Joy Division - "Epitaph"
I can still remember my exact whereabouts when I read the first review of Joy Division's 4th album "Epitaph".
Back then, the reviews hit us weeks before the actual music did - being situated as far from the rest of Europe as we were here in the Arctic in the pre-internet era.
I can still remember the sounds and smells of my surroundings as I flicked trough the pages of my fresh copy of the NME.
I was standing in the snow outside my local newsagent wearing my black coat.
The coat matched my desperate desire to emulate early eighties Northern English post punk chic far more than the polar surroundings I lived in.
I guess if I had moved away from the heat leaking from the sporadic opening of the automatic door behind me as other customers came or left, I'd probably frozen to death there and then.
It was 1984.
I was 18.
The NME was the only channel of information in the field of music that I was immersed in at the time, and this album was the most anticipated release that I could ever remember.
All the drama that had unfolded within and around the band since the release of "Closer" four years earlier didn't exactly make the wait any less tense.
After the split of the original line-up, and Factory Records' intermediate cash-in compilation "Still", Ian Curtis - being the only remaining founding member of the band - had been on a long and winding journey towards the album I was about to read the review of.
It all started after Joy Division's triumphant but disastrous breakthrough tour of America in the summer of 1980.
The tension that built up within the band grew so severe that it had led to a series of incidents resulting in actual bloodshed followed by expensive visits to US dentists less than halfway into the extensive 8-month tour.
I, and many other fans, had actually feared it was already the end of the whole band when bass player Peter Hook left the tour without no other notice than his own droppings on the bed of Curtis' hotel room in September, something that led to the immediate cancellations of a handful shows.
It might as well have been the end, hadn't it been for the pressure laid upon the rest of the group and their manager by their US record company EMI, who Tony Wilson had signed them off to for a record sum in July of the same year, and who would have nothing of their investment turning to dust due to any "internal differences".
Hook was swiftly replaced by LA studio musician Lou Guber, who got the job in spite of his long blonde hair, tanned face and bleached teeth, due to his ability to memorize a vast number of songs without rehearsal.
Hook then went on a lengthy binge in New York City, where he eventually settled, and in the year after formed disco outfit FUCK! together with a set of unemployed musicians from the pre Cominsky Park glory days of disco, insisting - quite contrary to just about anyone else on the planet at the time - that this form of music still had a place in the world.
The UK music media accused him of making this move with the sole intention of pissing off his former pale gloom-rock bandmates, but they would be proven quite wrong less than a decade later, when Hook returned to the UK, reunited with two of his former bandmates and set up the now historical Hacienda club and helped spark off the return of dance music.
As the Guber lineup of JD continued their conquest of America, the emotional climate between members Curtis, Sumner and Morris worsened even more.
This was partly due to the fact that one coke-fuelled A&R's at EMI suddenly had the rather "brilliant" idea that Curtis and his new wife, Belgian journalist Annik Honoré - who was also travelling with the band on the tour - were to take over the public image of JD and be promoted as "the John & Yoko for a new generation", now that the traditional image of the four-piece band of gloomy young men with guitars had cracked.
Matters didn't exactly improve when in December the original Lennon - the one for the old generation - was shot in NYC.
Now they didn't only have a relationship between the members of the band that was beyond repair, but also a rather embarrassing public face that made many fans turn against them.
On the return to the UK, it was inevitable that Morris and Sumner had had enough, and in February 1981 it was announced that they also left with the intention of starting "own projects".
Their new band, New Order, saw them reunite with their former bandmate-turned-disco-mogul Peter Hook in New York, and the threesome - together with keyboardess Gillian Gilbert - went on to produce one of the biggest synthesized dance classics ever to be released: "Blue Monday".
This is a track that would eventually have such an impact on my own musical career that it is almost beyond description.
Meanwhile Curtis, as the only one left in his own band, returned to Europe where he settled in Brussels and immediately started planning his next move.
This move was soon to be announced in an interview Curtis did with NME's Paul Morley, who now had almost become the main channel of Curtis' public communications due to his passionate involvement with JD.
The new JD constellation was rooted in Curtis' newfound friendship with Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P. Orridge, who had been a Joy Division fan from the very start and who'd contacted Curtis straight after he returned from the scandalous US tour.
After recording a set of demos at Daylight Studios in Brussels involving guest appearances by members of exiled San Francisco art band Tuxedomoon, Curtis and P. Orridge communicated to the press (Morley) that they were "extremely excited" about the results, and looked forward to complete the production of the new material.
