why we don't hear the city in Siouxsie & the Banshees

Currently I'm revising and expanding an essay I posted here a year ago, about how Joy Division came to sound like Manchester, to present at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference next month. The artistic connection between Joy Division and their city of origin is clear and powerful for many listeners, but my argument is that the connection isn't necessarily immanent in the band's sonics or biography, nor was it the primary way to understand the band during their brief existence. "Hearing Manchester" in the music of Joy Division is really an aesthetic sensibility that developed well past the band's brief existence, through specific interventions by journalists, photographers, music industry empresarios, filmmakers, analysts, cultural institutions, city boosters, and place marketers.

I'm still working out some of the finer points, but the goal is to destabilize the conventional geographical focus on Joy Division and shed light on the ways that listeners find meaning in the 'placeness' of this influential band. To underscore how historically contingent this way of listening is, it's useful to apply it to another group from the same era that we don't usually associate with place at all: Siouxsie & the Banshees. Sure, go ahead and laugh—I'll admit this thought experiment is also an excuse to write about another postpunk group I equally adore—but also ask yourself why we don't snicker with skepticism when Joy Division is the focus of this aesthetic sensibility.

Placing the Banshees in pop-music history

STEVE SEVERIN: The start of '81 was a weird time in music because a lot of the old guard had fallen away or changed. The Pistols had finished and John Lydon had formed Public Image, The Clash were in America, and even post-punk acts like Joy Division had split. I remember Joy division's Closer coming out the same week as [the Banshees' third album] Kaleidoscope, just as their debut had come out the same week as Join Hands [the Banshees' second album]. It was as if they were always one album behind. People used to say that bands like Public Image, Joy Division, even The Cure were ripping us off, but I preferred to think they were having the same ideas as us but just a bit later. Maybe that's being a little generous, but I did feel they were kindred spirits to some extent (pg. 105).

For about five hot years between 1978 and 1983 Siouxsie & the Banshees were at the center of British pop music. During that time they gigged incessantly across Britain and Europe; they regularly topped readers' and critics' polls in the British music weeklies; and their videos and appearances on TV shows like Top of the Pops inspired a whole generation of youth, girls and boys alike, to reinvent themselves, their appearance and their purpose. Around 1983, as the Smiths presided over an austere indie tide in British pop music, the Banshees made small but steady inroads in the U.S. as a regular presence on MTV's 120 Minutes, culminating in their prominent billing on the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991.

You don't hear much about the Banshees anymore, it seems. It's possible that many alternative-music fans born after 1975 know nothing at all about them. Singer Siouxsie Sioux is invariably mentioned in British clip shows on women in rock, and she or bassist Steve Severin are often interviewed about their role in the beginning of British punk rock's explosion. However, the group has no serious critical biography (all the quotes in this essay come from Mark Paytress's 2003 Siouxsie & the Banshees: The Authorised Biography unless otherwise indicated) or substantial documentary (instead, there's no-budget material like this) befitting their massive influence in popular culture in Britain and elsewhere.

Nowadays their career is often reduced to a single achievement, "the original Goth band," as was the case in Simon Reynolds' otherwise excellent history, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. Possibly their post-punk bona fides are overlooked because the Banshees are more commonly associated with the moment of punk. As it's well known, Siouxsie and Severin were right there on Bill Grundy's "Today" show in 1976 when the Sex Pistols' volley of expletives made them overnight scandals, and the Banshees played their first gig in 1977, clad in punk-era swastikas with a young Sid Vicious on drums. But this chronology overlooks the Banshees' swift move away from punk's barre-chord traditionalism by the time their first recordings came out a whole year later: the pop burst of August 1978's "Hong Kong Garden" and the expressionist anthems of their debut album The Scream three months later. (Note the almost coincidental releases of the 'original' postpunk group Public Image Limited: the "Public Image" single came out in October 1978, and the debut album First Issue was released in December.)

With today's interest in "independent" rock, the Banshees may be further overlooked because they signed on to a major label, as did all of the first-wave NYC and British punk groups. Of course, so too did other postpunk icons like PiL, Gang of Four and Wire. Extremely wary of heeding record-label expectations, the Banshees were nonetheless inspired by the giddy cultural seige of 70s glitter rockers like Bowie, Bolan and Roxy Music.

SIOUXSIE SIOUX: Steven [Severin] was one of the first straight guys I'd met in a long time. He seemed like a fellow outsider. He wasn't macho, or scared by my directeness, and he didn't think my humour sick. Music was our strongest connection, especially Bowie, though I'd been more into things like Brass Construction and a lot of imported American dance music, because that was the stuff that was big in the clubs. Steve and Simon [Barker, another friend] liked a lot of that, too, but they were definitely responsible for broadening my tastes. I'd never heard Velvet Underground before—probably because I never read the music press, which seemed to be a boy thing—so he and Simon played some for me. When I heard Iggy Pop for the first time, I remember feeling outraged that an artist like that had been denied access to Top Of The Pops or the radio. "Shake Appeal" should have been a Top 10 hit! Later on, when we started making music, I thought it was stupid not [to] be on Top Of The Pops. I thought, "You're depriving people and not changing things" (pg. 29).

Maybe we forget the Banshees these days simply because it's difficult to name a quintessential Banshees album. I'd say The Scream is their most consistently excellent, but the Banshees aren't one of those groups whose oeuvre can be seen as elaborating the project established by a programmatic debut album, as it could be argued for greats like the Doors, the Ramones, or the Pretenders. (Of late, my favorite Banshees album has alternated between Juju and A Kiss In The Dreamhouse.) Yet there's something wrong about foisting the expectations of an "album band" upon the Banshees. Their breadth is maybe best captured on their singles—not just the typically great A-sides collected on 1981's Once Upon a Time (probably the best starting point for any newcomer), but also their wildly unpredictable B-sides (compiled on the 2004 box set Downside Up, a must for any Banshees fan).

Really, is there even a singular Banshees' sound? So many musicians cycled through the group, even in their early years, that there are few constants besides Sioux's voice (which developed from an untrained staccato yelp to yield quite sonorous tones when she so chose) and Severin's bass. Speaking of which, talk about a post-punk sound—by the very first recordings, Severin's throbbing basslines set the precedent for the signature front-and-center picking style Peter Hook developed with Joy Division around the same time. If most listeners today can't identify a Severin style as memorable as Hook's, it's probably because the bass never consistently dominated the tonal range in the Banshees as much as it did in the more minimalist mix of Joy Division. (In any case, Severin and Hook remain essential touchstones to any "goth" style of bass-guitar playing.) Indeed, in their first ten years of recordings, the Banshees were very much a maximalist guitar-based band. They made "big music, dead loud on stage" as occasional member Robert Smith recalled, or (I always liked this one) "banshee metal" in the words of an NME review of 1984's live Nocturne coined it. But Banshee fans could expect a wide range of dynamics from the band's different guitarists (John McKay's minor-key chordings, John McGeoch's flanged jangles) and drummers (Kenny Morris' cymballess stomp, Budgie's polyrhythms).

