A good book about popular music will always give you a new appreciation of the records. Joy Division bassist Peter Hook’s Unknown Pleasures, just published in paperback by Simon & Schuster, might do just that, though perhaps not in the way the author intended: Joy Division’s music, never an easy listen, becomes almost unbearably intense once you fully understand the mental and physical suffering endured by vocalist Ian Curtis during its creation.
By the last few months of the group’s career, in 1980, Curtis was balancing band life with the demands of a wife and baby daughter, conducting an unconsummated affair with a Belgian journalist and frequently having epileptic fits on stage. The sombre side to this funny, foul-mouthed insider account of Joy Division’s career is Hook’s remorseful attempt to understand how he and his bandmates could have been so blind to the pressures their frontman was under, pressures Hook only fully grasps when he has to sing Curtis’s lyrics himself 30 years later. His candour demystifies the figure Hook calls ‘tragic Ian Curtis the genius’ while paying tribute to the importance of his leadership and gloomy poetic vision.
Hook has always been an excellent interviewee, and here he amusingly recounts how the defiantly Mancunian Factory Records kept the band clear of the London-centric music biz game: Joy Division existed for less than four years and barely ventured beyond Granadaland for much of that time. Their importance can only be measured in influence, not sales, and their story ends not with vindication and global success (that would come later, after their evolution into New Order), but with Curtis’s suicide at the age of 23. Stuffed with ribald anecdotes, musical epiphanies and old-fashioned Salfordian bloody-mindedness, Hook’s immersive memoir forsakes rock’n’roll highlife for an unglamorous world of motorway breakdowns, freezing practice rooms and the Bowdon Vale Youth Club.
Unknown Pleasures by Peter Hook is published by Simon & Schuster.
Comments