It’s been 40 years since Joy Division released their debut record Unknown Pleasures, an album that has done more than any other to teach us what the radio waves from pulsar stars look like.
Its now-iconic cover art, found by guitarist Bernard Sumner in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia Of Astronomy before being modified by graphic designer Peter Saville, has gone on to appear on everything from bed sheets and baby grows to trainers and skateboards.
While the Unknown Pleasures artwork has been subsumed into popular culture, the music itself has steadfastly resisted commercialisation. When the record was first released on 15 June 1979 on Factory Records it sounded quite unlike anything that had come before it. That was a result of the unlikely cast who ushered it into existence. Sumner and bassist Peter Hook had formed a band called Warsaw in 1976, later changing their name to avoid confusion with the punk band Warsaw Pakt. In Ian Curtis they had stumbled across a singular lyricist and frontman. Drummer Stephen Morris completed the band, but the sound of Unknown Pleasures would also be heavily shaped by maverick producer Martin Hannett.
Acclaimed from the moment it was released, the album’s critical reputation has only grown in the last four decades. NME, Q and Pitchfork all named it one of the greatest albums of the Seventies, while Rolling Stone called it one of the best debut albums of all time. The diverse list of artists to have cited it as an inspiration includes U2, Moby and The Killers.
Here, Sumner, Morris and Saville recall the creation of a classic.
Bernard Sumner: It’s a popular myth that it all started with the Sex Pistols at Manchester Free Trade Hall. It didn’t start with that. I’d already bought a guitar. We found it difficult to pick up girls and thought it would be easier if we were in a band, to be brutally honest. We put an advertisement in Virgin Records in Piccadilly in Manchester for a singer. I was the one who had a telephone number, or my mother did. Lots of people rang up to say they were interested, including a load of lunatics and prank callers. My mother got really annoyed because the phone would go at all hours. When Ian called I realised we’d already met at various punk gigs. I didn’t even audition him. I saw it as an opportunity to get these lunatics off my back and get me out of trouble with me mother. We still needed to find a drummer.
Stephen Morris: I was at a Blondie gig and picked up a fanzine. On the back page there were "Drummer Wanted" adverts for three bands: Warsaw, The Fall and V2. I became aware that there was a bit of a drummer shortage! When I rang up Ian, he told me Peter and Bernard were on holiday. I thought, "They’re on holiday? It must be a pretty good band if they can afford to go on holiday."
BS: We had jobs! The jobs financed the holiday, not the band! We got back and Ian said, "There’s this guy from Macclesfield," which is where Ian lived by that time. He said he could get a lift in with him because he had a Ford Cortina and he had his own drum kit. So Stephen came along and auditioned and we thought, yeah, he’s pretty weird. He’ll fit in perfectly.
SM: Meeting Rob Gretton was really important. He saw us as Warsaw and then he saw us as Joy Division and he thought we were fantastic. He was a grown-up and we were a bunch of stupid kids. Once Rob started managing us, it all started to happen. Tony Wilson saw us. Then we did the EP. Next thing we knew we were doing an album with Martin Hannett. He was the top man. He’d produced Jilted John and got independent records in the charts. My first impression of him was "Joe Meek combined with Tom Baker-period Doctor Who". He was an eccentric.
BS: Funnily enough that was also my first impression of Stephen. It’s true Martin did look like Tom Baker from Doctor Who, but you’d have to add some serious drugs to the equation as well. He was Doctor Who on drugs.
SM: We recorded the album at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. There was this lift and when someone shut the door he said, "Oh, that sounds great." We ended up recording the lift and then he’d decide he wanted some breaking glass on the next one so we’d smash some milk bottles up. It was... educational.
BS: We were literally using the studio as an instrument.
SM: It was only when we were recording that I could actually hear Ian’s lyrics. He kept them to himself. He had them all in a plastic bag in loads of notebooks, but he never showed them to us and said, "What do you think of this?"
BS: When you did hear his lyrics it wouldn’t really marry up with the person because the person was quite lighthearted and jovial, but obviously with a bookish side to him. When you heard these lyrics which sounded intensely personal it felt like you were intruding on something that was really private to him. Some of them came from a very dark place, which I didn’t quite understand to be honest.
SM: I’ve heard people say that the title Unknown Pleasures was a Proust reference, which is a good one. We hadn’t read much Proust. I think it was just two words. It wasn’t dug out of a book. If anything, Proust nicked it off us.
BS: At the time I worked at a place on Peter Street in central Manchester that did TV commercials. Sometimes it was great and sometimes it was boring. When it was boring, just up the street was Manchester Central Library so I used to go and look through books for inspiration. I was always looking at space stuff and when I saw that image [of the radio waves from the first recognised pulsar, CP 1919] I thought, "That would make a really great album cover." When we made the album I took the image to Peter Saville and said, "How about this for the sleeve?"
Peter Saville: Obviously it is an immediately intriguing image. It is ambiguously provocative and open to multiple interpretations. I thought it perfectly evoked the sensory reading of the title.
BS: The image I found was black on white and very large and what he did very cleverly was reduce it in size and colour-reversed it.
PS: I thought of the cover as an object and felt this would be best achieved through black – and after all the data represented a pulsar signal captured from deep space.
SM: The funniest thing about it was that when we first saw the final cover I said, "That’ll look really good on a T-shirt." Rob said, "We don’t do T-shirts. That’s a shit idea." Rob was quite militant about that. We did it on little badges but he considered T-shirts a step too far. That was selling out.
BS: For many years there was a guy called Scotch Tommy who made his own T-shirts and sold them outside our gigs. He made a fortune, I presume, but Rob wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He didn’t believe in the commerciality. I remember one night after a gig Scotch Tommy came back and said, "I feel really guilty about this. Will you take this cheque off me?" He gave Rob the cheque and Rob just ripped it up. If he’d given it to me instead that wouldn’t have happened.
PS: The very notion of merchandise was anathema to the spirit and sensibility of Factory. Ultimately though it has come about "by popular demand".
SM: Looking back, I don’t know how we did it. It’s one of those things. You can’t decide to make a timeless record, even though at the back of your mind that was always what you wanted it to be, and that’s what we got.
BS: When it came out I thought it was great to have a physical object that represented our work, but when I played it I had a great big question mark over my head. I played it to people at work and they said, "It’s alright, yeah." That’s what I thought about it as well. It wasn’t bad for a first record. Then it was universally applauded in all the reviews it got. It was a big surprise, but a nice surprise. It was like waking up on Christmas Day when you’re a kid.
The Unknown Pleasures 40th Anniversary Limited Edition Red Vinyl is out now.
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