In any case, if you want to talk about "post-punk" in either an objectively chronological sense (i.e., musicians whose careers took off after punk's "year zero") or as generic criteria (i.e., rock musicians who explored the artistic openings made by punk's rejection of rock convention), the Banshees are right up there in the canon. Their musical and sartorial developments between 1978-84 years were as rapid and exciting as any band of the time. The fact that Britain could follow them in the pop radio and TV as well as record store, music weekly or nightclub made their impact all the greater.

Placing the Banshees in British geography

If you consider yourself well versed in the Banshees, then try thinking of an archetypal urban setting for the Banshees—a city landscape, street scene, or geographical landmark associated with the Banshees as depicted in song, photos, film, press materials or other visual media. Okay, maybe you thought of the ancient Pompeii described in "Cities in Dust" or the Venice backdrop shown in the "Dear Prudence" video, but what about a British setting that inserts the Banshees in or around their place of origin, the way a dozen iconic images show Joy Division on a snowy Epping Walk, in the tube station, against the exposed brick of their rehearsal space, etc.? That's not so easy.

Thanks to traditional punk histories, everyone knows where the Banshees are from: they're from the South London suburbs, as part of the "Bromley Contingent" that gave the Pistols their first genuinely subcultural fan following. True, Sioux herself actually lived in Chislehurst three miles away, and the Bromley Contingent tag was coined by journalist Caroline Coon while observing the Pistols and entourage at a Paris date, but fair enough—they hailed from London's geographical and cultural margins, where sticking out came easily for fearless, dissatisfied youth. Just as importantly, from there it was easy to travel to the city center, the journey itself being quite a subcultural ritual.

SIOUX: I was there [at a sold-out 20 September 1975 Roxy Music show at Wembly Arena] on my own, which wasn't unusual for me. I was quite independent. I didn't have people to go to gigs with, so I'd often trek off on my own. I got dressed in a purple-and-green outfit, with a huge fishtail-like bustle, got the bus to the train station, sat on the platform, perched myself in the train carriage and then traipsed across London. The dress must have been used in some vaudeville costume drama, but it seemed quite normal to me. I used to enjoy people staring at me and then me turning my nose up at them.


SEVERIN: I had a blond quiff, a tartan jacket, black drainpipes and platform shoes with shite crepe soles and black patent leather uppers which had two stripes, Adidas-style. i think that's why Sioux said to me, "You look very sporty." Fashion was very important. It gave you a sense of belonging, of being outside of everything, and at the same time being with your own gang. I went with my friend Simon Barker.


SIMON BARKER (friend): I'd actually met Sioux some time before the Roxy concert. Even then, I couldn't believe how amazing she looked. Her hair was in a really extreme cut, with colours dyed into it. Some people might think "Sioux" was an invention, but she's always looked incredible. She was a star before she'd sung a note.'


SIOUX: That was on Bromley South platform. I was coming back form London on the train and I'd bumped into a couple of school friends, Gillian and Patricia. Simon was with them, and though we didn't swap numbers we did remember each other.


SIMON BARKER: People say suburbia is suffocating, but we thought what we were doing was great. It was everybody else that was a bit boring. And we were so close to London, 20 minutes on the train, so we went to all the major gigs. It wasn't a big deal. Bromely is a middle-class suburb, and, while we'd get a bit of abuse from people, I can't say we felt intimidated. We just did what we wanted to do. When you're living in Bromley, it's not that dificult to break out of it. It wasn't some council estate in Hull. We saw The New York Dolls in Biba: we wouldn't have been able to have done that had we not been living close to London (pp. 28-9).

Neighborhoods and metropolitan distance within the metropolitan London area are of course significant bases of identity and community for Londoners. As these quotes suggest, Sioux and Severin were particularly invested in rejecting the straightlaced mainstream traditions they associated with their suburban origins; at least for these two Banshees, the central London of punk's ground zero provided the symbol and locus for their subcultural transformations. (As Paul Du Noyer write in In the City: A Celebration of London Music, "personal reinvention... seems to be what suburban pop is all about.") However, the Bromley Contingent's well-known history unfolded before the Banshees played a single note, possibly before British punk even had a name. ("I didn't like being called the Bromley Contingent," Sioux told Jon Savage [in The England's Dreaming Tapes, pg. 341]. "It was the beginning of the labels, really. It was nicer when it confused people.")

If it's unfair to consign the Banshees' music to Sioux and Severin's pre-band place and time, fast forwarding to the band's rapid ascent finds them in central London, where they worked through a succession of early musicians: fellow Contingent-eers Marco Pirroni from the North London suburb Harrow and Sid Vicious (né John Ritchie) from Hackney, the mysterious Pete Fenton, and finally, cementing the original line-up, the art-school hangers-on Kenny Morris (from Essex) and John McKay. Eventually central London became the band's residential base.

SIOUX: We were all living in fairly dodgy flats, usually around the Maida Vale area because Nils [Stevenson, the band's manager] had a place there. I was living in a flat in Croxley Road, Queen's Park, in West London. I called it Crocodile Road. It was a furnished one-bedroom flat with an electric meter that you had to pump 50 pences into. It cost 30 quid a week or something. We were having hit singles and top-selling albums and we were still living in these shitty little flats, but we weren't complaining (pg. 119).

The Clash might have composed a "Garageland" from such a geographical profile, but not the Banshees. How then does London as geography and place surface in their career? To begin, there's the fact that the Banshees picked up members who hailed from across the metropolis, which might make intrametro commonalities difficult to establish within the group. Especially once non-Londoners like Budgie (from Liverpool) and John McGeoch (from Scotland but with previous stints in London and Manchester) joined the group, the broad geographical category 'London' probably sufficed for all intents and purposes to locate the band in the subcultural and mainstream imagination. Furthermore, the historic pull and circulation of non-Londoners to London—in the Banshees' case, the fact that they could draw members from such a broad pool of musical talent—is further indication the city's geographic centrality within the U.K.

To underscore this geographical context for the Banshees' rise, compare it with Joy Division's emergence in Manchester. Like the Banshees, they too had a metropolitan relationship to 'their city'. Macclesfield (where Ian Curtis and Steven Morris came from when they joined the band) and Salford (for Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner) are some 20 miles apart, but it was in dingy central Manchester where they came together, rehearsed, performed and found common cause. (The conventions of JD criticism now compel me to quote "Shadowplay":"To the centre of the city where all roads meet/Waiting for you...")

Unlike the Banshees, however, Joy Division had the benefit of maintaining a stable line-up (at least after Steven Morris, their second or third drummer, joined the band), and a geographically parochial one as well. The experience of spatial displacement appears to have influenced the band's musical project (in particular, Sumner has talked about the sense of trauma he felt from his family's forced relocation to urban renewal towerblocks), but their biographical horizons seem to have been circumscribed to the Manchester region. With no backgrounds of immigration, higher education, extensive travel or other geographically complicating factors in their lives, the identification of the band members with Manchester can proceed fairly easily, at least retrospectively. (Ever wonder what would have become of Joy Division's legacy if Ian Curtis had lived on to move to New York City or Berlin?)

We should also acknowledge how the salience of geography in Joy Division's career has been fostered by Mancunians' long tradition of city advocacy and rivalry, particularly vis-a-vis London. In the punk/post-punk era under examination here, this would have been expressed as a lot of DIY activity "making a virtue out of a necessity" (as Dave Haslam writes in Manchester, England: The Story of a Pop Cult City) due to the music industry/media's concentration in London. We can credit this Mancunian boosterism (a motivating principle for Factory Records/JD manager Tony Wilson) for much of our interest in 'hearing Manchester' in the music of Joy Division. If the same sensibility seems contrived where the Banshees are concerned, that says something about London's social and cultural dominance as the unmarked 'city in your head' of the British cultural imaginary.

The urban ethos of Siouxsie & the Banshees

To return to an earlier question, in contrast to the iconography of Joy Division, why are there no famous images of Sioux et al. shown in their "native" London streets and so on? There's the legendary graffitti "SIGN THE BANSHEES, DO IT NOW" scrawled by zealous fans outside London record company buildings (I couldn't find any images of it online), but significantly this urban intervention happened before the Banshees' first proper recordings. Once they got signed, the massive body of Banshees imagery—documentary and promotional, generated by the band, their label, the music press and fans—characteristically avoids or obscures urban context of any kind. See for yourself and browse the extensive Banshees photo archive compiled by Peter Routley, from which I've borrowed the few "urban" pictures in this post. Visual images and associations of the band are usually interior and/or set at mid-range to close-up so as to exclude bystanders or (when the band is shown outside) identifying backdrop from view. It's interesting to think about why there's so little 'real place' surrounding the Banshees' music and visuals.

One reason stems from the fact that the Banshees were generally uninterested in any kind of social realism. Typical auto-didacts for the punk era, the band members acknowledged reading then-contemporary authors like William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess, but the themes and images in their lyrics, artwork, videos and fashion generally drew on sources from pre-modern literature (Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll), ancient history (the petrified ruins of Pompeii), and foreign settings (Saudi Arabia, Japan). The most contemporary source of imagery in their work is probably 20th-century Germany from Christopher Isherwood's Weimar-era tales to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp (and let's not forget those swastikas the band wore in their earliest appearances). If there's a consistent theme in their lyrics (which were usually written by Sioux or Severin separately), it's the exploration of the psyche's darker side: anxieties, obsessions, childhood fears, cognitive disorders, seductive fantasy, and so on.

Given these aesthetic inclinations, contemporary urban themes or contexts seldom appear in the Banshees' work. There's seldom room in their lyrical psychodramas for more than one or two characters, and rarely does their music identify particular tribalisms, nationalities, and collective identities, or speak of social conditions in then-contemporary Britain. To illustrate, let's look at two atypical songs that could conceivably nullify this hypothesis. 

The first is their debut single, "Hong Kong Garden," which Sioux has said she "mentally dedicated to my local Chinese takeaway in Chislehurst High Street, which opened when I was 12 or so and at a time when there were loads of skinheads around. I was so sorry for the racist abuse that the people who worked there used to get" (pg. 67). However, the lyrics to "Hong Kong Garden" struggle to communicate any social commentary; setting, action and viewpoint are ambiguous, as the narrative is preoccupied with summoning a swirl of decontextualized Asian imagery, much like the song's hook uses an ersatz Asian melody. I love this song, but nevertheless it's understandable how these lyrics could be interpreted as racially insensitive. I tend to think of them as simply ineffective, the work of a band still trying to find its lyrical footing. 

The second song is "Monitor," a highlight off the Juju album and possibly their most urban song in subject matter. The lyrics concern the use of closed-circuit TV in an uncivil society, suggesting the song is an uncommon attempt at social criticism for the Banshees. However, the music and lyrics emphasize the perspective of cognitive interiority—in this case, a voyeur's telemediated gaze out into an unidentifiable environment. A classic piece of banshee metal, "Monitor" sets McGeoch and Severin riffing sixteenth notes and Budgie laying down a Bonham-esque downbeat, interrupted several times by an extended rhythmic caesura that feels like a parabolic moment of zero gravity before the guitar commences to hurtle the listener back to earth. Punctuated by some of Siouxsie's most unrestrained caterwauling, "Monitor" viscerally conveys the glee of the armchair voyeur safely removed from urban disorder by technology as the violence and cruelty 'out there' become the fodder for sadistic entertainment 'in here'. But while listeners might have little difficulty grasping the real-world relevance for the song, the lyrics dwell upon the subject's gaze upon the CCTV monitor, where stationary viewpoint and video-signal noise prevent the identification of particular people or places, making the monitor's feed more snuff film than urban documentary.

There's nothing aesthetically inferior or politically wrong with the Banshees' disinterest in explicitly referring to the social conditions and urban environments of their day. Far from it—the visual and thematic bricolage found on every Banshees album and every constume change by Siouxsie is potent in large part because the band drew inspiration far beyond the here-and-now of their era. Nor is there anything sociologically noteworthy about the thematic and perspectival tendencies of the group (or, since lyrics are most relevant here, the individual lyricists Sioux and Severin). But if we pull back from the group to focus on their cultural phenomenon—as mediated via recording, performance, video, press coverage, merchandise, clothing, and especially the productive consumption of fans and onlookers (a thousand Siouxsie clones, a million notebook scrawls and bedroom shrines, etc.)—then we see a much broader collective investment in/construction of the band's significance. It's here where we can glean further insights into the Banshees' urbanism—not in terms of their place of origins, but the social relations that constitute the urban via the occupation and representation of public space.

Here I need to bring gender to the forefront of the discussion, specifically in terms of the iconic figure that Siouxsie Sioux has cut in popular culture. Much has been said about her complex negotiation of femininity; a charismatic, visually striking frontwoman, Sioux has carefully controlled her appearance and performance so as to resist objectification by the male gaze. She's beautiful and glamorous but signals little about her sexuality (at least until those publicity shots of the Creatures, her side project with Budgie, were greeted by considerable controversy). On stage and off, Sioux seems to have been undeterred by male opprobrium and the threat of violence that traditionally enforce a submissive role for women in public space, if not exclude them from public view altogether. Her fearlessness is illustrated in an anecdote about a 1981 concert date in Minneapolis.

SIOUX: It was 11 in the morning, freezing cold and everyone else was asleep. I looked around the bus and thought, "You fucking tossers, I'm going for a walk." So I put on a Stetson and a poncho and went. I had this mission in my head to hit the bars and drink brandy. The town was desolate and windy but—God Bless America!—the bars were open. I remember walking through the business banking district in a foul mood looking for somewhere to drink, and I wandered miles, ending up in a much rougher neighbourhood. I was praying for some smartarse to make a comment about it not being Halloween yet so I could pick a fight. I went into this bar determined to get fuelled up and beat the shit out of someone. I sat in the corner scowling and giving off such a threatening vibe that everyone simply stayed away from me. You'd think that a girl on her own looking weird would be a prime target to gang up on or mug, but they weren't having any of it. I really wanted someone to pull a gun on me or something.