One can only wonder what would have come out of this dream collaboration, had it been followed through, and not been promptly rejected by EMI straight after the demos reached the ears of their US A&R department.
Devastated by the whole situation, Curtis turmoiled into a lengthy period of self-destructiveness, alcohol- and pill-abuse. Being based in Belgium, with its extremely liberal politics on prescription drugs, wasn't helping the situation either.
It wasn't until his old bandmate Peter Hook played at Brussel's Ancienne Belgique in the spring of 1992 with his seventh lineup of FUCK!, who had now - due to a growing popularity and desire to get played on the radio - changed their name to FOOK!, that Curtis seemed to wake up from his self-induced pharmaceutical hibernation.
The day after seeing his former bass player on stage, he got on the phone to EMI, and shortly after that he was on a plane destined for LA to lay down a new masterplan.
Based on their need to "monitor the process" it was decided that Curtis should develop and record the new material in LA, with a handpicked set of studio musicians all led by former JD touring bassplayer Lou Guber.
Curtis agreed to this on the condition that he could bring in a UK producer, and Martin Hannett was once again called for, and the new Joy Division set out to work in the summer of 1992.
Unfortunately it would soon be evident that the chemistry between Hannett and the musicians was going to prove a tricky one, and only 3 weeks into the sessions, after launching a string of death-threats, Hannett went AWOL and was never to be seen near the studio again.
As Curtis was now so immersed in his work and his re-gained creative vitality, he didn't object when his A&R's suggested to bring another - albeit quite different - UK producer into the project.
This new producer answered to the name of Trevor Horn, and had just gained industry fame for his productions of UK hit acts such as Dollar and ABC after having his own chart success with The Buggles some years before.
As the sessions progressed throughout the autumn, the unavoidable pressure from EMI for "strong" singles started to appear, and for "safety reasons" it was decided that a more radio-friendly cover version of JD's strongest moment to date, "Love will tear us apart", was to be recorded and re-launched into the US market as part of the new album.
For this job, EMI called for help in what they believed was some of the "strongest cards" within their network at the time, and thus members of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band, Steven Van Zandt and Clarence Clemons - who were both working with Springsteen in NYC's The Power Station studios on what would eventually become "Born in the USA" - flew out to LA to lay down some power riffs and a saxophone solo respectively.
In parallel, Horn was working on the production of prog-rockers Yes' new material, and from the Yes camp he brought in keyboardist Tony Kaye for some bright brass synth stabs to enhance the main riff of the song to complete the US West Coast feel of the production.
(It's worth mentioning that Throbbing Gristle's Peter Christopherson later directed the video for Yes' hit single "Owner of a lonely heart" - and thereby vaguely re-established some kind of underlying TG connection with JD)
The rest of the album took 18 more months to complete, and had one of the largest recording budgets ever to be spent on a US-signed English band.
And here I was, standing in the chilly draft of the Arctic air, flicking through the pages for the final verdict.
Morley's review was brief, but fiercely clear in its judgement:
"With their debut album five years ago, Joy Division came along as 'the next step' - a band who was supposed to show us the way forward from the last decade and into the future. More mysterious and less domestic than a banal punk band, their rage was always aimed at time, history and the gods, aimed at the self, and fate. They were meant to show us the darkness leading into the tunnel, and leave us hoping to find a glimpse of light at the end."
Then he wrote:
"This - is nothing of the sort, and I don't want to waste any more words explaining why. If you really must, you can go through the heartbreaking and unbearable experience of listening to this album for yourself."
I folded up my newspaper and just stood there, staring blankly into the air for minutes, until an old man walked past and shouted "No thanks! I've got enough toilet paper at home", believing me to be handing out some sort of political propaganda due to the out-of-place clothing and the paper I now seemed to be offering to bypassers.
The following suicide of Paul Morley sent shockwaves throughout the world of music, both across the industry and in the public.
He mailed a letter with the entire lyrics for "New Dawn Fades" as a suicide note to his own desk at the NME.
In retrospect I now realize how all of the above have been instrumental in me building up my own fear of "the mainstream", a fear that has lead me to insist on releasing my music mostly on small labels over the last two decades or so, always dodging every possibility of "getting it right" in a commercial way - bar the odd remix of other artists work getting on million-selling compilations and a couple of major label licenses.
I didn't actually bother to hear "Epitaph" until years later.
Words spoke for themselves.
Words. And suicides.
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