Joy Division's Closer is a breathtaking trip into darkness

Joy Division : Isolation

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On July 18, 1980 Joy Division released Closer, the band's final album and one that is impossible to separate from the tragic circumstances of frontman Ian Curtis's suicide. It would be years before we learned what led to the tailspin that ended with Curtis hanging himself May 18, 1980:  his worsening grand mal seizures due to epilepsy, his marriage falling apart and the pressure to try to shelve all of his troubles away to prepare for the band's first American tour. 

In retrospect the album reads like a suicide note but at the time the young members of the band really weren't paying attention to the lyrics.

"We'd go to rehearsals and sit around and talk about really banal things," says guitarist Bernard Sumner."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." 

They have all had to carry on with a certain amount of guilt, especially as the album's legacy has grown. Bass player Peter Hook says "people that are left behind are the ones that suffer".

The cover of the album is a photograph of a family tomb, selected before Curtis's death.

The band were not happy with producer Martin Hannett's studio wizardry but his reverb and delay treatments are  part of what makes the album so haunting. It sounds like it was recorded behind the "doors of hell's darker chambers".

Closer has become one of the best regarded albums of the entire decade. This review is from Smash Hits.

The band never got to promote Closer. They barely had time to grieve before reforming as New Order, adding drummer Stephen Morris' girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards.

In 2011 Peter Hook finally got to play some of the Closer songs live, standing next to his son. He said he got chills down the spine and that it was a wonderful moment he wished he could share with the other band members.

Echo and The Bunnymen stun with their debut Crocodiles

Echo and the Bunnymen : Do It Clean

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On July 18 of 1980 Echo and the Bunnymen ushered in the "New Psychedelia" or "neopsychedelic" scene with their UK#17 debut album Crocodiles. Forging 60's rock and lyrical imagery with punk anger, the Liverpudlian quartet would consistently release decent albums throughout the 80's. Frontman Ian McCulloch, however, quickly tired of the "psychedelic" description.

"Whoever the turd was who first said that, they should chop his head off," Mac the Mouth said. "It doesn't mean anything, 'psychedelic'. If only rock critics could learn to be as original as we are. If the music's got a dreamlike quality, maybe it comes from dreams. It doesn't have to be drug induced. We get drunk like once in a blue moon but that's about it."

Despite the silly name, Echo and the Bunnymen were seeking to record an album that was anything but. McCulloch has told Smash Hits earlier that year " I reckon it's more to do with a dark mood; dark music you play on your own in the dark, which is how I like listening to my favourite music: stuff like Bowie and Leonard Cohen."

There are also echoes of  Love and especially The Doors. Rob Dickens, who signed the band to Warner's Korova imprint said of McCulloch:

 "The singer looked so charismatic. He was beautiful. His voiced had that Jim Morrison ring to it. The songs weren't well-formulated, but you say 'Star' in neon above his head."

Contemporaneous reviews were mostly ecstatic.Writing for NME in 1980 Chis Salewicz described the album as "being probably the best album this year by a British band".  And there was this review in Smash Hits: 

In the US Robert Christgau gave the album a B , writing :

 If anything might convince me that the term "psychedelic revival" means something it's "Villiers Terrace," a real good terror-of-drugs song. And the music flows tunefully, in a vacant, hard-rock sort of way. But oh, Jimbo, can this really be the end--to be stuck inside of Frisco with the Liverpool blues again?

And Rolling Stone's David Fricke gave the album 4 our of 5 stars writing

Instead of dope, McCulloch trips out on his worst fears: isolation, death, sexual and emotional bankruptcy. Behind him, gripping music swells into Doors-style dirges (“Pictures on My Wall”), PiL-like guitar dynamics (“Monkeys”), spookily evocative pop (“Rescue”) and Yardbirds-cum-Elevators ravers jacked up in the New Wave manner (“Do It Clean,” “Crocodiles”).

Recent releases include ten extra tracks, mostly early versions and live versions of the songs on the album. There will be many more posts about these Happy Death Men to come.

Diana Ross and Chic team up for 1980's most infectious single

Diana Ross : Upside Down

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In July of 1980 Diana Ross returned to both the UK and US charts by joining forces with Chic to produce "Upside Down". The song, written by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edward and performed by their band,  hit #1 in the US and #2 in the UK. Though  "Love Hangover" ushered in the disco age in 1976, Ross had gone four years without a #1 hit. Then she caught a Chic concert in Santa Monica, California.

