The Joy Division song inspired by Phil Spector
Who is to say that influence has limitations? Anything can influence anything else, and the idea of posting a boundary on who or what someone can draw inspiration from seems counterproductive. That being said, if you were to listen to any song on Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, you probably wouldn’t cite Phil Spector as playing much of a part in its creation.
Joy Division’s sound and that which Phil Spector was able to achieve both seem to work in complete contrast to one another. While Spector was famous for the ‘Wall of Sound’ recording technique and liked big ensembles, Joy Division was always a bit more stripped back than that. However, the Beatles producer is cited as a specific influence on the Joy Division track, ‘She’s Lost Control’.
In Joy Division: The Oral History, Stephen Morris spoke about the song, saying, “The same beat, but played with different sounds, it’s just a classic Phil Spector beat. If you listen to it and imagine it played on a big drum kit, it’s the same thing, really. See, I’m not original at all.”
There were some other exciting production techniques used to bring the sound of the song alive. For instance, producer Martin Hannett made Stephen Morris go inside the vocal booth and spray the high-hat pattern out using an aerosol can. “Unfortunately, I think it was fly spray or something,” recalled Bernard Summer, “It nearly killed Steve – you know, pssst pssst all the way through the track.”
The song itself has a dark meaning behind it. At the time, Joy Division had a real knack for writing sad music, but the owner of their label, Tony Wilson, insists that they had a lot of fun while making the album. He even said that the band would play pranks on one another and laugh a lot; however, that didn’t transpire in their music.
Ian Curtis wrote the song about a woman who used to frequently come into the rehab centre where he worked. She had epilepsy and, as such, succumbed to frequent seizures, which she was losing more and more time to. One day, when she stopped coming into the rehab centre, Curtis assumed she had found a job; however, she had actually had a seizure and died.
Around the same time, Curtis was also starting to experience epileptic seizures, so he likely wrote the song as a homage to the woman but also as a means by which he could process the fact he was starting to get them. Ian Curtis killed himself the year after the song was written.
Who is to say that influence has limitations? Joy Division embody this incredibly well on the track ‘She’s Lost Control,’ as the subject matter of the song, the inspiration for instrumentation and production techniques all varied wildly from one another. Still, they come together to create a beautiful track.
