Listen to the silence - por Paul Morley (Londres 23/10/1997) (del booklet de Heart and Soul)

volver

And so, here. And so, to make some promises that cannot be kept. And so, to speak. And so, wonder. I am wondering what to write about Joy Divison, or to be exact, what exactly to write about Joy Division this time. How exact can I be? How exact should I be? I've been writing about Joy Division all my adult life; all my writing life; all my life. In many ways (and this is one way) everything I've ever written has been about Joy Division. (Let me explain, eventually... if I can... if I should...).

Everything they make me feel -or suggest I feel- is a central metaphor for everything I feel, about me, the world, music, emotion, love, death, time, God, and so on. And so, now I come to think about it, this is how exact I am going to be...

And so, in the ways (count the ways) that pop music opens you up and explains things (and t/fore closes you down and unexplains things, which is so part of the still moving thrill that pop zips and unzips in its own time and space) then shall we say for the sake of this promise that when I was fourteen Marc BoIan with a wave of his magic wand showed me the light and then at another age Joy Division -only my age, the fuckers, what did they know of this world let alone any other(s)- showed me with a dizzying dip of the mind the dark.

And so here are the extremes of pop: the masking of the world of appearances, and the unmasking. ...The glittering surfaces, and the shattering depths. Marc BoIan stuck stars onto his skin, and that was pretty exciting. Joy Division pierced their skin -put a hole in their being- with their cracked and cracking obssessiveness, and that was pretty exciting as well. Twenty years on, Marc BoIan reminds me of my past. He is, alas, behind me. Joy Division still point me towards my future. In many ways (entertain the ways) they're still to come.

And so, what. I could say (count the coulds) speaking as a damned virtual rock critic that Joy Division as a rock group are an interesting case, if not the most interesting case. This is speaking historically (whoever does the speaking, metaphorically speaking) and so does go some way (watch the way) towards creating some kind of shape to rock things, some order, but please feel free to remove the traces as soon as they seem to appear. In no time at all, just a sliver of no-time at the no-end of the '70s which in many ways (discount the ways) is as far away as the '50s, the sick boy band eventually named Joy Division after an auntie or something -boy oh boy- made up quite a myth with the help of themselves and a vain desire for purity.

The myth of the group quickly ghost-rolled hip-deep around their music: you thought that you could never see through this spilling myth, and yet somehow (count the somehows) you could see all the way through. To. (the other side). They had only been going a matter of months before the evidence was plain to see and hear; here was a strange out of nowhere out of place out of it rock group who were opaque and transparent, visible and invisible, straightforward and dissident. They changed all the time. They shed all manner of inner and outer skins monthly; some disconcerting musical menstruation saw them change inside a couple of seasons from chubby punk babes to mean rock'n'roll cockroaches implicated in some absurdly grand mission to take over the world, or bits of it.

And so they did it all -all of what they did- with two lp's a handful of singles and some shows (shows that showed how fast they were going however steep the corners were. Occasionally they slowed down, but that was only for some blood shedding). Ah, and talking of blood, there was a suicide (count it; you can't miss it; it's just round the corner) that manufactured for the group the ultimate end, a sudden stop to what had begun so unsuddenly and so slovenly, and this sheer shiny pointed end at the opposite end to their ragged quite pointless beginning created this great shape (count the shapes), this missile, and we now see and hear how this missile was launched into the light and then within a matter of time it exploded into the dark and so the story of Joy Division had the perfect 20th Century (leg)ending. And so the myth so soon so scandalously was neck high and climbing. And tightening.

