Joy Division – Closer (1980)
The thing is, I prefer Unknown Pleasures to Closer, but as I didn’t buy the debut album until around the same time as its follow-up, it can’t be considered for inclusion in the rundown.
I’m also loath to actually say that Closer is actually a favourite album. It is such a sad and tragic piece of art, especially all these years later with the knowledge of the circumstances under which it was written and recorded, that it is impossible for anyone to place it on a turntable and call it an enjoyable listen.
It is fair to say that my relationship with Closer has changed a great deal over the past 43 years. The 17-year old me was certainly moved by the suicide of Ian Curtis, but I never really made the connection between his music and what had driven him to take his own life. I clearly wasn’t alone, as can be evidenced from the many millions of words that have been written about it all ever since, with none of his three fellow musicians in Joy Division, or indeed almost anyone involved in Factory Records ever stopping to consider that his lyrics were, to all extent and purposes, a cry for help from a frightened and confused man. Nobody gave a damn about mental well-being in those days, and while there is still something of a stigma about it, at least there is a growing recognition these days that illnesses of the mind require the same level of professional care and attention as those which affect the bones, joints and muscles.
It is impossible to play Closer without picturing some of the scenes from the film Control, or to recall some of the prose written after the fact by the likes of Tony Wilson (RIP), John Savage or Paul Morley. There’s also been so many documentaries or TV shows in which Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris have had their say on things, and their words also are hanging in the air when listening to the music. It’s an album that is difficult to listen to purely on its own musical merits.
And yet………………..
I couldn’t dream of leaving it out this Top 60 for the simple fact that Joy Division are among the most personally influential groups in my life – some of the others have already featured in the rundown and others are still to appear. If it wasn’t for Joy Division, then a huge amount of the music I have loved since my late teens would never have made sense.
mp3: Joy Division – Isolation
Yup. Despite devoting all these words to the fact that Closer is such a hard listen, I’m finishing off the piece with the one that’s most danceable. It does seem remarkable that Ian chose to put one of his darkest and most foreboding lyrics to such an upbeat number…but it’s even more remarkable that nobody in the studio stopped to think for a couple of minutes and ask what he was thinking about or what was the meaning behind the lyric. If that had happened, who knows how things would have turned out?
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
That’s funny because I wrote an article today about music in 1980.
If you want, take a look 😁🎧🎵
Agree with pretty much all of this. Unknown Pleasures is a more powerful album as a whole. Always thought some of the keyboards on Closer sounded weird and off-kilter, had me checking my turntable speeds back in 1980. Heart and Soul is magnificently hypnotic, 24 Hours utterly devastating, Decades and The Eternal weary elegies. The sort of LP you stick on headphones in the dark, and not very often.
I was late to owning any Joy Division LP. It’d be helpful, in some ways, to work out why… yet I’d never wish to be directed in a different musical direction than the path I chose.
I don’t know the LP well enough to comment with fan-insight but I do know that as much as I like it can, in some circumstances, feel like a challenge rather than an enjoyable listen.
I agree with Chaval, Closer is a record I dont play very often. But then every note is seared into my brain and I can “listen” to it at will. Unknown Pleasures is brighter (amazingly) but I think Closer is the better album. I bought them both when they came out, and Still – though I think I’ve only listened to the live record once.
They were not at the edge of greatness – they were already there. Who knows what they would have done if Ian had lived? I tend to think New Order with a better singer, but that possibly does down Gillian’s influence.
Closer is a powerful, disturbing, beautiful, unsettling, artistic record. Not an easy listen but an essential one.
IT’s an incredible record. The step on in terms of sound and atmosphere from UP is unmistakeable (not to say its better but its a development). Bernard’s homemade synths and keyboards give it a unique sound. 24 Hours, Heart and Soul and The Eternal are all superb, defining songs. And Isolation is immense. Driving post- punk dance music with some of the most despairing lyrics in the popular music. I’ve often wondered, as you note, whether the contents were noted by anyone present
Also, Closer (as in nearer) or Closer (as in an ending)? I’ve always said Closer (nearer) but sometimes wonder about that too
Always thought of it ‘as in nearer’
Like you, JC, I came to Unknown Pleasures a little after the event, though I think I had a home-taped copy by the time Closer came out. I also had and loved the 12″ Atmosphere/She’s Lost Control and the 7″ of Love Will Tear Us Apart with the Komakino flexi disc. And from listening to Peel my ears were well filled with Joy Division generally. But Closer is the more significant LP to me and I prefer it to the first overall. A more well-developed and appealingly melancholy sound world. I think at the time those of us who were immersed in the new wave and the residue of punk were attuned to a miserabilist view of the world. We were inspired by angst and anger and railed against the inadequacy of everything. If you weren’t rich and beautiful and getting your hole on a regular basis then teenage life was shit and we wallowed in it. So I think it was easy to revel in Ian Curtis’s doomy words, the gothic grimness of Joy Division’s music and their whole grey overcoated post-industrial Mancunian dilapidation and for most of us that’s as far as it went, thankfully. Sadly for Curtis, he wasn’t just indulging in some woe-is-me teenage posing but was really grappling with the catastrophic collapse of his sense of being. Unfortunately I’ve seen it take a couple of people I knew in subsequent years, without warning. For Curtis I think the warning signs were in plain view but disguised by the zeitgeist, like a fire in a dry-ice factory.