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October 7, 2007

Music to Brood by, Desolate and Stark

By SIMON REYNOLDS, NYT

THE mystique surrounding Joy Division has always been way out of proportion to its record sales. Far bigger bands, like the Clash and Pink Floyd, are still waiting for their biopics, but this post-punk cult band from Manchester, England, has two to its name. The first, the bright, hyper-active “24 Hour Party People,” from 2002, couldn’t be further in mood from the lustrous monochrome and stillness of the new film, “Control.”

“Party People” wasn’t entirely devoted to Joy Division. (The lead character was Tony Wilson, Factory Records’ co-founder and a patron and champion of the band.) But it’s hard to imagine that movie getting made without the aura and international name recognition supplied by the band and its doomed frontman, Ian Curtis.

The Joy Division legend is based partly on the enigma of Mr. Curtis and his dramatic exit in 1980, a suicide that terminated the band’s life, too. (Its members had vowed to drop the name if any member quit.) But it’s also founded on the power and originality of Joy Division’s music. Listening to the band’s two studio albums, “Unknown Pleasures” (1979) and “Closer” (1980), which will be reissued on Oct. 30 by Rhino, what’s most striking is how harsh the music is. This is a sound with the mettle to match the unflinching view of the human condition presented by Mr. Curtis’s lyrics.

Bernard Sumner’s guitar sounds as if it has been chipped out of granite; Peter Hook’s bass playing is fluent but unyielding, like steel cable. In performance, as documented on the live recordings packaged with these reissues, Joy Division’s dense assault approaches heavy metal. But its studio music was stark and desolate, permeated with a cavernous spatiality courtesy of the brilliantly inventive producer Martin Hannett.

Joy Division’s unsettling combination of the visceral and the ethereal has hooked generation after generation of listeners. New Order, the more commercially palatable and dance-oriented (yet still angst-tinged) outfit that the band became after Mr. Curtis’s death, has helped maintain Joy Division’s profile. As with the Velvet Underground, Joy Division’s name has been kept alive by the vastly more successful groups it influenced, like U2 and the Cure, which have paid it public tribute.

Joy Division helped spawn the Goth movement (countless sepulchral singers have copied Mr. Curtis’s doomy baritone drone), and you can spot its stray chromosomes popping up everywhere from emo to the more melancholy strains of metal. Most recently, Joy Division-indebted outfits like Interpol, Bloc Party and Editors have refocused attention on post-punk, that late 1970s, early ’80s era of musical experimentalism and lyrical innovation in which Joy Division assumed a central role.

Crucial to Joy Division’s allure is Mr. Curtis’s bleak glamour. There were a relatively small number of photographs taken of him (many by Anton Corbijn, the director of “Control”), keeping his charisma — the faraway eyes, the Eastern bloc image of long gray raincoat and short hair — ageless in black and white. And his lyrics boasted an unusual combination of unflowery directness and mysterious poetic depths: “A cry for help, a hint of anesthesia/The sound from broken homes” (from “Colony”). Mr. Curtis’s despair has a perennial appeal to sensitive teenagers confronting for the first time the possibility that life is meaningless. At some point between “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer,” fans and critics began to treat Mr. Curtis like a seer: a New Wave equivalent to Jim Morrison, but with the balance shifted from Eros to Thanatos. (The Joy Division songbook is remarkably devoid of sex, not to mention humor.)

Then Mr. Curtis’s suicide transformed him into something like a martyr. This notion of singer as fallen savior was played up in Mr. Corbijn’s 1988 video for the re-released single “Atmosphere,” in which a procession of cowled monks carry a gigantic photograph of Mr. Curtis.

“Control” resembles an expanded remix of that black and white, Bergmanesque clip. But a full-length movie can’t rely on the power of pure imagery the way a video can. Mr. Corbijn obviously needed to somehow “explain” Joy Division. One approach he might have taken would be to situate the band’s music as the product of a time and place: late-’70s Manchester, a declining industrial city in the rainy, grey-skied northwest of England, its landscape blighted with derelict factories and cleared lots.

