Celebrating the 40th ANNIVERSARY of LOVE WILL TEAR US APART by JOY DIVISION (June 27th 1980)
LOVE WILL TEAR US APART presented a pivotal moment in Joy Division’s career: the coming together of one-time punk outsiders who had done their time rehearsing and gigging and Martin Hannett, legendary producer who was key in arranging the song’s elements to spotlight Ian Curtis’s exacting but resigned baritone.
The result was a compelling and foreboding soundscape – a new rock music - that had a genesis in the post-industrial decay of urban Manchester.
On ‘Love will tear us apart’, out went Bernard’s jagged guitar riffs and in came graceful, sylphlike keyboards serving to ornament Peter Hook’s tranced bass line.
Hook: “[The song] came from the dirty streets of Salford. It’s a thing that I still wonder about: where does any music come from? The part of your brain when you write music that’s unconscious? It was written on the bass and drums and then Bernard put the keyboard on it.”
Many took Curtis’s lyrics to be a refection on his disintegrating marriage but he insisted that his songs were open to interpretation.
Listening again to the polar opposites that are non-album singles Transmission and Love will tear us apart, one might muse again on the tantalising and impossible mystery at the heart of Joy Division. In just three years, The Stiff Kittens became Warsaw became Joy Division, became a group, became artists, became two albums and five singles old, released a mere handful of songs, and disappeared.
Joy Division became a legend then a memory. The tragedy of this is not just personal - who knows what creative limits Joy Division would have reached had they remained?
Combining candour and timeless, meticulous song-writing, Love Will Tear Us Apart is much more than an eloquent epitaph and title inscribed on Ian’s gravestone.
When routine bites hard,
And ambitions are low,
And resentment rides high,
But emotions won't grow,
And we're changing our ways,
Taking different roads.
Then love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.
Why is the bedroom so cold?
You've turned away on your side.
Is my timing that flawed?
Our respect runs so dry.
Yet there's still this appeal
That we've kept through our lives.
But love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.
You cry out in your sleep,
All my failings exposed.
And there's a taste in my mouth,
As desperation takes hold.
Just that something so good
Just can't function no more.
But love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.
Love, love will tear us apart again.