Escaping the shadow of Ian Curtis: New Order’s necessary transformation from underground to electronica
In 1976, Sex Pistols played a gig at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, a concert that has since been called “the gig that changed the world”. This achievement gains even more intrigue given the band’s intimate audience size of around four dozen. The triumph of quality over quantity prevailed that evening, though, with its significance not escaping the attention of a certain 17-year-old Morrissey, alongside the eager eyes of the fledgling musical aspirants Howard DeVoto, Pete Shelley, Mark E. Smith, Tony Wilson, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook.
Of course, Joy Division had yet to materialise the night Hook, and Sumner witnessed the Sex Pistols. Afterwards, however, they transformed their inspiration into a reality when they formed a band called Warsaw and enlisted a talented frontman, who was none other than Ian Curtis. At the time, most bands were rising from the ashes of the punk era, with Warsaw – which would later become Joy Division – floating down the same proverbial stream.
Their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, gave punk something that it wasn’t used to: vulnerability. Previously, acts had been scarcely navigating the icy waters of rage-fuelled rhetoric, with strength and angst being the two ingredients to success. With Curtis’ painfully fragile lyricism, enhanced by his deep vocalisation, Joy Division introduced a new delicacy within post-punk music that showed counterparts that depth and introspection can be beautiful.
Curtis’ struggle with mental health and his progressing epileptic condition were both filtered through in his writing, something that was almost unheard of in the 1970s, at least not to that calibre. Many of the band’s most well-known songs are ones that deal with the darkness of life, including ‘Disorder’, which talks about Curtis’ experiences with disassociation, and ‘She’s Lost Control’, which Curtis wrote after he experienced a woman have a seizure, and later died that day.
Broadly, Joy Division curated a world that you, somewhat weirdly, wanted to be a part of. Unknown Pleasures beckons with the allure of a vampire drawing you into its lair, offering the dream of a more exhilarating realm beyond as far as the eye can see. Within its depths, fairy tale-esque motifs intertwine, yet these delicate threads are saturated with the blood-crimson hues of life’s darkest contemplations. It’s addicting. It’s claustrophobic yet intimate and beautiful still.
Joy Division’s music was not for the faint of heart, and yet that’s precisely what makes fans hold it so dearly. Curtis had the power to lay his soul bare while reinventing an entire music genre. When he died in 1980, Joy Division garnered an almost immediate cult-like status, leaving many wondering where the band was going to go next – that’s if they had any future at all. His singular style had been such a central tenet for the band that carrying on without him seemed untenable. In short, the death of Ian Curtis marked the death of Joy Division.
Soon enough, however, the remaining members regrouped and renamed themselves ‘New Order’, but before they would face well-earned success after fusing together their recognisable post-punk sound with new electronic and dance music elements, the earlier years proved difficult. At first, they were significantly overshadowed by the legacy of Joy Division, and finding a place that represented everything they had created with Curtis while instating themselves as a new major player was a seemingly impossible task.
Escaping the shadow of Joy Division became an emotionally difficult yet musically necessary venture. To establish a point of difference, New Order had to do something that would become a substantial diversion from everything they had curated: experiment with some elements of music that Curtis purposefully avoided. After his death, the remaining band members spent a lot of time in the 1980s New York club scene, exposing them to different styles like electronic and dance sensibilities. During Joy Division’s reign, any suggestion of instruments like the synth would have probably been laughed out of the room, especially during a time when underground music very much valued its impenetrable walls.
However, New Order had taken to the dance scene like a moth to a flame, and their sound was finally being reborn. 1983 provided a real turning point when they released their hit ‘Blue Monday’, which was the band’s first real demonstration of exactly who they really were. Exposure to post-disco and electro had replaced the earlier melancholic melodies characteristic of Joy Division, and New Order had arrived as pioneers of electronica.
Their transitioning sound was something that John Cooper Clarke witnessed firsthand, who had been there at the start and joined the band afterwards in Australia. “After Ian’s death, the rest of the band had reinvented themselves out of necessity, throwing themselves headlong into the construction of their new corporate identity,” he wrote in his book I Wanna Be Yours. “When they came out with me to Australia, although they were showing great promise, they needed to establish themselves as with Bernard Sumner as their singer and were obviously all very unsure of their direction. They were playing Joy Division stuff written just before Ian’s death while also forming their new sound as a sort of electronic pop outfit.”
Cooper Clarke added: “Indeed, New Order were the frontrunners in that world. They’d become much more proficient as live performers, as you can imagine, but they were still very young and they weren’t ‘great musicians’ in inverted commas. Nevertheless, as a band, New Order made it happen: they went from nobodies to somebody to somebody else, quite effortlessly, really.”
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how Joy Division and New Order are both fundamentally different from each other. Joy Division formed a niche, one with rich tapestries of dark tendencies and the allure of the safe havens of subculture. It was inherently gothic and has become a canon of post-punk, indie rock movements. New Order, on the other hand, thanks to the blessing of time, has a more comprehensive catalogue exploring many different musical elements and appeals to the more quintessentially Depeche Mode-esque factions of alternative music.
Curtis was inspired by the poeticism of suicide and musicians who had taken their own life. He wanted nothing more than to provide music that reflected his own views, coupled with his experiences growing up in a city on the cusp of extreme societal and political change. Even though New Order initially intended to carry on creating the same type of music – which, for a little while, they did – the band were ultimately going to have to shape up and step out from behind the curtain.
And they did. ‘Blue Monday’ has since become the best-selling 12-inch single of all time and a widely popular club track. The 1980s saw a succession of acclaimed albums come to the fore with the release of Power, Corruption & Lies, and Technique. New Order somehow managed to stake yet another claim on a burgeoning musical genre while remaining respectful to their roots: though they gained multiple milestones throughout their tenure, Joy Division still remains a beloved foundation. A sentiment that remains strong in 2023, after they both became nominated as one act for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although, in truth, they are purposefully different out of tragic necessity.
