Significant longplayers from yesteryear

18 July 2025

Highly influential (still today) post-punk legends JOY DIVISION released
their 2nd and final LP CLOSER on 18 July 1980, today 45 years ago, through
Factory Records, produced by the late Martin Hannett. It came out two months
after frontman/lyricist Ian Curtis took his own life. It reached # 6 in the UK.

Debut LP Unknown Pleasures still is my favorite, although Closer is
a formidable record too, but the pitch black debut opus was hard
to match.

Bernard Sumner (guitarist): “We’d go to rehearsals and sit around and
talk about really banal things. We’d do that until we couldn’t talk about banal
things any more, then we’d pick up our instruments and record into a little
cassette player.

We didn’t talk about the music or the lyrics very much. We never analysed it.”

Peter Hook (bassist) wasn’t a Hannett fan: “I was like, head in hands, oh fucking
hell, it’s happening again. Unknown Pleasures number two. Martin had melted the
guitar on the track ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ ‘with his Marshall Time Waster.

Made it sound like somebody strangling a cat, and to my mind, absolutely killed
the song. I was so annoyed with him and went in and gave him a piece of my mind
but he just turned around and told me to fuck off.”

Melody Maker (former, legendary, British music weekly) said: “Probably some
of the most irresistible dance music we’ll hear this year and a far cry for sure from
the almost suffocating claustrophobic world of the debut album.

The best (and most subversive?) rock music has always dealt head-on with emotions
and thought rather than clichéd, standardised stances; that’s what makes Closer and
Joy Division so important.”

Key Track

ALBUM

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JD Story