‘Interzone’: The riff Joy Division stole from northern soul
For a scene that has always been immersed in obscure and impossibly rare music, the impact that northern soul has had on the musical mainstream is unavoidable. Whether it’s ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)’ being played on TV ads, or the handful of Wigan Casino reissues that entered the pop charts back in the 1970s, the influence of the scene is much greater than you might think – even impacting post-punk’s ultimate heroes, Joy Division.
It didn’t take overly long for the masses to cotton on to the revolutionary power of northern soul music. First emerging from clubs like Manchester’s Twisted Wheel back in the late 1960s, spurred on by the soul obsessives of the mod subculture, northern soul peaked in cultural relevancy around the mid-1970s.
With mile-long queues for the fabled Wigan Casino and thousands of young people up and down the length of the United Kingdom swapping flares for baggies and making pilgrimages to places like Blackpool, Stoke, or Wakefield, the power of the scene was palpable. Inevitably, then, major record labels soon scrambled to generate as much revenue from this blossoming grassroots scene as possible.
Predominantly, labels like Motown, which owned a lot of the rights to the songs soundtracking those sweaty all-nighters, wasted no time in reissuing those singles en masse, earning themselves a few charting hits from songs which had been ignored the decade prior, upon their initial release. RCA, on the other hand, decided in their infinite wisdom to recruit a few up-and-coming bands to reimagine those old northern soul classics for a new generation of listener, which is where Joy Division come into this story.
During the very early days of the Mancunian post-punk heroes, before they had ever crossed paths with Factory Records founder and general music messiah Tony Wilson, the band were approached by RCA in early 1978. Presumably in an effort to capitalise on the cultural relevancy of both punk and northern soul, the label tasked Ian Curtis and the gang with recording a cover of NF Porter’s beloved soul stormer ‘Keep On Keeping On’.
Although details on Joy Division’s pre-Factory days are fairly sketchy, it seems as though the cover was commissioned by Grapevine Records, who were responsible for many of the UK reissues of northern soul classics and were distributed by RCA.
The label’s head, John Anderson, was involved in those studio sessions for the ‘Keep On Keeping On’ cover. Seemingly, though, Anderson’s soul-slanted input didn’t wash well with the young punk devotees, and the studio sessions were pretty disastrous.
It is not clear whether a recording of the band performing ‘Keep On Keeping On’ ever survived those sessions, but after extensive efforts, Joy Division abandoned the project entirely, self-releasing their debut EP a few months later and unveiling their masterpiece of a debut, Unknown Pleasures, the following year.
That is not to say, however, that the band’s fleeting time with RCA. Their attempts to cover Porter’s legendary track might not have gone anywhere, but they chose to repurpose its distinctive guitar riff, from which the entire song is built, for ‘Interzone’, one of the stand-outs from Unknown Pleasures.
Admittedly, the two songs don’t share much in common other than that guitar riff – which Bernard Sumner and Martin Hannett rendered in a suitable wave of distortion and punk-infused aggression – but ‘Interzone’ does nevertheless encapsulate two core elements of Manchester’s music scene from back in the 1970s, uniting the factions of punks and soulies in one legendary track.
