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[RMoore]

In honour of the 'most depressing day of the year' Jan 24
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1396977,00.ht ml

I bought my very 1st JOY DIVISION album: 'Unknown Pleasures' (1979)

At the time +- 25yrs ago I couldn't relate to this style at all - the music just sounded all doomy & spastic with dour men sporting strange haircuts and skinny ties. Funny what the passage of time does!

Anyway had heard this album some time ago and thought hey this has something special, plus seeing a docu-drama on the BBC of the whole Factory label and Hacienda club scene in Manchester featuring Steve Coogan (aka Alan Partridge) http://www.coogans-run.co.uk/twentyfourhourpartypeople/
piqued my interest.

Anyway - the drum sound on this album is what I would classify as horrendous: the kick sounds like a little blip, miked by an sm57 through paper bag,The snare sounds like a flat thwap,
Toms sound all flat..
and I hear train wrecks on some drum fills, bum notes on bass etc,

BUT - it works PERFECTLY for the music IMHO.
This album possesses VIBE, ATTITUDE 100% performance, delivery and special songs,

I also love how everything is drenched in a strange reverb which adds to the dark and doomy sensation - I would hazard a guess: AKG BX.. spring?

[spoon]

Ryan Moore wrote on Wed, 25 January 2006 05:50

I bought my very 1st JOY DIVISION album: 'Unknown Pleasures' (1979) At the time +- 25yrs ago I couldn't relate to this style at all - the music just sounded all doomy & spastic with dour men sporting strange haircuts and skinny ties. Funny what the passage of time does! Anyway - the drum sound on this album is what I would classify as horrendous: the kick sounds like a little blip, miked by an sm57 through paper bag,The snare sounds like a flat thwap, Toms sound all flat.. and I hear train wrecks on some drum fills, bum notes on bass etc, BUT - it works PERFECTLY for the music IMHO. This album possesses VIBE, ATTITUDE 100% performance, delivery and special songs, I also love how everything is drenched in a strange reverb which adds to the dark and doomy sensation - I would hazard a guess: AKG BX.. spring?

At first I was going to offer counter-perspective to your thoughts on the drums sounds but that would be fruitless...things are so subjective and this is not my ideal drum sound to begin with.  

I love Joy Division.  I thought that album was amazing.  I loved the doom...gave such a strong atmosphere.  It mixed with my high school experience very well.
I didnt buy it until years after its initial release (1986) as I was 8 in 1979, but what a refreshing divergence from popular music (both in 1986 and in 1979).

I thought the musicianship on that album was pretty good overall...particularly the drumming.  In fact as they progressed in their careers none of the memebers attained any level of mastery of their respective instruments except the drummer. (Who really is the human drum machine e.g. Interzone, Chosen Time, Age of Consent, Ceremony etc.)

But I am glad you brought Joy Division up.  Seems like those genres get very little attention in these circles.  I am listening to that album as I type this....memories...[sniff,sniff]


Have a wonderfully gloomy winter day,
spoon

[cgc]

The Durutti Column publishing company is The Movement of the 24th January; a name inspired, like most of Factory, by the Situationists.

[arconaut]

Hey,

In 24 Hour Party People, they depict those drum tracks as being recorded on a rooftop (once again, the Beatles did everything first). The commentary track by Tony Wilson on the DVD is *definitely* worth checking out.

There is an interesting bio of Martin Hannett on the movie's website:

http://www.partypeoplemovie.com/legend_sub.php?section=2& ;subsection=4&article_id=94

Noah

[RMoore]

Interesting link,

The eccentric producer & studio depictions with the artists are pretty classic in the film,
Well worth checking out = 24 hr party people


JOY DIVISION is on non stop rotation these days,


She's lost control again!


-------------------------

But it was on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures LP that Hannett would make his name, and reputation.  The bad sign was perhaps on day three, when Martin ordered drummer Steve Morris to pull apart his entire kit, nut for nut, and put it back together again.  Central to Martin's approach was to get the drum sound right - it had to be perfect before anything else could work, and it could take days of minute tweaking to match the sound in his head.  It was on this LP that Hannett first utilised the recently-emerged technology of digital delay (where a machine repeats notes, like an echo).  He used it on the drum sound, not to create an echo effect, but intriguingly with such a tiny delay that the repeat was barely audible.  The result was to give a crunch and sinister feel to the sound.  On other occasions, Morris found himself playing drums, only to have the sound relayed to the toilets and picked up by a microphone there.

