbet is

(40:06):
that a typo? I like it?

Speaker 3 (40:07):
It is no wow sober? Oh wh all sober?

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Okay, but possibly while making sorbet. What a delio sprinkle,
A delicious wrinkle on the joy division myth of being
Curtis a devoted fan of Sorbet.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
I can't read this next part wold laughing Jesus Christ.
And then he collapsed on a venue floor after prolonged
exposure to a strobe light. Prior to his diagnosis, most
of these incidents were chalked up to drugs and alcohol,
but Curtis received an official diagnosis of epilepsy in January
nineteen seventy nine, with the horrifying prediction from doctors that,

(40:46):
without medication quote, his life would be ruled to obsolescence
by a severe epilepsy.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
A horrible thing to say to your patient.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
Epilepsy is so goddamn scary. Oh yeah, I know very
little about it. It's the two halves of your brain
stopped communicating.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Well, I believe, but I am not entirely sure that
it's uh from my high school psych class that one
of the first big insights into epilepsy came from that
guy who got the steel rod jammed up his face.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Oh Phineas Gauge.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yes, Phineas Gauge, our boy, Phineas Gage, the.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
Phineas Gage. Oh Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
The firsts up of him is him holding the iron
rod that went through his face and separated the halves
of his brain.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
So he was a railroad worker, right, and the railroad
spike went down the hole and something exploded and it shot. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah, it like went through the lower half of his
jaw and came out the top head of his brain.
But it severely it severed the yeah, sorry, it severed
the two halves of his brain essentially, And that was
like an early understanding of how the brain worked for us,
because his personality like changed drastically and it gave It
was like a landmark case in our understanding of how

(42:06):
mental illness or any kind of confliction of the affliction
of the brain was governed by how the two halves
work together.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
Did his personality change? Was he just like, Holy, a
spike just went through my head. I'm going to do
things differently.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
According to Wikipedia, the effects were sufficiently profound that his
friends saw him as quote no longer gauge.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Oh how long did he live after that?

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Twelve years after that?

Speaker 1 (42:31):
Wow, that is horrified. When was that like turn of
the century, like late eighteen hundreds, actually early eighteen hundreds,
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Incident the incident occurred in eighteen forty eight.

Speaker 3 (42:45):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Wow, I didn't know what it was that early.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, I don't actually believe they made any I don't
want to misrepresent him as being like some kind of
epilepsy forbear, but it was like our understanding of how
epilepsy as occur was informed by his case.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
That is wild wow.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
At least as I was educated in Central Pennsylvania, which
again I regret from a high school psychology class. I
actually read a little bit about the history of epilepsy
treatment and like diagnosis to get to get some context
for this, and it doesn't go back that far. The
like really had not developed treatments beyond like incredibly invasive

(43:30):
surgery and like a battery of truly horrifying drugs. By
the time Curtis was dealing with it was the new
young epileptic no hit polio and autism. I mean, he
might be lying about that because it's something you don't
like grow out of. So if Neil Young at any
point was like aight epilepsy, you know, remember that our

(43:53):
friend of a friend in our people days who said
Neil lies like he breathes.

Speaker 1 (43:58):
I think he No, he had epileptic seizures.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
I guess so.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
One of the best known singers with epilepsy rock Neil
Young's a rock legend, all right, Young Time. He's been
very open by his life with epilepsy, which he describes
in his memoir. He developed epilepsy as an adult in
nineteen sixty six and once told a journalist that a
seizure felt like, quote, you slip into some other world.
In December nineteen seventy eight, Ian Curtis was prescribed pheno

(44:26):
barbatol to combat he's seizures, but when they continued to occur,
he was subsequently given fen toyne fentytoyine fenotoin carbanza carba.
He was given some other stuff. Owing to the group's
heavy performance schedule and equally heavy drinking and drugging, Curtis

(44:47):
would lose track of which drug he was supposed to
be on at any given time, and unfortunately, one of
the well diagnosed side effects of pheno barbatol is depression.
So on all this is not good for Curtis.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
It's just so tragic man. I was definitely a combination
of like Northern UK like man culture of like never
talking about your problems and self medicating. I mean he
did drugs and drank to like both as part of
the culture, but like also to like numb all of
this horror and pain. And you know, also being a musician,

(45:22):
is this bad for you because you're supposed to get
like a lot of good sleep, regular sleep, and like
issue alcohol and drugs and all that stuff if you
have epilepsy. Anyway, a few weeks after that, Joy Division
landed the January thirteenth of NME and recorded their de

(45:42):
Reger event in Life of an Upcoming Punk band, The
Peel Session also that month, and three months later they
entered Strawberry Studios, founded by members of ten CC Inport
with Martin Hannett Jordan. Just give us a thumbnail sketch
of John Peel and the Peel Sessions.

Speaker 1 (46:01):
Oh. John Peel, legendary English DJ, one of the founding
members of BBC Radio one in nineteen sixty seven. He
was a veteran of the Pirate Stations before that, who
were like, you know, UK didn't have commercial radio, so
the Pirate stations were basically the only radio networks in
the early sixties who played like pop music all the time.
Otherwise it was strictly limited on BBC Radio waves. So

(46:24):
when he came aboard to BBC Radio One, which was
the UK's first real dedicated pop network, he was like
he had the cool cred because he was on the
pirate stations and he ran late night shows I think
called top Gear was one. The Perfumed Garden was another
in the late sixties, and anyway, he was famous for
having bands on. He was well, he's famous for a
couple of things. He was famous for playing kind of

(46:48):
the weirder like like FM before FM was a thing,
like the kind of weirder stuff, and then he would
have bands on for these sessions you have them play
like in studio concerts, and it became a real rite
of passage for breaking bands. He was like a big
probably one of the pre eminent people who broke punk

(47:09):
in the UK. I would have to say The Undertones
was one of his favorite bands. Yea, his Kicks, great song, Yeah,
teenage Kicks so hard to beat. So yeah, he was
just like the pre eminent taste maker of UK music
from the late sixties. Through cheese. I mean probably through
to his death in two thousand and four. I mean
any of our UK listeners keep me humble there, but

(47:31):
pretty undiminished the guy. The guy had some heaters through
to his death.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
He sure did. Jordan Steven Morris told British GQ that
his first impression of Martin Hannett was Joe Meek combined
with Tom Baker period Doctor Who, which Bernard Sumner echoed.
It's true Martin did look like Tom Baker from Doctor Who,
but you'd have to add some serious drugs to the
equation as well. He was basically Doctor Who on drugs.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
That's quite an image. And also Joe Meek is is
not a very flattering comparison.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
You don't tell people that you someone's like Joe Meek.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Yeah, Joe McK for non sixties britpop Megan Nerds like us.
He's basically like the UK's answer to Phil Spector. He
built a home studio in his apartment and did early
experiments with tape technology that basically amounts it to these spacey,
haunting pop records tell Us Star Dull Telstar Yeah, which
I believe was the first UK song to go number one.

(48:27):
The United States, and he also has a very, very
fascinating album called I Hear a New World which is
a pioneering concept album techno work.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
Tell you one thing, his landlady heard some new worlds.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Oh yes. Unfortunately, these achievements are overshadowed by the fact
that he was dealing with some serious undiagnosed mental issues
and ended up shooting his landlady to death before turning
the rifle on himself in nineteen sixty seven. So yeah,
not exactly a flattering comparison for Divisions producer Martin had it.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
And from that first impression things only deteriorated. Hannah was
just a super dick to them, and I think it
was he called the band like a producer's dream because
they were all so young and inexperienced that he would
just frequently tell them to shut the up and leave
him alone like and he was also perpetually stoned on
weed heroin suppers, often drunk. Peter Hooker called in the studio.

