Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures: “I’m not afraid anymore”
Some thoughts by Marco Pandin about a great classic: Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures
When it came out, during summer 1979, I was 21 years old, and no other record had thrown everything that was wrong between me and the rest of the world in my face in such a precise, determined and direct way before. It was the perfect description of my inner turmoil: that feeling of being out of tune, that constant feeling of being full of the wrong things, in the wrong place at the wrong time and not being able to do anything about it. It was all in there: it seemed as if every song on that record had been ripped out of me, as if they had written it by putting pieces of my stomach in, my reasoning, my heartbeats, my bad dreams, my uneasiness and discomfort.
It was really strange to be twenty years old in Mestre, shaping and growing up far away from England, America, Berlin, that is away from those places where, according to the newspapers, everything seemed to be happening. The north-east was a sort of boundless, sad suburbia suspended between winter fog and hot summers, where you came up crooked, strange, perpetually bewildered between the disappearing countryside and the advancing concrete and asphalt. But luckily Venice was just a bus ride away. Back then they wouldn’t turn you away if you sat with a book on the ground at the Zattere, catching the first sun.
Important things were happening in Venice, at the Biennale between cinema, exhibitions and concerts we could go and hear strange and unusual music. We would go and peek at what tomorrow would be like. During my high school years, I often went to La Fenice because the dress rehearsals were free, and there were important reductions for university students like tickets for as little as a thousand lira for Philip Glass’s ‘Einstein on the beach’. Even without money in my pockets, Venice allowed me to hear everything from Wagner to Schoenberg to Jon Hassell. I saw Carolyn Carlson dance and even got bored to death by Anthony Braxton or Bob Wilson’s production of ‘The civil wars’.
The problem, however, is that musicians usually come, play and leave – while we stay here. After an hour or two of escapism, we still find ourselves sinking into the same old shit. The jobs you can’t find except off the books, the frustration of not being able to put together a bit of a future, the mess at home, at school, on the streets, everywhere.
I find that allowing myself to be attracted by different music is an important workout, a kind of Zen exercise that helps me reflect, imagine, nurture dreams, develop and free my imagination. Dreams and fantasy, which for many boys and girls like me, united by poverty and despair, were then the only cheap chance to keep breathing. Perhaps that is why we placed so much importance to music, songs, poems, drawings: they were each a way out through the night to see what would happen the next day. In those days, we often listened to records in a group, at someone’s house: half an entire hour sitting quietly brooding, eyes downcast, as if concentrated in meditation, a deep breath and a quick glance around to meet other gazes just long enough to turn the vinyl over, then another half hour of apnoea.
Very often you don’t find anything inside record covers: if you believe what the newspapers and radio stations tell you, there should be a revolution, and instead there is just a round piece of plastic to be consumed. Sometimes, however, it happens that inside the cardboard of a record cover – behind the design, the refined graphics – a world is hidden. A new land waiting to be explored. ‘Unknown Pleasures’ is a black square without names or photos, just a drawing that is complicated to interpret. At first glance, one is undecided between some rock formation and an electroencephalogram line – only later did one learn that it is the radio waves emitted by a pulsar. It is a black square that most likely looks like a door.
This is ‘Interzone’:
Down the dark streets, the houses looked the same (Getting darker now, faces look the same)
And I walked round and round, nail me to a train (No stomach, torn apart, had to think again)
Trying to find a clue, trying to find a way to get out (Trying to move away, had to move away and keep out)
Sometimes it happens that the music bounces between the walls of the room, stays inside fouling the walls with its echo, sticks to the ceiling, hides in the corners and never leaves. Sometimes it happens that songs come out of the windows like butterflies, like swallows, like smoke, like spectres. This is ‘I remember nothing’:
We were strangers.
We were strangers, for way too long, for way too long,
We were strangers, for way too long.
Violent, violent,
Were strangers.Get weak all the time, may just pass the time,
Me in my own world, and you there beside,
The gaps are enormous, we stare from each side,
We were strangers for way too long.
And this is “Insight”:
Yeah, we wasted our time
We didn’t really have time
But we remember
When we were youngAll God’s angels, beware
All you judges, beware
Sons of chance, take good care
For all the people not there
I’m not afraid anymore
I’m not afraid anymore
I’m not afraid anymore
Oh, I’m not afraid anymore
Were the songs of ‘Unknown Pleasures’ about someone coming back from some war, I wondered, or were they more about us, us kids, our twenties, our disorientation, the burden and struggle of not saying growing old but growing up, of finding our place in the world? How was it that those boys in Manchester, a thousand miles and more from my home, my peers, had managed to open their eyes wide and reach so far beyond the horizon? How come my comrades and I were instead so blind, all groping in our familiar damp and lukewarm darkness, so miserable wallowing in our loneliness, in our rooms with no exits, so lost and desperate in our suburbs – as grey as lead, and as grey as theirs?
There, I wanted to take a picture of how I felt, but it comes out all black.
Marco Pandin
stella_nera@tin.it
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