Been mentally riffing on this tread today, and come up with a few things...
@soundslike & dharry - OTM for noting that JD are unrepresentitive of post punk as a movement. The idea of deconstructing or demystifying the rock'n'roll experience held no interest for them at all - they revelled in the shamanic element of performance. Sans hannett, their music isnt very experimental at all - the warsaw stuff has an unmistakeably oi-ish flavour and more than a hint of metal. Even more than the music, the arc of their career and of Curtis's life is 24-carat Classic Rock Myth.
The fact that they're the most revered band of that period despite having precious little truck with it's major cultural tropes says a few things... It suggests that at the core of the rock experience is a mystical element that post-punk's theoretical assault never really dealt with - depending on your bias that can be either a good or a bad thing. Whichever, it hints that throughout this era there was a silent majority of music fans who wanted to enjoy powerful, authentic music that they identified with without being forced into mental contortions.
Above all it suggests that JD were the most successful of the post punk bands at reinvigorating rock with meaning and intensity, and I think they managed this because they genuinely believed in the power of music to change thier own lives, in the mystical sense of connecting to some other, higher level of meaning through noise, energy and performance. No one in the history of rock has ever invested more than Ian Curtis in this ideal- this is someone who, once his epilepsy became apparent, would regularly risk his health and concievably his life to perform on stage. To go on to a stage knowing that you might not come off it alive is pretty fucking intense which ever way you cut it - however much you may dread 'authenticity' in rock, it's hard not to be impressed by that kind of commitment.
This is really interesting, because to associate post punk with a desire to destroy rock in this sense is to misread it completely - punks hated what rock had become by 1976, but they yearned to restore it to what it had been in the 50s & 60s - magnetic, futuristic, a gleeful destroyer of mediocraty and an inextinguishable source of possibilities; in short, a force that transforms lives, on both a mass and an individual level. All of postpunk's theoretical strategems and manouvres were deployed with this goal in mind. So at this deepest level, post punk was 'retro' and mystical: they were desperate to believe. The sublime irony is that JD, in their untutored way, zeroed in on this hidden need while other bands could only orbit it at varying distances. So dharry is quite right when he calls JD 'some kind of apothesis of rock itself'.
Hannett was the perfect foil for JD, although they didn't think so at the time. He venerated the music of the 50s & 60s, both stylistically (50s rockabilly & 60s punk psychadelia being the truest references for his sound) and more infamously in terms of his general approach - which was, that the producer's job is to create a record that best embodies what he (the producer) judges to be the band's core aesthetic; iit's nice if the band agree, but generally their opinions should be given no credence whatsoever and the producer is duty bound to use any method at his disposal to get the record made. It's a sign of JD's naivety that they allowed Hannett to operate in this way as any other punk band would have told him to fuck off. What Hannett saw in punk, beyond a general excitement at the spectacle of youth in revolt, was the chance to work with bands who concieved thier sound primarily or wholly in terms of live performance. He, Martin Hannett, would be the backroom genius who caught their flashes of brilliance on the documents before which future generations would genuflect.
Hannett is a ridiculous figure in many ways, but he was the only one involved in Factory who fully understood how special JD were. It's a mistake to see his callous treatment of them as being dismissive of their abilities - on the contrary, he was ruthless precisely because
he knew, with total clarity, what this record should sound like and how it should feel, and having a keen awareness of genius's transitiory nature he realized that he would only get a very limited number of chances to capture it. With bands he genuinely didnt give a toss about, Hannett's behavior was passive & scatty rather than despotic; cf the countless stories about him wandering out of sessions or falling asleep. Bummed & Movement are both sloppy pieces of work.
Even though Hannett's behavior made life uneasy for the band, at a deeper level it matched their belief and commitment to the rock ideal - and this allowed them to expand the intensity of their self image and their live shows into the area of recorded music, which they would otherwise have been unable to do. A live recording of a JD set would have been wholly inadequate. Instead, hannett created a soundworld which maintains a
psychic connection to the idealised experience of the JD performance.
Again, sublime irony: Hannett wasnt trying to be experimental for it's own sake, or rebel against any percieved rock production orthodoxies - his single goal was to fashion the music so as to mirror curtis's emotional narratives as accurately as possible. But in doing this he, more than any other post punk producer, created a completely new type of rock music. The sheer sonic impact of those records is staggering even today - despite the huge influence they've had, there is still nothing on earth that sounds remotely like them.
Hannett is an anomoly among the great record producers - his track record is minimal, and quite a lot of that is frankly not very good. He wasnt particularly experimental, being stubbornly stuck in his ways and one could even say conservative. He certainly didnt nurture talent. What I love about him is that for those JD records, he risked being a total arsehole to people he loved because he wouldnt compromise his vision. If he had been wrong history would have seen him as a total clown...but he was right.
dHarry said:
One of them said later that they felt like their eyes were missing after he died. A profoundly physical way of describing it...
... and how fucking eerie is that? I think Bernard said that, presumably not having read Oedipus Rex beforehand. So there's this band, with a visionary shamanic singer (who by the way is epileptic), feels that he's marked for death but very publically struggles against it, and after his death (an act of catharsis for the spectating public), bernie says;
we feel like our eyes are missing!!!
What chance did other bands of the era have of competing against that kind of narrative sweep?