(49:25):
We'd sit on the left, he'd sit on the right,
and if we said anything like I think the guitars
are a bit quiet, Martin, he'd scream, Oh my god,
why don't you just off.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
To be fair. That sounds like something you would do
when you were annoyed with us.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
It's true. And I was also frequently messed up Hannah's
instruction to the band while tracking, which took two days.
They did basic tracks on a Saturday and then overdubs
on a Sunday, and then the rest of it was
like mixing. The album was done in like a matter
of days, but his instructions to them were vague and

(50:06):
pseudomistical in nature. Be magnificent, but humble. That also sounds
like Barry Matt Barry thing. Be magnificent but humble. Or
he would tell them to do it again, but more
cocktail party like that, or more yellow, I really like that.
And he once asked for another take, slower but faster,

(50:29):
and it would do things like listen to mixes from
under the console, and when he got tired of the band,
he would literally freeze them out by cranking the AC
down or up. I've never understood how that works, to
untenable levels of freezing. Hook wrote in his memory that
there were obviously no such thing as click tracks or
backing tracks in those days, so they would just go
in bang out the tracks. Ian would be in the room,

(50:52):
but he would do the vocal in isolation later.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
I just have to retell the famous story speaking of
outrageous music descriptions of how John Lennon would convey what
he wanted to hear at Beatles producer George Martin. He
has there's a great piece on Vulture about just all
the most like ridiculous things that John Lennon told George
Martin for the benefit of mister Kite. He told George
Martin that he wanted it to quote sounds like an orange.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Martin recalled this in Mark Lewison's nineteen eighty eight book
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. John had said he wanted
to smell the sawdust on the floor, wanted to taste
the atmosphere of the circus for the climax to a
day in a life. He wanted a sound quote like
the end of the world, which I'd have to argue
that George Martin delivered a seachord, no, the whole like crescendo.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
I know, no, I know, But isn't it just like
the piano chord is just like a boatload of sea
chords on like four pianos, right, I guess it e.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Sorry, check me, check me, check me. Yeah, do it off?

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Do it off, John hurt voice, I have the wallras,
George Barton recalled John, asking I'd like for you to
do a score and use some brass and some strings
and some weird noises. You know, the kind of thing
I want. But, as George Barton recalled, I didn't. I

(52:13):
just went away and did what I did, and for
tomorrow never knows. John wanted to sound like a thousand
monks chanting, even though he was only one of him.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
Tom Waits would do this kind of good too, He
would like, if I recall correctly. Some of his advice
was like play it like your hair is on fire,
which is a good one.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
And then there is Becker and Fagan from Steely Dan,
who would just tell their guitar soloists play the blues.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
Or just no, that wasn't it. That wasn't it either, No,
do another one, all right, thanks for coming in. I
love the Dan.

Speaker 1 (52:50):
Yes. Martin Hannett reserved most of his abuse. However, for
Steven Morris the drummer. He was actually quite enthralled with
Morris's ability to play fast and repetitively without error. But
he seemed to take this as a license to put
him through all kinds of abuse while recording, like allegedly
for legal reasons while he's dead, don't care like forcing him.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
One person said this wasn't true out of band, but
it's also in I think it's part of it is
in the movie Control. Yes, on the Coorian movie Korbian.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
He supposedly forced him to record the drums for She's
Lost Control on the roof of the studio, which must
have been freezing. I assume he reportedly made Morris dismantles
entire kit down to the screws because he said he
heard something rattling inside. To this day, the surviving members
of Joy Division don't seem to know if this was
true or one of hand. It's psychological games. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
Yeah, I mean, his whole thing was isolation in the drums.
He wanted everything to be I guess because he had
such ambitious designs on how he was going to treat
them with reverb and delay. He wanted them each part
as clean as possible, and so he put Steven Morris
through the I have to imagine insanity inducing trial of

(54:06):
literally recording the drums one at a time. So you know, normally,
when you play a drum set, you play all of
the parts at a single time as the instrument mandates.
But Hannatt had Steven Morris sit there and just go
through an entire take, playing just one of the tom parts,
then just another tom part, then just to the snare part.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
I don't even matter.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
That's like playing piano one finger at a time, like
I can't it's not I don't even understand how that
would even walk together.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
And Morris would just like he will. He did it
by I guess, imagining and hearing and then playing the
other drum parts on his legs like with his sticks
to keep time while he just like did a kick
pedal or waited for like one tom hit to come up.
But he said he found it up bruised all over
his thighs because of like a day or hours of

(55:00):
doing this.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
That's horrifying.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
It is that would make me so insane. Just how
do you visualize how do you visualize a one tom
hit coming up in your song?

Speaker 1 (55:13):
I mean almost be one thing if you just dampen
everything and so you continue to sort of play it
or hit it or whatever, and then have the one thing.
But I can imagine that that was a luxury that
was not afforded to him.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
And that's what rules about Steven Morris man. I mean,
you know I mentioned his nickname earlier, but the human
drum machine. But he is just like a phenom.

Speaker 1 (55:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
The other person who vies to that title is Jackie
Leebzzik something from can who was like a big influence
actually on Steven Morris but you know, he took it
so much further, especially in the New Order stuff where
it's like he's just keeping time with like sequencers and
like synth parts, like just absolutely playing drum machine parts

(55:56):
and so damn fast. Did I paste this in here later?

Speaker 3 (56:00):
I think?

Speaker 1 (56:01):
So?

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
Like Transmission, that song is bonkers fast and he's just
playing sixteen notes on the high hat the entire time.
He must have been on speed.

Speaker 1 (56:10):
And hilariously, he looks like, are hey the strongest man
in the world. He looks just like yeah. He adds
so much to this anecdote.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
What a sweet boy.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Yeah. Hannah's quest for weird sounds led him to record
the sound of the elevator in the building with a
rotating Leslie speaker place inside, and also the band breaking
milk bottles in the studio and in one case placing
Stephen Morris in a potentially fatal situation when he asked
him to overdub some drum hits on She's lost control

(56:42):
with the can of aerosol tape cleaner discharged in time
with the hits.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
Can you hear that?

Speaker 2 (56:48):
I mean you can? Actually, that's amazing about all of this,
Like it's on the It's why those snare parts in
that song sound like they're sampled. They almost they sound like, uh,
the sound that you get, yes, exactly, They sound like
what you would later get in a number of years
from like the landrum from Roland, the sound of the

(57:09):
closed high hats that you hear on all that early
hip hop stuff. And Hannah was hearing it years earlier,
and it was just like, don't worry, I'll just compromise
the drummer's physical health to get that song.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
Yes, as more as reculled, it was absolutely stupid, like
because it's just playing one of those snare drum parts.
And Martin made me go into a vocal booth with
a can of tape head cleaner, which is highly flammable
and poisonous. So I'm in this confined space that's slowly
filling up, and I come out of it completely dazed.
If I lit a cigarette, that whole place would have

(57:40):
gone up.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
That is so nuts.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
I mean, just like, yeah, literally breathing toxic fubes just
to get a specific snare sound. But you know, it
is just impossible to overstate how important Hanna it was
for crafting this sound. I mean, and then you get
everything from post punk except for Susie Sue, who was
like contemporary with them, and I guess maybe the cure.

(58:02):
The Cure started I think also contemporaneously around this time
in Bajaus. But like when you think of like the
sound of post punk records, that's like sort of very
clinical and icy and pristine, but at the same time
it sounds like it's recorded very high fidelity but in
a very spooky cave. That makes sense, Yeah, very much, Okay, Yeah,

(58:24):
I mean the Jordan in our first wave punk band,
their early gigs were just like Volume, and especially parts
of that I troublingly titled EP, and then Hannatt found
like these ways to just completely invert the entire concept
of punk as it currently was, just on its head.
You know, he took all these guitar parts like you
think of punk, you think of like Marshall's amps cranked

(58:46):
right like that's the sex pistol sound, that's the the
Ramones sound. And he just took Barney's guitar and made
it as teeny and like echo weee and backgrounded it
essentially and draping it in plate reverb and treating it
which weird pans. I mean, Someoneer at the time was
a prettish guitarist by his own admission, and so a
lot of his lines are not particularly athletic or thick,

(59:08):
but you know they only did. There's only one song
on here where there are two guitar parts. It's like
a single note part and chords. And in doing so,
he brought our sweet boy Hooky Peter Hook to the
four and basically coined a new style of bass playing.
I mean, that's why I'm ultimately like a hook fan
over anything, because there are very few people who have

(59:28):
revolutionized the instrument, the electric bass, and I would say
the first one is James Jamerson. Nobody played bass until
he started playing it like that, until he picked up
a p bass on the Motown stuff can I make
a suggestion, you're gonna say John Intois or aren't.