"Diana couldn't believe the crowd reaction," Rodgers told Billboard magazine. "She said, 'I haven't seen this since the Jackson 5.' She was backstage, dancing and into it. 'My kids made me come and see this show, all they were talking about was Chic, Chic, Chic. That's what I want my record to sound like.'"

But Ross only wanted to sound like Chic up to a point. When she heard the final mix, she went into the lab with Motown producer Russ Terrana and remixed the whole thing, pushing her vocals further to the front. This pissed off Rodgers and Edwards to the point where they almost had their names taken off of the project. 

"The basic problem was that we had two different concepts of what her voice should sound like," Rodgers told Billboard. "She hears her voice in one way and we hear it in another way. When it got a point where she wanted her voice to sound a certain way, we couldn't take the responsibility for it because that's just not how we make records."

The single helped sell ten million copies of propel Diana worldwide and introduce a new 80's vibe to the dance club scene.

Remembering Malcolm Owen: The Ruts 5 Best songs

The Ruts : Something That I Said

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On July 14, 1980, just weeks after Ian Curtis's suicide, Malcolm Owen of The Ruts died at the age of 25 from a heroin overdose. The charismatic frontman with the hoarse voice had hit rock bottom earlier in the year. He had been kicked out of the band, sold all of his possessions, separated from his wife and moved in with his parents. He had just persuaded The Ruts he was ready to rejoin the band when he was found dead of an overdose in the bath at his parents' home. 

For 18 months The Ruts were among the most exciting bands in the U.K. Here are 5 Ruts songs you need to know.

1. Babylon's Burning

One of the great singles from the Summer of '79, "Babylon's Burning"peaked at UK #7 while providing a soundtrack as Margaret Thatcher's anti-union, anti-immigrant, monetarist policies took effect. Appearing on the Times Square soundtrack in the US, this is far and away their best known song.

2. In a Rut

John Peel championed this song which sold 20,000 copies. Enough to be a UK #1 these days, but too few to break into the UK Top 75 in '79. Considering the fate of the singer, its chorus "If you're in a rut You gotta get out of it, out of it, out of it" resonates as much as its anti-heroin B-side "H Eyes".

3. S.U.S.

From the Ruts debut The Crack, which Henry Rollins calls "the best album ever made". The band's roadie Mannah assisted in writing "S.U.S" which deals with the vagrancy act, widely used by London's Metropolitan Police Service in the late 1970s to hassle anyone they wanted.

4.  Staring At The Rude Boys

This UK #22 hit, the last before Malcolm's death, celebrates crowded night clubs, invoking a special kind of nostalgia in this day of social distancing: 

The skins in the corner are staring at the bar 

 The rude boys are dancing to some heavy heavy ska 

 It's getting so hot people are dripping with sweat 

 The punks in the corner are speeding like a jet 

5. Something That I Said

One more from The Crack. this UK#29 hit is a message to all the rude boys,"So get off your pedestal Before you ain't got no friends no more". 

Dexys Midnight Runners make their debut a memorable one

Dexys Midnight Runners : Tell Me When My Light Turns Green

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In July of 1980 Dexys Midnight Runners released Searching For the Young Soul Rebels, their UK#6 debut album. Dressed like New York City dockworkers and putting on shows so full of energy you'd figure dexedrine might be playing a role, the Birmingham band had already topped the UK charts with the single "Geno", a tribute to Geno Washington whose 1960's era Ram Jam Band inspired the Midnight Runners sound. We are still nearly three full years away from "Come On Eileen" replacing Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" at  #1 in the US.

While frontman Kevin Rowland got most of the attention, the true joy of this album comes from the three guys making up the brass section: Big Jim Paterson on trombone, Steve Spooner on alto sax and Geoff Blythe on sax and horn arrangements.  My favorite track is "Tell Me When My Light Turns Green". Every American high school and college band should be playing this at half time.  Instead we get "Seven Nations Army" by the White Stripes. 

The trio were so good they get their moment to shine on the instrumental "The Teams That Meet in Caffs". The band often met in greasy spoon cafes to savor their coffees and teas and make plans to change the world. Rowland himself was dead serious about the band, telling NME "We're totally disillusioned with the press. If we're not represented properly this time, it'll be the last one." I guess he didn't like the article because Rowland didn't do any interviews for two years.

FAST FORWARD :During the Summer of 2020 members of Dexy's reunited virtually for one of Tim Burgess's Twitter Listening Parties. As fans listened to the album in its entirety, band members offered insight. Of the smash hit "Geno" Rowland said "It's hard to comment...except that my vocal sounds a bit too shrill. The playing is amazing!"

