40 years ago today, Joy Division released what was to be their final album — Closer.
Its release came only two months after the tragic suicide of the band’s lead singer and lyricist, Ian Curtis, which only added to the dark and morose overtones of the gothic rock masterpiece.
It went on to be the band’s highest-charting release and is now considered to be “the crown jewel” of the post-punk genre. To celebrate the anniversary, the album has been given the special reissue treatment.
The album contains two of Joy Division’s most notable songs. There’s the rhythmic and hypnotic album opener ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, and its succeeding track, the brooding, riff-heavy ‘Isolation’.
Speaking of ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ to GQ, drummer Stephen Morris says: “That was one of the few where Hooky and Bernard swapped instruments, so Bernard played the bass on it and Hooky played guitar.
“I remember making them put in synths through fuzzboxes and making a horrible ambient racket, which you could barely hear on the record, but it’s like a buzz saw. That one was pretty easy to make, because it was already written. Probably Ian was still tweaking the lyrics and, obviously, it shows his interest in the works of JG Ballard.”
On the other hand, Morris says ‘Isolation’ wasn’t meant to sound like it does. “The original idea was nothing like that,” he told GQ. “It was the first song we put together in the studio around synths, so it was changing all the time.
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“The one thing I remember is listening to the playback of it and thinking this is a song that people could actually dance to. The music is really happy and then again it’s one of those afterwards when you listen to the bloody lyrics it wasn’t really happy at all, was it? [“Isolation”] was kind of a signpost to the way we would eventually develop with New Order.”
Since the release of Closer and the formation of New Order, the band’s members have found themselves tumultuously in and out of arguments. But they did manage to put everything aside to play Closer in full at The Factory in Manchester, England.
“I must admit, one of the greatest moments as a musician I’ve ever had was to actually play Closer in its entirety and to get it back,” Hook recently told Rolling Stone.
“I mean, I’ve never stopped arguing with the other members of Joy Division since I started playing [Joy Division’s music live] but the only good thing to come out of it is that now they play Joy Division. So that’s been great for the fans.”
