Routine Bites Hard: Joy Division and the Dangers of Solitude
Forty years ago, Ian Kevin Curtis — the English singer-songwriter, musician, and enigmatic frontman for post-punk luminaries Joy Division — committed suicide. On the morning of May 18th, 1980, at the young age of 23, Curtis was alone in his home in Barton Street, Macclesfield. In his final moments, Curtis watched Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, listened to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, left a note for his wife Deborah, and hung himself in the kitchen. Curtis took his own life on the eve of Joy Division’s first North American tour and mere months before the release of Closer (1980), the group’s then highly-anticipated (and now iconic) second full-length album.
While the band’s profile was already on the rise, Curtis was evidently in a bad place. His “marriage was falling apart, his epilepsy was worsening, and” as critic Joshua Klein notes, “at their most uplifting, his band’s lyrics set new benchmarks for melodrama, paranoia, and depression.” Ultimately, Curtis’ death resulted in the dissolution of Joy Division (as the members had previously agreed to change the name of the band should one member decide to leave) and the subsequent formation of the more dance and club-oriented New Order.
Forty years on, Curtis’ tragic end is an established part of rock’n’roll legend, putting him alongside revered figures such as Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Bon Scott, Jim Morrison and, later, Kurt Cobain. Meanwhile, the band’s legacy remains as one of the formative influences central to the burgeoning post-punk and goth movements of the late 70s/early 80s. As Mark Fisher outlines in his essay “No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division”:
If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times. Listen to JD now, and you have the inescapable impression that the group were catatonically channelling our present, their future. (50)
After weeks and months of pandemic fear-mongering, quarantine lockdowns, self-imposed isolation, and now outbreaks of civil unrest around the world, it’s hard not to see doom and gloom as an all-too-real configuration of the present moment, a phenomenon no longer resigned to some nebulous, distant mirage of the future.
In his writing on the pervasive nature of hauntological lost futures, Fisher connects Joy Division’s continued relevance with their ability to give voice to a perceived lack of momentum in contemporary culture and the depressive streak prevalent in disenfranchised youth: “From the start their work was overshadowed by a deep foreboding, a sense of a future foreclosed, all certainties dissolved, only growing gloom ahead” (50).
And, while it’s easy to argue that Closer is by far the group’s most representative work — what Klein describes as Joy Division’s “start-to-finish masterpiece, a flawless encapsulation of everything the group sought to achieve” — I believe that one track in particular, ‘Isolation,’ stands above the rest in speaking directly to our current moment. Sequenced between the stark and mesmerising, J.G. Ballard-influenced album opener ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and the morbid lamentation of ‘Passover,’ the second track on Side A of Closer contains brief bursts of icy synth-pop and Curtis’ austere, depressive imagery.
“In fear every day, every evening/
He calls her aloud from above.
Carefully watched for a reason/
Painstaking devotion and love.”
‘Isolation’ kicks off with a harsh electronic drumbeat from percussionist Stephen Morris, accented with compressed, flat kicks and cracking snare hits. Next, we hear bassist Peter Hook’s throbbing bassline, wandering listlessly across the first few bars. In place of a traditional guitar melody — that quintessential lifeblood of angular, amp-driven rock music — guitarist Bernard Sumner instead provides an icy, trebly synth line that slowly unravels in a shrill and ascetic fashion, adding a sense of tense unease to an otherwise upbeat instrumental soundscape. Writing on the band’s rejection of rock’s pronounced, overly aggressive impulses in favour of post-punk’s cold and menacing tones, Fisher observes:
Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor — it would be better to say that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions. (59–60)
Perhaps then, somewhat ironically, it seems intentional that Curtis’ vocals appear to be patched and delivered from some ethereal nether-realm, beyond the world of the band’s truth: the dreary industrial reality of post-war England. With his deep baritone wavering in and out of range, stuttering with moments of surreal vitality, Curtis sings of fear as a pervasive facet of everyday life. It’s a notion that today at least, feels all-too-relevant to those of us living in the continually head-spinning news cycle delirium of 2020.
“Surrendered to self-preservation /
From others who care for themselves.
A blindness that touches perfection /
But hurts just like anything else.”