But “Control,” for all its unstinting attention to period detail, barely mentions the group’s sociopolitical context. Instead Mr. Corbijn opts for biography, presenting Mr. Curtis’s increasingly out-of-control life — his disintegrating marriage and a guilt-racked affair, the conflicting pressures of impending fame and a rapidly deteriorating epileptic condition — as the truth behind Joy Division’s songs.

All this makes for a compelling story, but it has distinct limits as a prism for understanding Joy Division’s music. Mr. Curtis’s songs are existential rather than autobiographical. Rarely straightforwardly drawn from his life, his lyrics strip away the everyday details that observational songwriters use to impart a sense of lived reality. In his songs, ordinary life achieves an epic grandeur (hence their perennial fit with the wounded narcissism of adolescence). But there’s no bombast or emotional theatrics; instead there’s a modernist starkness as pared down as a Samuel Beckett play.

These lyrics are all the more effective framed by music that has the hard-rocking power of the Stooges but is too repressed to actually rock out. Another problem with tying Joy Division’s impact to the specifics of Mr. Curtis’s life is that during the group’s lifetime, hardly any of it was public knowledge. Few outside the Factory Records milieu were aware of his marital problems. It’s only since the publication of “Touching From a Distance,” the 1995 memoir by his widow, Deborah Curtis, on which “Control” is largely based, that his personal trials have become widely known. The foundations of the group’s enduring cult were laid during a 15-year period in which Mr. Curtis really was an enigma.

Yet there’s one crucial factor mentioned in “Touching From a Distance” that “Control” strangely ignores: Mr. Curtis’s romantic fascination with rock stars who died young. In the book Ms. Curtis writes that her husband told her he had “no intention of living beyond his early 20s.” This apparent death wish suggests that amid the depression and confusion, there was an aesthetic component to his fatal decision. From his teenage infatuation with glam rock to the attention he paid to record design, Mr. Curtis appreciated the power of gesture. Because his suicide preceded the release of “Closer,” it determined the album’s immediate reception and its long-term resonance. (In “The Eternal,” the narrator watches a funeral procession — his own?) It could be that Mr. Curtis planned it that way. He played a major role in choosing the album’s cover, a photograph of a sculpture tableau in a cemetery of the dead Christ surrounded by mourners.

At some gut level, Mr. Curtis understood that rock is all about myth. From the start, he was driven by a fierce ambition to become precisely the kind of edge-walking rock shaman that he ended his life as. The manner of that ending sealed the deal, giving Joy Division’s music an appalling gravity and — for better or worse — an undeniable authenticity.

Joy Division assimilated the desolation of its environment and the dislocation of its era and gave it a somber glamour. The barren beauty of that landscape of sound captured how lots of people felt at that late-’70s moment: the dawn of the Thatcher-Reagan era, a freshly frigid cold war with renewed anxiety about Armageddon. But tension and dread are far more the norm than the exception, which perhaps explains the time-defying and endlessly renewing appeal of Joy Division.

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October 7, 2007

The Cult of the Lads From Manchester

By DENNIS LIM, NYT

IAN CURTIS, the frontman of the beloved post-punk British band Joy Division, has been dead 27 years, longer than he was alive, but his moment in the film spotlight has only now arrived. Mr. Curtis hanged himself on May 18, 1980, two months shy of his 24th birthday and on the eve of what would have been his band’s first American tour. The Joy Division story, a sacred narrative to legions of cultish fans (and a natural for the movies, complete with doomed, charismatic hero), is now the subject of two new films, the biopic “Control” and the documentary “Joy Division.”

Both were made with the cooperation of those who best knew Mr. Curtis. “Control,” the feature directing debut of the portrait photographer Anton Corbijn, is loosely based on “Touching From a Distance,” a 1995 memoir by Mr. Curtis’s widow, Deborah, of their life together. “Joy Division,” directed by the music-video veteran Grant Gee and written by the author and critic Jon Savage, takes a panoramic approach, combining archival footage with revealing interviews of firsthand observers and Mr. Curtis’s surviving bandmates, who went on to form New Order.

