History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs Read Online Free PDF Page A

that cauldron all songs, the band’s songs, every song they’ve ever heard, every song that has ever been played, the impulse to make sound, the desire to sing and play itself, is boiling over. Curtis is boiling over. Riley is boiling over—or he is simply playing someone who’s boiling over, but that’s hard to credit as you watch. Curtis’s arms begin to windmill in tight circles. His shoulders jump. He’sa marionette who has just discovered that his movements are not his but can’t remember a puppetmaster; he’s a man turning a large piece of machinery with arms that don’t belong to him. His eyes dart over here, over there, bulging with horror at what he’s seeing, what he’s seeing far beyond the studio, outside its walls, maybe in the streets as they were when the four walked into the studio and as they’ll be when they leave, maybe in the past, maybe in the future; he doesn’t want to be here but he has no choice. He is almost screaming now, his face breaking up, his words weirdly holding their shape, perfectly clear in the absolute panic that, musically, is putting the words across—“Language is sound, that’s all we need know”—the panic that on the level beneath the plane of musical communication has rendered his words, any words, irrelevant, a bad joke, a lie. His arms jerk, but with such intensity they carry their own grace: you can’t take your eyes off them, you don’t want the movements to stop. The music breaks, slows down, comes to a halt as if the music is physically coming apart, instrument by instrument, piece by piece, idea by idea. Sitting in the theater, watching the movie, I realized that half a minute had passed and I hadn’t taken a breath.
    In real time, with people walking into a room to hear the band play, the same thing happened throughout 1978 and 1979, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, in Manchester time and again. Watching Corbijn’s movie now, you can notice,near the end of the song, a shot of the actor playing Peter Hook leaning into a microphone, adding a backing vocal to Curtis’s “Dance, dance, dance—to the radio”—which as a line in a song is precisely what the Beach Boys were doing in the car in “Dance, Dance, Dance” in 1964, but something else as a line from Jeremiah, which is how Curtis is delivering it, or how the line is delivering him—and be stopped cold. What? Another band member putting in a rehearsed effect to give the performance a little more impact? You mean this was a show?
    Over and over again, this is what happened in “Transmission.” There would be nights when the song froze, when its gestures lost their language and the rhythm reached a point where it could no longer tell the band anything it hadn’t heard before, when the audience demanded to hear it, which told the musicians that the audience knew exactly what to expect, and they could no longer give the audience, even the song, the lie. Then on another night the song would return to claim what it rightfully deserved. As a typically elegant Joy Division song it was the most unstable song they could play.
    Like the Buzzcocks, like many other Manchester bands, some never going beyond fantasy, some heard around the world, Joy Division had its genesis in the show the Sex Pistols played in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976. Depending on which story you believe, there were forty people there—some of them, well before the SexPistols had released an actual record, already calling out for favorite numbers—or maybe sixty, even a hundred; no one has ever said there were more than that. It was a fearsome, thrilling show; from an audience tape of that night, it sounds like an initiation into a secret society. Halfway through, with “No Feelings,” relentless, the song building on itself with every beat, with every iteration of its idea, you can physically sense how shocking it all must have been. “God, what the fuck is this?” Tony Wilson wrote in 2002, looking