Best of 1979

1979 was a remarkable year for albums and singles. I don 't think we've witnessed a year like that since. In the same year we got The Clash's London Calling, Pink Floyd's The Wall, Gang of Four's Entertainment!, Talking Heads's Fear of Music, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Over the course of the year my admiration for some albums increased, especially Unknown Pleasures, Wire's 154, Pil's Metal Box, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and The Beat's debut which I wasn't familiar with at the start of the year. Other great discoveries included Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure and Gary Numan's Pleasure Principle, Joe Egan's Out of Nowhere, and the Toms album. 

Fave Albums 1979

The Clash London Calling
Gang of Four Entertainment!
Talking Heads Fear of Music
Joy Division Unknown Pleasures
Elvis Costello Armed Forces

Wire 154
PiL Metal Box
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Damn the Torpedoes
Graham Parker Squeezing Out Sparks
Fleetwood Mac Tusk

XTC Drums and Wires
The Beat
Joe Jackson Look Sharp
The Specials
Sparks No 1 Song in Heaven

Tangerine Dream Force Majeure
Robert Fripp Exposure
The Cars Candy O
Gary Numan Pleasure Principle
The B 52's

Fave Singles

Joy Division Transmission
The Clash London Calling
Wire Outdoor Miner
The Cure Boys Don't Cry
Buzzcocks Everybody's Happy Nowadays/Why Can't I Touch It

XTC Making Plans for Nigel
The Specials Gangsters
Talking Heads Life During Wartime
The Pop Group She is Beyond Good and Evil
The Ruts Babylon's Burning

Undertones Teenage Kicks
Blondie Heart of Glass
Nick Lowe Cruel to be Kind
Prince I Wanna Be Your Lover
Squeeze Up the Junction

Gary Numan Cars
Michael Jackson Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
Chic Good Times
Sugarhill Gang Rappers Delight
Sparks The Number One Song in Heaven

    On Social Media

Promoting this page on Twitter has been fun this year with retweets, likes and responses from Graham Parker, Eric Idle, The Mekons, Gang of Four, Bebe Buell, Mark Stewart of The Pop Group and these two, from Cher and Feargal Sharkey.

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. 

Left to Blind Destruction

Joy Division : Transmission ( Peel Session)

[Purchase]

On January 31, 1979 Joy Division recorded four songs for John Peel's show. They were broadcast on February 14, 1979. Thee songs were "Exercise One", the band's future debut single "Transmission",  and two forthcoming Unknown Pleasures tracks "Insight" and "She's Lost Control". 

Peel had first played Joy Division in March of 1978 but he wasn't as wild about them as he was about other bands. "I didn’t at the time think that Joy Division were a band that I was going to prefer above any other," he told author John Walters. "They were just one of a whole handful of bands whose work I was quite enjoying at that time."

The band grew on him. Peel would play Joy Division 34 times in 1979 . In 2000 he would declare the single, "Atmosphere", the #1 all time song among his Festive Fifty, ahead of the song he was best known for championing,  The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks".