Producer Stories

He'd been brought in by Tony Wilson, the man behind the newly founded Factory Records, to become the label's artistic supervisor and oversee Joy Division's contribution to its first official release, The Factory Sample (the other acts involved were Durutti Column, John Dowie and Cabaret Voltaire).

The title of the first of the two tracks ("Digital") with which Ian Curtis and co. appeared on the Sample (released on 24 December 1978) already hinted at how much Hannett and his technological toy were shaping the band's artistic choices, in particular by warping Curtis's voice with a frigid echo. The other contribution, "Glass", was instead a bridge between the raw, Warsaw-school material (the band's earlier incarnation, halfway between punk and Black Sabbath) and the sound still to come on "Unknown Pleasures". Hannett used it as a training ground, trying to draw out the darkness lurking between Sumner's chords, the anxious rhythm of the Hook/Morris rhythm section, and Curtis's baritone voice.

Joy Division had gradually become one of the most compelling bands outside the London scene, yet they still hadn't officially recorded a single. The first real record deal on the table actually came from Genetic (contractually tied to Radar Records, a WEA subsidiary) on behalf of its co-owner Martin Rushent, a producer well respected in the punk community, especially in Manchester, for his work with Buzzcocks and Generation X. The deal never got off the ground, over royalty disputes; of the 15 tracks recorded with Rushent (who would soon become the enfant prodige of synth-pop thanks to his work with Human League), only five ended up on a demo for Genetic, after which Joy Division returned to Factory to carry on trying to capture on tape the frantic live performances on which they'd built a modest but striking reputation.

Ian Curtis later recalled: "There was a point where we were thinking about signing with Genetic, but we didn't want to rush into anything. We went down to London to see what kind of working relationship we'd have, but by that time we'd already agreed to make the first LP with Factory"

"Bernard and I were pretty down-to-earth people", Peter Hook recalls, "whereas he seemed to come from another planet. He was a really strange hippie, who'd say things that made no sense at all — or at least, I never had a clue what he was on about. He used to tell Rob (Gretton, the band's manager and Factory co-founder, ed.): 'Get these two idiots away from me'. In the studio we'd sit on the left, him on the right, and whenever we tried to suggest something like 'I think the guitars are a bit too soft, Martin', he'd shout 'Oh my God! Why don't you just go away, you stupid moron!'. At first it was fine, but bit by bit his strangeness started getting worse".

With that technique (which apparently was also part of a questionable plan – along with the air conditioning permanently cranked up – to destabilize the band and push it out of its comfort zone) it was as if Morris were trapped inside a single microphone, the one that sent his muted hits back toward Martin Hannett's magic black box (the digital delay).

The effect wasn't used as an actual audible delay, but set at one millisecond, so tight against the original sound that it was almost impossible to hear.

Peter Hook's basslines were emphasized in the mix through a boost to the mid-high frequencies, while the robust dual-humbucker sound of Sumner's Gibson SG was thinned out to make room for the vocal parts.

This was precisely the source of Bernie's long-standing dissatisfaction: “Live, our music was pretty loud and heavy, whereas Martin had toned it down considerably, especially where the guitars were concerned. The production had inflicted this dark mood on the record: we'd thought of it as a simple black-and-white photo, but Martin had gone and colored it in however he pleased.”

Sumner and Hook's dissatisfaction with Hannett was especially evident on “Insight,” which was hugely toned down compared to its live rendition (and even compared to the January Peel Sessions). The obsessive focus on drums, vocals and electronic noises (and the consequent scaling back of the guitars) reduced a song that had originally been full of energy to a tense midtempo ballad, but for Hannett it was a natural choice: “The guitars were only partly a problem. The fact is, though, there always came a point where they wore the listener down more than anything else. So I left in only a few of them.”

By and large, Joy Division still identified with the urgency of punk, having seen every band of the first-wave British scene in person and having played alongside many of them. Hannett's forward-looking obsession with digital delay and distant guitars, however, created a sound that was too elaborate for the studio, too close to the very production excesses the punk generation was still trying to burn at the stake.

Curtis, however, didn't dislike the “Hannett treatment” at all.