Speaker 3 (59:45):
You Oh yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
I was gonna say, yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Yes, but yes, as a lead instrument, I think it's
a similar thing where you had a guitarist who was
more focused on rhythm slashes. Yeah, and then you opened
the door for the bassis elite instrument.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
It's true.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
But I don't consider and this is maybe a spicy take,
but I don't consider end Twistles stuff melodic. I think
it's too choppy and he's playing too many notes, like
in the sense that Hook is, you know, because Hook
was not a virtuoso. You can hear and I don't
mean this as a pun but Hooks to those songs
like Entwistle like is just all over the place in

(01:00:24):
a fantastic way. He was a virtuoso. But like sing
me the bass part to like the live version of
you know, any of their stuff, it's like ten thousand
notes at once, you know. And yeah, so you have
like rock derived playing, you have R and B derived
bass playing. And until Peter Hook, he invented a new
vocabulary for the instrument, you know, and and all of

(01:00:47):
the post punk people who would follow in his wake
picked up on that template. You know, there's like eighties
post punk, goth new wave bass playing is not really
like much else at the time, and it's down to him.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
You're gonna get mad, I mean, if you're gonna think
I'm being difficult. This is this is here question to
what degree was the influenced by disco? Because I hear
a lot of that in his mind he was influenced
by disco. Yeah, I don't think at all.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
I mean just because they well they got into in
New Order was the first New Order stuff was influenced
by Italo disco like but like traditional disco bass playing
is just like octaves and it's still really R and
B influenced because a lot of it was like black
guys from New York, you know. And I'm not sure
how much of Hook would have heard it, but you know,

(01:01:37):
it's so fascinating because he in the true ways that
so much great art is born from limitations. He was
doing it out of necessity. Bernard Summer's first guitar amp
was a cheap piece of Prior to this, he had
just wired his and Hook's instruments into his grandmother's stereo
so they could hear each other, and then when the
band started writing and rehearsing, having both both of their

(01:02:00):
amps so cranked, it essentially moved stole all the low
end out and Hook couldn't hear himself over the sound
of first Bernard's guitar amp being cranked and then his
own bad basics. Like I'm not even sure if they
were making specific bass amps at this time, or they
probably were, but it probably wouldn't been available at Manchester

(01:02:21):
because like so many early bass things were just like
we took a guitar head and cranked the bass. I
think it was actually end Twistle who was probably or
Bill Wyman, who were like responsible for starting to get
bass specific amplifiers made and had the circuitry voice for
the instrument.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
I mean, I think I know in the late sixties
they had bass amps because the baseman sticker on Paul
McCartney's base on the rooftop was taken from a Fender
baseman amp package.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
It was it was case candy that came.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
With the so I think by this time, by the
time Joey Division were recording, they had bas specific amps.
But your point about them not being available right Manchester,
I'm sorry that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
Is dramatically incorrect. The base came out in fifty two,
so I was I was incorrect, Mayakoba, But yeah, I
mean it would have been a matter of what was
available to him anyway, as anyone who's ever tried to
play with it, he practice amp nose. You get no
low end out of it, but they are great for treble.
And so you know, Hook was just putting all of

(01:03:19):
his basslines really high up on the neck because that
was all he could hear, and in doing so created
an entire new vocabulary for the instrument. His habit of
wearing the bass comically low, in some cases around his
knees was not a sonic choice, though he admitted to
stealing that from Paul Simon, and of the clash, he said, well,

(01:03:41):
you've got the bass strap high. Playing it is dead
easy when you're going down with the strap. The further
you have it, the more bum notes you play. And
I was renowned for my bum notes, but you've got
to put coolness against bum notes. I play bass in
the studio up high, and when people see it, they say,
my god, look at how you play bass. That is

(01:04:01):
son funny to me. The fact that he was like no,
I know the way that this instrument should be played
and the way that it is easier to play. I
will not be doing that because it looks.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Cooler, because it doesn't look as good.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Hannat Martin Hannett and Stephen Morris, the drummer, were also
advancing the cause of electronic drums in an extremely infantile
state at this point on Unknown Pleasures. I mentioned earlier
that Morris was a big fan of Can, and he
actually saw this piece of gear on the British cover
of Can's Tago Mago or Tagomego. Never heard it pronounced.
He was obsessed with the band's drummer, Jackie Leebzit and

(01:04:38):
decided he had to find this piece of equipment, which
was called a sinnare. It was a synthetic snare drum
thing and it doesn't even sound like a drum half
the time. Like the swishing noises, the weird swishing noises
you hear on disorder are the sinnare because it worked
like an actual synthesizer like a moge or whatever, where
you can get all these filter sweeps and oscillations out

(01:04:59):
of it. And if you just did that in the
quote unquote incorrect way. It would create all these other
worldly noises and textures. I don't know, man, plug this,
plug this isolated Stephen Morris track in for like ten
seconds at around the end of the song, and hear
him seamlessly transitioning from this insane stream of sixteenth notes

(01:05:21):
on a high hap to really intense tom fills and
then back into the beat without missing it, and again
he was like nineteen or twenty. People listening to the

(01:05:48):
Sound of Unknown Pleasures frequently use the word space, and
that is entirely down to Martin Hannett's innovative use of
reverb and several delays, but chiefly won and not always.
I contradicted myself immediately for insight. He just did the
time monitored track of having Ian Curtis sing through telephone
to create the required distance. They also did that with

(01:06:09):
Bad Brains for one of the songs, but that was
because HR was in jail.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
I didn't know that was a thing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):
I know. I made a joke when we did the
Strokes episode about Chilian Casablanca sounding like he's singing through
an early cell phone, but I didn't know they actually
recorded people that way.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Yeah, people, I mean there's a whole cottage industries of
mics that people have made. I mean, back in this era,
I would have been a pain in the ass to
patch it into a mixing desk. But nowadays people just
make and sell bespoke telephone mics. Is because of the
compression and everything crunching a down of the signal that

(01:06:44):
a telephone mic, you know, induces people do like that sound,
and so now you can just buy an old telephone
handset that is just wired into an XLR.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
That's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
It's in a lot of garage rock bands. Yeah. The
other thing you see is a lot is people using
the the Green Bullet, the sure mic that was a
harmonica mic.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
That sounds at Jack White thing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
Well, yes, probably, but it distorted so much that you
see people use the green bullet as like a special
mic for effect. They'll have like a dedicated vocal mic
and then they'll do something else into the green bullet
to make it sound all weird anyway. Hannett heavily relied
on a delay unit called the DMX fifteen eighty, which
is confusingly not related to the Oberheim DMX drum machine,

(01:07:29):
which Steven Morris later used in New Order Hannah's preference
may have been because he helped design the thing, although
he did so in a typically eccentric way. Advanced Music
Systems AMS was founded by two guys former aerospace engineers
named Mark Crabtree and Stuart Nevison in seventy six, and
for a few months they collaborated with Hannett to create

(01:07:51):
the AMS DMX fifteen eighty, and they did so by
meeting Martin Hannett in a random parking lot between where
they were located in Burnley and where he lived in Manchester,
and he would get into the back of their car
and just rant at them about the qualities that this
delay would have, and then he would get out and
drive home, and this went on for months. The recording

(01:08:12):
setup at Strawberry Studios had pretty standard pieces of analog
reverb and delay stuff. They had even tides, They had
tape phase simulator, they had emt plate reverbs, they had
an actual tape echo, and they had something called the
Marshall time modulator, which Peter Hook started calling the Marshall
time wasterau how finnicky it was. But the DMX fifteen

(01:08:34):
to eighty was the world's first microprocessor control digital delay
and I think I've ranted about tape delay on this
very podcast before, but that has achieved. The early rockabilly
records achieved the slap back effect, and Pink Floyd used
tape delay, and like the psychedelic tape delay that you
hear is accomplished by having a second reel of tape

(01:08:56):
running varying degrees of lateness in accordance to the main
input signal. Right, so you get a you hear someone
go ah, and then like a millisecond later, the second
reel of tape goes ah, and you increase that distance
at very low settings. It's it's what we call slap
back effect where it, yeah, it's almost indetectable as an

(01:09:18):
actual copy of the sound because it's occurring like a
millisecond after. And then you know later when they introduced
like the space echo and once the other big correct well,
the Binsenecarek is actually a rotating drum, which is a
different style of anyway, with all of those delays, because