[zmix]

cgc wrote on Wed, 25 January 2006 23:16

The Durutti Column publishing company is The Movement of the 24th January; a name inspired, like most of Factory, by the Situationists.

Vive Guy DeBord!!

[MB]

spoon wrote on Wed, 25 January 2006 17:24

I thought the musicianship on that album was pretty good overall...particularly the drumming.  In fact as they progressed in their careers none of the memebers attained any level of mastery of their respective instruments except the drummer. (Who really is the human drum machine e.g. Interzone, Chosen Time, Age of Consent, Ceremony etc.)

Er...

Peter Hook is a bass monster and is often sited as one of the most influencial bassist in modern pop by more discerning rags.

Johnny Marr once said that Bernard Sumner was the innovator for post punk guitar playing and without him guys like Robert Smith wouldn't know where to start.

As for "the producer", my god man it's Martin Hannett. Famous for that dark, cold yet enormous drum sound. Heart and Soul, She's Lost Control, Love Will Tear Us Apart - those are all amazing drum sounds and light years above anything anyone else was putting out circa 1980. Visionary. "Play faster yet slower."

[RMoore]

Unknown Pleasures

I am so freakin' out on this album right now..

Just when you thought you'd heard it all - too funny..

So I guess the strange and dark reverb sound on the album may possibly have been the studio toilet!


------------------------------------

UNKNOWN PLEASURES | Joy Division
Producer: Martin Hannet
Factory, 1979   
   
Punk rock took a while to filter out of London into other parts of the UK, but when it did the results where often more interesting. Take Joy Division, for instance. The band had come together in the wake of the Sex Pistol's gig at Manchester's Free Trade Hall in 1977. Initially trading under the suitably doomy moniker of Warsaw, they recorded a debut album in 1978 for RCA, but production problems led to it being scrapped. They reconvened with producer Martin Hannett in April 1979, and recorded Unknown Pleasures in less than a week.

The band, relative novices in the studio, were treated as a blank canvas by Hannett, whose production swathed the instruments in his trademark harsh metallic reverb and augmented Steven Morris' metronomic rhythms with drum machines. The overall mood of darkness is powered by Peter Hook's driving bass lines and Bernard Sumner's jagged guitar, apparently influenced by the decidedly non punk Black Sabbath. Above this eerie soundscape floats the spectral baritone of the late Ian Curtis, whose lyrical themes dealt in existential dread and pessimism, the darkness at the heart of the modern urban experience. Ironically for a band so associated with the recession hit post-punk years, Curtis was a Tory voter.

Enormously influential, not least on U2's early sound, Joy Divison would only record one more album, the glacially monumental Closer, before Curtis' untimely suicide. With Unknown Pleasures they created a template that would spawn hordes of angst ridden, black clad doom merchants in long overcoats, but few of its imitators matched its disturbing power, which still sounds defiantly strange and vaguely unsettling today.

[RMoore]

An interview with Martin Hannett, 29th May 1989

Interview by Jon Savage

[RMoore]

I went out on Sunday and saw this new Joy Division biopic film 'Control'

tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_%282007_film%29

I think Anton Corbijn really hit a slam dunk with this one - his first feature film too..

Very well done film I think which captures the times in great detail, down to period 'authentic' posters, stickers in the club scenes - and as well capturing the human side of the story & the complications and dilemmas Ian Curtis faced...

They appeared to get a lot of the small live show and studio details looking 'authentic', including overhead SM58's for drums etc...but strangely the one thing that seemed out of place was the studio vocal mic - looked like an Audio Technica kind of LDC (?)..

For the rest though -the film did seem visually perfect, capturing the look and feel of those days.

You get the sense from the film that Curtis was a decent guy, trying to do the right thing but caught up in clash of Worlds between being a working class married family man with a mortgage on the one hand and being a broke burgeoning new music icon on the other...

Only 23 when he took his own life!

Pretty tragic...

If the same story took place now - people around him and especially the health services might have been more aware of signs of depression onset etc and acted accordingly...
at the time he was pretty much adrift & all alone...poor guy!

