November 23rd, 2007Teenage utopias
Pop isn’t a lost golden age, writes Guy Rundle, but onehas to miss its heroic innocence.
SHOT IN BLACK AND white, with grey, low skies and litter-blownstreets, Macclesfield, satellite city of Manchester, has neverlooked as good as it does in Control, Anton Corbijn’s filmof the life, death and rebirth of Joy Division, that almostincomparably mythical band of the late ’70s, and its doomedauto-destructive singer Ian Curtis. Today, vastly more of the musicmade by the members of Joy Division is known through its successorband, New Order, whether it’s the chain-store coffee shop standardBlue Monday, or the thundering instrumental adopted as thetheme music for Sports Tonight, but much of the legendcomes from the two albums the earlier band produced - simplisticbuzz-saw guitar songs, re-imagined with the austere, spacey timbreof Kraftwerk. That contrary move made them the quintessential, thelast expression of punk, achieved by drawing in everything -egghead electronic avant-guardisme - usually taken as its anathema.It was the sort of bold move of sufficient force to spark aquasi-religious devotion in many of those it touched.
It was certainly so for Corbijn, in the late ’70s a photographerwho became so obsessed by the group’s music that he moved from theNetherlands to be their official chronicler - has gained ravereviews at Cannes, not only for its cool visual style, but alsobecause it tapped into the youth, or pre-history, of so many of thejournalists and filmmakers there. Joy Division have been caught onfilm before, but though the first outing - Michael Winterbottom’s24 Hour Party People - initially impressed people, iteventually irritated by its whimsical approach to a period and theplace where something was palpably happening. Control isat the other extreme, less a film than a veronica, a holy relicbearing the imprint of divinity. Yet watching it, hearing thatmusic again, in all its grim seriousness, one is struck by howtuneful it is. Among the more resistant efforts there are tuneslike Atmosphere and the incomparable Love Will Tear UsApart, whose austere nightmarish quality cannot hide the factthat beneath the thudding bass and affectless guitar is a sweetsong whose quality is, well, pop.
At the same time as the grim northern streets of the North wereplaying on La Croisette, another pop nightmare was being played outin Los Angeles, where the trial for murder of the visionary,reclusive record producer Phil Spector has ended in a hung juryand, at time of writing, the promise of a retrial. Spector, theinventor of the ‘Wall of Sound’ style of girl groups and thicklayers of instrumentation that became part of the aural backgroundof the 20th century, was accused of shooting a B-movie actress whoaccompanied him back to his bizarre mock castle in the suburbs.Spector, who has a history of pulling guns on people in tensemoments, has claimed that the woman grabbed his gun and committedsuicide - but even if a new jury believes that it’s fair to saythat the music is unlikely to survive it unscathed.
