The Making Of: Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures

Released in the summer of 1979, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures was the result of both madness and illness, of pain and catharsis. Recorded in just two days, Unknown Pleasures is widely considered as marking the end of the raucous era of British punk, and the ushering in of the era of post-punk.

Employing experimental sound design techniques that would be considered far-flung even by today’s standards, producer Martin Hannett’s icy, liminal production style combined with the raw adolescent energy of Curtis, Sumner, Hook, and Morris catapulted the coarse and unfledged punk band into textural rock icons, at the forefront of a new genre they didn’t even know they created.

Continue reading to learn more about the making of Joy Division's landmark album, Unknown Pleasures, including what it was like working in the studio, how the band crafted their signature sound, and the lasting impact it had on the world.

MANCUNIAN BOMBS

We can better understand how Unknown Pleasures came about through understanding the conditions that the band experienced growing up in the early 1960s in Manchester. Textile, chemical, and electrical production were all part of the city’s output at the turn of the century until the Great Depression in the 1930s brought much of the city’s production to a screeching halt.

During WWII, Mancunian factories were repurposed to aid in the production of aircraft for the war effort, which made it a prime target of the German Blitz of 1940-1941. The city sustained very heavy damage as a result and wasn’t completely repaired until many years later. After the war, the city’s economic problems worsened, with many industries moving production overseas and much of Manchester still in ruins due to the Blitz. Poverty was rampant, and many people struggled to make ends meet.

Since many of the factories that once employed the city’s people were abandoned, many families (and many musicians from the fledgling Manchester music scene) lived in “council houses” which were housing projects subsidized by the British government that were notorious for being very poorly maintained and in a constant state of disrepair.

Against a backdrop of constant gray skies, rows of abandoned factories, economic disparity, and bombed-out buildings, post-WWII Manchester didn’t have a reputation for being the cheeriest place on earth. One could imagine that the landscape contributed to the collective experience in Manchester that gave birth to its incredible music scene despite widespread financial hardship and constant reminders of the not-so-distant memories of the Blitz only a few years earlier.

THE PUNK INCEPTION

Joy Division formed in 1976, in the borough of Salford in Manchester (coincidentally one of the hardest hit areas during WWII). Salford at the time had a reputation for being one of the poorest areas of Manchester, and no doubt had an impact on the band’s fascination with themes of decay, mortality, and isolation.

A linchpin moment in their formation (and what many consider to be the seminal moment of British punk) was on June 4th, 1976, when The Sex Pistols played a now-legendary show at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. While quantitively the show was a flop (it’s estimated there were only about 40 people in there), among those in attendance were Steven Morrisey (of The Smiths), Howard Devoto (of The Buzzcocks and later Magazine), Pete Shelley (of The Buzzcocks), Tony Wilson (the founder of the legendary Factory Records, Joy Division’s label), Martin Hannett (the infamous producer), and of course, ones Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Terry Mason and Peter Hook.

The boys were inspired and taken by The Sex Pistol’s speed, aggression, and simplicity, and the very next day, Peter Hook bought his first guitar and formed a band with Sumner and Mason, calling themselves The Stiff Kittens, which was then swiftly renamed to Warsaw. The band had put out an advertisement in the paper looking for a vocalist, and Curtis was the first to answer; he was hired immediately without audition. Stephen Morris was brought on in August of 1977, and in early 1978, they officially changed their name to Joy Division.

RECORDING UNKNOWN PLEASURES

After the release of their first EP An Ideal for Living, and contributing to the Factory compilation A Factory Sample, Joy Division began work on their debut album Unknown Pleasures in April of 1979. The album was recorded in about two days, and the mixing took about three weeks.

Ian Curtis’ epilepsy had become a more prominent issue and made it very difficult for Ian to record and perform. In addition, Martin Hannett’s relentless and dogged pursuit of perfection at the expense of the band proved to be very trying for the members of Joy Division. His alcohol and drug use was incessant and problematic, and combined with his unconventional production techniques along with his insistence to leave the band nearly completely in the dark on the production made for a challenging recording process.

After the recording was completed and the band was brought in to listen to the final mixes, the band was split down the middle on opinion. Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner had a hard time hiding their dislike of the record, Peter Hook saying “…I couldn't hide my disappointment then, it sounded like Pink Floyd.”

Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris were both happy with the icy and distant production, congratulating Hannett on his work. Unknown Pleasures itself was not a huge commercial success but was actually propelled further by the successful non-album single "Transmission" and a well-planned tour supporting the Buzzcocks around Europe.

At the time, many critics were generally positive about the LP, and it enjoyed moderate critical acclaim, although it flew under the radar of most. After Curtis’ death in 1980 following the release of their second LP Closer, Unknown Pleasures took off as a result and saw the LP lauded as the defining moment in the genre of post-punk.

THE SOUND

Unknown Pleasures was recorded in Strawberry Studios in Stockport, which was originally started by the members of 10cc. It sported a state-of-the-art custom-made 24-channel Helios console, as well as two EMT 140 plate reverbs which Hannett used to great effect. Among some of his favorite outboard pieces were the Marshall Time Modulator (which Peter Hook referred to as the “Marshall Time Waster”), the Eventide H910, the AMS DM2-20 Tape Phase Simulator, a Melos tape echo, and his favorite piece of outboard, the AMS DMX 15-80, which Hannett called “Heaven sent.”.

It also isn’t so well known, but Hannett actually had a hand in the development of the DMX 15-80. Mark Crabtree and Stuart Nevison were former aerospace engineers who founded Advanced Music Systems (AMS) in Burnley in 1976. Somehow, they had discovered Martin Hannett and would meet once a month in a random parking lot between Manchester and Burnley. Martin would clamber into the back of their car, describe the crazy sounds that he was imagining in his head, and then drive back to Manchester. This went on for a few months, and through these strange encounters, the DMX 15-80 was born.

Hannett was rather unconventional with his use of the device and would use the DMX to its absolute limit: he used to send the snare track to the AMS with an incredibly short delay time, then panning that delayed sound to create a wide stereo image on the snare track. You can hear this effect most notably on “Wilderness”, and a similar technique seemed to be used on “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. The DMX also features prominently on Ian Curtis’ vocals on “She’s Lost Control”, and its characteristic pitched whooshing can be heard flying under Bernard Sumner’s guitars on the album’s opener, “Disorder”.

Hannett was well known for his eccentricity, which often led to obtuse results in his pursuit of perfection and desire for control. He saw Joy Division as “…a gift to a producer because they didn't have a clue. They didn't argue.” He was a big fan of Stephen Morris’ metronome-like precision and would make him record each drum individually to be able to maintain complete control over the sound and minimize bleed.

He famously once forced Morris to disassemble the entire drum kit because he heard a rattle (whether the rattle was actually present or was just another mind game played by Hannett on the band remains to be seen), who then proceeded to take the entire thing apart looking for the rattle, leaving the rest of the band scratching their heads.

On another occasion, he forced Morris to go to the roof of the studio and play his drums in some obsessive search for sonics and texture. For the vocals on “Insight”, Hannett had Ian Curtis record his vocals down a telephone line to achieve the “requisite distance” (in his own words). He would often turn the A/C in the studio to frigid temperatures in an attempt to get the band out of the studio, so he could do what he pleased without interference from those “bloody musicians”.

He was incredibly heavy-handed with EQ, and would often abuse the parametric Helios EQs to mangle the drums beyond total recognition. Hannett was also an avid fan of what we call sampling today and would record aerosol sprays (heard as the synthetic hi-hats on “She’s Lost Control”), as well as the sounds of bottles smashing, people eating chips, and most interestingly, the sound of the Strawberry Studios elevator with a Leslie speaker whirring inside.

Guitars were often drenched in plate reverb, used more as a texture and less of a feature like the punk rock the band originally set out to create.
Unknown Pleasures was a staggering artistic accomplishment, made even more impressive by the fact that the band had finished the record in only two days. Bernard Sumner said of the recording, “It was like someone else had made Unknown Pleasures and we just stuck our names on it…it was written from the subconscious.”

Martin Hannett seemingly intuited the bands’ cluelessness to the recording process and used this as an opportunity to further explore by proxy his own artistic ambitions, believing punk was too sonically conservative. Hannett and the members of the band seemed to be feeding off the same energy of isolation, emptiness, and disparity of Manchester in the late 1970s, just with different ways of contextualizing it within the music.

The band channeled it into adolescent angst, youthful aggression, and cathartic lyrics on love and loss, while Hannett took the textural approach, painting with broad strokes of reverb, delay, and industrial sound design that truly makes the mise en scène of the abandoned factories and bombed out buildings feel as much a part of the record as the music itself.

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