BUDGIE: When the rest of us woke up she was nowhere to be seen, so we split up and each headed across town in a different direction trying to find her. We thought she'd got lost somewhere because her sense of direction is hopeless at the best of times. We didn't imagine she'd gone off on a bender. No one could find her so we went to the venue to start soundchecking, by which time it had got dark. She'd been gone for hours. Eventually she turned up completely pissed. I remember her walking on stage and grabbing a microphone that wasn't there. That's when she realised she wasn't quite herself (pg. 116).

Yet despite her refusal of traditional norms of femininity—or, more accurately, because of it—Siouxsie & the Banshees must be seen as having a gendered significance in popular culture. In fact, they highlight the gendering that goes on in pop-music culture around male and female-identified performers alike. As feminist scholar Angela McRobbie argued in her critique of the Birmingham cultural studies ethnographic tradition carried out by male researchers like Paul Willis and Dick Hebdidge, young women are underrepresented in the studies of urban subcultures not because they're uninterested in the allures and functions of subcultural resistance, but because patriarchal norms confine their sociality and leisure to the spaces of home, school, and consumption. It's in this way that Siouxsie & the Banshees are a 'girl's band', since the perhaps quintessential moment of fan identification with Sioux happens in the interior spaces of leisure and domesticity that are the special prison of young women. The story that Shirley Manson relates in the foreward of the Banshees biography is an emblematic one, I suspect.

SHIRLEY MANSON: I was 14, at a girlfriend's house and she put on this single, 'Happy House'. I can remember thinking, 'What the fuck is this?' I'd not heard anything like it. And the B-side, 'Drop Dead-Celebration', encapsulated every single thing that I felt at that time as a totally inarticulate, podgy, pasty, unempowered child. I became addicted. I bought the record and played it obsessively.


At the time, I had no idea what she or the band looked like. The voice and the music were enough. But when I saw how she looked, I was hopelessly seduced. No woman I'd ever seen looked like that. She was one of the first to project a really powerful iimage of womanhood. There had been a lot of protest singers, but their music never resonated with me. I got into Patti Smith at around the same time, but Siouxsie Sioux was the one I connected with immediately. You never got the feeling that she was anybody's victim or anybody's whore. She was my girl, and has been ever since (pg. 8).

A comparison with Joy Division further illustrates the gendering that goes on in pop-culture reception. Their stereotypical fan cult has always been the gloomy lads in trenchcoats, maybe asexual yet definitely homosocial. As Mark Fisher (a.k.a. k-punk) wrote in 2005:

There was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees (provided you were male of course). Look at those whom they left their mark upon, whom they still haunt: Savage, Morley (who has made an art out of not writing about them), Sinker, Eshun, Bohn, me. Gay, black, straight, white, postmodern, anti-postmodern: the point when you could count yourself one of Joy Division’s 'we'—'the sorrows we suffered and never were free'—is prelapsarian now, a time before the straitjackets Identity Politics had tailor-made for us had been cooked up.


Provided you were male of course… The Joy Division religion was, self-consciously, a boys' thing. The group wanted it that way and we, we colluded. Deborah Curtis: 'Whether it was intentional or not, the wives and girlfriends had gradually been banished from all but the most local of gigs and a curious male bonding had taken place. The boys seemed to derive their fun from each other.' ([Touching from a Distance, pg.] 77) No girls allowed…

Interestingly, while Fisher acknowledges his discomfort at being part of the JD boys club, elsewhere in the same essay he takes a different kind of gendered swipe at the Goth subculture that began with the Banshees.

Strange in many ways to see [Joy Division] canonized as Goth princes [in a special NME issue on Goth]. There was no question of course that theirs was a fiercely expressionist sound—a sound in fact that was much more genuinely Gothic than that of the Caligari-faced panto turns who have appropriated the name or who have delighted in having had it foisted upon them... Yet the austerity of Joy Division’s image—their staged refusal of Image—set them at odds with the post-Bowie mummery of the Banshees, the Cure, Bauhaus and their diminishing returns photocopy-of-photocopies offspring. They were Gothic, but not Goths, surely.

Why Fisher doesn't regard Joy Division's "staged refusal of Image" (emphasis added) as another variety of the contrived self-display he criticizes Goths for, who can say. But his caveat notwithstanding, Fisher's remarks draw on a traditional criticism of fashion-mindedness and public artifice that have anxiously reasserted a number of social hierarchies—race (particularly in the U.S.), class (no doubt relevant to the U.K., I'd guess) and sexuality among them—as they intersect with dominant masculine norms of authority and propriety. The nexus of social relations revealed by Fisher's remarks here should be understood to constitute a kind of urbanism—a system of proper behavior and privileged groups in public space. It's an urban code that, not coincidentally, Sioux, Severin et al. have long refused to abide, much to the delight of their fans, Goth and others.

The role of urban(ism) advocates

Finally, if we're going to look at the various contributors to the cultural reception surrounding the Banshees and Joy Division, then a word about music journalists who have written about these groups is in order. Both groups have set critics' pens afire with florid praise at different times, but Joy Division seems to have attracted a special breed of journalistic advocate, most notably Paul Morley and Jon Savage, whose writings on into recent years have sustained interest and offered perspectives on the band. By contrast, the Banshees never had such dedicated journalistic advocates. This could be the result of their oft-remarked "elitism" and disdain of industry hobnobbing, although I suspect the Banshees may have granted far more interviews than Joy Division did in those post-punk years. It's certainly the case that Joy Division's management generally advised the band to clam up around interviewers, which only encouraged writers to fill in the blanks about the group's aesthetics and importance—probably by management's design.

There's an unexpected reversal of gender roles here: Siouxsie and the Banshees defined and controlled their image more effectively than Joy Division did. More relevant to my argument here, Joy Division's journalistic advocates may very well have emphasized the question of Manchester urbanism more than Ian Curtis et al. ever did. Bernard Sumner, it should be remembered, only went on record about the traumatic influence of his neighborhood's destruction long after Joy Division ended. In the interim, readers of the British music press had many years to digest Morley and Savage's repeated references to Manchester environments (which may have been further primed by Tony Wilson's interest in Situationism, an interest that Savage shared). By contrast, which journalists or other contributors have held the critical flag for the Banshees as consistently? And did any of them look beyond the group's manifest aesthetics, or beyond the subcultural contexts and gender politics that would surround them, to emphasize their urban orientation?

