Lights Are Flashing, Cars Are Crashing

Joy Division : Disorder

[Purchase]

On June 15, 1979 Factory Records released Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division's debut album. The only Joy Division album released during singer Ian Curtis's lifetime, it has grown in status every decade. Unknown Pleasures has now topped the user reviewed database Rate Your Music as the top album of 1979, over London Calling, The Wall, Fear of Music and Entertainment!.

In 1979 NME's Max Bell called the album with its distinctive dark cover "memorably psychotic", writing:

All the material bears the mark of obsession and personal experience; it's stark, alarmingly defiant. Curtis delivers his parts with dramatic flatness, as semi-chants, matter-of-fact monologues, pushing out the meaning in spurts...Unknown Pleasures is an English rock masterwork, its only equivalent probably made in Los Angeles 12 years ago: The Doors' Strange Days, the most pertinent comparison I can make. Listen to this album and wonder because you'll never love the sound of breaking glass again.

Some of the credit for the lasting appeal of Unknown Pleasures belongs to producer Martin Hannett. The album has a spacious and atmospheric sound that contrasted with the band's live performances. At first the band members resented what Hannett had done. This is Bernard Sumner:

The music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars. The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we'd drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin had coloured it in for us.

But Peter Hook would later say "There's no two ways about it, Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound."

It was also Hook, who in 2011, revealed how Factory owner Tony Wilson and band manager Rob Gretton bought Curtis a greatest hits album by Frank Sinatra hoping Curtis would take some tips from the legendary vocalist's way with melancholy tunes. You can judge whether it worked:

There was a song called "I Remember Nothing" and the lyric is "We were strangers" and I thought to myself "Ah, he got it from Frank Sinatra" because he didn't have any words for it and he had been listening to the Frank Sinatra album downstairs in Strawberry ( Studios) and I think that was a direct rip.

The album was praised by most critics ( although Melody Maker's Mary Harron wasn't so impressed:"I found at least half of it to be turgid and monotonous, and the vocals heavy and melodramatic—Jim Morrison without flair.") but failed to enter the U.K. charts.  

Today you'll find Unknown Pleasures getting near unanimous praise, as one of the 1970's greatest debut albums. It's taken 40 years but, as some have said, it's a grower.