There's a thing going round asking people to list their seven favourite/most important albums of all time (to them). So here's mine:
R.E.M. Automatic for the People
1992
Tracklisting: Drive • Try Not to Breathe • The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite • Everybody Hurts • New Orleans Instrumental No. 1 • Sweetness Follows • Monty Got a Raw Deal • Ignoreland • Star Me Kitten • Man on the Moon • Nightswimming • Find the River
Although they'd been knocking around since 1981, ceaselessly touring and releasing multiple critically-acclaimed albums, it was REM's seventh LP, Out of Time, that finally catapulted them to superstardom. Fronted by the monster hits "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People", the record propelled the band to ubiquitous status, to both the band's pleasure but discomfort. Although grateful for the financial security afforded by their success, the band were wary of becoming "radio-friendly unit-shifters" and low-key rebelled. They refused to tour Out of Time and went straight back into the studio to rush-record a follow up.
Drummer Bill Berry insisted that the record had to rock hard and the rest of the band initially agreed, but both music and lyrics instead went very stripped-back, bare and acoustic. After the expansive Out of Time, Automatic for the People (named after the motto of a local restaurant, Weaver D's Delicious Fine Foods: "It's automatic, people!") was introverted, moody and - mostly - quiet. The band were confident that they'd made an album that would not repeat the monster success of its forebear, especially in a music industry now dominated by grunge (Michael Stipe gladly handing over the "spokesman of a generation" mantle to his friend Kurt Cobain).
Instead, the record utterly eclipsed it (to the tune of just under 20 million copies sold by itself). "Everybody Hurts" became the melancholic anthem of the year and the album generated a further five singles, although frankly every song on the album could be a single bar the instrumental. It's kind of cool now to disdain Automatic a little and instead opt for Murmur, Document or New Adventures in Hi-Fi as REM's top album, but that ignores the album's irrepressible atmosphere which mixes hope and melancholy, love and hate, and politics and emotion.
35 years ago today, Manchester group New Order released the most important single of their career. "Blue Monday" marked the band's most significant and biggest break with their former incarnation as post-punk legends Joy Division and ensured their future as a separate musical entity.
Protip: never release your record in packaging so expensive you lose money on every copy sold, and then make it the biggest-selling record in its format of all time. This is not good financial sense.
New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris had been members of the band Joy Division (formerly Warsaw, formerly the Stiff Kittens) which had achieved significant critical acclaim in the late 1970s, particularly in the Manchester area. Their doom-laden lyrics, pounding bass lines and sparse, powerful guitar sounds won them a significant following and the approval of the music press and important radio DJs like John Peel. Their frontman, lead singer and lyricist Ian Curtis was also praised for his hypnotic stage presence and incomparable vocal style.
Joy Division's rise to the top abruptly and tragically ended on 18 May 1980 when Ian Curtis committed suicide at his home in Macclesfield, on the eve of the band's first scheduled American tour. Both the album Closer and the single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" were released posthumously and were significant critical and commercial successes.
The group reorganised themselves, taking the name New Order from a Guardian article about Cambodia. They recruited Stephen Morris's girlfriend Gillian Gilbert, initially as s second guitarist and then a keyboard player. The band had just started working on a third album, Movement, when Curtis had passed away, so continued work on the record in a similar vein to Joy Division, producing more songs that were dark and heavy on the bass guitar, although also furthering the growing use of synthesisers that had begun towards the end of the Joy Division era. Movement and its attendant singles, "Ceremony", "Procession", "Everything's Gone Green" and "Temptation" (which weren't on the album itself, New Order being contrary buggers at the best of times) were only moderate successes, despite the band's profile and critical acclaim ("Temptation" later found renewed success through an appearance on the film Trainspotting).
The original 1983 12" version of the song played over a (slowed) version of the 1988 music video. Yes, New Order took four years to release a video for their biggest single, which is very them.
The band returned to the studio to record their second album, Power, Corruption and Lies, which was released in 1983 to significantly greater commercial success. But the driver of that success wasn't any song on the album itself, but the single-only release that preceded it.
Released on 7 March 1983, "Blue Monday" wore its influences - Donna Summer meets Kraftwerk - on its sleeve but also fused them into something quite unusual: a disco-synth-funk-rock anthem that would inarguably be New Order's signature song if they didn't have half a dozen others queuing up to dispute that.
