It was 1987.
After a difficult breakup (one of those you can't shake; one of those that you wanted to break off, but when she
beat you to it, it was devastating), it had been a year of sad
Beach Boy songs and her songs
(Cocteau Twins' "Heaven or Las Vegas," The Cure's "Plainsong") dark days, rainy days (for a year it rained), those feel like you were dead days, ...and then, Kate. I knew that I was getting somewhere when she told me that I didn't
have to listen to Joy Division anymore. The truth of the matter was that
this had never occurred to me; one did not simply stop listening to Joy Division.
Listening to these seminal post-punk gods was my professional
responsibility as a writer, and, as a long-time self-imposed depressive, an obligation. Kate, so much younger at 19, shelved her depression with The
Smiths, you know, Depression Lite.
I first heard The Smiths' "Rubber Ring" when I was 18 years old. I was devastated by Morrissey's suggestion that "the most impassioned song to a lonely soul is so easily outgrown" and I
decided that I would never let that happen. I vowed that I would not forget
the songs that made me cry; indeed Joy Division was my rubber ring. They were the
ones I turned to during my bouts of misery and despair. There was a wry smirk
and a meta hint of self-awareness hiding in the undercurrents of Morrissey songs,
and The Cure always came with the risk of something blisteringly
mirthful ("Love Cats"), should one stray too far from Disintegration. But there was no joy to be found
anywhere in Joy Division's oeuvre. Beauty, yes. Even the most angry and angular
of early tracks like "Warsaw" and "No Love Lost" had a gorgeous, haunted
quality to them. Almost every lyric that Ian Curtis wrote expressed the
most brutal things that can happen to a brain and a soul with both precision
and poetry. And few songs will ever approach the aching perfection of "Atmosphere," with or without Teletubbies. All of that
Gothic beauty is relentless, though, and it started to wear on me.
