History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (5 page)

in January 1980, Curtis made his first suicide attempt, cutting his wrists. In April he tried again, with an overdose of phenobarbitone. On May 18 he succeeded. But that explains nothing about why, in “Transmission” as it was captured
on record or on video, the song is not an occasion for explanation, but an event, where what seemed impossible before the event took place seems inevitable afterward. It’s no matter that the event, if that is what “Transmission” is, was staged, that it was the integrity of form on the part of the band that allowed Curtis to attack the legitimacy of form, the very idea; no one knew what was going to happen when the song happened. To Deborah Curtis, Curtis’s wife, Jon Savage has written, “Ian’s mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that she had to cope with at home”—but the biographical is just another mode of denying the autonomous nature of any work of art, for erasing art as a field where what is at issue, whatever that might be, is not only expressed but discovered. Curtis’s performance might have been a mirror of his epilepsy. But it might also have been a matter of intentionally replicating fits, reenacting them, using them as a form of energy and a form of music, as form as such. More deeply, it might have been a matter of Curtis’s using his fits as an idea, the idea for which the songs were only containers. Was it a matter of calling up the demon, and letting it take the stage? Curtis told Sumner how disturbed he was that while once he had struggled to write songs, now they arrived complete, unbidden: “The words were writing themselves.”

An attempt to record “Transmission” in March 1979 was vague, muffled; everything sounded contrived. A few months
later, the band recorded it again, in a version released as a single, with a lightness in the rhythm, the guitar languid, and, you could imagine, someone who’d wandered into the studio and started carrying on about nothing, until he wanders away. But the song was never about the recording studio. On 13 July 1979 the band played the Factory club in Manchester. For “Dead Souls,” Peter Hook’s bass playing feels as if it’s coming from out of the ground, as if mining is going on beneath the stage. Curtis is inflamed from the start. In “She’s Lost Control,” part of what is scary is the way the singer maintains control:
he’s lying,
the song’s second mind says behind its words, its beat, the stitch-by-stitch countdown of what stands in for a melody,
don’t believe me.
In “Shadowplay” the singer might have left the hall altogether, singing from the street, accosting people to tell them to beware, to watch out, to look both ways and then step off the curb with their eyes closed. Pressure builds, and by the time the band gets to “Transmission” the crowd is drunk and loud. The music rushes past Curtis, and he makes no attempt to catch up. His singing is abstracted from itself; it’s been an extraordinary show, but what’s happening here doesn’t fit with anything that’s come before, and nothing will come after it. Lines in the song begin to fray, pants dragging in the gutter, each unraveling thread a signifier without an object. It is unhinged—you can’t imagine what it would have been like to see this, if, in the moment, you
would have been capable of seeing what now, in the comfort of your own room, with the singer dead and the rest of the band having gone on for more than thirty years as New Order, you can hear, and conjure up out of your own imagination. “Dance, dance, dance”—the words shatter, the rest of the band shouting behind Curtis. He doesn’t need them; they want to be part of it, to testify that they too are alive in this moment. “Dance, dance, dance, to the radio”—as the words batter against each other, nothing could be more loathsome, degrading, immoral.

“I always felt that the ‘Dance to the radio’ bit was a bit of a cop-out, on that song,” Peter Hook said in 2013. “It seemed to be courting the radio, to me.” “To get airplay?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Which is what Tony did say to me once. But when I spoke to Ian about it, it was the opposite. ‘
It was a call to arms
’—against the radio. It made me reevaluate the whole thing. But
I
—being the
bass player
”—he laughed out loud at himself—“felt that it was the other way around!”

It wasn’t that Hook ever missed the black hole of the song. “When you play it,” he said, repeating how a friend described it, “you push the whole beat, you’re playing in front of the beat, every note, so the rest of them are always trying to catch up with you, and that’s what gives it the urgency. From a bass player’s point of view, it’s a very, very simple riff. It’s a repetitious two-note riff, that you can really only—take up and down. In intensity. You can sit back on the verses,
you can pound it out on the chorus, but the riff never really changes. The riff is the solid backbone of the song. The song actually changes quite a lot—around the bass riff. The vocals are very, very—almost Neanderthal. When it gets to that,
Dahhhhhnce
”—with a dredging sound coming up behind the word as Hook pulls it out of his throat—“to play, to sing—the looks on people’s faces, when you do it, you actually tap in to a basic primal instinct with that roar. That Ian did so wonderfully. People cannot believe—every single piece—even to
hate
you, and be there to watch you fall on your
ass
—they still cannot believe—
WHHHHAAAAAAA!
at that moment, before the last chorus.”

