‘Atrocity Exhibition’: how Joy Division captured despair in one song
Even on their most famous song, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, which is possibly the closest they ever got to sounding carefree, the whole track is undercut and underscored with a ripple of despair. The Beatles said, “All you need is love”, and Willie Nelson sang that love is “the greatest healer to be found”, but for singer Ian Curtis and Joy Division, it had the power of destruction.
A non-album single released before their second record, Closer, came out, there is a constant battle in the song between the ebullient guitars, synths and frenetic drumming and Curtis’ pre-Morrissey northern croon-come-drone. Though the song is the band’s best-known and most enduring work, it is not the most indicative piece that the group wrote or recorded during the time period of the true emotional and mental depths that Curtis had hit in the lead-up to his tragic and untimely death.
From the album that was released mere months after his passing, ‘Passover’ is all jagged edges and cry-for-help lyrics right from the opening lines, as Curtis intones that “this is a crisis I knew had to come, destroying the balance I’d kept” and then descending further into the darkness from there.
‘Heart and Soul’ is a shimmering gloom and sounds like the musical equivalent of an already dark sky filling up with even darker, heavier clouds. “An abyss that laughs at creation”, Curtis half-talks half-sings, “A circus complete with all fools. Foundations that lasted the ages, then ripped apart at their roots”.
Releasing as it did mere months after Curtis’ suicide, Closer can almost act as the note that the singer left behind to explain the way he was feeling and to leave a physical remnant of his suffering. His final parting shot and eternal mission statement: despair is the oxygen that keeps all of these songs breathing. It’s the baseline for every rhythm and melody. It’s in the heart and soul of the album, and it was there right from the start.
From the very first song on the album, the opener ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ lays out what is to come and informs the listener about Curtis’ worldview. A six-minute rolling dirge and swirl of industrial guitars, constant drums and floating bass, the song would give the impression of darkness even without the lyrics.
But it is those lyrics, as it so often is with the ironically named Joy Division, which reveal the true depths of despair which was such a constant feeling and source of inspiration for the band. “For entertainment, they watch his body twist, behind his eyes he says ‘I still exist’,” Curtis sings, and it’s easy to see this reluctant performer relating to the disparity between his struggle to merely survive and the audiences’ demand for more.
But further into the song, he opens that feeling up to more universal experiences of suffering and pain on a grander scale, which everyone will witness or relate to at some point or other in their lives. He sings of lawmakers sending death and destruction on a mass scale to faraway places, or else of fights to the death on a more local scale; insane asylums turned into zoos where civilisation is forced to face the reality of a world that wasn’t set up to help them succeed.
In the final verse, he sings about the relentless onward march of demand and consumerism. Though he denounces it all at the end and can’t relate to any of this death-filled life, the refrain—repeated over and over and over again throughout—sets the tone for the rest of the album and all the deepening despair that soaks through every song: “This is the way, step inside.”
It’s hard not to see that much-repeated invitation as both an indication of what is to come on the album and what was to come in the world and in society as the decades have flown by.
