Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division (Love Will Tear Us Apart, Single – 1980)

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.

Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus (Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Single, 1979)

Used to brilliant effect in Tony Scott’s 1983 erotic vampire flick The Hunger Bauhaus’ performance of Bela Lugosi’s Dead features prominently in one of the most memorable opening scenes in film. This dirge has been called the first Gothic Rock record and, if not the first, it is certainly the most revered. I don’t remember the context in which I first heard it, but I do recall the effect it routinely had on the dance floor at The Bronx in the mid-‘80s. At 9 minutes 34 seconds, Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the Goth Stairway to Heaven. Just as then (and to this day) lanky haired sub-urban high school kids in tight jeans and Van Halen tour t-shirts dutifully slunk onto the floor for the Led Zepic, so too did (and to this day) the lanky haired sub-urban kids in eyeliner and black trench coats mope out of the shadows to take their place at the centre of the dance floor for the tribe’s compulsory act of religious observance.

There can be comfort in the repetition of ritual, but even for the most devout an overly lengthy sermon can become tedious, especially if you’re standing for the duration and moving as little as possible. In Stairway to Heaven the tempo change at about 5:30 both signals that you’ve more stairs below you than above (relief), but also demands that you speed up and do something suitably expressive, just when you’ve mastered the ergonomically efficient somnambulist shuffle of a couple reaching the end of a dance marathon (irritation). To be honest, I have yet to see someone make that 5:30 transition successfully and not end up looking like a flailing marionette in the hands of a drunken puppeteer – which seems to be what the Zep demands at this point in the song. There’s an analogous yet contrasting moment at about 7:40 in Bela Lugosi’s Dead, when even the band seems to have grown totally disinterested with this already minimalist dirge. Rather than pick things up a little and make a sprint for the finish, Bauhaus just kind of drop out, one by one. This poses a particular challenge from the observant Goths. Having, as a sub-culture, elevated the affectation of ennui to a high art, the dancers struggle to mask their genuine – and well earned – boredom. I’ve been on that dance floor in communion with the Goths and imagined them, heads down, eyes hidden under a cascade of jet black hair, questioning the Faustian bargain they’ve made with Peter Murphy, yearning for Stairway to Heaven’s comparatively early release at 8 minutes 2 seconds, and the option of refreshing with a nice tall Bloody Caesar rather than a more literal beverage.

Some twenty years later, I went to see Bauhaus live in Toronto. I stood in the back. I was flanked by women and men of my generation, most of whom had swapped knee high boots, corsets and lengthy leather coats for the simple elegance of black turtle necks, tapered pants or well tailored mini dresses. Expensive eyewear marked them as (to quote my friend Chris Wodskou) ‘the College Street Rapp Optical crowd’ and they wore shoes only nominally pointer than functionality would dictate. I concluded that the Gothic horde’s first wave had all grown up to become art directors, designers, architects, new media specialists and owners of boutiques that supplied furniture to the growing community of loft dwellers. Collectively, we remained as stationary as possible and slowly sipped our expensive Heinekens while the younger, more historically accurately attired, Goth kids surged forward as the show opened with Peter Murphy’s disembodied face appearing on a large TV wheeled to centre stage.

I realize now that, in almost perfect symmetry with the impossibly sophisticated and urbane characters played by Deneuve and Bowie in the opening scene of The Hunger, Tony Scott had foreshadowed our behaviour that night with chilling accuracy. Coldly observing the Goth kids from the back of that cinder block night club, we were exercising the only option available to us from our particular vantage. We weren’t there to experience our own vitality, but to feed on the vitality of others… younger others.

Just to prove to us that they fully understood the significant and requisite pain of the 7:40 moment, Bauhaus waited an agonizing twenty minutes before returning to the stage to play Bela Lugosi’s Dead as the encore. And those of us who had remained in the shadows had feet that ached exquisitely from a long night standing on the club’s hard concrete dance floor, only shifting periodically, ever so slightly, from side to side – the minimum necessary to keep our blood flowing and sustain the illusion of a pulse.

To Hell with Poverty! - Gang of Four (Another Day / Another Dollar, 1982)

It’s somewhat incredulous that I’ve managed to get so far into this protracted and spasmodic project without mentioning the film, Urgh! A Music War. Urgh!, which was released in ’81 or ’82, is an extraordinary snapshot of post-punk new wave scene in the UK and USA. The film documents concert performances – primarily in London, New York and LA – by over thirty acts. Some of them have had illustrious careers (The Police); others (Invisible Sex) would have remained anonymous but for their appearance in this infuriatingly difficult to access (legitimately) concert film; and one or two, most notably Klaus Nomi, are dead.

Coincidentally, when Klaus Nomi died in 1983 it was the first time in those intensely stigmatic early days of the pandemic that I recall hearing of a public figure dying of AIDS. The fact that Nomi was an androgynous countertenor who – when in full kabuki-like stage make up and dressed in two-tone vinyl with hair like a Kewpie in middle age and moving like a robotic Victorian porcelain doll – didn’t do much to challenge the media’s ‘gay plague’ hysteria that associated AIDS with all kinds of real and imagined homosexual degeneracy. It’s just occurring to me now, but there’s more than a little of Joel Grey’s Cabaret Emcee in Klaus Nomi. If the former is an icon of Weimar and the rise of Nazism, perhaps Nomi is a bellwether of life for the counterculture in the Reagan / Thatcher years. Nomi’s death was a shock to my 16 year old self and I will never forget the circumstances.