In Mr. Corbijn’s film, as in Ms. Curtis’s book, the other members of Joy Division, which formed in Manchester in 1976, recede into a blur. The story homes in on Mr. Curtis’s personal pain: his struggles with epilepsy, overmedication and a guilt-inducing love triangle. By contrast, what emerges in “Joy Division” is a picture not just of Mr. Curtis and his band, but also of the social and existential conditions that produced them. The music’s coiled, haunted sound and nihilist lyrics, the documentary argues, are inseparable from the decaying postindustrial dystopia that was Manchester at the time.

The two projects, which evolved separately, are complementary but also work in similar ways. Intentionally or not, both return a mythic figure to life-size proportions.

The Weinstein Company is releasing the two films, having acquired “Control” at the Cannes Film Festival in May and “Joy Division” at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. (“Control” opens Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan. No release date has been set for the documentary.)

Mr. Corbijn’s hefty résumé includes four coffee-table volumes (mostly of celebrities and rock stars) and dozens of music videos for the likes of Depeche Mode and U2. But before “Control” he had no feature film experience. Speaking at the festival in Toronto, he said he had initially turned the project down but changed his mind, figuring that an “emotional connection to the material” would serve him well on his first feature. Born in the Netherlands, Mr. Corbijn, 52, was drawn to London in his early 20s by the flourishing music scene and, in particular, Joy Division.

Within two weeks of relocating there, he had tracked the band down for a shoot and taken what is perhaps the most defining photograph of Joy Division: the members walking into a tube station’s neon-lighted tunnel, Mr. Curtis looking back at the camera.

Like that image — and many others of Joy Division — “Control” is in black and white. “That felt like the proper approach,” Mr. Corbijn said. The covers for “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer,” the group’s two studio albums, use black and white imagery. And an inky, gloomy palette, Mr. Corbijn added, corresponds with his memories of ’70s England.

Ms. Curtis’s book was the primary basis for the screenplay, but Mr. Corbijn and the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh also wove in details of Mr. Curtis’s affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian journalist. It took some persuasion before Ms. Honoré would talk to the filmmakers, but she eventually assented and even shared letters that Mr. Curtis wrote to her, heard in voice-over in the film.

Samantha Morton signed on to play Deborah. For Ian, Mr. Corbijn chose Sam Riley, 27, who had previously appeared in a few bit parts but was folding shirts in a warehouse when he landed the role. For Mr. Riley, whose magnetic performance is the film’s scarred heart, playing Ian Curtis was a draining feat of psychological immersion and physical mimicry. He had to enact the grand mal seizures that plagued him as well as the manic, uncoordinated flailings that were his signature dance moves. (Filming the scenes between Ian and Annik were easier because “I was falling in love in real life,” he said. He and Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Annik, are now a couple.)

To populate the concert scenes in “Control,” the filmmakers rounded up Joy Division fans, which did not exactly calm Mr. Riley’s nerves. “It was big pressure going out there and having 150 extras discussing my merits and my failures,” he said. To make things trickier, the actors in the band were also performing — not simply miming — Joy Division originals.

Mr. Riley, who had briefly been the singer in a band called 10000 Things, could manage a credible copy of Mr. Curtis’s hectoring baritone, but the other actors were essentially learning to play their instruments (not unlike Joy Division in the early days). “We practiced for hours, between rehearsals and late into the night,” Mr. Riley said.

“Control” and “Joy Division” are both necessarily elegies, not merely to Mr. Curtis but also to a host of people and places that are no longer around. “To be brutal about it, the equity of Factory is death,” Mr. Savage said, referring to Factory Records, the now-defunct label that made its name with Joy Division. In addition to Mr. Curtis, Rob Gretton, who managed Joy Division and New Order, and Martin Hannett, the producer responsible for the band’s crystalline studio sound, are also dead. Tony Wilson, the mythomaniacal founder of Factory, a producer of “Control” and the subject of Michael Winterbottom’s “24 Hour Party People” (which touches on the Joy Division story), died in August.