And so, speaking to order, The Interesting Case OF Joy Division as a rock group (or as we shall see in this order of things, THE rock group). For a start, they had these values, this stubborn need not to sully their worth. they took themselves very seriously, which suggested that deep down they might be comedians as much as tragedians. The two lp's they made didn't contain any of their singles, so there was no over-familiarity to back-pollute the complete and separate works that the albums were. The singles were from different worlds. Joy Division defied commercial conventions with such shrugging care and inattention because they know, really, that in the long run -and perhaps they were in it for the long run, the steep climb- it would pay off. the deliberate distinction they wnated to maintain between their albums (the two energised masterpieces, 'Closer' with its soft and hard 's', 'Unknown Pleasures' with its spaced out s and s, different but connected, one icy and jumpy, the other thawed and graceful, one out of the womb, the other into the tomb) and their irresistibly overemotional singles was their way of achieving the aloof splendour enjoyed by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Groups far too grand and superior to fret about the grubby worlds of hard sell and instant gratification: their glamour came from their anti-commercial perversity, a wonderful mixture of laziness, arrogance and self-confidence. Some anti-social need to preserve integrity, to play on reclusiveness, to back into the limelight. (They were independent: but never 'indie.') This was for Joy Division -long term style not short term fashion. From the very beginning, they thought big.

And so their music had to be big too, and rebellious, and they had a lot to go on: in may ways (keep counting) they had as much to go on as any group twenty years later. with Joy Division, you hear a group with a great record collection, who have great discrimination, and whose intention was to absorb and dominate these influences, to equal and surpass. Their music has this betranced European detachment -arted, parted, departed, stop and started separateness, music that oozed out of the great European cities- that they picked up from the likes of Can and Kraftwerk. When they started to get so good, they started to rub noises together, to blend temperatures, to mix rude rock directness with shy nervy avantgarde indirecteness. They drifted even as they shifted. they gIanced as they flashed. They floated as they attacked.

There was this sarcastic alternative American thing about them that they nicked in their bedrooms from The Doors, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground -the way they used guitars as an abuse, melodies as a sign of bitter-sweet intelligence, beat to beat up beat, the way hate was as great a subject as love, the secrecy of thought as sexy a subject as sex. These surly, sacrificial Americans revealed to them the edgy. Then there was even this deadpan sensation seeking camp outsider thing snatched out of the studded back pocket of the smart aplombish Eno, Roxy Music and Bowie. The sleek bleak and S&M bruised Roxy of 'For your pleasure', the colder, fishier, tenser Bowie of 'The man who sold the world' and 'low', the allusive Las Vagueness playfulness of Eno the singer/songwriter. In the wet dead north west such delectable subversive stuff was the surreal thing: there was a way out over the grey walls and the sharp and hostile things of everyday.
And so all these distant decadent musicians banked up in the lives of the four impressionable young men shared this thing about "not belonging" and not wanting to belong and they had this flamboyant and tenacious urge to tell the truth about the world about them through magnificent and liberating lies.

And so as if the world could be a better place and... why not. And so at just the right time in this order of things came punk rock (turning private emergencies into public urgency) named after somebodies uncle or something (still counting), and that fitted in just right with all that other stuff. The Sex Pistols, vomited out of the mouths of The Stooges, harassed the group that would be Joy Division into action, and they adapted to and pretty soon transcended this frenzied coincidence of The Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and the Doors. (and you never know, Peter Hamill, Nick Drake and Black Sabbath. And you never know, more JG Ballard, Mary Shelley and Alber Camus. And you never know more than Franz Kafka and Dostoevski). And so there was more to help this transcendence, this disorderly magic. There was the Manchester damp and the shadows and omens called into dread being by the hills and moors that lurked at the edges of their vision. It wasn't soft, where they lived. It was stained green and unpleasant. It seemed to be at the edge of the edge of the world. You had to dream your way out of such a tranquillised, inert stretch of Iand/mind scape. You had to use your imagination to believe that there was anything else but nothing else. In these slow suburbs, your mind would ache for release. And so would your body.

