![]() ![]() “Unknown Pleasures once sounded like the future – its genius is that, four decades later, it still sounds like the future,” says John Robb, Manchester musician, rock journalist and author of The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City 1976–1996. You may think you’ve got its measure – but you’re never quite there, never really all the way in. All these decades later there’s a case that it remains fundamentally inscrutable. And though it could be enjoyed as both a bleak pop revue and an exorcism (ultimately unsuccessful) of singer Ian Curtis’s demons, the LP was above all profoundly mysterious. Unknown Pleasures seemed to have arrived through a slipstream, from another time and place. ![]() The album was bleak, unknowable, tuned – so it felt – to alien frequencies. Instead Unknown Pleasures, released 40 years ago this month, was the rock equivalent of one of Kubrick’s monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the pasty foursome, a blur of student haircuts, slouching posture and melodramatic jackets, gathered at Strawberry Studios in Stockport over three weekends in the spring of 1979, their stated purpose was to knock out a warts-and-everything punk record. Nobody expected Joy Division to change popular music – least of all Joy Division themselves. ![]()
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