(01:09:38):
they were tape based, and because tape is a decaying
source that literally degrades every time you use it, there
were all kinds of pitch inconsistencies and wobble or warble,
which you know people have an affinity for, but was
not you know, accurate to the pitch. So when the
digital delay came in, it was a huge deal for

(01:09:59):
engine ears and gear nerds because suddenly you had these
very pristine repeats that could then be pitch shifted, so
you could have a drum hit and then you could
have the drum hits delay pitched up differently, and that
was just radical. And what Handa did with it was

(01:10:19):
to on the drums at least, was to pan those
two signals hard, so you have the acoustic drum hit
in one ear and then the digital delay of signal
of it in the other ear, and that just gave
all of this auspaciousness that you could only previously achieve
with reverb. Hand It also used it as an early
sampler because with enough time you could get like an

(01:10:41):
isolated you know, if you set it to long enough,
you couldet an isolated signal. So you would hit a
guitar chord or hit a snarehead bop, and then like
an appreciable amount of time later, you would hear bop
and he would record the second hit and it trigger
that with a keyboard, which is basically he invented He
kind of invented sampling really, so he would take just

(01:11:04):
the delay signal and then be able to reproduce that
with a trigger with a keyboard, and that's what he
did with You can hear New Dawn Fades, the weird
song of Weird intro to that is what he did
with Sumner's guitar, and the Marshall time modulator was a
thing to like they basically just made drums not sound
like drums. Steven Morris would said, they put the toms

(01:11:26):
through it and they would just get these very dead
like sounds, and all of this just went into the
drum mix and the final mix, which is just I mean,
this record still sounds incredible and weird, and like if
you listen to it on good headphones are really good speakers,
you can really hear the depth of what he was doing.
And when you put that up against like, yeah, dude,

(01:11:46):
a Ramones record, it's insane. It sounds like it was
done by aliens. Whoo edit around that, Thank you for that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
That was Heigel's techno wank corner.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
Yeah, Hig's gear corner. Beata as you meditate on that
we'll be right back with more too much information after
these messages.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
Well, from the sounds, we go to the words everybody,
let's all have a group hug before we delve deep
into the psyche of one Ian Curtis.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
Here we go all the fund's over.

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
Yes. Because the band were more concerned with volume than
energy in the early days, it wasn't until the recording
process began that the other three members of the band
actually heard what Ian Curtis was singing about. And h boy,
g golly, that must have been Nah, quite an experience

(01:13:03):
he's saying what. As we mentioned up top Ian Curtis
was an intensely literate young man, and he was extremely
influenced by writers like Franz Kofka, J. G. Ballard, and
Nicolaia Googol, whose works he rated for song titles like Atrocity, Exhibition,
Colony and Dead Souls. Disorder opens with the couplet I've

(01:13:23):
been waiting for a guide to come and take me
by the hand. Could these sensations make me feel the
pleasures of a normal man? God? That's crushing. It's been
interpreted by some as alluding to Curtis's struggles both with
the symptoms and treatments for his epilepsy and depression. A
few lines later, he sings, lights are flashing, cars are

(01:13:45):
crashing getting frequent. Now I've got the spirit, lose the feeling,
let it out somehow, which you pause. It is almost
certainly a reference to his seizures, as well as J. G.
Ballard's Crash, which was in nineteen seventy three novel about
people with sexual fetishes for car crashes. Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Yeah, and I mean lights are flashing getting frequent now,
like at the time his seizures were increasing. Again, the
band's timeline was so short. Yeah, first gig in seventy seven,
and by you know, late seventy eight, they were like, oh,
you have epilepsy, Like you will not be able to
live a normal life and continue in this band. And
it did get progressively worse as well, sadly discuss later.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
Insight contains a staggeringly depressing first verse, guess your dreams
always end. They don't rise up just to send. But
I don't care anymore. I've lost the will to want more.
I'm not afraid, not at all. I watched them all
as they fall. All the stuff was something of a

(01:14:53):
shock for Ian's band it's because Ann could be as
lavish as any one of them, and the piss taking,
heavy drinking culture of the North meant that his bandmates
were frequently in the dark. As to the depths of
his struggles, numbness and lack of feeling are recurring motifs.
Curtis sings the strange too much, can't take much more. Oh,

(01:15:13):
I've walked on water, run through fire, can't seem to
feel it anymore. On New Dawn Phase, which has become
one of the most covered and reused of Unknown Pleasures tracks,
one of the album's most oft discussed lyrics is She's
Lost Control, which is sort of cruelly ironic in that
Curtis is singing about an epileptic woman having seizures and

(01:15:35):
rumordho have died afterwards, which he saw firsthand at one
of his day jobs as an assistant disablement resettlement officer,
a job he started in September nineteen seventy seven. He'd
later write in a March nineteen eighty letter, I feel
it more as I used to work with people who
had epilepsy, among others, and every month used to visit

(01:15:55):
the David Lewis Center as part of my job as
a medical center. All of the very bad cases are
there for treatment or just to be looked after. It
left terrible pictures in my mind. It left salable pictures
in my mind.

Speaker 2 (01:16:10):
You pick up that job, and then like a year later,
you find out you have epilepsy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
Yeah. Curtis added another verse to the song while the
band were recording it, leaving it a lyrical chronicle of
his experience before and after his diagnosis. What was the verse.

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
It's the whole second verse where it basically changes it
from oh, it like changes the perspective of it to
like a witness rather than first firsthand. Wow, I don't know.
Do you want me to look at up? Do you
want to get sad?

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
Yeah, let's get sad. Let's get sad. Good sad folks.

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
Yeah. So the second verse puts it into first person.
He says. Then I had to phone her friend to
state my case and say she's lost control again. And
she showed up all the errors and mistakes and said
I've lost control again. And she expressed herself in many
different ways until she lost control again and walked upon
the edge of no escape and laughed, I've lost control again. God,

(01:17:08):
that song is so haunting. One of the first things
I learned on bass.

Speaker 1 (01:17:11):
Actually, oh wow, And.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
It's funny because it's famous. They like it's got a cool,
like droney part like that, and love the baseline to
leveled Harris apart. Both have like an open string open
d ringing while he plays the riff on the G string,
and he said that there's like bum Peter Hook said
that there's like bum notes on it because he couldn't
play very well at the time, and so subsequently they

(01:17:34):
would over dub all of those drones like he would.
He would do the Martin Hannett thing on New Order
where he would play the bass riff one of the
riffs first and then overdubbed like the drony notes. He
was also so famous for his use of the chorus pedal. Man,
but you should put that in later and not what
we're talking about in Curtis is depressing ish. But you
know when you hear that like eighties chorus bass tone,

(01:17:55):
that is that's our boy hooky Uh yeah, Man, why
don't you just keep going on talking about I remember nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:18:02):
I mean, she's always control though. I just want to
say that footage of him performing on I don't even
remember what show it is is so so upsetting to watch.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
It's yeah, man, it's horrible. You watch the light drain
from his eyes in between the first televised appearance they
made on the Tony Wilson thing and then that this
later thing from just like a year not even maybe
not even a year later. Jesus, it's it is very sad.

Speaker 1 (01:18:28):
And was it a theorize that his dance moves, if
you can call it, that were sort of inspiredly.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
By I mean that's the theory.

Speaker 2 (01:18:36):
I'm not sure if I think his widow, Debora, who
wrote her own deeply sad biography about living with him,
I think she said that she had never seen him
like link the two in that kind of way. But
you know, there were there were certainly instances, and we'll
talk about one later where you know, he had a

(01:18:57):
seizure on stage and people did not cotton onto what
was happening because of the way that he danced.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
Jesus, well, I remember nothing. Meanwhile, Oh it was equally bleak. Great, Okay,
I thought I thought we had a respite here. You're right,
Curtis sings variously at points, get weak all the time.
May just past the time, me in my own world.
You there beside and trapped in a cage and surrendered

(01:19:25):
too soon, me in my own world, the one that
you knew.

