I can’t help myself. I love countdown shows. I suppose it started with Jimmy Savile running through the weekly chart on Top of the Pops. Thursday nights throughout summers in the ‘70’s, cross legged in front of my grandparents little black and white TV, enduring a running commentary from Johnny Baker, voicing his disapproval at the parade of ‘poofters and queers’ (Ziggy-era Bowie) and ‘bloody nonsense’ (Elton John, et al). Nevertheless, he sat through TOTP with us pretty regularly, waiting for his dinner and the promise of seeing Pan’s People frolicking in something provocative. I’ll never forget seeing The Specials performing Ghost Town when the song hit #1 in the summer of 1981. Jeremy Vine, producer of the BBC radio documentary Stand Down Margaret: Music’s Response to Thatcherism quite rightly identifies this performance as a high point in British pop – an injection of irrepressible sobriety into a program that more typically deflected rather than reflected the (literally) burning issues of the day.From there it got a little bit obsessive. Duo-Tangs filled with chart paper where the rise, fall and occasional resurrection of various songs were plotted according to 630 CHED’s playlists posted in The Edmonton Journal. Graduating from the singles oriented CHED to the heavier ‘album rock’ format of K-97, the habit continued, but far more anticipated than the weekly top twenty was the annual new year’s eve countdown of the top 97 songs of the year, as voted by ‘you the listener’. Here, once a year, the crass commercial measure of weekly sales was tempered by the great weight of the hammer wielded by the classic rock gods. Certainly the year’s strongest releases would find their place in the list, but they would be scattered throughout or, more often than not, clustered near the bottom. Once filtered through the listenership’s (albeit limited and highly selective) collective consciousness, it was pretty rare for a new artist to crack the top twenty, which was typically the preserve of the foremost in the pantheon of rock. The outcome was highly predictable, free of upsets, and characterized at the top end by only small adjustments to the previous year’s ranking. Not a whiff of revisionism or even significant reassessment, the annual countdown was (and remains) a profoundly conservative affair, a recitation of sorts, primarily intended to prescribe the listening for the tribe and the songs that would bind them. In retrospect, it was an obvious case of defining the canonical. The term may have been foreign to me at the time, but the concept rang as loud and clear as Hell’s Bells.
As the ‘80’s progressed, musical curiosity led me into an eclecticism from which I hope never to escape. To this day I own with pride and affection the feelings I had for the albums and bands that excited me in my mid- teens. However, I rapidly reached a tipping point past which my tastes would never find their full expression in the Top 97 on K-97.
I gave up on the charts and the countdowns for a while. There seemed to be something irreconcilable about actively seeking out the marginal, novel and unique on the one hand and engaging in the kind of culture by plebiscite that the countdowns seemed to epitomize. Of course, all I and my cohort were doing was cultivating a whole set of common musical reference points that we too, inevitably, would order into our own distinct, but equally predictable, canon. All of which leads me to December 1989 and the apotheosis of countdowns.
For some it was the Christmas holidays. For me, it was the Saturday before New Year’s Eve, school was starting again in two days, and it was time to really buckle down and finish that history paper that was overdue by two weeks and suffering death by a thousand cuts, with marks deducted every day over the deadline. Convinced – though with abundant evidence to the contrary – that I did my best writing on the Mac in my Mum’s office, assisted by a two-litre bottle of soda water, a large bag of peanut M&Ms and a pouch of Drum mild tobacco, I set out mid-evening to confront the blank screen and blinking cursor. The office was in a bungalow in Garneau. Along with a kitchen well stocked with coffee and Selfridge pottery, the place was equipped with a more than passable stereo. CBC radio had long been part of my ‘scholarly’ routine. I would gauge the available hours remained before deadline and delivery against my progress through the late night and overnight broadcast schedule, punctuated by the hourly news. I settled in and turned on the radio. What I hadn’t realized was that (the much lamented) David Wisdom was conducting a ‘best of the 1980’s’ countdown on (the equally lamented) Nightlines. I was joining the program very late in the game… somewhere in the late-teens as I recall. It became apparent very quickly that this show was not unfolding like any other I had heard in this all too familiar format. It was all ‘Kiss Me on the Bus’ and ‘Radio Free Europe’ with nary a ‘Smoke on the Water’ or ‘Born to be Wild’ to be found. As the countdown continued I found myself becoming more and more anxious. I was reassured by what I was hearing. However, not having listened from the beginning, I could neither confirm that my favourites had already found a place further down the list, nor could I be 100% confident that they merited a high finish. When Wisdom got down to the top five and I heard ‘London Calling’ and ‘How Soon Is Now?’ I found myself in a near panic about one song in particular. I honestly can’t recall which songs finished #2 and #3. All I remember is the incredible sense of elation I felt when I heard the unmistakable opening bars of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in the #1 slot.
I realize that I have told you virtually nothing about Love Will Tear Us Apart or Joy Division. At the same time, by stating unequivocally that this is my #1 song of the last 42 years, I think I’m probably telling you everything you need to know about this track.
There is an extraordinary segment in Grant Gee’s 2007 Joy Division documentary where the surviving members of the band confess to having been largely oblivious to the content of Ian Curtis’s lyrics prior to his suicide. It’s a brutally honest admission about the dynamics between the singer/lyricist and his/her band mates (which may be more universal in popular music than we might want to believe). From the perspective of the fan who hangs off every word, it’s incredulous that anyone could miss them, but I suppose that’s a lesser crime than hearing the lyric and remaining indifferent to their message. Ian Curtis wrote the words to Love Will Tear Us Apart when he was just 22 years old, but they are laden with the world weariness of a man twice that age. It’s post-punk Macclesfield’s answer to the Delta Blues. I think it’s unmatched in popular music for what it says about the solitude of the failing relationship. Of course, the irony in all of this is that it is impossible to imagine any other musical setting. Given the band’s confessed lack of sensitivity to Curtis’s self-eviscerating lyrics this probably says more about the guiding hand of genius producer Martin Hannett than some sort of mysterious pseudo-Jungian expression of a collective unconscious.
Regardless, I don’t believe this version can be improved upon. Nevertheless, predictably and justifiably, iTunes is loaded with versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart, many of them by artists I respect deeply. It’s a measure of the potency of Joy Division’s original that all these covers – without exception – are unlistenable.