On John Peel’s
Something Else,
on television two months after the show at the Factory club, the song is speeded up, a way to keep the interest of listeners who have heard “Transmission” before, maybe of musicians who have played it too many times. It’s automatic. The Doors were always hovering over Joy Division, as if watching them go to places they had glimpsed but never reached; far in front of the sound, Curtis never sounded so much like Jim Morrison, somewhat distracted, forgetting where he is, then remembering, clumsy, then rushing, as if he’s trying to run right out of the song.

The song catches up, and traps him at just that point where it tips into uncertainty. “When the going gets tough—” When the going gets tough, you find out how feeble you really are. Paradoxically, your voice gets louder, your body more violent,
because arguments, ideas, even words, are now useless, and your voice, as a sound, and your body, as movement, are all you have. Curtis stares into the face of the BBC camera, his own face transparent, his eyes shaking in their sockets, the notion that this is Ian Curtis, famous person, Existential hero,
La Nausée
on two legs, falling far short of a person wordlessly asking,
Where am I, who are these people, why are they looking at me?

Three years after he appeared as Ian Curtis in
Control,
Sam Riley played Pinkie in a remake of
Brighton Rock.
Graham Greene’s 1938 novel was set in the thirties, as was the 1947 film with Richard Attenborough as the small-time gangster—the killer who marries a waitress, Rose, because she’s a witness and now she’ll keep her mouth shut. But as Sam Riley steps out onto the Brighton pier, it’s 1964, with the Mods and Rockers about to take over the town and fight with knives and chains over the definition of cool.

Riley’s face is squashed. “His brain is squirmin’ like a toad,” as Jim Morrison sang in “Riders on the Storm”— that’s what Riley’s Pinkie looks like. He is not as inhuman as Attenborough’s, or as smart—behind his own thoughts, his own gestures of disdain, contempt, impatience, loathing, you can see him worry, for a second, over the things about himself he doesn’t understand, and then you can see him decide he doesn’t care.

In the crucial scene, just after Pinkie and Rose are married, in a squalid little civil ceremony, they’re walking on the Brighton pier. “Rose stopped him,” Greene wrote. “‘Look,’ she said, won’t you give me one of those? As a souvenir. They don’t cost much,’ she said, ‘only sixpence.’ It was a small glass box like a telephone cabinet. ‘Make a record of your own voice,’ the legend ran.” “‘What do you want me to say?’ ‘Just anything,’ she said. ‘Say something to me. Say Rose and—something.’” Pinkie goes in, reads the instructions: “He looked over his shoulder and there outside she was watching him, with a smile. He saw her as a stranger: a shabby child from Nelson Place . . . He put in a sixpence, and speaking in a low voice for fear it might carry beyond the box, he gave his message up to be graven on vulcanite: ‘God damn you, you little bitch, why can’t you go back home forever and leave me be?’” They don’t have a record player; it’s a keepsake, she isn’t going to hear it. Richard Attenborough’s record is worse: “You asked me to make a record of me voice,” he says, looking like Richard Widmark in the same year in
Kiss of Death,
the two movies playing as the world’s ugliest double feature. “Well, here it is. What you want me to say is, I love you”—romantic music comes up as Rose gazes adoringly through the glass—“Well, here’s the truth. I hate you, you little slut. You make me sick. Why don’t you get back to Nelson Place and leave me be?”

Sam Riley’s Pinkie and Andrea Riseborough’s Rose are
on the pier. She asks him for a record. He brushes her off. With people passing by, she screams at him: “If you don’t want me then why don’t you just leave me alone? What do you want me for?” People are staring. Pinkie is scared: this whole thing is about keeping him safe, respectable, out of prison. “I’d rather drown!” Rose says. “You can have your record,” he says. He says it again. She smiles at him. She apologizes. He goes into the booth, with Rose smiling and waving through the glass.