Speaker 2 (01:19:29):
Oh my, it's so insane because like in that in
this John Savage oral history. I haven't read Debrah's a book,
but you know, when his affair happened, he was like
still hanging out with Debra and their daughter, you know,
and so so much of this was like literally him
going through this depression and battling epilepsy, which again over

(01:19:51):
the course of like a year in change, while his
marriage was falling apart, and you know, and they were
he got married at nineteen, I think she was sixteen,
and like just totally unequipped to navigate this terrain in
your personally or as part of a marriage. And it's

(01:20:12):
just so sad hearing her talk about like, yeah, he
would like go in his room and write, or I
would have to wait out hearing him like I would
have to watch against seizures, and just it just sounds
like such a thoroughly miserable way to live. I have
no insight to add to that. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:20:32):
Just so you too, you wrote here this is a
very insightful paragraph. As you say, it's important to remember
that the stigma surrounding people with epilepsy during this era
was hardly enlightened.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
I didn't know any of this.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
In the United States, for example, eighteen states provided for
the sterilization on eugenic grounds of people with epilepsy, while
in the UK in this again in this country. In
the UK, there was a law preventing people from epilepsy
for marrying and was only repealed in nineteen seventy, less
than ten years before Ian Curtis's diagnosis. Meeting notes from

(01:21:09):
the Royal College of Physicians and the UK and in
nineteen sixty eight described those with severe epilepsy as quote
a major problem in terms of inequalities and treatment access.
Even as treatment conditions improved, the stigma still remained. A
nineteen ninety four survey across the Netherlands, the United Kingdom
and Ireland among a group of professionals including psychologists, occupational physicians,

(01:21:33):
vocational therapists and social workers, revealed that fifteen percent of
the seventy six respondents believed in quote, the epileptic personality
and thirty two percent believe that epilepsy affected intellectual performance.
Notions not borne out by the science behind the condition.
I had no idea there was any kind of stigma
behind epilepsy.

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
So they thought it was all part of that UK
culture where they were just like they called them like spastics,
your beloved John and mocked them frequently to his own
amusement and that of others, including to the point where
Paul McCartney included a wonderful clip of just such a
mocking in that video for that song. Sorry now I'm

(01:22:14):
just punching, punching down. No, it was awful. I mean
they yeah, they were lumped into like spastics and and
uh and that's the point. But this whole thing about
having epileptic personality personalities like they basically thought it was like, oh,
that's the thing that like poor people develop, or like
the lower classes develop, and they thought they were like

(01:22:35):
intellectually inferior.

Speaker 1 (01:22:36):
I had never heard that.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):
Yeah, yeah, it's really tragic. And again you add this
to like, dude, if antidepressants and anti anxiety pills are
like throwing a dart at a map today, and as
someone who's been on most of them, I can attest
that they are. And five doctors will be like, yeah,
let's try these three different things in different dosages. Come back,

(01:22:58):
tell me how that happened, how that went. By the way,
that's two hundred dollars. I just imagined how awful that
would have been in the seventies man. I mean they
just used it was like a shotgun, sledgehammer. It wasn't
just like because even in like you know, the stuff
that they put Nick Drake on for his depression was
so just like deadening that They're like basic approach was

(01:23:21):
not like how can we affect the brain chemistry? It
was just like, how can we make it not work
to the point where it won't hurt anymore? And so
they were just putting them on you know, anything up
to in including like lithium and thorazine and just being like, yeah, see.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
How that works. And you add contributing to all this,
the whole Northern Man close lipped attitude didn't really help
much either for Ian Curtis. So we ended up joining
the British Epilepsy Association and for a time was willing
to discuss his condition publicly. Curtis didn't want to be
a burden most of all, and so he hid most
of his struggles from his bandmates. In particular particular theme

(01:24:00):
in Peter Hook's autobiography Unknown Pleasures Inside Joy Division is guilt.
He accuses himself, Sumner, and Morris of quote selfishness, stupidity,
and willful ignorance, and semi jokes that he could have
called the book he said he was all right, so
we carried on.

Speaker 2 (01:24:23):
Getting back to the actual album. Hook and Sumner initially
hated what Hannatt had done to their record. They accused
him of turning it into a Pink Floyd record, which
is hilarious, and Hook would later describe their hatred as
the time we were most united. But he did allow,
he has allowed in his later years that you know,
what Hannett ended up doing with their raw materials was,

(01:24:46):
you know, nothing short of revolutionary in that he was
like the fifth member of the band in that regard.
I wasn't actually able to trace down a hard source
that could prove that the Unknown Pleasures is a Marcel
Proust reference, though that phrase appears in Swan's Way. But
I did find a hilarious quote from Stephen Morris about it,
where he said, I've heard people say that the title

(01:25:08):
Unknown Pleasures was a Proust reference, which is a good one.
We hadn't read much Proust. I think it was just
two words. It wasn't dug out of a book. If anything,
prus Nick did off us. So that cover the album
cover of all time. Maybe you're gonna say, Sergeant Pepper's
I know you are?

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
Ah, I mean this does as much with less.

Speaker 2 (01:25:32):
I would say, yes, that was exactly how I was
going to counter you if you came out with that
ridiculous bullshit.

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):
Abby Road.

Speaker 2 (01:25:41):
However, the white album, however, I haven't seen very many
white album T shirts, I'll tell you that. Nor have
I seen Disney attempt to market Oh man, they should.
They should market an Abbey Road T shirt where it's
like Mickey Goofy the duck.

Speaker 3 (01:25:57):
That's money on the table. If they haven't that fo One.

Speaker 1 (01:26:01):
The cat, the cat choke it so much mileage.

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
That is an image of the radio waves from the
first recognized pulsar friend of the pod CP. I bought
a copy of this record at at our beloved Human
Head Records in Brooklyn in New York. Go check them out.
Shouts to Travis like a decade or at least, and

(01:26:28):
I was at a bar. Then subsequently with my Fines
in my tote bag. I'm not sure if it was
a New Yorker tote possibly it was. And I just
struck up a conversation with this very well meaning guy
next to me at the bar, and I was just like,
he was like, oh, you guys, we bought some records.
I was like, oh yeah, human, head right down the
street check them out. And I pulled out I pulled
out my my Fines and went through them. And when

(01:26:51):
I pulled out Unknown Pleasures, he was like, Wow, that's
a that's a cool album cover. Starcastic No, totally genuine
and because I was like, yeah, dude, that's like the
album cover. Have you you've not seen it? He was
like yeah, I don't know. I just it's like someone
describing like the Star Wars title crawl as being like,

(01:27:12):
that's a cool intro.

Speaker 1 (01:27:15):
Where this duck dug no tradesman. Oh yeah, oh he's
a djer there.

Speaker 2 (01:27:21):
Yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:27:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:27:23):
It's one of the most it's understatement, like the most
iconic of all time in just terms of like remixes
and parodies that have gone over. It's definitely higher than
Black Flag, and I've seen a lot of black parodies
My favorite was Beach Boys with the barsh isn't He

(01:27:44):
In twenty twelve marketed a T shirt that had the
Mickey mouse head spelled out in the waves, and then
yanked it two days later. So if you have one
of those, you're sitting pretty.

Speaker 1 (01:27:57):
The original image came from Bernard's Sumner's job at the
time near the Manchester Central Library, so when he was
born at work, he'd nick out for a bit and
browse the stacks. He said, I was always looking at
space stuff, and when I saw that image, I thought
that would make a really great album cover. When we
made the album, I took the image to Peter Saville
and said, how about this for a sleeve. The image

(01:28:19):
originally came from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy nineteen seventy
seven edition, and Saville's great innovation was to color reverse it.
It was originally black on white.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
I hate that so much. I know, there's just the
ultimate like Andy Warhol bullsh like I bring you a
fully formed image that someone else made, and you're like, well,
I better recontextualize it by simply flipping the colors. You
see what it is, and then I will make money
off of it for the rest of time.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
But he was right. He was right, He was very right.

Speaker 3 (01:28:52):
Yeah, it wouldn't.

Speaker 1 (01:28:53):
I mean, can you imagine if it was like a
bright white sleeve.

Speaker 2 (01:28:58):
No, it looked terrible.

Speaker 1 (01:28:59):
It would, and it would also be completely wrong for
the ethos of the band, as he writes states, Yes,
Peter Saville told The Washington Post the group asked for
it to be white on the outside, and I just
couldn't see it. I was afraid it might look a
little cheap. I was convinced that it was just sexier
and black. This is a radio energy from space space,

(01:29:21):
he notes, not many people know this is black.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
I tried not to punch down at people intellectually, but
like so many people involved in this story just seem
like gentle idiots.