There was sexual frustration battering the air from all directions. There was godless depthless nightclub music desperately seducing these serious young men with remorseless promises per minute: the adventue of art and the chaos of the mind versus the mindless temptations of the rhythms of the moment, and eventually as New Order the remains of Joy Division would somehow solve this absurd dichotomy without compromise, introducing northern lights to northern darks. And so anyway, circus minded glam pop, with all its bump and grind, something of the comedy meat of this stuff (count the stuffing) made into the JD pot, into this wilderness of the familiar and the freshly compelling, this atmosphere of futuristic cataclysm. So they hapenned.

And so they thought.

And so they had the daring of the mind.

And so they knew what they were doing.

And so they did.

And so things happened to them.

And so there was tension and a release of tension.

And so all hell let loose.

And they didn't know what they were doing.

And so ite came from somewhere and nowhere and they didn't like to think about it too much just in case it stopped coming.

And so they just let it happen.

And so they bIanketed the sky with orange sheets that turned to a diaphanous white chiffon before sweeping upward into instant oblivion.

And so time and time again reality burnt through to the surface of this wicked and deep adventure.

(And so what about their record company, Factory, not so much a record company, more a state of mind, or a state, with mind, who pushed them and pulled them. And so who encouraged them. And helped them. and hindered them. And indulged them. In some ways, they drove Joy Division, and in some ways, Joy Division were very driven. Sometimes, Joy Division drove Factory, they drove each other up the wall. Together they erratically defied the banal rock gravity of following certain rules of presentation and promotion. Since when has a record company -not so much a record company, more and existential minder- been a combination of villain, pantomime dame, benefactor, wicked stepmother, clown, lover and butler? Factory and Joy Division are the perverse proof of that old chocolate pudding of a saying that there is no business like show business. And of that old banana split of a saying that there are more quests than panthers).

(And so, also, they had a manager, Rob gretton, who loved them, like a child, like a brother, like a friend, like a fan, and who watched over them sith such belief and commitment. He followed them to the ends of the earth and then, funnily enough, beyond).
And so all of this bled fed wed and headed dead or alive into the drastic mind and body of Joy Division (who were outgrowing their mind and body and packing more time into the time they had than they had time for) and all of this, all these coincidences and transmissions and transitions and (r)apt moments and exotic settings and mild distortions, it all added up, and put them into this unique position where they were both the last ever great rock group (after The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, MC5, The Doors, Television, the Sex Pistols) and the first ever great rock band (before The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead) ... they were some twisted turning point some tunnel of light and dark and love and hate that you must journey through from one era to the next if you are to make any new sense... Joy Division summoned up in a rocket shell in their time and place all the great rock -surface and substance, pose and power- that there ever was and ever will be.

And so somehow (and what are the odds of this happening) they drew into themselves all the greatness of rock's past and rock's future and received all this interference and information from fact and fantasy, absence and presence, that transformed their music into an epic of timelessness. Say what you want, time never seems to corrupt the music of Joy Division: the actions, sensations, images, movement all seems to fit into the next moment, the noises and agitation, the courage and diligence, always seems to be happening for the first time. Their music so feverishly conjures up insecurity, malign gods, moral chaos, human lostness, caged energy, loss, shifting meaning and danger that it could never slip back into some cosy version of itself. It could never be stripped of its harrowing power because its crystallisation of moody form and seething content is so classic and universal.

And so where was I?

Joy Division are, in this order of things, the centre of the (rock) universe. They even ended up being as dug up and compiled and re-compiled and re-mastered as Hendrix -and so here we are finding ever more ways to extend the brief moment(ousness), to spin it out, to hold on, searching for clues in the out-takes and the bootlegs for how this might have happened, knowing all along that it's mystery, and within that it's accidental, and within that it's futile, and within that it's over.

