Long Division: the final chapter, written from the inside out

HERE IS THE conundrum: how does anyone write coherently about a band that have been mythologised and almost embalmed in prose that’s more parable than purple? If the band is Manchester’s Joy Division, and if you are that band’s former bass player, Peter Hook, then the answer is crystal clear.

“The interesting thing from my point of view,” says the engaging 56-year-old Hook, in Dublin this week to promote Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, his spiky, insightful book, “and one of the puzzles I had with Joy Division, was that they were viewed as very serious and fantastically powerful in a very cerebral way. Yet when the four of us were extricated from the group we were completely down-to-earth, normal blokes. What I feel has been lacking in anything written about Joy Division is the humanity.”

Formed in the late 1970s in Salford, Greater Manchester, Joy Division helped to create a different strand of postpunk music. It had an intense form of dysfunction via the band’s singer, Ian Curtis, whose lyrical motifs, formed around his bouts of severe depression and epilepsy, included words and images of failure, coldness, crisis, pressure, darkness, collapse and loss of control; they fused this with a sound that their producer, Martin Hannett, once described as “dance music with Gothic overtones”.

Naming the band after prostitution wings of Nazi concentration camps, to which a reference first appeared in Yehiel De-Nur’s 1955 novella, House of Dolls, only strengthened the band’s nihilistic appeal.

Their time was brief, however: Joy Division as a band existed for less than three years, released two albums, Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980) and split up shortly after Curtis, at the age of 23, killed himself prior to the release of the second album and the band’s debut US tour. Since then, what has been written about Joy Division and, for a while at least, New Order, the band the surviving members morphed into, has been a series of eulogies and hagiographies.

What makes Hook’s book so refreshing is the lack of linguistic and intellectual showboating, and its simple laying of facts on the line.

His primary reason for writing the book was that, having been frustrated by other books and articles on Joy Division, some of which were written by his close friends, he tired of “reading stuff written by people who weren’t there, who weren’t in the group”.

The book also acts as the closing chapter to a long-withheld sense of grieving, as Hook explains. “It didn’t really bother us at the time, but when Joy Division split up, when Ian died, we just threw ourselves into New Order. We never took any time to wonder what had happened. Now, when you’re young – this is what I reckon, anyway – that’s probably the best thing to do. But when you get older, you kind of realise that you should have taken a few months off, if only to appreciate the enormity of what had happened. We should have gone round to Ian’s family, spoken to his friends, and not thrown ourselves immediately, utterly into another band. It was very, very sad that we swerved such unhappiness by throwing ourselves into another bout of frenzied work.

“You see, the northern English mindset, that nothing’s a problem work won’t solve, didn’t really help Ian. Of course, now we have this softer, more caring, more thoughtful and much more knowledgeable society than we had 30 to 35 years ago, and that’s a good thing. But back then, once we were inside New Order and getting on with that, we just ignored Ian and Joy Division, lock, stock and barrel. As the years passed, we got more comfortable talking about things that were, actually, very deep and upsetting.”