Joy Division is the band that Manchester’s music identity is built on more than any other – including Oasis, including The Smiths, including The Stone Roses. The connection between the city’s postindustrial landscape, the grey weather, the specific kind of darkness that underlines even Joy Division’s most danceable tracks, and the Manchester identity is not metaphorical. It is literal: these four people from Salford and Macclesfield made music that sounds like this city looks in November.
The Lesser Free Trade Hall – 4 June 1976
The Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall on Peter Street on 4 June 1976 to an audience of roughly 40 people. Among those 40 people were members of what would become Joy Division, The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Morrissey, and most of the rest of the Manchester post-punk scene. The Lesser Free Trade Hall show is the most mythologised night in Manchester music history – the gig that started everything. The building is now a Radisson hotel. A plaque marks the occasion.
Factory Records and Tony Wilson
Factory Records was founded by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus in 1978, with early signings including Joy Division. The Factory philosophy – artists own their masters, no contract, aesthetic decisions made by designers not accountants – was either visionary or commercially naive depending on who you ask and when you ask them. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980) were Factory releases. The label went on to sign New Order (Joy Division’s continuation after Ian Curtis’s death in 1980), Happy Mondays, and build the Hacienda.
Ian Curtis and Macclesfield
Ian Curtis was from Macclesfield, not Manchester – a detail that gets elided in the mythology but matters. He moved to Macclesfield from Stretford, worked at the Job Centre in Macclesfield, and is buried in Macclesfield Cemetery. His grave at Macclesfield Cemetery is visited by pilgrims from around the world. The headstone reads “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The town is 20 minutes south of Manchester by train.
New Order – The Continuation
After Curtis’s death in May 1980, the remaining three members of Joy Division became New Order. The shift from the darkness of Joy Division to the electronic dance music of New Order is one of the most interesting transitions in British music. Blue Monday (1983) is the best-selling 12-inch single in UK chart history. The Factory Records story, which continued through New Order, ended in Factory’s bankruptcy in 1992 – a result of the Hacienda’s losses rather than the label’s music.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong? Send a correction.