So here then, some 30 years after their postpunk heyday, I modestly offer an urban sensibility that apparently no one has given the Siouxsie & the Banshees over all this time! My analysis, which follows out of some basis frameworks from urban studies, illustrates how one might "hear the city" in music—by identifying the geographic context of a band's career, assessing the presence of urban perspectives and themes in their music, and elaborating the urban relations posited by their art and its popular reception. That said, objective truth about or critical insight into 'the music' hasn't really been the main concern in this essay, which has exemplified the same phenomenon that it sought to investigate: the social contexts and external interventions (by fans, media, management, urban boosters, academics, etc.) that promote a certain kind of aesthetic orientation toward the music—in this case, an urban sensibility. The study of this sensibility is, I think, an important undertaking for pop-culture research. But is this urban sensibility essential to an understanding and appreciation of a 'non-urban' group like the Banshees—or, for that matter, the evidently 'urban' music that Joy Division made during its brief existence?

metaphors of the urban-industrial backbeat

In 1979, the late great music critic Ellen Willis gave a brief yet compelling explanation for how rock and roll sounds like the city, writing about "rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy contained by a tight repetitive structure." Her formulation has two components. First, rock and roll functions as metaphor, not the lyrical or vocal narration of stories or emotions, as the music simulates by sonic suggestion the experience of urban life. Second, this metaphor operates through the tension of opposites: chaos and order, uncontainable noise and inescapable rhythm.

These opposing terms and their juxtaposition would seem to be necessarily indefinite and unfixed; what sounds like anarchy to one listen might seem predictable to another. I think the listener's relativism can be understood through a historical perspective, as rock 'n' roll at any one point conveys novel sensations that, for subsequent generations, might recede into the background of "modern city life." My point here invokes Adam Krims' concept of the urban ethos, a framework for analyzing musical representations of social life:

[T]here is a range of possible, and more or less likely, representations of the city in the corpus of… commercial popular music, and… certain representations call for framing at certain times… It is the scope of that range of urban representations and their possible modalities, in any given time span, that I call the urban ethos. The urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of possibilities, always having discernable limits as well as common practices. It is not a picture of how life is in any particular city. Instead, it distills publicly disseminated notions of how cities are generally, even though it may be disproportionately shaped by the fate of particular cities…

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Willis's formulation appears from her entry on the Velvet Underground in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, a 1979 volume edited by Greil Marcus's 1979 edited volume. I read this piece in the fantastic new anthology, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). It's worth requoting the passage in its original context, in which Willis makes her case for the Velvets' essential contribution.

The Velvets straddled the categories [of art rock and rock-and-roll art]. They were nothing if not eclectic: their music and sensibility suggested influences as diverse as Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol, Peter Townshend and John Cage; they experimented with demended feedback and isolated, pure notes and noise for noise's sake; they were partial to sweet, almost folk-like melodies; they played the electric viola on "Desolation Row." But they were basically rock-and-roll artists, buidling their songs on a beat that was sometimes implied rather than heard, on simple, tough, pithy lyrics about their hard-edged urban demimonde, on rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy contained by a tight, repetitive structure. Some of the Velvets' best songs—"Heroin," especially—redefined how rock-and-roll was supposed to sound. Others—"I'm Waiting for the Man," "White Light/White Heat," "Beginning to See the Light," Rock & Roll"—used basic rock-and-roll patterns to redefine how the music was supposed to feel (pp. 55-6).

Many others have of course heard the urban in the Velvets' sound, no doubt without having read Willis's piece. The group's first two records, 1967's Velvet Underground and Nico and 1968's White Light/White Heat, provide especially fertile material for this kind of analysis. Invariably, the sound and feel of subway trains are mentioned:

Notice how the song’s rhythm mimics the subway train this neophyte would surely have taken up to Harlem to score drugs. “I’m waiting for my man / twenty-six dollars in my hand / up to Lexington, 125 / feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive.”
—Nicholas Taylor, "Guest Playlist," 2011

There were songs where Lou's guitar would conjure the screeching sound of the N.Y. subway and the sensory overload of the modern city experienced by the amphetamine eyes of its residents as their minds split open.
—William Crain, "The Modern Lovers: Despite All The Amputations," 2002


Even more noticeable when he switched to electric viola, Cale's sound evoked the terror of Reed's compositions, with the bowed strings screeching like a runaway subway car.
—CD Universe review, undated

As I listen to track after track, I can feel a tinge of the city’s seedy side: the risqué narrative in “Venus in Furs,” the sound of air blasting through subway vents in “Black Angel’s Death Song,” and the nervous intense jonesing in “Run, Run, Run.”
—Lindsay Sanchez, "You've Never Heard 'The Velvet Underground and Nico'?", 2011

THE STOOGES

Maybe it's best not to focus too narrowly on the urban landscape of NYC circa 1967. Placed in its broader historical context, we're talking about what sociologist Chris Rojek has called the "urban-industrial backbeat" against which modern pop music emerged over the 20th century. In regards to the industrial element of this backbeat, a frequently referenced touchpoint is the Stooges, particularly the early material they developed in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Like most "godfathers of punk," Iggy Stooge (later Pop) was a wired fuck-up liable to bring his whole crew down in the broken glass with him. But his cohorts, especially guitarist Ron Asheton, framed Iggy's self-destruction in such pointedly blasted, assembly-line riffage that the whole thing ended up as classic Detroit folk art: auto-plant noise and Motown shimmy, meth jitters and wah-wah groove—the blueprint for everything fast, sexy, and grungy to come.
—"The Stooges," Spin Magazine, February 2002

        In early interviews, Iggy used to claim the Stooge's uniquely brutal, industrial sound was inspired by the noise of Detroit's mighty car plants.
       "Absolutely," he says, "I didn't realize it then how unusual that was then to live in an environment where really cars were the only things goin' on. When I was little we went on a field trip to River Rouge which was an industrial park of immense size. If I went there now it would probably look nightmarish but to me then it was great. You heard how they pressed the metal, saw the catwalks, and all this was very impressive."
—Richard Fleury, undated

As is well known, the Stooges' 1969 eponymous debut album was produced by John Cale not long after he was kicked out of the Velvets. The clip below (from 2002's "Lust for Life" documentary, a.k.a. "Jesus? This is Iggy?") indicates the Stooges had formulated their sound before Iggy Pop ever "made my first trip to New York, or to any big city." So, to continue with Rojek's notion of the urban-industrial backbeat perhaps the Stooges' first record comprises an ideal type for an early industrial backbeat, distinguished from its urban element.

MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS

I wonder how useful it is to limit the metaphoric medium to rock 'n' roll, since urban-industrial connotations of the kind Willis had in mind arguably can be across across the pop-music spectrum. How could "anarchic energy contained by a tight repetitive structure" not have been an apt or at least adequate description of early rhythm 'n' blues? Imagine what unsuspecting and unprepared ears, white or black, would have made of Joe Turner's "Shake Rattle & Roll"? How else to describe the culturally unprecedented sounds emanating from into radio stations like Cleveland's WJW 1210 AM, home of Allan "Moondog" Freed, or Memphis's WDIA, "73 on your dial," America's first radio station with an all-black format?

Another potentially relevant musical signifer is Detroit's Motown sound. Consider for instance Martha and the Vandellas' 1965 single, "Nowhere to Run." In homage to Detroit's auto plants (the same inspiration for the Stooges), producer Lamont Dozier fortified drummer Benny Benjamin's beat with the sounds of car chains. The urban metaphor for "Nowhere to Run," ostensibly a song about love gone wrong, was hammered home by a promotional video filmed in the Ford River River Rouge Plant that was broadcast on the CBS music show "It's What's Happening Baby," hosted by popular NYC disc jockey Murray "the K" Kaufman.

In Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard University Press, 1999), Suzanne E. Smith offers an acute interpretation of the Vandellas' video in its historical and geographical contexts:

The use of car parts to create the song's apprehensive tone complimented the "Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide" lyrics, which recount the loer's inability to free herself from a tortured romance. The staging of the television shoot on the factory shop floor accentuated the eerie quality of the song as Martha and the Vandellas tried to navigate their way through the mechanics of an unfamiliar assembly line. The performance concludes with "Murray the K" driving a fully assembled Mustang out of the auto plant while Martha and the Vandellas stay behind with the autoworkers and wave good-bye.
       In this television appearance one of Motown's musical products disrupted the Ford assembly line in order to promote Motown's sound, Ford's Mustang, and the summer employment campaign of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity. The moment exemplified James Bogg's assertion that automation and modern technologies carried "the contradictions of capitalism to their furthest extreme." "Nowhere to Run" became more than a song about a tormented love affair when Martha and performed it in the Ford River Rouge Plant, a performance televised to a national audience of teenage consumers. The audience of autoworkers at the filming of the song often had "nowhere to run" from the tedium of assembly-line work and nowhere to go if automation displaced them from their jobs. The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity broadcast the show to encourage teenagers to look for part-time summer work but did not offer any long-term solutions to the employment crises that automation and deindustrialization had produced in cities like Detroit. For the Ford Motor Company, the "Nowhere to Run" segment offered free publicity for its new and popular Mustang. For Martha and the Vandellas, their appearance on the television special represented what had become a critical stage on Motown's own assembly line, which strengthened the record company's position in the larger record industry (pp. 129-30).

JOY DIVISION

As Out of the Vinyl Deeps makes clear, Ellen Willis' critical paradigm was indelibly associated with countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Her musical reference points were the Stones, Joplin, Dylan and the Velvets, whose artistic agendas drew pointedly (if not always sympathetically) upon the generational and gender revolts of the day; tellingly, when these revolts dried up by the late 1970s, Willis turned away from music criticism. 

Such bygone origins do little to diminish the analytical productivity of Willis's formulation of "rock-and-roll's oldest metaphor for modern city life—anarchic energy contained by a tight repetitive structure." So vague yet so provocative—unhinged from her 60s rock references, it invites listeners to critically perceive the urban through a variety of musical sounds and genres. Obviously hip hop, industrial music, electronic dance music etc. provide ample fodder for such analysis.

Instead, I conclude with another recording much closer to the years Willis wrote music criticism. To my thinking, Joy Division's "She's Lost Control" evokes the city of post-industrial decline. Here, 'anarchy' reflects not the (white) heat of population/infrastructural pressure and subcultural clash, but rather an immoral policy of urban disinvestment and workforce redundancy. In this city void of material function and social solidarity, the music's 'tight repetitive structure' traps the listener into an isolating echo chamber of the mind.

how Joy Division came to sound like Manchester

I'm always puzzled when I hear how Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger "sounded black" when they first appeared on the radio.  Back in the 70s, when I was a kid listening commercial radio that played pop, soul, and disco music, I never once mistook the vocals of Presley and Jagger as coming from African-American singers.  Perhaps this was because these pop icons had been on TV and magazines for more than a decade when I first became familiar with their music.  Perhaps. 

But even today, after I've gotten better at identifying the many strands of popular music and sequencing their historical influences upon later music, I still don't hear their voices as black.  Yes, it's clear now how the attack of their performance, the grit in their voice, and the slur of their vowels show the influence of blues and R&B singers before them—artists who weren't recognized by mainstream white pop music audiences back then.  And yes, their historical significance is in some part due to the fact that they introduced African-American music to white audiences (whether or not that was cultural exploitation, go ask Public Enemy).  But that's just it: Presley and Jagger sounded black to listeners who had no historically available vocabulary to interpret the social and cultural transgressions set off by the singers' vocals, performance, artistic choices and careers other than the discourse of race at the time.  Hence, they "sounded black."

The larger point here is a basic one in cultural anthropology: meaning doesn't emerge immediately out of language—or of any symbolic system, visual, aural (most relevant here) or otherwise.  Instead, people attribute meaning to the vocabularies and grammars of language by collectively assigning referents, at the most basic level, in terms of binaries or contrasts.  "Hot" makes sense only in reference to a symbolic opposite, "cold", and "white" only by contrast to "black."  In this way, symbolic systems aren't transcendent; rather, they're collective accomplishments that emerge through the play of history, its changing social contexts, and the symbolic codes and tools that mediate language to its users.

So what does it mean when we hear that music sounds like a city?

Joy Division's Mancunian myth

Joy Division offers as good a case study as any to break down the myths we revel in when we say a particular band or music "sounds like" a particular place.  Most serious music fans today can associate Joy Division with the northern English city of Manchester.  Some will appreciate Joy Division's historic distinction as the first truly important Mancunian band to break out in Manchester, bypassing the centrality of London and its music companies, recording studios, and entertainment media.  Many more fans will know that a string of legendary bands (New Order, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, that whole "Madchester" scene, Oasis) followed upon the DIY/"made in Manchester" tradition that Joy Division pioneered.  And a remarkably extensive literature and filmography portraying the band in its moment (three feature-length films?!) have helped spread the idea that the group's aloof, reticient, yet undeterred stance somehow captures a quintessence of the Manchester ethos—at least before the drug ecstasy turned the city into the UK's manic dance capital for a time.

But Joy Division is often assigned a deeper aesthetic relationship to Manchester than just these social-historic characterizations.  For many listeners, Joy Division sounds like Manchester.  That is to say, their music doesn't just come from the late 1970s Manchester of deindustrialization, a carceral welfare state epitomized by concrete housing estates built in brutalist architecture style, Margaret Thatcher's subsequent class warfare upon Britain's industrial proletariat, and the discovery of expressive and artistic possibilities in the wake of punk—their music recreates and conveys this historic milieu through its sonics and aesthetics.  From Grant Gee's 2007 documentary Joy Division (all quotes in this essay come from this source unless otherwise noted):

Liz Naylor: When Unknown Pleasures came out, it was sort of like, This is the ambient music for my environment.  I mean, when I think about Joy Division, they're an ambient band, almost.  You don't see them function as a band.  It's just the noise around where you are.

Paul Morley: It was almost like a science-fiction interpretation of Manchester.  You could recognize the landscape and the mindscape and the soundscape as being Manchester.  It was extraordinary that they managed to make Manchester international, if you like—make Manchester cosmic.

Jon Wozencraft: Unknown Pleasures is also a very iPodded kind of world.  It's urban, but it's not.  It's about a landscape, but that landscape is primarily an interior landscape.  And so, what is very, very important about it now is to see where we've travelled from since then and exactly why it still sounds so bloody contemporary.