And so there was a death in the family. And rock and roll, the very real greedy myth of it, the sly shifting life of it, loves early death and gaudy sacrifice. The rock and roll myth, the sensation of it, loves death as the lions loved christians. Death in rock and roll chronically cosmically represents rocks vain mad mock mocking. As if there is such a thing after all. It makes it all worthwhile, all the effort and frenzy, all the lust and collapse. All the fucking fantasy. True, tried outsiders –pretenders and contenders– can find a place to live, and die, inside rock and roll. At the extremes of desire, death proves rock and roll, certifies its acts of rebellion. And death proved Joy Division; it set them up. Death rams home into amplified eternity the essential black glamour rock and roll aspires to, instantly, brutally creates the kind of immortality that all entertainers -even the frail, unformed and boyishly, conscientiously alienated Ian Curtis –desperately crave.

And so Ian Curtis, dead name, dead stop, dead mysterious, dead success, dead all the same, dead at the ment, a close relation of the unknown, as withdrawn as gets. And so how romantic can you get And so how accidental is life and death. And so, fatalism. And so Joy vision, dead cool, as made up as history;.as mad as. rock and roll history, had seriousness thrust upon them overnight –that’s overnight; that's serious, that's boys becoming men, that's their music coming true, the fictions becoming facts, overnight, seriously, And so Joy Division, who'd perhaps played at being out of this world, were hurled out of this world. And so overnight And so they played at taking themselves seriously. And then, in the middle of one martyring night it worked for them. Seriousness. Who could deny it? This was some meaning. And so Joy Division, as lovely as a dream in stone; just as their record sleeves always cried and whispered, had it all going for them as rock and roll myths. A great short fast fractured life rendered psychedelic by a messy midnight death. And so their seriousness was left hanging in space. And so that is something. Else.

And so what might have been was viciously disturbed.

And so all along they were glorying in their fate.

Oh, and so, the death of producer Martin Hannett –more mischievous myth, more (disjointed) history, more incidental insubordination, more violence, more degenerate heroism and indecipherable cowardice, all in all adding to the serious components of Joy Division as big deal rock and roll illusion inside their very own infinitely variable endlessly interpreted mystery melodrama They were bigger than they seemed, bigger than they seem, on the quiet as big as they come. Their myth is noisy and quiet, dazzling and hidden, static and dynamic ... and so is their music.

And so, seriously, Joy Division, after their overnight stop, neither exist or do not exist.

And so, as specimens, as living things, as boys, as innovators, as brats, as fuckers, as thinkers, as feelers, as dreamers, as ghosts, as petuIant bleeders, as occultists, as neurotics, as heroes, as narcissists, as dead things, as commodity, as history, as future, as ageless punks, as sceptics, as forever young, as practical jokers, as auto–didactics, as deceivers, as a touch inflated, as vapours, as liars, as chaos, as pleasure, as strangers, as egos, as northerners, as EngIanders, as Europeans, as futurists, as the inspired, as the inspirers, as metaphysicians, as sentimentalists, as next door neighbours, as sell outs, as swines, as artists, as borrowers, as lenders, as drinkers, as addicts, as cults, as confessors, as back catalogue, as weirdos, as adulterers, as fathers, as sons, as images, as details, as nutters, as musicians, as Joy Division, as survivors, as far as it goes we can say that they’re like group zero. Out of the group, all that they are and sound like and did and had done to them, you could find traces of ail the great ‘non/not belonging' rock music that there has been and will be. Their myth is the myth of rock, they're a compression of all the obscure and commercial, wild and inexplicable dynamics that makes – made– rock such a force in our face and in our lives. They are the end, the beginning and the middle all at once. And so they never belonged. They never got bogged down. They never repeated themselves. They were always in the process of discovering themselves, in the process of thinking, in the process of. processing their influences. They had it easy in the sense that for them it was all over after three years –and the rest was history– and they never reached the point where they might get assimilated or jaded, but then again (and again) they had it hard in the other sense that there was something about them that knew they had an awful lot to do in such a short time. You can hear in their music that they knew some kind of crash was coming: the end of the century or just the end of their dawning noise.

And so that was an order.

And so far so good.

And so selfish.

(And so when one is doing rock criticism one gets
to the point where one would just like to emit an inarticulate sound).