[I’m sure the books are already written, but if regular ‘duck and cover’ classroom exercises in anticipation of nuclear war profoundly marked the psyches of teens during the cold war era, then the spectre of AIDS in the early ‘80s was the threat that compounded the already complicated experience of adolescence for my generation.]

But I digress… Gang of Four was one of the groups featured in Urgh! Somehow I’ve managed to convince myself – erroneously it would appear – that To Hell with Poverty! was the song they performed in the film. It wasn’t, the song documented is He’d Send in the Army. What I did recall correctly and vividly is guitarist Andy Gill’s performance. He plays like he’s gripped by a sort of palsy; as if he’s just had a guitar thrust into his hands for the first time and been shoved out on stage to herk and jerk all over one of the most memorable, disciplined, funky baselines of the whole era. It’s pure genius.

Travel - Simple Minds (Empires & Dance, 1980)

The aforementioned 16 Candles was made by the American John Hughes who, in the period 1984-1986, wrote or directed a trilogy of seminal teen flicks starring the 80's geek muse Molly Ringwald. Sadly for Molly she suffered the fatal - and kind of ironic - mistake of 'peaking in high school' [this powerfully derisive phrase will take on greater and greater weight - and provoke a little pathos - as you age and encounter more and more of the 'popular' and 'athletic' kids at the Safeway check out, enduring the same cruel indignities that befall the rest of us].

On the subject of indignities... the soundtrack of the second in the Hughes triad, The Breakfast Club (1985), prominently features the saccharine Don't You Forget About Me, an absolutely dreadful and shameless attempt by Simple Minds to the grasp the elusive brass ring of US pop radio stardom via the silver screen. It worked spectacularly. The song was massive. However, fans of the pre-Breakfast Club Simple Minds who loved them for their 'originality' (or at least, as we invariably discovered retroactively, their unimpeachable good taste in conspicuous musical influences - Lou Reed, Kraftwerk, Neu!), ignored their entreaty with callous abandon and promptly forgot about them... with absolutely no deleterious effect on the band's considerable royalty cheques. Coincidentally, I graduated in the Class of 1985 and while I did see the Pretty in Pink in 1986, I never bought another Simple Minds album. I consider failure to separate one of the great plagues of the 20th century. Perhaps the only thing sadder than a middle aged man squeezing himself into his high school football jacket is a Harry Ainlay CHS '85 reunion playing Don't You Forget About Me as its last dance.

Twenty years on, while I remember both Hughes films and Simple Minds fondly, I mostly remember Molly Ringwald for having dated Adam Horowitz of The Beastie Boys and Dweezil Zappa, and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds for having married Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders and subsequently serial rockgamist Patsy Kensit.

In Between Days - The Cure (Head on the Door, 1985)

This one I associate less with a specific event or person, than with period of transition of which The Cure - and bands like them - were a part. I gave myself a bit of a 'makeover' in 1983. Gave up the jean jacket, feathered hair and wispy moustache, in favour of a somewhat 'cleaner' look. New Wave was well underway; I was mid-way through High School; and realizing the headbanger look wasn't working for me, but lacking the nerve to be a punk, I chose a middle ground (not the last time). The 80's were all about the floppy (foppish) forelock, paisley shirts, cardigans, desert boots, and all kinds of self-absorbed nonsense. If you are interested in better understanding the sub-urban Prairie experience of that era, watch the two great and harrowing documentaries of the period: Fast Times at Ridgemont High and 16 Candles.

Take the Skinheads Bowling - Camper van Beethoven (Telephone Free Landslide Victory, 1985)

I'm really not sure why I chose to put this on the CD. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that 'Take the Skinheads Bowling' appeared on a compilation published by the UK magazine Uncut in December 2005 called 'John Peel's Festive 15'. Listening to The Fall put me in mind of John Peel (Peel's favourite band) and... here we are. It's a silly song, but with the recurring image of skinheads in a bowling alley, it neatly lampoons the absurdity of being a bald headed racist in 18 hole Doc Martens, suspenders and a bomber jacket... in Southern California to boot. Anyway, to see how skinheads look bowling, there is, inevitably, a video on You Tube. Got big lanes... got big lanes... look the same... look the same.

How I Wrote 'Elastic Man' - The Fall (Grotesque, 1980)

Grotesque was (after Patrik Fitzgerald's Gifts & Telegrams) the greatest of Michael's Southgate Public Library discoveries. Easy to see why he couldn't resist the cover. Rapidly dubbed to cassette tape, Grotesque was the soundtrack for many late night adventures in Michael's Dad's Toyota Corolla. I can honestly say that, at the time, it was the strangest thing I'd ever heard, not least of which because of the snarling, lazy, almost spoken, vocals of Mark E. Smith (seen here in 1985). He hasn't aged especially well, competing with The Pogues Shane McGowan for the ravaged face of rock award.

The Fall were huge favourites of the hugely influential British DJ John Peel. Of course, we had absolutely no idea at the time, we just liked the cover and the nasty music. When Peel died in 2004, the BBC called in Mark E. Smith for an opinion. He wasn't especially helpful...

I had to wait until September of 1994 to see The Fall, in Vancouver at The Starfish Room. One surviving account from that night suggests he wasn't very helpful on that occasion either.