The only thing noteworthy about From Safety To Where is that the Manic Street Preachers stole the title of it for their 1993 single ‘From Despair To Where’. If it wasn’t for this then From Safety To Where would be long forgotten and rightfully so.
The song is littered with confounding fart noises from Sumner’s guitar and occasional interjections from Curtis about how he doesn’t know ‘which way to turn’ – a reference to both his general fedupness at the time and his desire to have Hooky sit on his sack of magic.
Digital is as uplifting as it gets for Joy Division. By uplifting I mean the bassline is ‘fun’. It’s something I can imagine Barbara Windsor dancing to pissed with her baps out at the last night of the fair in Blackpool 1978.
The song in its entirety consists of Ian Curtis screaming ‘Feel it closing in’ and ‘Day in day out’ for 2:49. What exactly is ‘closing in’ is up for debate. I personally believe that he is referring to his own arsehole, bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t had a good shit since the Tony Tabac days.
If only Ian was intelligent enough to realize that living off a diet of chips and old wallpaper was not good form, then we wouldn’t have been so depressed and knocked himself off.
Shadowplay is by my admittance an O.K song but nothing more. It’s a throwaway schmaltzy rock effort that is barely worthy of a Black Sabbath outtake.
The pressing question here is – why the hell does Ian Curtis have to sound so constipated in this song? If he’s trying to sound ‘moody’ then he fails miserably. He sounds like he needs a shit urgently, that’s all.
The cheesy guitar break ruins the whole song. Honest to God. It’s like something you’d hear in a 70’s porno. I can hear testicles bouncing off foreheads every time I listen to it.
The video to it is comedy gold. We’re introduced for the first time to Ian’s Robot dance that his fans love so much. What Joy Division fans don’t realize is that Ian does not dance like a robot. He looks like a lost old man on a treadmill in the midst of a dementia-induced panic attack.
Atmosphere is the most depressing song in the known Universe. It is also one of Joy Division’s most famous featuring prominently in the movie ‘Control’ in the scene where fake-Debbie hacks down fake-Ian with a pen knife in Macclesfield.
The song itself starts with Ian Curtis moaning about how he always has people walking away from him in silence. Is he surprised? I mean the guy was hardly the heart and soul of the party, was he?
The backing music is like something off the soundtrack to a Christmas B-Movie where Santa turns out to be a lesbian and the kids get nothing for Christmas. It’s just plain bland and cheesy.
It continues on in a similar vein until we reach the climax of the song with the lyric “People like you find it easy”
Oh boo-hoo. Yes I find life perfectly easy. I woke up this morning with a godawful hungover and laid a turd of which the stench nearly made my family pass out.
I had to explain why it smelt so bad to my whole family. I could have been a whiny little bitch and wrote a moany meandering piece of nonsense like Atmosphere but I’m a better man than that. I have balls.
This song would actually be OK if it was 5 seconds long. But it’s not. It lasts 2:53 and those are 2:53’s you’ll never be able to claim back.
First thing’s first, what the fuck is it with the synth noises? This may be innovative but that doesn’t make it good. It’s as if Martin Hannett has deliberately tried to sabotage the record with this purile techo-wank. Curtis’s vocals are unbelievably bad here too. It took me 3 weeks to realise that this isn’t a joke. It sounds like he’s trying to do a Pee-wee Herman impersonation singing through an empty Pringles can. How can anyone take this man seriously?
The following line from the song sums up Joy Division perfectly.
“Mother I’ve tried please believe. I’m doing the best that I can”
Well Ian, sometimes your best just isn’t good enough! Why couldn’t you have just stayed at home and got a job as a postman, instead of plaguing the word with this utter bollocks?
Fuck me. I haven’t heard anything as bad as this in a long time. I bet Stephen Morris thought he was being inventive when he recorded those rainy syndrum beats. They sound like they belong in a George Michael record for crying out loud!
Apparently Curtis wrote this song one night after he came home, beat up his dog with a pool cue, donned Debbie’s clothes and began to masturbate vigorously into an ashtray. When Debbie came downstairs to get a drink, Curtis whispered in an effeminate voice “She’s Lost Control!” before faking an epeleptic fit. Apparently Curtis would masturbate regularly in public and would use his epilepsy to excuse his deviancy.
I digress! I actually like the live versions of this song. It’s frantic and fun. But the version on Unknown Pleasures is just bollocks. What the hell did Martin Hannett do to the guitar?