Speaker 1 (01:29:32):
Well spinal tap, like, what's blacker than black?

Speaker 3 (01:29:35):
Well, yes, no, no, But I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):
Like I like Tony Willson, like, yeah, architect of like
a very specific sound in music in the eighties changed
the music industry so comically bad with money that it
was like a child lived in his head and was
doing maths. As they say, you know, love him to death,
But like Hookey Barney, all of these guys is just

(01:29:57):
like were you kicked in the head by a horror,
like so many of your decisions just and like Peter Saville,
he's like, you know, legendary designer quote unquote, but like
all of his stuff for they give it his new
order covers are just other people's paintings with like a
little three color strip, like you know, added to it.

(01:30:17):
And he's like, yes, thank you. The genius of my
design was making it black instead of white. Holds out
hand for check.

Speaker 1 (01:30:27):
But there is a truly hilarious ap pheto out there
of Savile holding a parody T shirt that reads what
is this? I've seen it on Tumblr.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
With the waves. Yeah, it's good, so good.

Speaker 1 (01:30:41):
Saville explained a little further, and a short documentary produced
about the science behind the cover. The diagram himself is
a cutting of the continuous readout and then a stacking.
He said, So what you're seeing is this comparative chart
of the frequency and the accuracy of the signal.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
Yeah, so that was really interesting to me about it.
I had no idea that because obviously it would be
it would be an unbroken linear signal, right, because it's
regular pulses being emitted, and so this this genius diagrammer
or illustrator or whatever you know, placed a series of
them vertically to illustrate their regularity and how they were

(01:31:19):
in relations to each other. And that's what makes it
such a cool image to me. That's what gives it
the ambiguity and the wave like nature. If you saw
if that were merely a single horizontal line, it wouldn't
look as cool. So CP nineteen nineteen now referred to
as PSRB nineteen nineteen plus twenty one, which rolls off
the tongue your had. Others better put that one in.

(01:31:44):
Originally discovered in nineteen sixty seven, it was a radio
signal detected using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array band name calling
it of the Mollared Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge by
Joscelyn Bell Burnell. In a development that will surprise no one,
Bell's male thesis advisor was awarded the Nobel Prize for

(01:32:08):
this discovery, although she would eventually win three million dollars
as a Physics prize in twenty eighteen, so you know,
not that long later. Initially, because of the regularity and
strength of the signal, this will interest you the scientist
jokingly nicknamed it LGM one. That was its name for
Little Green Men, because they said something, this signal, of

(01:32:30):
this strength of regularity, surely must be aliens. Scientific American
had a very in depth article about the science of
mapping radio signals from pulsars and this illustration, the Joy
Division one, was published in nineteen seventy from the Arecibo
Radio Observatory. It was part of doctor Harold D. Kraft
Junior's PhD thesis titled and wait for it because this

(01:32:53):
title just leaps off the page Radio Observations of the
Pulse Profiles and dispersion Measures of twelve pulsear. Who doesn't
remember that hit.

Speaker 1 (01:33:04):
Pulsar is a cool word, though, it's a really cool word.

Speaker 2 (01:33:08):
Have you ever heard of spider pulsars?

Speaker 1 (01:33:11):
No? How has it not been a band name for
you or a EP or scient title?

Speaker 2 (01:33:16):
I don't know. Do you know what spider?

Speaker 1 (01:33:18):
Well? No?

Speaker 2 (01:33:19):
Why would anyone know what this was? I learned about
it from Twitter. A pulsar is the dense core that
remains from a collapsed dead star and that's how they turn.
They turn into neutron stars right and rotating generates these signals,
these pulses and radiation. Spider pulsars are a special class
of pulsars because they destroy other stars that orbit them.

(01:33:41):
Because of the strength of their emanations, they systematically destroy
anything in a certain distance around them.

Speaker 3 (01:33:51):
So let me get this straight.

Speaker 1 (01:33:52):
A force from a dead star that has the power
to destroy other live things in its area. Yes, that's
the most Heigel thing I've ever heard. It is, how
has that not been used by you for something?

Speaker 2 (01:34:08):
It's very unbrand with me, I will admit, and I'll
you know, I'll get on it. I'll get on monetizing
that some way. I apologize for the oversight. Alex regrets the.

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):
Spider pulse are Wow, that's a really yes, yes anyway,
As drummer Stephen Morris recalled, the funniest thing about it
was when we first saw the final cover. I said,
that'll look really good on a T shirt, to which
their manager at the time, Rob Gretton replied, we don't
do T shirts. That's adea.

Speaker 2 (01:34:44):
Again, dumbasses a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (01:34:48):
Consequently, there was around the decade or so for which
the only available T shirts of this iconic image were bootlegs.
As Bernard Sumner would recall, for many years there was
a guy called Scotch Tommy who made his own T
shirts and sold them outside our gigs. He made a fortune,
I presume, but Rob wouldn't have anything to do with it.
He didn't believe in the commerciality. I remember one night

(01:35:10):
after a gig, Scotch Tommy came back and said, I
feel really guilty about this. Will you take this check
off me? He gave Rob the check and Rob just
ripped it up. If he'd given it to me instead,
that wouldn't have happened. This probably didn't happen when Savill
collaborated in the ots with both designer Raf Simmons and

(01:35:31):
Supreme on capsule collections based around the design.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
I was tracing some of the pop like references to
the Joy Division thing, and it's a long rabbit hole,
but two of the most notable ones of the past
decade happened within a year of each other and came
from hip hop, which is really funny. Vince Staples credited
his Mexican neighbors in Long Beach with getting him into
Joy Division as a kid, and so he did a
version of their He did a version of the Pulsar thing,

(01:35:57):
but with Ocean waves with the cover of his twenty
fifteen h Summertime O six and Danny Brown titled his
Wildly adventurous twenty sixteen album Atrocity Exhibition after a Joy
Division song. So I just think that's neat. I'm forever
obligated to mention that Clostermann article where he talks about
Morrissey's popularity within the Mexican American community. So I have

(01:36:19):
to assume Vince Staples was getting Joy Division via his
long Beach Chicano neighbors via their love of Morrissey.

Speaker 1 (01:36:27):
There's a lot of stuff written about Mexican affinity for Morrissey.
It's really fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 (01:36:33):
And EMO like in the wake of Morrissey, like MCR
and like stuff has become a huge subculture.

Speaker 1 (01:36:40):
Down there are my Chemical Romance Oh oh oh, sorry,
I assumed you were a fan.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
I assumed you were a kem head. Oh I know,
I hate them. Meanwhile, the inner Sleeve of Unknown Pleasures
if you even care God was also supplied Too Savile
by the band, and it took him several months to
source it as a photograph titled hand through the Doorway,
which it indeed depicts by American photographer Ralph Gibson, who

(01:37:07):
is still alive at eighty five years young, from his
nineteen seventy book The Somnambulist.

Speaker 1 (01:37:13):
All of Us contributed to Joy Division's austere, quasi scary image.
All up it to semi scary or completely scary. They
were told to do as few interviews as possible by
their manager because he considered the three non in Curtis
members of the band idiots and they're buttoned up quasi
military fashion went along with some of the idiotic Nazi

(01:37:36):
imagery they'd adopted early on. In Simon Reynold's book about
post punk, Rip It Up and Start Again, he described
Joy Division fans as quote intense young men dressed in
gray overcoats.

Speaker 3 (01:37:47):
That's not ominous, Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:37:53):
Yeah. They did arguably like set the template for a
lot of post punk fashion, which was like weird, distinguishing
ourselves from punks by being as like drab and utilitarian
as possible because of society, I guess. But you know,
Jordan tell us about the troubling history of this era
and adopting or toying with Nazi imagery.

Speaker 1 (01:38:15):
I thought you'd never ask. This was an unfortunately common
instance in punk rock at the time, and even nascent
goths and post punks Susie Sue wore a Nazi pin
and the sex Pistols were big fans of the imagery
as well. Part of it was just the youthful intention
to shock. The first wave of British punk musicians were

(01:38:35):
mostly born in the fallout of World War two WW
two the big one to TMI listeners, and for them
it was sort of like our generation's predisposition to nine
to eleven jokes, but as you write, on a much
much worse scale. All caps. Bernard Sumner even used the
alias Bernard all brecked early on, supposedly after hearing Bertold

(01:38:57):
Breck's name in a documentary, which is either terrible flimsy
excuse or.