As Curtis knew all too well, there’s also profound loneliness to be found in solitude. And it’s no surprise that Curtis equates the slow, gradual embrace of the oppressive neurology of depression to a form of surrender, in relinquishing one’s agency to an internal force beyond your control. Here’s Fisher again:
That is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock’s standard downer states, but depression: depression, whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered The (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire. The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life — or inner death — overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. … Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position. (59)
For Curtis, there’s a certain bliss to be found in the sensation of truly letting go. Depression not only lets you become willfully ignorant of your downward spiral and its inevitable trajectory, but it consumes you with the knowledge that this state of phenomenological absence, without feeling and desire and devotion to others, without wanting — needing — anything at all, is the real freedom. As his vocals hit that most sepulchral of registers, warbling in and out of phase during the simple chorus refrain, Curtis appears to acknowledge that even perfection, no matter how perverted a prize, still has a price.
“Mother I tried, please believe me /
I’m doing the best that I can.
I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through /
I’m ashamed of the person I am.”
In the track’s midsection, Curtis’ voice rises above the synth line as he sings of struggles with shame and self-doubt. There’s an uncomfortable sense of resignation and desolation in Curtis’ delivery, a voice that Fisher describes as “from the very start terrifying in its fatalism, in its acceptance of the worst — [sounding] like the voice of man who is already dead, or who has entered an appalling state of suspended animation, death-within-life” (61).
And yet, as Simon Reynolds argues in a piece for The New York Times, Curtis’ lyricism was frequently more existential than strictly autobiographical. In his studio work on Closer, Reynolds finds a “modern starkness” and “mysterious poetic depths” in Curtis’ lyrics, perfectly augmented by the “cavernous spatiality” of the record’s production from frequent collaborator, Martin Hannett. In discussing Curtis’ unique brand of “bleak glamour,” Reynolds writes:
At some point between Unknown Pleasures and Closer, fans and critics began to treat 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.) … 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).
Just before the track throttles into the final verse, a brief instrumental switch-up finds Morris launching into a jagged hi-hat motif, flowing through as an energy boost right when Curtis alienated imagery hits its darkest ebb.
“But if you could just see the beauty /
These things I could never describe.
These pleasures a wayward distraction /
This is my one lucky prize.”
With Curtis intoning here at his most arresting and futile, his yearning for the transcendent beauty and perfection of an afterlife becomes even more apparent. As Reynold notes, in her 1995 biography, Touching from a Distance, Curtis’ wife Deborah recounts how her husband was always fascinated with the idea of suicide and had “no intention of living beyond his early 20s.” For Reynolds, this apparent death wish provides evidence for an aesthetic component to Curtis’ thought process on that fateful May morning:
From his teenage infatuation with glam rock to the attention he paid to record design, 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. … At some gut level, 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.
Likewise, in his argument for depressive ontology as both a factor of the human condition and a philosophical position, Fisher (who had his own well-documented and long-running battle with depression, and would sadly take his own life in the early days of 2017) sees Curtis’ suicide as the ultimate promise of authenticity:
Suicide has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ — into a cold myth, as solid, seamless and permanent as the ‘marble and stone’ that Peter Saville would simulate on the record sleeves and Curtis would caress in the lyrics to ‘In a Lonely Place’. (62)
It’s hard to know the ins and outs of depression without being there. Yet, for me, ‘Isolation’ helps to shed light on what depression can do to a person and their outlook on life. How devotion can give way to desolation, how endless distractions can leave you feeling unmoored in the crashing waves of life before you find yourself battered and broken on the jagged rocks of despair.
And while the last few months have certainly provided ample fuel for negative thoughts, I like to think that there’s a sliver of hope and solidarity to be found in the music and art and creativity of others. Even the ones like Joy Division and Closer and ‘Isolation,’ that stare out at us from deep recesses of time and the darkest abyss.
Works Cited
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zer0 Books, 2014, pp. 50–63.
Klein, Joshua. “Unknown Pleasures/Closer/Still.” Pitchfork, Oct. 29, 2007, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11624-unknown-pleasurescloserstill/. Accessed 28 Jun. 2020.
Reynolds, Simon. “Joy Division’s Enigmatic Mystique.” The New York Times, Oct. 09, 2007, nytimes.com/2007/10/09/arts/09iht-division.1.7817510.html. Accessed 27 Jun. 2020.
