Unknown Pleasures.

This is not a review.

What is pleasure without it being known? Oxymoronic?

The first relationship that I am going to look at is between Peter Saville's cover for Unknown Pleasures(1979) and Joy Division. This artwork was the only instance in the working relationship where the band gave Saville something to work with as opposed to Saville having carte blanche with the design. Rob Gretten the manager of the band, gave Saville a folder of material to work with.

Not only was this the first time that the band had given material, they had also given the title. The now famous wave image on the cover had come  from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy; something that, until researched I did not know. From CP 1919, it was the first pulsar*. It's imaginable that the linear  sketch came from Jodrell Bank**,the centre for astrophysics which is local to Joy Division and Manchester. At the time that Saville had been given this job, he was moving  from Manchester to London, which in a sense has an attatchment to this as perhaps the waves also suggest a sort of journey from one place to the next, the lines are directional and they also have a sense of time, which again relates to the thought of some sort of journey. 

Many observers of this album cover I'm sure will also not be aware of where it  came from, leading them to question what it is and what it means. Personally, when I first saw the image I thought that it was mountains. On reading the title and looking at this artwork, it made me question more. 

Perhaps it was a pulse of blood circulation at some place in the body? A heartbeat? Showing emotion through the jittered lines. 

Joy Devision and New Order are both recognised for is a post-punk feel. The melodies of many songs are repeated over and over again. This is very similar to this album cover. The thin lines are simple and repeated, layered on top of one another. The lines give a cold impersonal impact. Along with the monochromatic theme, which seems to be a re-occuring pattern through much of New Order and Joy Division's photo shoots and artworks produced by Saville, all reflect a certain bleakness. I might put this down to essentialism - the sound that the band's needed to play at this point is perhaps mirrored in the cover's artwork and its depiction of repetitive yet simple line.

Unknown Pleasures - Disorder

  

"It's both technical and sensual. it's tight like Stephen Morris' drumming, but it's also fluid: lots of people think it's a heartbeat. Having the title on the front just didn't seem necessary. I asked Rob about it and between us, we felt it wasn't a cool thing to do. It was the post- punk moment and we were against stardom. The band didn't want to be popstars." - Peter Saville quoted in the Guardian (29.5.2011)

Both New Order and Joy Division had a minimal sound. The same band - just an Ian Curtis down after Joy Division's lead singers suicide in 1980.

The sound and the artwork both reflect a kind of Northern, Manchester, black and white, bleak world. Along with other post-punk bands, the image reflected how young people felt under the Thatcher Government of the day; mass unemployment, strikes and civil unrest echoed the Sex Pistol's late 1970's epitaph of 'No Future'.


 *Pulsar - " A Pulsar is a highly magnetised , rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation" This kind of radiation can only be seen when a beam of emission is pointing towards earth.Neutron stars are extremely dense and they have short rotational periods, this makes a precise break between pulses that range from millisecond to seconds, for each individual pulsar. 

"Observations of a pulsar in a binary neutron star system were used to indirectly confirm the existence of gravitational radiation. The first extrasolar planets were discovered around a pulsar,PSR B1257+12." 

I think that this image could represent the existence of something new. A new band with a new sound.

The Jodrell Bank Observatory - A british observatory which holds a number of radio telescopes at the university of Manchester. An observatory is a place used to watch terrestrial or astronomical phenomenon. (celestial events) Examples being the moon, comets and meteor showers. 

24 Hour Party People. 

24 Hour Party People is a film about the popular music scene , set in Manchester from 1976 -1992 and tells the story of Factory Records. The film starts with the punk-rock era , it goes through the 1980's and into the early 1990's. The films main character is Tony Wilson the record label owner (played by Steve Coogan), a news reporter for Granada television and the head of factory records. The film goes along the story of Tony Wilson's career really, following some of the major factory artists such as Joy Division and New Order. The film is subtext, it's the North, in particular,  Manchester,  a  black and white, bleak world. Arguably the right place and the right time for Factory records to happen. 

"The film is a dramatisation based on a combination of real events, rumours, urban legends, and the imaginings of the scriptwriter - as the film makes clear. In one scene, one-time Buzzcocks member Howard Devoto, played by Martin Hancock, is shown having sex with Wilson's first wife in the toilets of a club; the real Devoto, an extra in the scene, turns to the camera and says "I definitely don't remember this happening". Thefourth wall is frequently broken, with Wilson (who also acts as the narrator) frequently commenting on events directly to camera as they occur, at one point declaring that he is "being postmodern, before it's fashionable". The actors are often intercut with real contemporary concert footage, including the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade " ( wikipedia) 

The way that the film has been recorded gives it a very nostalgic feel. We can see in the imagery above that the camera that has been used to take these pictures is either and old camera or an effect has been put on top of the images to give them a kind of grainy look.They do not look high definition as most cameras are today. The original images have also been  written on top with the words, " Genius, Poet" and "twat" have been hand illustrated. The word "Genius" looks like it has just been scribbled on with biro pen, which gives the image a hand-drawn appearance. This almost fits with the word that has been written, as some people establish "genius'" to be in some way a little eccentric refers to Howard Devoto. The word "poet" has been written in  neon pink and sunshine yellow ,  suggests to me some kind of psychedelic  feel, and refers to Shaun Ryder (singer with the Happy Mondays)  and linking to the music of The Happy Mondays and drug culture of the time. Arguably, the bands exploration of Factory Records ( including drug use) was instrumental in the downfall of the label. And "twat" refers to Tony Wilson. 




contextualise - how it relates to art of the period - ie minimalism - formalistic, basic structure, reduced, abstract, repetitive