Speaker 3 (01:39:02):
Proof that he is genuinely a dumbass.

Speaker 1 (01:39:04):
Your words.

Speaker 2 (01:39:06):
I just think it's it all adds up, like it's just,
you know, I'm not making fun of dumb people. I'm
making fun of them because they have this, you know,
horribly austere image. I mean that oral history is really illuminating,
because you know, you think of them as glowering men
who sit around like reading about Bajaus architecture or something
and they were just so into getting drunk and like

(01:39:30):
playing incredibly juvenile pranks on each other. They paid their
one roadie to drink a pint glass of piss and
then escalated it to a sandwich, a literal sandwich made
of like try squaring that with like this record. But
that's the wonderful contradiction of them.

Speaker 3 (01:39:49):
Art Sunder looks like a Nazi like of all the bands.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):
Well he got the Hitler youth haircut like right, which again,
guys read the room.

Speaker 1 (01:40:00):
John Savage, who published the aforementioned the Oral History of
the band, remembered it was a dangerous one and a
stupid one, but in essence it wasn't meant to be
taken much more seriously than that, by which he means
they're Nazi flirtations in fashion. Supposedly, Joy Division wisened up
and played rock against isolationism benefits, and later denounced fashionism.

Speaker 2 (01:40:23):
When they were caught and called out. Though undewn Pleasures
was a fairly immediate critical hit, it took six months
after its release on June fifteenth of nineteen seventy nine
to even notch Fifteen thousand copies sold, not great numbers
at that time. A godsend in these days. This was
bolstered largely by the band's October nineteen seventy nine tour

(01:40:44):
supporting The Buzzcocks, which was so successful to the point
where they were finally able to quit their day jobs.
Then the non album single Transmission came out, which bolstered
sales of the albums when it was released in nineteen
seventy nine, but underown Pleasures didn't even chart in the
UK until it was res shoot after Curtis's suicide the
following May. Unfortunately, the Buzzcocks tour was something of a

(01:41:08):
watershed terrible awful beginning of the end moment for Curtis.
He and Deborah had had their only child, Natalie, in
April of nineteen seventy nine, and again they were literal children.
He was twenty two years old. Though the tour with
the Buzzcocks was relatively stable, he only had two seizures
during the run, but his fears about his epilepsy were worsening,

(01:41:28):
and to make matters good, to compound matters, he began
an affair with a Belgian woman, An all And While
Arnauld herself would later claim that her relationship with Curtis
was platonic. Curtis's widow, Deborah, denied that. Hilariously and awfully,

(01:41:48):
Ian Curtis supposedly punted the decision whether or not to
divorce his wife or stay with her to Bernard Sumner,
who wisely demurred. Joy division toward Europe in January of
nineteen eighty and began recording their sophomore I'm Closer in March.
Debora Curtis wrote in her memoir that Ian was beset
by the increasing pressure of the band, along with his

(01:42:11):
affair and his epilepsy and depression. An irregular sleep habit,
and his refusal to Kurt Tailor's intake of various substances
all contributed to making his seizures more regular. He was
experiencing two per week while making Closer. One of his
greatest fears was dying in his sleep. From this, he
supposedly told Debora that that was what happened to the

(01:42:33):
woman the song she thus control was written about. So
they had this god awful ritual where if he didn't
have a seizure the night of a gig while playing gig,
when he came home, he would just sit in a
chair and try and wait out a seizure, or he
would lie in bed next to her and she would
stay awake waiting to hear his breathing change, which would

(01:42:55):
signal the onset of a seizure. And most horrifically, his
condition meant that he couldn't hold his infant daughter very often,
or without supervision in the case that he had a
seizure while holding her.

Speaker 1 (01:43:08):
That is.

Speaker 2 (01:43:10):
Heartbreaking, and Curtis knew it. He wrote in a March
nineteen eighty letter, the attacks of epilepsy are beginning to
frighten me. Sometimes I'm afraid to go out somewhere at
night for fear of having a fit in a club
or cinema. I get more nervous when we play now
for fear of it happening. It seems more frequent. I
don't think I could ever set foot on stage again
if I had a full stage attack while playing. It

(01:43:32):
gets more worrying. With the American tour and lots of
other dates coming up, I keep thinking that someday things
will be so intense that I'll no longer be able
to carry on.

Speaker 1 (01:43:40):
During the recording for Closer, the band noticed that Curtis
had been absent for around two hours and hook found
them unconscious in the bathroom, having hit his head on
the sink during a seizure. During an April nineteen eighty concert,
lighting techts at a venue expressly ignored the band's mandate
against strobe lighting, and Curtis collapsed against the drum kit

(01:44:02):
and was carried off stage. Two days later, he attempted
suicide by overdosing on a seizure medication incidentally. In Grant
Lee and Tom Tencio's two thousand and seven documentary about
the band, an epilepsy specialist analyzed Curtis's perception from the
time and concluded that it was guaranteed to kill him.

Speaker 2 (01:44:22):
How so, I have to say in either quantity or
the scattershot nature of them, just like I know, I
would probably quantity in combination, you know, because you remember
he was on at least three different ones at various points,
and you know by this time he probably either on
a combination of them or just one that was so
heavy that it would have damaged you. I mean, they

(01:44:43):
were barbituates. It was like quailud. So they were in
it the downer class, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:44:49):
The next month, in May nineteen eighty, Curtis visited Deborah,
his wife, the day before the band was scheduled to
depart for their first North American tour. He wanted to
ask her to drop the divorce suit she after he
refused to cut off contact with his girlfriend, Anique on
a I think saw you say her name. He wrote
several letters to Anique while recuperating from his first suicide,

(01:45:09):
attempt Shafford to spend the night with him, his wife
or Anique.

Speaker 2 (01:45:14):
Deborah I didn't write this in but she had moved
out and she and their daughter were living with her parents.

Speaker 1 (01:45:20):
Okay. Shafford to spend the night with Ian worried about
his state of mind triggering a seizure, but after returning
from her parents' house, he told her that he wanted
to spend the night alone and told her not to
come to the house until after he'd caught a train
to Manchester at ten am the next morning. In the
intervening hours, Curtis watched Werner Herzog's nineteen seventy seven film Strozik,

(01:45:42):
which ends with the protagonist suicide, and listened to Iggy
Pop's The Idiot, titled at Fidolphstoyevsky's novel of the same
name starring an epileptic prince driven mad by society. He
took photos of his wedding day and daughter off the
walls and wrote an ambiguous note to Deborah asking her
not to contact him for a while, before hanging himself

(01:46:03):
with the washing line in the homes kitchen.

Speaker 2 (01:46:06):
The band were shocked by Curtis's suicide, although Tony Wilson
would later recall that Andike told him she'd been terrified
after listening to Closer telling him Ian means it. Wilson,
with characteristic irreverence, said an interview later that after Curis's suicide,
his reaction was he had meant it, adding I think

(01:46:29):
we were a bunch of silly cops not to see
it coming. We never listened to his lyrics, Bernard Sumner
told Uncut magazine in twenty eighteen. No one sat down
and said, have you read Ian's lyrics? They're a bit
Because he was a normal, happy guy. It was very
difficult to tell with Ian what he could and couldn't handle.
We had no idea. We hadn't known him that long.

(01:46:51):
We didn't know he was approaching his breaking point. One
of the more eerie aspects to this is that Closer
having been completed before Ian's death, had this the art
of a family tomb in an Italian cemetery. He was
already in place and through the production facility when he
killed himself. Some people have posited after the fact that

(01:47:13):
Curtis knew he wasn't up to the continuing stressors of
being enjoy division and was already making peace with the
idea of the band continuing without him. He saw it
going on without him. Lindsay Reid, whose cottage Curtis stayed
in while recuperating from his first suicide attempt, said he
felt very removed from it. With the epilepsy. He just
knew he couldn't carry on with the performances. He'd sort

(01:47:33):
of hit a pinnacle with Closer, and he knew he
couldn't go on. In her nineteen ninety five book Touching
from a Distance, his widow Deborah wrote, I believe Ian
chose his deadline. It was important for him to keep
the charade up in front of the band in case
they tried to dissuade him. The only reason he was
no longer worried about the American trip was because he
knew he wasn't going. Stephen Morris said at one point

(01:47:56):
that the band had made a unanimous decision to rename
themselves if any member had left, which he Hook and
Sumner obviously did, christening themselves New Order and further melding
their unique instrumental sound with electronic elements. Obviously, there are
an episode of their own, but the long and short
of it is that New Order became one of the
defining bands of the nineteen eighties with hits like Blue Monday,

(01:48:19):
but their relationship with Factory Records, the club it created,
the Hacienda, and themselves eventually soured.