Riley puts in a coin, and the machine places a 45 blank on the turntable. He looks down at it, his face serious and dark, as if he’s about to testify in court, to speak just before he is sentenced, to make his final, defiant statement, his final, pathetic plea. The words he speaks are not that different from what Greene’s or Attenborough’s Pinkie says, but as speech they are in a different language. As Attenborough played him, Pinkie carried a patina of urbanity and an air of confidence. Riley catches all the years of privation since the economic ruin of the 1930s, the bombing of England in the 1940s, the postwar rationing of Pinkie’s childhood, a school class system that divides the worthy from the worthless except for those in places where no one is ever judged worthy, a coarsening of affect that has spread through the whole of British life, a longing for style that was just about to explode with the Beatles, Brian Epstein, Julie Christie, Peter Blake, Joe Meek, Lindsay Anderson, the Rolling Stones, Robert
Fraser, Joe Orton, the Who, Carnaby Street, Tom Stoppard, Ray Davies, Terence Stamp, Peter Sellers, David Bailey, Michael Caine, Mary Quant, Joseph Losey, Twiggy, Tom Courtenay, Dirk Bogarde, Susannah York, Marianne Faithfull, or for that matter Christine Keeler, Johnny Edge, and the nightclub gangsters the Kray twins, who at one point plotted to blackmail Brian Epstein into surrendering the Beatles—an explosion that for this Pinkie would come just too late.
^*
Even in the 1960s, the ’30s are breathing through his pores.

“You asked me to make a record of my voice,” Riley says. “Well, here it is.”

There is the faint, gravelly spindle sound of the record turning.

“What you want me to say is”—and Riley’s voice turns like the record with disgust—“I love you. Well, I don’t. I hate you”—and his voice burrs through
hate
with its own wind.

Outside the booth, Rose might be sensing what is happening; she looks alarmed.

“I hate the way you look,” Pinkie says, bearing down. “I hate the way you talk—I hate everything about you.” Rose smiles again. “You make me sick.”

Riley’s Pinkie stares at the spinning 45 as if it’s a mirror. He’s becoming aware of himself as an artist; this is now a performance, an art statement that will live on outside of him. He is making a record.

“Goddamn you little bitch, why don’t you go back to where you came from and leave me alone forever?”

It comes off the screen as the first punk single. That Riley has already played Ian Curtis, that anyone watching
Brighton Rock
in 2010 has likely already seen Riley embrace punk and take it past itself, is part of this: though in ordinary time
Brighton Rock
comes three years after
Control,
in the historical time of the two films,
Brighton Rock
is taking place some twelve, thirteen, fourteen years earlier. But a more swirling time is at play: time made by the dictum that, as
the singer David Thomas puts it, the ballad gets what the ballad wants. It is a curving time made by the way actors carry roles with them through their careers, each role, if the actors can burn at the core, bleeding into every other; it’s pop time, the time made by the way songs and movies cannibalize history and rewrite it according to a logic of their own. In this time, where what Sam Riley learned singing Ian Curtis’s songs informs every syllable coming out of his Pinkie’s mouth, with the disgust of Curtis’s “Dance, dance, dance” thudding against Pinkie’s
I hate, I hate, I hate,
Sam Riley’s Pinkie is his own father. That is, he is Ian Curtis’s father, and Rose his mother, playing that record for him all through his childhood, saying, “Listen, this is your father’s voice.”

in 1964 in
Brighton Rock,
Pinkie is killed. Rose, in a home for unwed or abandoned expectant mothers, is at her bed in an ugly dormitory. Another girl has a birthday; she gets a little portable record player. When everyone is asleep, Rose brings the record player to her bed, plugs it in, and, cradling it in her arms, plays her own record for the first time. “You’ve asked me to make a record of my voice,” she hears. “Well, here it is. What you want me to say is, I love you.” But the grooves are cheap; the needle sticks. “
I love you.
” “
I love you.
” “
I love you.
” “
I love you
”—the record won’t play beyond those words. Those words are all she’ll ever hear, but her son will hear the music.

In the Still of the Nite

1956 • 1959 • 2010