Roddy Woomble once said “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was Joy Division’s best single, if only because it’s the only one that captures the band’s live energy. I was four months when Ian Curtis killed himself, so I had to take Woomble’s word for it, but it certainly feels unusual – almost unique - within the band’s songs. This is one of those contrary takes wearying dickheads pretend are “unpopular”, or – heaven forfend! – “cancellable”, but I’ve never been able to get next to Joy Division. I don’t quibble with Peter Hook’s contention their music seemed to come from some other place. It just wasn’t a very enticing place, cold and distant and half-illuminated with polarised light. Extraordinary doesn’t have to mean engaging.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart”, together with equally late cuts “Atmosphere” and (so late Curtis was dead before it was recorded, and it came out as a New Order joint) “Ceremony”, represented the band moving into more interesting territory. Or, given the previous metaphor, perhaps I should say they represented a shift in how the band processed the territory they were already exploring. Songs about how it felt to traverse this strange, alien world, rather than terse reports about what it contained.
It’s not that this isn’t still minimalist (part of why it’s almost impossible to cover), though it wasn’t common to hear Curtis on guitar to free Sumner up for keys – the song is built around a D chord both because of its versatility and the ease with which Curtis could play it. But there’s an energy here that’s purposefully held back in the band’s two studio albums. A sense of release, as Curtis channels his disintegrating marriage, the stress of juggling new success and old commitments, and a recent epilepsy diagnosis into a piano-wire tight growl of exhausted desperation. The cliché contrast of how good/poor luck in life matters nothing compared to poor/good luck in love is rewritten to something much more interesting: “Everything is awful, but all that really matters is my marriage – which just so happens to
also be fucked”.
There are all sorts of offensively self-centred ways to link Curtis’ last months with the quality of the song. All of them we shall ignore. No song is so good it is worth a human life, and no band is so good them losing one among their number is primarily sad because the music stops. Instead of inferences, then, let’s stick to the one certainty we have in this: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. That should be - HAS to be - enough.
B-side:
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