Synth pop had been successful in the UK for a couple of years at that point, but "Blue Monday" was influential in how it fused that form to dance music, particularly in how it absorbed influences from the New York club scene (which the band had been sampling between records). Ironically, given its iconic status, the song was originally intended to be a throwaway instrumental the band could leave playing at the end of a set in lieu of doing an encore (which they considered to be pointless, as they'd rather spend that time playing). Sumner and Gilbert laid down keyboards and Morris created a looped beat that could be played on a drum machine. The band considered the result to be far more impressive than they'd first planned. Peter Hook was inspired to write a bass line and Sumner decided to add a lyric.
Bassist Peter Hook on the recording of "Blue Monday" and the album Power, Corruption and Lies.
The song came together pretty quickly in composition, but the actual recording turned out to be a major headache, due to the extremely primitive state of the recording studio which lacked many of the amenities of a modern American or London recording studio: when an awe-struck Kraftwerk visited the studio to see how the band had recorded the song, they walked out in disgust, assuming they were the victims of a practical joke. During the recording Gilbert accidentally missed a note on the synthesiser riff, desynchronising the whole song. The band liked the way it sounded, so didn't fix it and made sure they repeated the "mistake" when playing the song live and in later recordings. It took several hours to record the complex track: upon completion, Stephen Morris stood up and promptly kicked the power cord out of the drum machine, causing it to dump its memory and forcing them to re-record the entire drum loop (not the entire song, fortunately) whilst they remembered how to do it.
Peter Saville, Factory Records' infamously idiosyncratic visual designer, was inspired to create a record sleeve based on the 5.5" floppy disc sleeves lying around the studio. To create the desired effect, the sleeve had to be die-cut three times with a silver inlay. To fit the 12" single (the band refusing to reduce the song's length to fit the more standard 7" single format) this proved inordinately expensive and would cause the label to lose 5p on every copy sold. Tony Wilson, the head of Factory Records, gave the go-ahead, noting that you couldn't put a price on art and, besides, the single was too weird and strange to be commercially successful, so wouldn't lose the company much money.
"Blue Monday" became the biggest-selling 12" single in history and lost the label £50,000 (about £162,000 in today's money), and that was only because they stopped making the expensive sleeves after several printings sold out. It's possible that "Blue Monday" would have sold even more if it had been made clear it was a single-only release; the single re-entered the charts later that year when the album Power, Corruption and Lies was released without the song on it. Some overseas licencees capitalised on the single's success by including it on their versions of the album (due to the song's length, some preferred to issue it only on the cassette version of the album, creating further discographic confusion). In 1988 the song was remixed by Quincy Jones and re-released with a music video, who propelled it up the charts to #3. A further re-released in 1994 also charted.
To date, "Blue Monday" has sold over 3 million copies worldwide, 1.2 million of them in the UK alone. It arguably saved the band - or at least firmly shook them free of their past - and helped propel them to greater success in the following years. It also still sounds like, weirdly, a song from an alternate timeline's far more colourful and interesting future.
On 25 January 1978 four lads from Manchester performed their first gig under the name Joy Division. On 18 May 1980 their lead singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide, bringing their career screeching to a halt. They later regrouped as New Order, wrote the biggest-selling 12" single of all time, founded the first superclub in the UK, wrote the only decent England World Cup football song, created The Killers (sort of) and broke up acrimoniously. Several times, although their latest split (in 2007) seems to be permanent. But it all began back in the late 1970s with four guys and their instruments playing in dingy, dark pubs in the north of England.
Joy Division are one of the bands that shook the music world. Formed after seeing a Sex Pistols gig and given early encouragement by the Buzzcocks, Joy Division rapidly eclipsed both bands in musical craftsmanship and critical acclaim, although commercial success eluded them for a long time. They only briefly tasted the fruits of success thanks to the success of the single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and their second album Closer, both released after Ian Curtis's suicide. The band's influence was huge and long-lasting: Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Moby (amongst many others) were inspired by Joy Division and would cover their songs or perform alongside them in their later guise as New Order. Other bands, such as Interpol and Editors, would base their sound more directly on Joy Division, to great success.
The story of Joy Division is bound up in the story of Ian Curtis and the story of Factory Records, that great Madchester outfit which brought so many great musicians to public notice. It's a story that has, over the course of forty years, been mythologised to a great extent, with Ian Curtis held up as a tormented soul, a wounded poet and artist-genius too good for this world etc etc. This mythologising would be fine except for the fact that most of it was done by people looking on from the outside or long after the fact. It wasn't until 1995's Touching from a Distance, written by Curtis's widow Deborah, that a more thorough and human perspective was brought to events. Two feature films have also explored the period: Michael Winterbottom's Twenty-Four Hour Party People (2002) is good but its comedic elements and the fact it tried to cover the entire history of Factory in a limited timespan meant the Joy Division era was given relatively little coverage; Control(2007) is far more in-depth and intricate, but it focuses more on Curtis's marital problems than his life in the band.
Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division provides another viewpoint of the band. Bassist Peter Hook, always the band's most garrulous and painfully honest member, delivers a 300-page account of the band's history and does so in a readable and fascinating manner. Having been a Joy Division fan for over twenty years, I was pretty familiar with the story and thought that there was little else to learn. However, Hook's book is packed full of incidents and details that will be new to many readers. This is, after all, the first time we've had a book written by someone who was actually in the room when they decided to pick a new name, when they decided to recruit machine-like drummer Stephen Morris and when they played "Transmission" live for the first time at a sound check and stopped all of the other roadies and technicians dead in their tracks.
It's this inside perspective which makes the book a compelling read. Hook is a great story-teller but also a bit of a geek, having collected various Joy Division bootlegs and unauthorised recordings of gigs over the years. He provides a timeline mentioning every single gig the band played (where possible with setlists) and spends some time mentioning the gear he played with, such as the awful speaker which led to him switching to playing high notes so he could hear himself (and inadvertently giving the band their trademark sound). However, the majority of the focus is on the human story of the band and its curious internal relationships.
From left: Peter Hook, Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner.
Hook and Bernard Sumner founded the band, initially as Stiff Kittens and then Warsaw, in 1976 after seeing the Sex Pistols. They went through an early rotation of singers and drummers before recruiting Curtis and Morris. In early chapters it's very much Hooky and Barney versus the world, old school friends who taught themselves to play guitar and bass and achieved something special. But the long-simmering musical tensions between the two set in surprisingly early on. Hook admits that it was Curtis, initially solely and later in collaboration with visionary (but stark raving bonkers) producer Martin Hannett, who held the band together through these periods of tension and helped mould their sound into what made them so distinctive. The book's focus shifts gradually from the Hooky & Barney Show to being more about Curtis, whose maturing lyrical prowess and his growing ear for a memorable song led to him becoming a more and more important figure in the band.
A lot of the book is taken up by thoughts on the band and their musical direction, but also about their laddish tendencies: the juvenile pranks they'd pull on support acts or their willingness to chat up girls despite having wives or girlfriends at home. Joy Division have a reputation for being an artsy and doom-laden band, but on the road they worked hard and partied harder.
The book achieves a surprising emotional charge once Curtis is diagnosed with epilepsy. The flashing lights at their shows would often trigger fits right there on stage, but Curtis was adamant he didn't want to leave the band and demanded they keep playing. His bandmates would oblige. In the book Hook admits this was a titanic mistake, but their own urgent desire to escape their crappy jobs in Manchester and enjoy life on the road made them turn a blind eye to common medical sense. It's at this point you remember these guys were only in their early twenties when all of this went down, as was their manager. Hook admits to feeling guilty that they didn't do more to help Curtis, but it's also clear (from both this book and Touching from a Distance) that Curtis believed absolutely and utterly in the band and would not countenance leaving it under any circumstances. Ultimately the pressure of wanting to stay in the band, being stricken with a debilitating medical condition requiring a huge amount of medication and being in a failing marriage all took their toll.
The end of the book is abrupt, but then the end of the band was abrupt. In the opening months of 1980 the band recorded the album Closer and the singles "Atmosphere" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart". They'd recorded their first-ever music video and several appearances on TV. They hit a new level of critical acclaim and were booked to play a tour of the United States. They had a series of impressive new demos in hand (which would later become New Order's first few singles, including the magnificent "Ceremony") and they seemed poised to explode into megastardom. Instead, their lead singer hung himself at home whilst listening to an Iggy Pop record. The long-lasting appeal of Joy Division, beyond the fantastic songs, has always been that idea of a band forever trapped in that moment, with no bad songs or phoned-in albums to their name, poised forever on the cusp of greatness but having it denied by tragedy. It's a mythic image that even Hook cannot dispel with his down-to-earth stories of four mates having a laugh on the road.
But Unknown Pleasures (****½) is also a very human book, very funny at times, touching at others and mainly free of rancour (Hook saves that up - with interest - for its follow-up Substance, about New Order). It'll certainly make fans want to reconnect with Joy Division's back catalogue and check out Hook's thunderous live shows where he plays the albums by the band in full. The book is available now in the UK and USA.