Speaker 1 (01:48:26):
And so did the relationship between Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner.
Tensions between the two had begun to increase during the
Closer sessions, with Hook clinging onto their roots as punk
rockers and Sumner's growing interest in electronic and programmed music.
New Order's first single was Ceremony, one of the last
Joy Division songs, composed by Ian Curtis, who had written

(01:48:46):
the lyrics.

Speaker 2 (01:48:47):
There was such a funny part in Control the Korbian
movie where he like, they're obviously trying to paint him
as like a lad and he comes out of like
like the backstage of some shoot, like Dingy show, and
like Ian it is just like staring soulfully off into distance,
and the hook it just staggers out with like I
think pints in like both of his hands and he's like,
all right, girls, come to HOOKI.

Speaker 1 (01:49:13):
In Hook's book, he talks about how initially ceremony at
his Sumner and Curtis's voice is all overlaid, but Sumner
wanted another take and inadvertently or intentionally you pause, it
wiped the other two in the process. Can you imagine
wiping your late bandmate's last vocal performance. There's no way
that could have been intentional. There's no way that was

(01:49:35):
an accidentally on purpose thing. I refuse to believe it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:38):
You're more charitable towards Barney than Hooky is.

Speaker 1 (01:49:41):
Yeah. Yeah, hook was by his own emission, I wanna
be rock star see the whole base hanging down by
his knees thing, And that contrasted with Bernie Sumner's more bookish,
introspective personality. See this is why I kind of, you know,
I feel a little more you like Barnie. I mean
I don't I like Peter hook better, but I personality

(01:50:04):
wise I get it.

Speaker 2 (01:50:05):
Well. Yeah, yeah, because I'm Hook and you're.

Speaker 3 (01:50:12):
I would never wipe no.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
No, but I mean those are very obviously the same
archetypes like the Lennon McCartney one that you and I occupy.

Speaker 1 (01:50:22):
Some who decided to stop touring during the height of
New Order's success, which pissed Hook off to no end.
When they did play live, Hook painted Sumner as a
consummate diva, always late and whining behavior bolstered when a
stomach ulcer for Sumner out of commission and led to
a canceled date, which Hook says convinced Sumner quote, they
need me, they can't do it without me. The personal

(01:50:45):
stuff was compounded by the idiotic finances behind factory records.
In the band Blue Monday became the best selling twelve
inch single of all time, but the elaborate sleeve designed
by Peter Salvill meant that it lost five pence for
every copy. Soul Hilarious and the Haciend the club which
Peter Hook in New Order co owned, I believe because

(01:51:06):
they wrote the book about it.

Speaker 3 (01:51:07):
I think it's called How Not to Manage a Club?

Speaker 1 (01:51:09):
If I Recall was losing something like ten pounds a week,
which meant tour revenue was constantly going to pay for
their debts. It all just kept getting worse and worse.
For Peter Hook, the beginning of the end came and
Bernard's Suddener teamed up with Smith's guitarist Johnny Marr for
a side project.

Speaker 2 (01:51:27):
And hilariously claims that Mar approached him first with the
line which I cannot actually imagine, Johnny Marr saying, the
best guitarist in Manchester should make an album with the
best bassist in Manchester.

Speaker 1 (01:51:42):
Yeah, Johnny Mar's too sweet for that.

Speaker 2 (01:51:44):
Yeah, it's just oh. And then Peter Hook said he
declined because he was too dedicated to New Order. It's
just like, yeah, I mean, I love the guy, but
he definitely rewrites things in his own favor.

Speaker 1 (01:51:56):
Hook got sober, and Sumner said that actually made him
a worse per which is an amazing thing to say
about anyone, especially a bandmate that you've known for decades.
Hook also purchased the rights to the Hacienda club name
out from under the rest of the band and began
licensing quite liberally, which annoyed the others, no doubt, who
thought it was a group venture. Eventually, the band split

(01:52:20):
very publicly and in dueling memoirs by Minard Sumner and
Peter Hook, they dragged each other through the mud. And
there was also a royalties based lawsuit by Peter Hook.

Speaker 2 (01:52:29):
Do you know about that one?

Speaker 1 (01:52:30):
I must have written about it for the Rivals episode,
but I don't remember it now.

Speaker 2 (01:52:33):
He essentially sumed them, claiming that they formed a like
a separate llc or like a separate corporation and dealt
themselves a royalty rate higher than his without his knowledge.
And it basically got settled. Like the judge looked at
this and was like, I think this case has merit,
but I would I would urge you all to settle

(01:52:54):
it rather than go through court costs. That's what they did.
It's just so, I mean, we know that she happens too.
Are we talking about that four guys negotiated a higher
royalty rate than the other guy when they re signed?

Speaker 3 (01:53:05):
Well, van Halen seems like a van Halen, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:53:07):
Yes, yeah, you know if you remember that is one
of the conflicts in van Halen. You know the brothers
and I think it was the brothers and Michael the Bassis.
Around their time, the Greatest Hits collection came out like
quietly signed a new contract that cut David Lee roth
in for much less ough.

Speaker 1 (01:53:27):
And now Peter Hook tour says Peter Hook and the
Light playing Joy Division and New Order songs all Bernard's
Sumner continues to tour as New Order.

Speaker 2 (01:53:35):
That was supposedly another point of contention with them that
Peter Hook wanted to keep playing Joy Division songs and
some just said no, huh, do you have anything else
to add before I get all bummer and serious again.

Speaker 1 (01:53:45):
I mean, that's interesting if he really did the Racie
and Curtis's voice on ceremony, because maybe he really does
just want to like start fresh.

Speaker 2 (01:53:52):
Yeah. Have you read Bernard's book?

Speaker 1 (01:53:55):
I did years ago. It was a lot less mean
than Peter hook books, but a lot less fun.

Speaker 2 (01:54:01):
Yeah. I think Hook's whole thing with it was like
reading that book, you'd think Bernard Sumner never quarreled with
anyone who wasn't Peter Hook, which is a great a
great quote easy. I'm telling you, man, he's got the
better quotes. He looks cooler. Now for final thoughts, I

(01:54:23):
truly don't know how we're going to transition into this,
so we won't. You know, writing this, I got a
little bit sidetracked with the New Order stuff, and it
is fascinating obviously, but if I can do my my
Jerry Springer final thought moment, I think that the entire
saga of Ian Curtis enjoy Division is communication is really important,

(01:54:47):
not just in the New Order situation where they just
were refusing to talk or negotiating this stuff, but especially
with Ian, where it's like, reach out to someone, if
you're in pain, for the love of God, just do it.
Don't be afraid of being a burden. I hope that
attitude is not as prevalent in twenty twenty four as
it was in nineteen eighty. But you know, when you

(01:55:10):
hear this constant theme of all the people ostensibly closest
to him, who said, we had no idea, I'm contributing to,
We're contributing to an irresponsible lionization of Curtis's suicide is
some kind of foregone poet's gesture when it really should
be looked at as a warning not to isolate yourself

(01:55:31):
because of your own pain. You know, there's a repeated
line in joy Division's atmosphere, don't walk away in silence,
and it's a sentiment that ian after writing it ultimately ignored.
As good as the music on Unknown Pleasures is to
listen to if you find yourself in a bad place,
learn from it. Stay here and talk. I'm Alex Haigel.

(01:55:57):
This has been too much information.

Speaker 1 (01:56:00):
I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you all next time. Too
Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:56:11):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalg.

Speaker 1 (01:56:14):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:56:17):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run
Talk and Alex.

Speaker 1 (01:56:21):
Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost
Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe
and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures': Everything You Didn't Know