[Daniel Farris]

RMoore wrote on Tue, 23 October 2007 03:27

I went out on Sunday and saw this new Joy Division biopic film 'Control' tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_%282007_film%29 I think Anton Corbijn really hit a slam dunk with this one - his first feature film too..

Well, you and I spent our Sunday night doing the same thing.

I loved this film and, in fact, I was so moved by it that, when it was over and they brought out the producer and lead actors for Q&A, I had to excuse myself. I just couldn't sit and let my memory of that movie be marred by stupid questions like "What was it like to be in a MOVIE?" So I sat in the lobby and waited for the rest of my party.

It was truly a beautiful movie. Corbijn did, as always, a phenomenal job.

I hope Tony Wilson lived long enough to see the finished cut. He would have loved it.

I personally love the Joy Division drum sound, btw. It isn't something I'm aiming for, but it's great.

While I was in the lobby at the NuArt, waiting for the Q&A to end, I kept asking myself, "Why does the theater manager look so familiar? Do I KNOW this guy from somewhere?!" It nearly drove me crazy. Later at Father's Office, it dawned on me: He was the Movie Geek from that distant game show Beat the Geeks.

DF

[Todd Loomis]

  Unknown pleasures was the first album by them I really fell in love with too - it's really good - I don't listen to it as often now as I used to.  I have to be in the right mood I guess - I did listen to closer in it's entirety just recently.  I love that album as well...

 There is so much power in their music, but such a sense of desperation.  This music was really comforting to me during one of the toughest periods in my life.

 Interestingly enough, I didn't get to know them until probably the early 90's.  I was actually introduced to "New Order" before that - who I instantly fell in love with.  I had the album "Substance"...  I used to listen to it over and over and over...  that, Depeche Mode's 101 (live), and OMD (the greatest hits album).  Those were the first 3 cds I bought when CD's came out!  heheh...   this thread takes me back to different times... it's funny, and kind of sad at the same time.  Those years for me were such a special time - I think just partially because of my age back then, and the experiences I was going through - but in addition, it was great music.

 This thread puts me back there again for a while - I'll have to get out those albums and start listening to them again for a bit.  They were kind of my first real "love" in music - where I felt like I was beginning to find my identity - something I could identify with easier.  Actually, I shouldn't say that - strangely enough, and I know it's a HUGE departure, the very first "album" I ever really fell in love with and had the same kind of experience was "Endless Summer" by "The Beach Boys"!  hahaha - go figure - quite a bit different, but I think there was some kind of strange sadness in "The Beach Boys" music that trancended everything they were doing lyrically - it's in the harmony - in the music itself...  it made more sense than anything.  There were "hits" by other bands that really stuck with me from back then too, but not really a whole "album" - "Eye in the sky" by the Alan Parsons Project, "Hungry like the wolf" by Duran Duran, and "Every breath you take" by the Police...   I really loved those too.

 Anyway, I think I'll have a listen to the Joy Division albums again.  Thanks for the reminder Ryan.    Yeah, the drum sound is cool...  it's really strange, but it fits with that really stark, bleak atmosphere.

[minkthinking]

RMoore wrote on Wed, 25 January 2006 05:50

In honour of the 'most depressing day of the year' Jan 24

Jan. 24th is my birthday!

that explains a lot about me.

[Chris Moore]

One thing Hannett used to do was have the drummer record every drum separately. So the drummer would do a pass of just kick, then overdub the snare, then the hh, etc. I assume that this is so Hannett would have total isolation over the sounds and be able to print each sound through the AMS and/or reverb. He also used the Marshall Time Modulators a lot, but I'm not sure when he got them. Also, Unknown Pleasures was recorded at Strawberry Studios, I believe on the Helios.
I think the drums on the roof thing from "24 hour party people" is probably fictional, as I doubt that one would be able to get a very isolated sound on a city rooftop. Similar to the "Closer" movie where he is playing the Syn-drum part on a spray bottle or something.

[Gold]

I was 12 and at summer camp in northern Ontario in 1979. A counsellor played Unknown Pleasures. I had to have it. On the way back to Buffalo I stoped at at least three record stores in Toronto before I found it.  Seriously good.