And so I could place Joy Division in that order.

And so I could not.

And so I could write –with intention– about Joy Division’s central role in it all, the it all of rock et al, and yet how they are also so off–centre: but then to be so central to the story they have to be off centre as well, because the central beauty of pure rock is that it is off–centre. If they were just central they would not be central: that would be too banal for words. They must be off centre to be central, to be properly obvious and mysterious, to be (in the skipped beat of a missing moment) enigmatic.

And so they are.

And so good.

And so moving on from the centre where we have placed them off-centre in the history of (rock) things, the myth still rises, and obscures, and provokes.

And so I was just thinking.

And so their music could form a soundtrack for Godard or Bergman or Fassbinder or Wenders or (...) Herzog. It could worm through the words of Sterling or Gibson, and it could buzz around the upsense and downdata of Ballard or Burroughs. And it could be called cyberpunk or cyberpunk, perhaps their one true location is lost in cyberspace, they're scattered, vastly out there, intimately in here, and they’re as hyperreal as the next hyperreal thing and imagine how hyperreal that is, and girl oh girl are they ever so hypersensitive. There was something (the way they got the human spirit dancing on the end of pins and needles, the way they didn’t smile much in public, the way they could evoke derangement with such cool clarity, the way they wore their second hand clothes, the way there was something cruel lurking behind the beauty) about them that was ancient and, so, gothic (1548 and all that). They were postmodern (postmodern as something atmospheric, something bored and fanatical, a volatile mix of this, that and the approximate other, fraught with an eerie, brittle significance) from the moment –if not the moment before, but let’s not get too date specific at a time like this– they facelessly if not namelessly produced ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and said that they were waiting for some guy to come and take them by the hand and there were these gulping black noises and squirming off white sub–noises going on way out beyond their realish rock that sounded like they were giving birth or operating on themselves and yes Joy Division’s music could form a soundtrack for Lynch but not Tarantino oh no that’s the point Joy Division never had any intention of wanting to cut The Universe down to size. They love –and hate but with respect– the size of The Universe. The size of the Universe is everything. And so the size is in the details. And one of the great things (count the things) about Joy Division is their appreciation of size and their attention to detail. And so I suppose. And so believe me it was as if, whether they intended this or not, they were trying to warn us about dangers to avoid.

And so according to Joy Division whether they knew it or not nothing is neutral nothing is impotent in the universe an atom may ruin all an atom may ransom all. And so you wake up frightened with the feeling of having overslept. And so they made us think of another separate world that maniacs and exiles invent when the normal everyday world seems impossible. And so the mood shifts again.

And so then there were the writings of Ian Curtis, who was underground by the time he was 23, and he wrote these overloaded and penetrating autobiographical fragments, these notes and notices from the above ground underground, these tensing of the senses, that seem to come from the life of someone who lived so much more than twenty years and a bit. Something was concentrating his mind dramatically. It was like he suspected it –the all embracing it, the it of all its– was coming to end one way or another sooner rather than later. Even without having all that I’ve mentioned –their off centred centrality, their essence-ness, their zero, matrix, symbolic status –Ian Curtis’s impressions and depressions would have lifted Joy Division into greatness. He sang from the knife edge with a kind of suave sordid middle of the road disconnectedness. He sang suffering with an almost tender listlessness. He put this awkward but handsome spin on despair.

He crooned anguish. He delivered sullen commotion. He expressed his restlessness and soul–sickness with a damaged insouciance. Even when he was charged, and brutal, he seemed resigned. He sang his sharply apprehensive songs in the spirit of:

I’ll get this off my chest
and then get my chest off me.

This music that rocked –that could go the distance, from here to there and beyond– hung inside a sense of sadness and waste and emptiness. And so, more and more, a mental and physical exhaustion, as if Curtis was transferring himself into the very body of the music, slipping over the line from where the music was for him to where he was for the music. The music was taking him away. Taking him over. Needing the drama of his life. And so more drama. And so more. And so the sin always rises.