These statements, like so many others issues by writers and fans alike, erudite and thick, constitute a pervasive myth about Joy Division's relationship to late 1970s Manchester.  The myth goes that through its music, Joy Division manifests and summons a historic urbanism with uncanny fidelity; like vinyl grooves reproducing soundwaves from a bygone time and place for eternity, audiences can seemingly revisit the Manchester of that era just by listening to the recordings.  This would be a remarkable feat, considering that singer Ian Curtis never made lyrical or vocal reference to the city, specific landmarks or groups, or really any concrete references to ways of life.  Such is the remarkable power of Joy Division's music and—let's give credit where it's due—the echoey, disembodied production of Factory Records house producer Martin Hannett, that audiences today almost can't help but come away from the recordings and videos with a visceral sense of alienation and withdrawal that Mancunians from that era could recognize as indigenous.

To call these aesthetic associations between music and place myth isn't to diminish the artistry of Joy Division and their collaborators, nor to shatter the sense of emotional 'truth' and personal resonance that audiences can take away when listening or watching the band.  However, calling it myth troubles the pleasant delusion that music as symbolic/aesthetic system can immediately record history.  The sense of time-place recognition that audiences experience is a social construction; at least hypothetically, we can understand in terms of a chronological sequence of social contexts and symbolic interventions that mediate the music to its audiences so that they can competently and consciously experience a sense of time-place recognition—before they can "hear" Manchester in the music of Joy Division.

It would be impossible to innumerate the many possible social contexts and symbolic interventions that mediate audience's different understandings of Joy Division's Mancunian myth.  But I think we can identify some of the key ones to appreciate what the kind of analysis I have in mind can look like.

Britain's cultural geography

Before punk and post-punk emerged, England was an industrial country for almost two centuries.  Its geographic imaginary was deeply impressed by the legacy of politics, trade, and finance concentrated in London, industry established in Manchester and other northern cities, and agriculture relegated to the remaining countryside.  Where the production of British culture was concerned (let's leave the culture associated with British "heritage" aside for the moment), London was the only place to be, and artists from anywhere else would have to make their move to London if they didn't want to be regarded with disdain as hicks from the hinterlands.

This was the cultural geography that British pop music inherited.  The Merseybeat didn't escape the centrality of London, as the Beatles and their machinery quickly left Liverpool for London—a distance of just over 200 miles, but almost a different country entirely where British regional identity is concerned.  Even punk initially reinforced London's centrality in British pop music.  The list of first-generation punk groups who signed with big labels out of London is long, and it includes the Buzzcocks, Manchester's most significant band before Joy Division.  As Simon Reynolds observes in Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984, the DIY ethic commonly attributed to punk really took hold only with post-punk, and Joy Division's relationship to Factory Records in Manchester was a big part of the story.  But we get ahead of ourselves. 

One consequence was the relative poverty of urban/regional symbolism outside the of London orbit in British pop music.  There would be references to other places, of course; think of Sheffield Steel (a Joe Cocker album) or the association of heavy metal and the British midlands.  But look deeper into such music at the time—for instance, look at the lyrics—and you'll find very little substance in these regards.  British folk music might seize the moral high ground where reverence and place-specificity for the British countryside is concerned, but in pop music, images of dreary factories or drab towns were largely fodder for Londoners' imaginations. 

The state of British media

At least one might hold this perception if the British music press of the time was to be read literally.  The parochialism and snobbery it displayed toward music and musicians based out of London were probably, at least in part, instincts inherited from the legacy of Britain's geographic imaginary.  However, the fairly late development of serious music journalism also has to be considered. 

As Paul Gorman's In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press suggests, Britain's music weeklies had only developed a narrative function beyond simple publicity in the early 1970s, inheriting the generational/countercultural voice from underground weeklies of the late 60s like International Times and Oz and, later, American publications like Creem and Who Put the Bomp.  A journalistic focus on not just music but its surrounding culture was especially the hallmark of the NME.  Melody Maker, its second-place rival in the late 70s, was slow to shift out of its reverent muso orientation, although the arrival of punk helped bring about this journalistic mission.  While punk bands sprung up across the isles, the press had yet to give proper attention to their cultural/urban specificity.  This was the media environment in which Joy Division appeared.

Consider as well the lack of television devoted to punk and postpunk music.  Joy Division never appeared on Top of the Pops; its televised performances were so rare as to constitute key moments in pop music history.  Many people vividly remember when they saw Joy Division play on Tony Wilson's So It Goes, or do two performances of "She's Lost Control" two months apart in 1979; such reminiscences are an important motif in the writing and films that posthumously surrounded the band. 

Why does all this matter?  In the relatively impoverished media environment of the late 1970s, Joy Division's debut album would for most listeners appear with almost no aesthetic precedent or artistic context to give it meaning.  Yet such was its sonic innovation and artistic power that listeners, writers, and music industry would feverishly try to make sense of it.  Hence the many comparisons to Bowie and krautrock, references that get the listener close but, I think, don't really do justice to the strange new sounds that Joy Division created. Some three decades later, the band's closest collaborators and earliest supporters still strain to find the words for this unprecedented music:

Peter Saville [talking about designing the cover of Unknown Pleasures independent of the band's input]: Hadn't heard the music.  They'd given me the elements; the wave patterns are astonishing.  I mean, what an amazing image for something called Unknown Pleasures.  I took it to Rob's house, took the artwork to Rob's, and he said, "I have a test pressing.  Do you want to listen to it?"  I didn't know if I could sit through 40 minutes of Joy Division... especially in front of their manager [chuckles].  But I couldn't really say no.  And within moments, I knew that I had a part in a kind of life-changing experience.  Minute after minute was beyond anything I could have expected.  It was just beyond... it was astonishing.

Paul Morley: And just as soon as [Unknown Pleasures] started, and the drums sounded like no drums had ever sounded, and everything seemed to belong in its own space, and not quite connecting somehow, something amazing had happened.

Thus the project of making Joy Division sound like Manchester began in earnest—a project that arguably the four musicians had no major role in after providing the affecting, ambiguous source material.  Here we have to look instead to the assemblage of other elements and other actors besides the group to see how the Mancunian myth develops.

Images

For an obvious starter, the visuals and graphics associated with the band helped establish their association with the sound of Manchester.  In January 1979, before Joy Division had released a full-length album, NME photographer Kevin Cummins shot the group for their first cover story against a desolate daytime backdrop of deteriorating buildings and ominous housing projects (this work is now collected in a rather expensive coffeetable book of Cummins' photography, also called Joy Division).  Cummins describes how his famous shot of the band on the Epping Walk Bridge came about:

Kevin Cummins: Already by then I've shot two-thirds of a roll of film, and I'm conscious of the fact that I didn't really think I had anything.  I'm walking up the bridge, and they're waiting for me, and I just felt it looked so bleak, and they were so un-rock and roll-like, that I took two frames and then took an upright shot of the same thing, and that's all I did of that picture.  And that's I guess become probably the most recognized Joy Division image.

By November of that year, Anton Corbijn's shoot for the NME added to the band's visual repertoire with a photo (later used for Paul Morley's book cover) of the band in a tunnel: three members calmly gaze away, hands in pockets, while Curtis acknowledges the camera—with uncertainty, anguish, resignation?  All of these iconic images are black and white, and I suspect many viewers would assume, it being punk rock and not London flash, that these were candid photos capturing the member's natural demeanors in their everyday habitats.

