It’s easy to forget how young Joy Division were when Unknown Pleasures came out in 1979. Still in their early twenties, the band had gained recognition early and had already moved on to writing songs for their second album, Closer, released in 1980.
As drummer Stephen Morris says, “Before the paint was dry on it, we were writing more songs that would become the basis of Closer. Unknown Pleasures was us finding our feet, it ends with “I Remember Nothing” and that was kind of where we were going. The stuff that always influenced us was Berlin-period Bowie. We were getting more experimental. We were writing songs all the time. We always rehearsed. We were getting very professional.”
The band moved from Stockport’s Strawberry Studios to the plush Britannia Row in London, originally built by Pink Floyd, to record. “We stayed in a flat off Baker Street. There was the nice boy's flat, which was Ian [Curtis] and Martin [Hannett, producer] and it was us who had the scruffy one: me, Bernard [Sumner] and Hooky [Peter Hook], watching the mice shuttle about. We worked long hours while we were making the record.” As Morris recalls, it was a step up for the band. “The first thing that impressed me about Britannia Row was you got a little basket of sandwiches every morning. It was like, ‘This is the big time.’ And the main contribution to Closer was Roger Waters' full-sized snooker table. At Strawberry, all you had was a little pool table. You had to keep putting 10ps in.”
Closer was an emotional second album, loaded with chilling lyrics (such as on “Colony”: "A cry for help, a hint of anaesthesia / The sound from broken homes, we used to always meet here"). It was a new post-punk sound, which oscillated between unsettling beats to, even more surprisingly, mutated disco sound in the space of a few tracks.
Here, Morris talks through how each track came together.
‘Atrocity Exhibition’
“Very fond memories of making that one, it's all based around a drum riff. That was one of the few where Hooky and Bernard swapped instruments, so Bernard played the bass on it and Hooky played guitar. I just did this hypnotic tom riff. I was probably trying to do “A Saucerful Of Secrets” or something by Captain Beefheart. I remember making them put in synths through fuzzboxes and making a horrible ambient racket, which you could barely hear on the record, but it's like a buzz saw. That one was pretty easy to make, because it was already written. Probably Ian was still tweaking the lyrics and, obviously, it shows his interest in the works of JG Ballard.”
‘Isolation’
“The original idea was nothing like that. It was the first song we put together in the studio around synths, so it was changing all the time. The one thing I remember is listening to the playback of it and thinking this is a song that people could actually dance to. The music is really happy and then again it’s one of those afterwards when you listen to the bloody lyrics it wasn't really happy at all, was it? ["Isolation"] was kind of a signpost to the way we would eventually develop with New Order.”
‘Passover’
“I'd love to be able to ask [Ian Curtis] what the lyrics were about. He was going to do divinity at school. He was interested in religion. I can remember when we did it, we were all very impressed that we'd done something that got a big stop-starty feel to it. It's not a regular beat. I was trying to do a bit of a tabla Indian drum thing on it, using a synthesiser to make those noises, quite unsuccessfully, I should say. We'd had that one for a while. The lyrics did definitely evolve over time and got finished off in the studio. We always wrote around the bass and drums.”
‘Colony’
“Colony is probably my favourite Joy Division song. Again, it's got a literary reference to Kafka, which Ian was reading and I read a fair bit as well. Whereas all the early songs were punky, thrashy things, we were trying to do stuff that was a bit unsettling. I really thought Ian's lyrics on that one were absolutely fantastic. He'd had it for a while, so it was an easy one to do. There was no messing about, with Martin doing the drums or anything. It was pretty much done more or less live because we all knew exactly how it went.”
‘A Means To An End’
“It went through quite a few changes before it became “A Means To An End”. There's another song called “Incubation”. I think those two titles got swapped. The lyrics for that one were definitely written in the studio. All I remember having is just the bass riff. It kind of became the song as we were recording it. It was a pretty unusual vocal line, I think, for Ian. It's kind of awkward to sing. I can remember hearing it for the first time and thinking it sounded a bit odd, but now you're used to hearing it it all makes perfect sense.”
‘Heart And Soul’
“It was a lot of fun to do, but later, when we tried doing it live, it was always a bit hit and miss. It's based around Bernard playing the bass synths and it was going into a hypnotic rhythm that just doesn't stop. I remember in the studio doing it and you go into a bit of a trance while you're just playing the beat over and over because you couldn't just sample it. I honestly couldn't play that drum riff now. It sounds really simple, but when you listen to it’s actually impossible to play. It was probably one of the first ones where Hooky is not playing a bass line. Really he's playing the melody, but his bass riff is really complicated. It's really hard, possibly because we would have punctured it in. You play a riff for a bit and drop another riff in afterwards, so you build it up like that.
"We were really, really, really tight as a band. I mean, we could just jam and you'd know what Hooky was gonna do next, you’d know what Bernard was going to do next and you'd know when Ian was going to start singing. Even if you've never played it before, you just sort of instinctively understood that. There was a lot of telepathy going on when we were making stuff on stage. When things broke down we'd do these spontaneous things.”
‘Twenty Four Hours’
“You just took the cue from [Ian] singing and it built up to the vocals. It sounds really simple but that was one of the first one things we did after we finished Unknown Pleasures. I think it started with something that's like a northern soul song, which we've kind of done on “Interzone”, which is the beat in the middle, then I just started playing half time and then we got the slow verse part for it. I really like the way it's kind of moody and sort of snakes along then suddenly it gets really very spirited. Furious, I think. A little bit like “Insight” on Unknown Pleasures, but a lot more accomplished."
‘The Eternal’
“The piano riff that Bernard did, I think they found somebody whistling in the studio, which was quite spooky. It has got that atmosphere about it. It's a lovely song. [Ian] did actually tell us what it's about. A lad that he knew, I knew him as well, when he worked at the labour exchange who had Down’s syndrome. He used to go and see him at the labour exchange, but you'd also see him playing in the park and he never seemed to age. He just always stayed the same. I thought that was really a very moving song.”
‘Decades’
“It was originally called ‘Euro pop’, which it sounded absolutely nothing like. When it started it had a bossa nova beat to it, which Martin absolutely hated. It was probably about the same day we would have done “The Eternal”. We didn't have a drum machine at the time, so we hired one and this Roland CR-78. I’d never seen a drum machine before and thought Martin would know how it worked. He's pressing buttons and it plays “In The Air Tonight”, all those classic drum machine beats. I said, 'Well it's not really that kind of song, Martin. And he said, 'No. We can program it. They can make it play wherever you want. I got detention stuck in this room trying to understand this manual. It was poorly translated from Japanese and it didn't make any sense. We got to the end of the manual and it said it only works with such and such a foot switch, optional extra, so we got the optional extra foot switch and it still didn't work. I only realised this last year, because I saw one for sale in an auction, that they sent us the wrong foot switch.”
The rerelease of Closer is out now. £23.99. At roughtrade.com
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