An Update About My Joy Division Book

This blog has been mostly on hiatus for the past four (?) years because I have been focusing on writing my book, Tears in Their Eyes: Joy Division as Theological Lamentation. I am finally nearing completion and it’s about time to start creating some buzz about it. This book approaches pop music and theology from the bottom up, letting the music, history, and culture of Joy Division frame and present its own “crypto-religious” (to use Paul Elie’s term) concerns for the reader’s benefit. What the invested reader then does with those concerns, is up to them.

I’d originally chosen the main title “Don’t Walk Away”, which is from Joy Division’s monumental single “Atmosphere”. I thought it captured the cry of someone pleading to not be abandoned. And the Book of Lamentations is all about a person in the midst of societal ruin asking God to not abandon them. But as I attempted to interpret “Atmosphere” theologically as an analogy of the church abandoning people, I realized that the lyrics and the biblical text did not mesh as well as I’d hoped. So I had to (ironically) abandon that approach.

It was an 1980 interview with Bono that led me to the new main title. In the course of my research, I discovered that Joy Division was early U2’s greatest influence. This was when three-fourths of U2 were members of Shalom, an intense “para-church” that had doubts about the band’s secular aspirations. I ended up writing over eight thousand words about early U2, their faith journey, and their relation to Joy Division in what I dub “the Shalom Crisis”. Among the U2 biographies, commentaries, and Christian devotionals, no one has taken the time to critically examine the relationship between Joy Division and U2

In the interview, after talking about the death of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who U2 had met during the recording of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Bono talks about other bands in the post-punk scene. He isn’t impressed with Magazine, which was Howard Devoto’s band after he left Buzzcocks. Bono says that “They lose out in terms of emotion, in terms of that sort of ‘tears in their eyes’, but they had something there.” Bono is quoting the frantically repeated last line of Joy Division’s “Wilderness”, which is a caustic takedown of the church. I realized that “tears in their eyes” was much more encapsulating of my project.

U2’s chapter is juxtaposed to a chapter on photographer/film maker Anton Corbijn, born into a family of Reformed pastors, who upon hearing Unknown Pleasures left Amsterdam for Manchester to photograph the band. The chapter also explains how “Atmosphere” was posthumously transformed into a dirge. U2 wanted Corbijn to be their photographer after seeing his iconic work with Joy Division. Corbijn would go on to direct both the video for “Atmosphere” and the Curtis biopic Control. His religious background is constantly in his photographic mind, especially in his portraiture. Just don’t call it “iconic”. He hates that.

Right now, I am working on a chapter of the indirect influence of Joy Division upon communal encounters with the Divine. My three topics are Manchester music promoter (and Nico’s manager in her later years) Alan Wise, England’s most famous dance club The Haçienda, and the Manchester Passion, which BBC3 broadcast live on Good Friday in 2006. It’s less about Joy Division and more about how the band has been used for other people’s visions. It’s also to demonstrate that I am not forcing this religious understanding of Joy Division, but that Mancunians, themselves, have done this decades before I have.

What I do is look at Manchester’s post-World War II religious context, especially during the blight in the 1970s and 80s. Within that I assemble the religious biographies of the members of Joy Division and Factory Records. I also appraise Closer‘s cover image of a Good Friday scene, the women mourning the dead Christ. From there, I analyze the overtly religious lyrics in “Wilderness”, “Passover”, and “Colony” and based upon that, frame “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Atmosphere” with the disintegration of the relationship between the believer and God and the believer and the church, respectfully. What I hope to convey is that Joy Division has always had a theologically lament aspect. No one has taken the time to examine it.

My final chapter is my own spin on all of this. I explain how Joy Division’s music can serve as a soundtrack (dare I say hymnal) for lamentation in a time of increasing secularization and disillusion with religious institutions. U2 demonstrated on just their second album how this was possible. Resisting the beatification of Ian Curtis, who was no saint, we can still appreciate his personal “deconstruction” as his theological world collapsed. Furthermore, I emphasize the cathartic role sad songs play to comfort and edify us at our lowest, much like the Psalms and other biblical texts can do. Through lamentation about God, the church, and our selves, we can better understand in our world the absence and presence of God through both fear and trembling.

Yes, this is all very niche and very subcultural. But if you’re into post-punk and religion, then this book is probably for you. Please understand that this is not an evangelical – or even exvangelical – take, if that means anything. But it is for those theologically disenchanted of a particular bent.

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