Bass player Pete Williams added "Sometimes when we played, the sheer focus, intensity, whatever, turned into a kind of transcendence, the band became an engine, beyond our control almost, I’ll never forget that feeling."

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels was number 10 in the NME  writers' end -of-year chart for 1980. The album is among the subjects of the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and ranks #16 on NME's list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever  

But it took time for some critics to take the album to heart. Robert Christgau never did, grading the album a B and writing:

Perhaps it will clear something up to specify that this is not a soul record. It is a weird record. Never have soul horns sounded remotely as sour, and Kevin Rowland can't carry a tune to the next note. There are horn interjections that make me laugh out loud at their perfectly timed wrong rightness, and with Kevin Rowland quavering through his deeply felt poesy and everybody else blaring away, I enjoy it in much the same way I enjoy a no-wave band on a good night--DNA, say. But DNA I understand.

And aside from "Geno" and the current single "There There  My Dear", David Hepworth was not impressed.

I've always appreciated rock's chameleons. The easiest thing to do is find a big selling sound and keep at it. Dexy's Midnight Runners did the opposite. They were ambitious, possibly to a fault, but always entertaining.

P.S.

When the band cut off press interviews they made their statements in advertisements. Here they are asking fans to quiet down: "We've been quickly disillusioned by ecstatic audiences...we are far from flattered by people dressing up like us". 

My Top 10 by Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott

Phil Lynott : King's Call

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In the Summer of 1980 with his debut solo album Solo In Soho in the UK charts, Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott prepared a list of his all time top ten favorite songs for Smash Hits. At this time 40 years ago "King's Call", Lynott's tribute to Elvis featuring Mark Knopfler, was climbing the charts where it would peak at UK#35.

Ultravox ushers in The New Romantic sound with Vienna

Ultravox : New Europeans

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On July 11, 1980 Ultravox released its best known album, Vienna, ushering in a new Eurosynth sound that would be called New Romantic. For Vienna, the new line-up of Ultravox returned to Germany to record with Systems Of Romance producer Conny Plank. The album cover would be shot by Dutchman Anton Corbijn.  Now featuring Kraftwerk fanatic Midge Ure as its new singer, the band made its artistic statement on the song "New Europeans": 

On a crowded beach washed by the sun, he puts his headphones on. 

His modern world revolves around the synthesizer's song. 

Full of future thoughts and thrills, his senses slip away. 

He's a European legacy, a culture for today 

By looking to Germany for inspiration, as Bowie had done earlier, Ultravox tapped into a vein. With the music of Gary Numan, Bowie, Ultravox frontman turned solo artist John Foxx, Human League, up and comers Spandau Ballet and Visage (another band Ure and Ultravox's Billie Currie were members of), a new scene developed where androgyny, a spoiled kind of artistocracy and loads of synthesizers all intersected. These were the Blitz Kids, named for a London music venue where electropop bands performed. 

This was filmed in November, 1980. Steve Strange appears 5:00 in. Spandau Ballet at 7:00.

The music had nothing to do with American-based blues and it worked on almost every level.

The instrumental opener "Astradyne" sounds like the birth of the movement that would eventually give us Duran Duran. Chrysalis Records, however moved the song to the end of the A side for the US release , preferring to start things off the first single from the album, "Sleepwalk". 

The next track is "New Europeans", the first song to really pop off the album for me. 

The album's most famous song is its title track, described in this way by Rip It Up And Start Again author Simon Reynolds:

Ultravox...plunged into full-blown Teutonica with the quasi-classical "Vienna". Wreathed in the sonic equivalent of dry ice, this ludicrously portentous ballad --inspired by a vague notion of a past-its-prime Hapsburg Empire sliding into decadence--reached number two in the U.K. charts in the first weeks of  1981 and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity.

Fun fact: the song that held "Vienna" from the top spot was "Shaddup Your Face" by Joe Dolce.

From Robert Christgau a grade of C:

First they wanted to be machines, now they want to have roots--it's new, it's different. "A European legacy, a culture for today," sings former Rich Kid Midge Ure through a signifying synthesizer, and he's not being ironic--new Europeans may be jaded, but they avoid irony except in totally frivolous contexts. So they buy electronic instruments, rendezvous in Köln with Conny Plank, and manufacture dance music for the locked pelvis. One strange thing, though--sounds like "Western Promise" should be called "Algiers."

From Smash Hits:

On both "Mr. X" and the apocalyptic "All Stood Still", the synths run the show. I was still playing the latter on my college radio show when "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" was climbing the charts in the U.K.