Touching from a distance, further all the time
One spring day during my junior year of high school, a friend came up to me and said, “Did you hear? Ian Curtis killed himself.” Dumbfounded, I replied, “Who?” At the time, my musical tastes were evolving, and this friend, who was always a step ahead of me, briefed me about Joy Division’s history, and lamented that he wouldn’t get to see them at Hurrah as he had planned (if memory serves correctly, he kept his tickets to the canceled show as a memento mori, rather than turning them in for a refund). Over the next few months, I would come to fully embrace Joy Division’s small, powerful ouevre, along with that of New Order, which rose almost too rapidly from the band’s ashes.
I’ve been thinking about those days a lot lately, as the Joy Division revival launches into high gear. In the past three days alone, The New York Times has had three articles about the group, culminating in today’s glowing review of the biopic “Control,” which is, of course, the driving force behind the newfound interest in Joy Division. And, not to let an opportunity pass it by, Apple has released its “iTunes Originals” New Order album, which includes mostly interview clips, along with versions of “Transmission” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
The most striking thing about the New Order versions of these songs is how ordinary they sound. When Ian Curtis sang, “Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio,” each “dance” was a sharply punctuated, like a hammer hitting a nail. Curtis wasn’t singing about dancing; he was singing about using music as a blunt instrument to blot out painful memories. When Bernard Sumner sings the same lyrics, he’s, well, singing about dancing. That’s not exactly surprising. New Order, has, after all, always been a dance band, focused more on finding the perfect beat than a meaningful turn of phrase. Even the group’s best song, the Curtis tribute “The Perfect Kiss,” features such inane, wince-worth lyrics as “I have always thought about/staying here or going out.” That doesn’t mean I don’t like New Order. The group’s early singles sound as fresh to me today as they did over 25 years ago, and I certainly listen to “Temptation” more often than, say, “Komakino.” But when I want more substance, I’ll return to Joy Division, as I suspect many fans, old and new, will do in the coming weeks.