This searing light, the sun and everything else: Joy Division: The Oral History by Jon Savage

Author:Jon Savage [Savage, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780571345380
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Ian Wood, review of Eric’s, Liverpool, 3 May 1979, in NME, 26 May 1979

When Joy Division left the stage I felt emotionally drained. They are, without any exaggeration, an Important Band.

8

JUNE – SEPTEMBER 1979

Handwritten notes for Unknown Pleasures assembly, spring 1979, Rob Gretton (Courtesy of Lesley Gilbert, Benedict Gretton and Laura Gretton)

5 June 1979: release of Unknown Pleasures

Bernard Sumner: I remember me and Hooky being a bit frustrated at the sound of Unknown Pleasures, because we felt that the sound of the group playing live was a lot wilder and more rocky and aggressive than the sound that came out on the album. If you’ve got any live recordings, you can hear that. Martin didn’t want it to be a straight-ahead sound: there’s this straight recording band and that’s it, finished. He wanted to warp it quite a lot, and sometimes we liked that and sometimes we didn’t.

Unknown Pleasures was our first outing and we’d played it live a few times, and it was powerful, almost heavy-metal kind of stuff to us. Two things Ian said. One, he never wanted to get any bigger than the Kinks ever got. Two, that what he wanted to do was to get onto the heavy-metal circuit in America, which was really weird. He really loved the Stooges, and he wanted to get into what the Stooges were into.

So the music was quite loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars, taken out the more raucous elements of it. So we didn’t actually like Unknown Pleasures. It inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we’d drawn a picture in black and white, and he’d coloured it in for us. We resented that, but Rob loved it, and Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the public loved it, so we were just the poor stupid musicians who wrote it. We swallowed our pride and went with it.

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