As with other rock star suicides, Mr. Curtis’s final hours have been sifted for clues, retraced in near fetishistic detail. He was found dead by Deborah in their kitchen on a Sunday morning. The night before, he had gotten drunk, argued with her (she left), watched Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” on television and played the Iggy Pop album “The Idiot.” As depicted in “Control,” which largely resists the temptation to assign blame or explanations, his suicide seems an impulsive act. “I think it was a moment,” Mr. Corbijn said. “I don’t think it was planned.”

The documentary, even less willing to indulge in the romance of suicide, doesn’t get into Mr. Curtis’s death until late in the film. “The ultimate romantic application of the myth is that Ian validated his art when he died,” Mr. Savage said, adding in no uncertain terms that he thought it was nonsense.

In a sense, the process of stripping the myth away from Ian Curtis began with his widow and her plaintive, clear-eyed book. Ms. Curtis has stayed out of the publicity glare surrounding “Control.” Despite being credited as co-producer, she has not attended premieres or spoken publicly about the film until now. She recently consented to an e-mail interview.

Ms. Curtis said she spent a few days on the set and observed most of the scenes that were filmed on location, often right outside the house where she and Mr. Curtis had lived in Macclesfield, a town near Manchester. She was rendered “pretty much speechless,” she said, meeting Ms. Morton. “I think she plays Debbie in a forceful way. Samantha became the strong, determined woman I always wanted to be.” Meeting Mr. Riley, especially in character as Ian, was harder. “I didn’t know where to begin to talk to him really,” she said. “I think the difference is that Samantha could empathize with me and Sam’s role required him not to.”

Watching the shoot naturally stirred up mixed emotions. “Part of me didn’t want to see the wedding scene,” she said, “especially as it was filmed outside the very same church” in which she and Mr. Curtis were married in 1975. She was present for the filming of one of the most painful scenes: as Ian and Debbie walk home from a party, he matter-of-factly tells her he no longer loves her.

“I felt emotional, not for me, but for the characters in the movie,” Ms. Curtis said. “It really was like watching someone else. And in that way I suppose it was a kind of release.”

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Thanks for posting this. I love me some Joy Division - but only on cold bleak days. For an interesting (and probably greatly embellished) look at the band and Factory Records check out the movie 24 Hour Party People that is referenced in the articles.

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  • 12 years later...

I've been revisiting Joy Division through the excellent Heart And Soul box-set (which compiles the vast majority of recordings made by the band), rereading the 33 1/3 about their debut album Unknown Pleasures, and now reading Jon Savage's recently-published oral history of the band, This Searing Light, The Sun And Everything Else.  (Which gives, IMO, a better sense of the context of 1970s Manchester/Salford that Simon Reynolds complains is lacking to some degree in his review of the movie Control.  That movie is well worth watching, though, simply for Sam Riley's mesmerizing performance as Ian Curtis.)  An amazing band whose music continues to hold up extraordinarily well 40 years after Curtis' death.

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2 hours ago, medjuck said:

IIRC I've read that  Alan Partridge was based on the guy he plays in 24 Hour Party People. 

Tony Wilson of Factory Records?  The Partridge character originated in the early 1990s, s lot earlier than the film. I always thought it was a composite but probably quite a lot of Coogan himself in Partridge.

Edited by sidewinder
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3 hours ago, sidewinder said:

Tony Wilson of Factory Records?  The Partridge character originated in the early 1990s, s lot earlier than the film. I always thought it was a composite but probably quite a lot of Coogan himself in Partridge.

I knew the chronology but thought I had read that Coogan partly got the role because there was a bit of Tony Wilson in Alan Partridge. I probably should have written my usual: "IIRC (and I often don 't)... "

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