“Classic Phil Spector”: When Joy Division mimicked the 1960s
As the world of pop music becomes more accessible and interconnected by the day, it’s getting harder and harder to find people doing anything truly original or new. To be clear, I don’t mean this as a criticism at all. Original is not the same as good, and artists being inspired by other artists is always a good thing. However, when you look at a band like Joy Division, you realise just how huge an outlier they were in their brief heyday.
There were very, very few other bands that sounded remotely like them. This was because they had a huge array of diverse influences. Joy Division’s early demos as Warsaw sound like Deep Purple and other hard rock acts of the time. After they developed their sound into something a little more unique, they started informing their music with the sounds of punk.
There’s a smattering of The Stooges’ manic energy running through the band’s sound, which makes sense as the entire band were die-hard Iggy Pop fans. There’s the stilted, somewhat awkward energy of fellow Mancunians The Buzzcocks. However, that’s more or less where comparisons to punks ends.
Other, more esoteric influences were starting to creep into their sound, too. Nowhere is this more apparent than in singer Ian Curtis, whose hollow, aching baritone is a genuine one-off in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. While there’s a touch of the hammy baritone Iggy was deploying on albums like The Idiot, the main inspiration for this vocal style came from a bygone era of music.
Which classic artists influenced Joy Division?
In an interview with Uncut magazine discussing the process behind making the classic album Closer, Joy Division bassist Peter Hook told of a tip Tony Wilson gave Curtis on who to emulate with his deep voice. He said, “I don’t know whether it was half in jest, but Tony suggested Ian listen to Frank Sinatra.
Perhaps it was only half serious but, typically for a very serious band, they went through with it. Hook goes on to say, “then Rob [Gretton, Joy Division manager] went out and bought him some Sinatra records and Ian did get into listening to Sinatra, which was quite funny. Quite nice, actually.”
This wasn’t the only time that vintage music influenced the sound of Joy Division either. In Jon Savage’s book Joy Division: The Oral History, Stephen Morris discussed the iconic drum line powering one of the best songs Joy Division ever created, ‘She’s Lost Control’. He said, “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!”
Which is where he’s absolutely wrong. All these disparate influences came together to make a band that has never been equalled or replicated. In a world connected enough where every artist can look hard enough and find a band doing the same basic thing as they want to do, we may never see their likes again.
Just as Morris was wrong about his drumming, though, here’s hoping I’m wrong too!
