‘Atmosphere’: the Joy Division song that confirms Morrissey was the most misguided man in Manchester
George Michael once called Joy Division’s Closer “beautiful”. He acknowledged the way Ian Curtis’s death overshadowed parts of their story, but how that didn’t take away from how objectively great their music was. And he said all of this sitting on a talk show next to a very sceptical, very opposing Morrissey.
The pair were on a talk show in 1984 discussing a book about Joy Division’s legacy. Four years after Curtis’s death, their reflections veered into the band’s cultural, political, and artistic significance – both sitting on opposing ends of the spectrum when it came to whether they deserved their popularity, or whether they’d become merely another mythologised band doused in tragedy.
Morrissey, as usual, criticised how he’d never really got into them in the Manchester scene, ending up at their gigs by accident and not really understanding what all the hype was about. “Joy Division were one group that I really didn’t take to that much,” he said. “I saw them a few times by accident. I look upon Ian Curtis and New Order as neither singers nor lyricists but as symbolists. They had the spirit of the times, but it was totally false.”
He went on, saying how the band pretended they were without emotion when they weren’t, and that their whole thing centred around “people wanting to be something that they weren’t.” He even went so far as to say that in a musical sense, “I hear nothing whatsoever”.
Now, it feels important to say that, around the same time, Johnny Marr echoed some of the same concerns. He said his problem with Joy Division was with the fact that people said they were “the Manchester sound”, which he felt wasn’t something that actually existed.
But where Morrissey failed to hit the mark wasn’t his worry that Curtis’s death helped their legacy, but something else entirely. And it came from two distinctive lies – that Joy Division weren’t lyricists but “symbolists”, and that they failed to capture the societal disillusionment and despair felt by working-class musicians (and people in general) in Manchester.
Now, one of the most obvious disparities here is that Morrissey is almost always associated with privilege. Not in his background, of course, as he also grew up in a working-class family. But rather, the way he came across as a witty and self-righteous intellectual whose opinions were and still are above everybody else’s. So, immediately, it seems strange he’d dismiss Joy Division’s capturing of Manchester’s dark, bleak spirit when he experienced the exact same.
However, maybe this superiority complex came from opposing views on what this actually meant, exactly. Morrissey, someone whose world revolved around a certain type of working-class, both musically and in his worldviews, clearly didn’t really see any authenticity in Joy Division’s atmospheric depictions of mental torment and darkness in a psychological way. Which may have meant he saw the whole thing as pretentious and a way to create a legacy built on something that wasn’t even real. To him, anyway.
But his claim that they weren’t true lyricists is where things seem to fall apart. Most of their lyrics tap into this inward personal experience of depression and struggle that almost feels like a beckon for spiritual or divine intervention, even if it is vague. As Curtis sings in ‘Disorder’: “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand / Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?” Or, similarly, these lines from ‘Dead Souls’: “Someone take these dreams away, / That point me to another day / A duel of personalities / That stretch all true realities.”
Pair that with Morrissey’s tongue-in-cheek reflections on economic and social decline, and you’ve got two completely different experiences of struggle. In ‘Atmosphere’, a song so lyrically excellent and poignantly poetic that John Peel chose it as their defining tribute song after Curtis’s death, the song has this bidding farewell feel to it, of walking towards something inevitable, a charm of l’appel du vide that anchored both Curtis’s mental anguish and genius as a poetic storyteller.
Some parts are simple, as the verse ticks in: “Walk in silence / Don’t walk away, in silence / See the danger / Always danger.” But then Curtis goes for a complicated kind of bitterness that could either be him hitting out at the economically privileged or those who will never know the perils of depression: “Worn like a mask of self-hate / Confronts and then dies / Don’t walk away / People like you find it easy / Naked to see / Walking on air / Hunting by the rivers, through the streets, every corner.”
Its poignancy has such a chilling finality to it that made it the perfect cue towards the end of the 2007 biopic Control. It says a lot by saying little, capturing the desperate, disillusioned state of Mancunian working-class suffering experienced by someone whose brain chemistry was ultimately their undoing. It’s an impoverished mental illness, someone wronged by their own hometown, turning the very real tragedy of their very real life into art – something that Morrissey dared to say was performative, when, as we know, it was anything but.
Even Peter Hook later said the entire beauty of the song is credited to Curtis’s words. “It is very moving and very melancholic,” he told TeamRock. “Which Ian capitalised on with the vocal line and the lyrics.”
With all of this in mind, it’s hard to pick apart Morrissey’s lines about them failing to capture a “real” Manchester and being mere “symbolists” because that feels far from the truth. So, in the end, it poses the question about whether it was a battle of working-class stories, and whether Morrissey’s opinion about being more visceral, atmospheric and whimsical about these realities meant he felt they weren’t realities at all.
But therein lies his biggest failure: that just because they captured a different “spirit of the times”, they were no less authentic. The implication that they were just “symbolists” invalidates Curtis’s real experiences and ability to transform them into artistic masterpieces. And that in invalidating Curtis’s voice, Morrissey also invalidates his own, proving that his own thoughts and experiences were the only ones he ever viewed as the most legitimate.