It’s like he’s just recorded himself taking a shit or something. Hooky must have had a say with this. The bass is far too loud and repetitive. I wish he’d have just recorded one song without that annoying chorus effect. Obviously he needed something to cover up all of the mistakes he was making, especially live where he was more interested in staring at Barney’s arse than playing the bass.
I’ve heard an alternate version to this too and it was worse. It had an additional verse at the end which was just totally dull. Fuck knows why they bothered.
Presumably this song was written by Ian Curtis regarding the amount of prank phone calls he was receiving from music critics who’d regularly slam his band in the musical newspapers.
“They keep calling me!!!”
This is another example of a Joy Division song that is at least 3 minutes too long. If they cut out the intro it might actually be a decent track. You’d also have to remove Curtis’s vocals too though because as usual they make the song sound retarded. If only Bernard had the insight to fire Ian and instead hire Stephen Hawking to vocals for the band. Hawking would have sounded 100x better than Ian Curtis and could have written a computer program to dynamically generate lyrics for the group. Let’s face it, they couldn’t be any worse than Ian’s lyrics.
Joy Division were obviously in a hurry to release this song as it’s not complete. In fact Ian spends the last 10 minutes repeating the same “THEY KEEP CALLING ME!” line over and over. I don’t blame him. He was obviously far too busy bucking his Belgian bird and downing copious amounts of Carlsberg Specials to care!
I don’t mind depressing music, hell I love Radiohead! But just because a song is depressing doesn’t mean that it has a meaning. Decades is perfect example of this. The song starts with something you’d expect to hear over the opening credits of a really low budget porn movie.
This continues on for ‘decades’ before Ian Curtis starts moaning about how his balls hurt or something. I can never understand what he’s singing. He just howls like a dog most of the time. The lyrics that I do manage to hear are so pointless that you’d wonder why he even went to the effort of penning them at all.
Finally we get to the bridge and then the chorus of “Where have they been?”. Ian never gets around to mentioning who THEY are, or why they aren’t around. I’m assuming he’s referring to his bandmates as it’s obvious they spent more time in the booze/kebab shop than actually honing their musical talents (or lack thereof.)
After repeating this line 150 times he decided to change his tune by telling everyone he’s “weary inside”. No wonder! If I had a voice like Ian Curtis’s I’d be well weary inside. That said, I can sing much better than Ian Curtis, as can my dead Gramps.
Love Will Tear Us Apart is the most overrated song in pop history. It’s the song every rock-kid knows and loves. Just why this is – I don’t know! It’s a steaming pile of horse poo after all! The keyboard’s are off-key. Ian sounds like his genitals are being tortured by a chainsaw and Peter Hook’s bass is just pointless. Why the hell did they even let him in the band anyway when he couldn’t play bass at all?
I’m listening to it now and the lyrics are atrocious.
“There’s a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold”
You can tell by this that Ian Curtis was fully aware that the band were awful and that the backlash was gonna start against them in the press which is probably why he ended up calling it quits. I still find it amazing that the song got to Number 13 in the in the UK Charts. It’s obvious to me that someone at Factory Records bought about 50,000 copies for themselves. There’s no other reasonable explanation. People would not willfully subject themselves to this twoddle.
Christ the single sleeve is dire too. This band has no idea stylistically. It’s almost as if there were deliberately trying to sabotage their chances of success.
Disorder is the first song off Unknown Pleasures and it sets the scene perfectly in that it is one of the worst songs ever recorded. The bassline is woefully inept and the guitar riff makes even The Edge seem like a guitar God. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been an instrumental track but Ian Curtis’s vocals just make it laughable. Only it’s not funny. It’s just piss poor.
What the hell is it with the drums ? Were they recorded in some sort of sex dungeon? Probably, going by the looks of the drummer!
Anyway, back to the song. I’m listening to it now and I’ve noticed that the guitar riff never changes all the way through. It’s obvious that the producer has attempted to hide Sumner’s musical ineptitude by drowning the track in reverb.
The last saving grace of the song might have been the lyrics if they were any good. But they aren’t. They are just vague, quasi-apocolyptic garbage. It’s like listening to the demented blatherings of a Mancunian Nostradamus, only not fun.
Ian Curtis may have had the spirit but talent, he had not. This is a song you should only listen to when you’re in dire need of a shit. It’s certainly helped me.