Between Cummins' and Corbijn's shoots, of course, Joy Division released their debut album.  Never mind the effect of the music contained within the sleeve—almost immediately the album cover became a classic.

Paul Morley: And I just remember the whole... the sleeve, you know.  It was just an uncanny moment, because it did belong in your collection next to Roxy Music, next to Velvet [Underground], and it didn't look wrong next to Diamond Dogs.  It was a great piece of work, but it didn't borrow any of that language; it didn't borrow any of that visual language.  It was totally itself, and I couldn't work out how or where it had come from.

Is it too much to argue that the juxtaposition between the naturalistic band photography and the sci-fi album cover create the symbolic poles between which Joy Division's urbanism is imagined?  The contrast between the two forms in terms of visual grammar and referents is great, but significantly both effectively convey a sense of space, albeit an eerily desolate or (in the album cover's case) unreal version of a human landscape.  Certainly the juxtaposition of the two conveys that "interior landscape" that Jon Wozencraft invoked to describe the music. 

In any case, the visuals establish a resonant yet ambiguous visual grammar.  Additional visual connections between Joy Division and Manchester urbanism would be made by adventurous aesthetes, most notably DIY filmmaker Charles Salem, whose 1979 short film No City Fun explicitly juxtaposed Unknown Pleasures to Manchester landscapes and Liz Naylor's text about Manchester (it ended up on Factory Records' release FAC 9: The Factory Flick).  But for most audiences, it would take a journalistic narration to articulate Joy Division's Mancunian myth.

Narrations

Like few other bands of the post-punk era, Joy Division attracted a zealous breed of journalists and other writers prone to remarkably purple prose when describing the band.  In one category, academic writers interpreted the band's artistry via esoteric, obtuse theorists like Martin Heidegger or Georges Bataille.  (I still can't wade through Jean-Pierre Turmel's 1979 essay accompanying the "Atmosphere"/"Dead Souls" single.) 

More influentially, Joy Division attracted hotshot music journalists who came of age with punk, most famously Paul Morley in the NME and Jon Savage in Melody Maker.  Like few others, Morley and Savage used their pulpit to advocate for the aesthetic liberation that punk created—i.e., what we now call post-punk—against the "social realism" (to use Savage's term) of oi, anarchist punk, and other unimaginative proletarian agit-pop in the wake of the Sex Pistols.  Hardly doctrinaire Marxists, these writers were nonetheless sociological in their writing, looking carefully for the influence of industrial-urban-political context on music. 

In Joy Division, Morley and Savage found their muse.  For one thing, they had to discover Joy Division, traveling to Manchester to interview the band and its collaborators and to see the environs for themselves.  No doubt this wasn't a simple assignment for London-based journalists, and years later their writing still betrays a sense of personal investment and commitment to the city (Savage eventually relocated to Manchester in 1979).

Paul Morley: There was the Manchester damp and the shadows and omens called into dread being by the hills and moors that lurked at the edge of their vision.  It wasn't soft, where they lived.  It was stained green and unpleasant.  It seemed to be at the edge of the world.  You had to dream your way out of such a tranquilised, inert stretch of land/mindscape.  You had to use your imagination to believe that there was anything else than nothing else.  In these slow suburbs, your mind would ache for release.  And so would your body (1997 liner notes of Joy Division Heart and Soul box set; reprinted later in Morley's Joy Division: Piece by Piece, pp. 239-40).

Jon Savage: I'd just moved to Manchester the spring [sic], and 'Unknown Pleasures' helped me orient around the city.  I reviewed it for Melody Maker in typically over-heated style: "Joy Division's spatial circular themes and Martin Hannett's shiny, waking dream production gloss are one perfect reflection of Manchester's dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites—the endless detritus of the 19th century—seen gaping like teeth from an orange bus..." (1994 liner notes of Joy Division Heart and Soul box set)

Perhaps any Londoner would come away from 1979 Manchester with the same astonishment that Savage recalled in a 2008 article ("The Things That Aren't There Anymore"): "a disturbing new landscape that, like the city itself, the music and its people, triggered an almost overwhelming emotional response".  But few worked to cement the link between urbanization (deindustrialization, urban decline and social-political neglect), urbanism (alienation but also DIY resourcefulness against a northern English character), and sonics like Morley and Savage did.  The mode of inquiry and style of writing may have come naturally to them, but against a journalistic tradition of London-centrism, disdain for the provinces, and latching on to the next big thing, we shouldn't overlook how Morley and Savage were journalistic entrepreneurs of Joy Division's Mancunian myth.

Contexts for listening

The elements of the Mancunian myth—an evocation of an alienated subjectivity shaped by the industrial-urban contexts of Manchester—were now present.  They only awaited a deep meditation by the listener.  How did Joy Division stimulate such close, attentive listening? 

Not to dispense of the intrinsic mystery and beauty of the group's music, but I think we might also recall how someone would get to hear Joy Division in 1979.  A lucky few in Britain and West Europe might see the group in concert, thereby viewing them in a context removed from Mancunian associations.  However, most listeners had only their recorded output to turn to.  Originally, this would have been on vinyl only, a medium that fixes the listener in a stationary relationship with a record player.  Radio might liberate the listener from this environment, although we shouldn't overstate how often Joy Division was broadcast (John Peel notwithstanding) before Ian Curtis's death.  Otherwise, a spatially contained listening experience would have been typical, most likely in the domestic space of the bedroom or other rooms where the stereo would be located.  For a multimedia experience, the listener might also gaze at the record sleeve or simultaneously read an article about the band. 

Think about how this might reinforce the solitary, solipsistic experience of Joy Division's music.  In extended listening sessions, the mind might retreat from its psychedelic activity (no drugs required) and seek to an object or theme to alight upon.  Here the Mancunian associations provided by the photography and journalism of the band might offer fertile ground for mental recreation.  Having been prompted about the band's place of origins, the listener can hardly resist imagining the landscapes that the music conveys.  Correspondences between real place (Manchester), artistic consciousness ("what the band must have felt") and aesthetic response (the "interior landscapes" that listeners inhabit) have time to develop.

How Joy Division shaped the way we listen to cities

Put together, these social contexts and symbolic interventions provide a formula for a reverent listening that Joy Division rewards with powerful emotional responses and a lasting imagination of the place, time and mindset that the group occupied.  If this sounds like just another word for fan devotion, I hope the preceding argument makes clear how these social contexts—of complete geographic and cultural centralization of music industry/press in London, and of a stationary mode of listening—no longer quite exist anymore, and how the symbolic interventions of graphics, photography and journalists that Joy Division attracted are by now quite rote. 

If nowadays we can access through many other bands and styles of music the "forgotten city" urbanism of geographical marginalization and expressive alienation characterized by Joy Division's Mancunian myth, this is an achievement of many people, not just the band themselves, in the historical moment surrounding Joy Division's brief existence.  We simply didn't listen to cities in that way before Joy Division.  Now, in a very different world, we can do it all the time.