On “Disorder” and “Day Of The Lords” his voice sat perfectly within the song's sonic palette, a largely realistic reproduction of their live performance, while on “Candidate” Hannett had boosted the treble, creating a guttural timbre full of inflections on the consonants.

Hannett had taken Joy Division's dark rock and roll and steered it toward the kind of soundscapes favored by groups Ian greatly admired (such as Throbbing Gristle and Kraftwerk).

Morris was a bit less tranchant, even though his contribution had been heavily reworked by Hannett's techniques: “Well, Martin still taught us a lot, he helped us look at music, our songs and our sounds in a completely different way. Before that we had a very narrow view of the whole thing, the only thing we knew how to do was walk into the room and switch the amps on.”

Sumner again: “Martin didn't give a damn about making a pop record. All he wanted to do was experiment. His attitude was that you'd take a load of drugs, shut the studio door and stay there all night to see what came out of it by the following morning. And you kept doing that until you were done. That's how all our records were made: we were high on speed (amphetamine, the punks' drug of choice, ed.), he was high on heroin.”

Peter Hook: “The whole thing was stupid from the start. Martin never understood that he was working for us. We were paying him, so he should have done the mixing whenever we decided… he should have done whatever we decided, whenever we decided it.”

Hannett's point of view, on the other hand, was that the band had run through their studio budget and that the only way for him to finish the mix properly was to do it entirely on his own (a claim backed up by the post-production and remix of “Walked In Line,” which wasn't released until 1981, on “Still”).

Tony Wilson confirmed that Hannett had originally estimated the record's production cost at around £5,000, well below the £12,000 that was actually spent in the end: “I remember we'd got to the ninth take of a recording, and at one point Martin came on the mic from the control room and said: 'Okay. This has to be the last take. You need to play it fast, but I want it slower.'”

Wilson: “We had absolutely no sense of the situation. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. Besides, the big misconception about Joy Division was that they were a bunch of unhappy people, when they were exactly the opposite. They were the biggest, funniest band I'd ever worked with. Even while recording an album like 'Unknown Pleasures,' their favorite activity was playing pranks on each other — the music came second.”

Peter Hook: “At the Good Mood Club in Halifax, the audience consisted of a single person, who left after two songs. It felt like we were just wasting our time and nobody really cared about listening to us.” After a few interrupted sessions at Central Sound Studios in Manchester, Martin Hannett and Joy Division retreated once again to Strawberry to record what many rightly consider their defining moment, “Transmission”. It was certainly the most accessible track in their repertoire, and the decision to release it as a single came after seeing the audience's reaction during its first live performance. “Transmission” came out on 7 October and finally got the recognition it deserved, in a sense also breathing new life into “Unknown Pleasures”, which had dropped off the sales charts and whose copies were cluttering up both the Factory offices and co-founder Alan Erasmus's flat.

Whether Martin's obsessive perfectionism in the studio was justified is debatable, especially from the band's point of view, evicted from the pool of their initial convictions and unceremoniously pushed down the slide of the Hannett water park, but one has to be honest about the results the producer achieved in terms of impact and his ability to create new templates. Without him, Joy Division would never have become the band we all learned to love. He remained firmly at the helm of the band's production choices on their subsequent releases too (the second album “Closer”, the posthumous compilations “Still” and “Substance”), and later found further personal success working with Magazine, Psychedelic Furs, A Certain Ratio, New Order, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays.

He died of a heart attack in 1991, at just 43, after a prolonged relationship with drugs, leaving behind a legacy as evident in stylistic terms as it was audacious, as quick to take hold as it has been reluctant to fade.

From an interview with Jon Savage, May 1989

Did Joy Division's huge success change everything? Did you start getting more job offers?

Not really, because I still don't move away from Manchester. I was courted quite a bit by record labels at first, but then I stopped thinking about it. I've never wanted to do anything I didn't feel like doing.

Joy Division were special, weren't they? Ian on stage was totally…

Possessed. It was me who said “touched by the hand of God” in an interview with a Dutch magazine. Every now and then someone remembers that.

Where did that stuff come from, was it just inside him?

Ian was one of those channels for the Gestalt, a kind of lightning rod…

The only real case of that kind I came across in that period.