And so Ian lived his (rock and roll) life intensely to such depths. And so the love and alarm of ‘Love will tear us apart’. And so you can tell exactly –around an unknown centre– when his life started to end. (And, somewhere else, when it started to begin. You can even hear when he started to believe in death. It’s right there in the way his voice forms and reforms).

And so there was Ian Curtis leading the band who were all playing their instruments as if they were leading. Three lead instruments –the glass and capering Sumner guitars, the cold and anxious Morris drums, the iron and lurid Hook bass– plus spare and marooned noises off and noises in that acted as if they had an (ectoplasmic) ego all of their own and were leading ... plus Ian with his tragic voice and his antic dancing and his leading the group and us into ...

... his space.

A space that hung around the music like a tarnished halo, a space that seemed to fill the music out from within, a space that kept itself buttoned up even as it spilled the beans and lost its marbles.

The space in Joy Division’s music has always been intriguing. Somehow (one more time) the group could leave such emptiness in the middle –and at the edges of their music– without weakening it. In fact, it added to the strength, the resonance. Perhaps it came out of the space they were all leaving around themselves –even as they came together to make this music they kept themselves to themselves, they stayed trapped inside their own splendid isolation, stuck inside their own young minds. They all played and sung inside their own worlds. Privacy X 4 and beyond.

And so their music is, sure enough, about isolation, and the difficulties of keeping in touch with other human beings as we create for safety’s sake a reality around us that works for us as much as it can. It’s about the mind –as far as my mind is concerned– and the tricks that it plays on itself, it’s about the way (one way) the mind can find all sorts of ways (link the ways) to prize apart illusion and reality and then cobble them back together and then start all over again and so on.

And so to the songs, again and again because they just do not wear out whatever you take from them, wherever you take them. Somewhere in there, amidst other more secretive and even more catastrophic narratives, you can just make out Ian’s battle for self–preservation, a battle that he was winning and then he was losing. These songs were lifted beyond themselves by being somehow –as far as it can go, if this isn’t too far fetched– set inside the enclosed, abstract and echoing space of a mind which enveloped the songs from all sides like a prison. This is some illusion. And so some reality. Ian's mind somehow –how this is so is on the tip of my tongue– held the songs in volatile place. And so I suppose, this time, that I’m saying with the music, we can see inside his mind. And we see him just beginning to think ideas he only has so much time to formulate, ideas and thoughts that are about, with such boyish bravado, everything and then nothing.

And so he re–enters the shadows of his living night, the overnight that strangled his everything and then nothing. And so ideas, forgotten, abandoned, miscarried.

And so Ian Curtis. He gave Joy Division their life and their death. He gave Joy Division his life and his death. He gave them their specialness. He actually risked his neck. And so what was the fucking point of that. (The point: not the point). He was under crisis and he passed this sense of crisis –real and imagined– right into the bloody unstable mood of the music. He was fighting mad, and you can feel that in the turbulence of the music. He was frightened, and the music is frightening. He was in love. And so he was lonely. That he and his friends –who were just as lonely in their own ways– could turn these thoughts and confusions so magically into sounds –gentle, pure, heartbreaking and lacerating sounds– is but a hint of the alchemical extravagance of this strangely intelligent, ridiculously burdened, youthfully defiant, glooming and blooming, magnificently doomed, old style, avant garde, anonymous and famous rock and roll group.

And so?

What.

Exactly.

And so if I may be so bold at such an exact time as to say the fallowing; Joy Division locate us in the gently smoldering nowhere solid hell* of communal remembering, of mutual awareness, never exact, never erased.

And so, mind you, there**.

 

 

* The word hell stems from the Germanic root meaning 'concealed’ and originally, like Hades or Sheol, had less to with punishment than simple bleak survival in a vague netherworld.

** Another end, another day, another doldrum, another beginning, another way of seeing things where there is nothing and everything to see. And so, on.