Joy Division - Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979
(NMC)
Hearing Joy Division live may challenge any assumptions you have about the
band. Though they have been appropriated by pasty-faced cry babies
because of the unfortunately titled "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again"
and pioneering use of cemetery photography, their live recordings strip
away the weak goth pretensions that have attached to their music. What
is heard on these recordings is not a feeble, suffering band, but a
raging one.
This record is the second Joy Division release from the Fractured Music
Archive, following 1999's Preston 28 February 1980, despite the
fact that the tracks on this one actually predate those of the first
record. It was wisdom, though, to release the Preston gig first because
it's inferior quality is both a greater shock to the cult of Joy Division
and an incredible document of a band playing just another show.
Preston is muddled, and the show was fraught with technical
difficulties; the set was made up of more atmospheric songs, which
did not come across well on the recording. But it sounds like what
Joy Division would have sounding like live. Les Bains Douches,
by contrast, has a clear recording and is evenly mixed (the first nine
tracks are taken from a recording for a radio broadcast of the December
'79 gig--tracks 10-16 are taken from two shows in Amsterdam from January
'80, and sound a bit less clear). The band sounds more together and the
songs are aggressive, better suited to a live setting.
These songs are nothing if not tough. Everything is sped up. It's loose
and raw. There is a primal passion in the music that matches the
intensity of Ian Curtis' singing. On "Disorder," when he cries,
"I got the spirit, lose the feeling, let it out somehow," it is not
sterile and haunted like it is on Unknown Pleasures but has
the kick of man who is exorcising something un-namable. On "Insight,"
after Curtis barks "I'm not afraid anymore," and that cheesy laser beam
keyboard part kicks in, it's not really cheesy. The rapid synth pings
are coupled with a prominent, dissonant base riff which creates an
off-balance, atonal kind of noise, which is equally appropriate and
disorienting. "Shadowplay" explodes with a huge burst of guitar
distortion, and Bernard Sumner's guitar licks are racked with tension.
He likewise generates a terrible amount of noise on "Day of the Lords."
There are an awful lot of Joy Division releases that depend on a fairly
limited number of songs. The band was only active for a few years and
generated a mere two albums and handful of singles. Yet they occupy a
large stretch of space in my collection. Like many of the bands of that
era, they were inspired by the economy and energy of punk, but, as that
particular flame burnt itself out too quickly and with too few colors,
they sought a more vibrant, varied, and complex mode of expression.
The music being created in the wake was rich and textured, as far as
pop music goes, and thus practice sessions, radio shows, live recordings,
and studio versions all have their own particular feeling. Les Bains
Douches 18 December 1979 gives us an idea of what Joy Division
sounded like on that particular day, as opposed to how they sounded
later in the studio with Martin Hannett. But it takes both to
understand, twenty plus years down the road, what Joy Division
really was.
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