You sit against a palm tree, sheltered from the unforgiving tropical sun, surveying a bunch of bronzed Olympians in aviator shades, dripping with sweat and playing a round of ferociously homoerotic beach volleyball. Some slinky, doe-eyed, slightly vacant-looking minx from a spiritualist Californian commune thrusts a perfectly engineered Negroni into your hand. It’s a scene straight from the Book of Genesis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ein Leben wie im Traum. But then, wait, what’s that sound you hear, thundering from the giant speakers next to the beach hut? “When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried.” Sorry? “Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away.” Steady on, the Victoria’s Secret models have started scrolling on their phones with contemptuous detachment. “We knocked on the doors of hell’s darker chambers, pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.” Christ, who’s DJing? That twat from Interpol?
(1) “Digital”
“Feel it closing in” – no, not the Teutonic tourists getting their black-red-gold towels down on the sun loungers before the crack of dawn, but “Digital”, Joy Division’s first Joy Division-sounding song after two years of Bowie-adjacent punk. The belligerence isn’t gone, exactly, but it’s been inverted into frenetic distress, an acute fear of one’s own inner demons, which may include an inability to apply sunscreen to the small of one’s own back.
(2) “Day of the Lords”
If you’re looking for a song to build and then destroy a sandcastle to, then why not “Day of the Lords”? The second track on 1979’s Unknown Pleasures is menacing, malignant, glacially paced doom rock, with chilling lyrics about abandoned cars at the side of eerily deserted roads and how there’s “no room for the weak.” Frisbee, anyone?
(3) “She’s Lost Control”
I come to the beach to forget the pressures of work, actually, not to be reminded of them with a splenetic four-minute death march about that time Ian Curtis watched a girl have an epileptic fit in the lobby of the Macclesfield Employment Exchange. The 12 inch version, with its terrifying tacked-on final verse about how Ian could “live a little better with the myths and the lies”, is especially conducive to devouring an overpriced hazelnut Cornetto.
(4) “Shadowplay”
“In the shadowplay, acting out your own death” is a bit dreary for a Saturday afternoon on the Playa de las Américas, lads. Still, this might be the quintessential Joy Division song – ominous intro, thunderous guitars, Ian sounding like he just noticed that the queue at the snack shack is ten meters long.
(5) “New Dawn Fades”
One of the most fragile and defeated moments on Unknown Pleasures – which is certainly saying something – it’s quintessential post-punk; skeletal, macabre, with no emotional payoff whatsoever, just escalating despair. A loaded gun won’t set you free, but how about a game of Uno under the canopy?
(6) “I Remember Nothing”
Yes, let’s close the most depressing album of all time with some catatonic sludge punctuated by the sound of jump scare bottle-smashing and industrial lifts getting stuck between floors. Anyway, boys, you should have thought about not being able to remember anything before you ordered Long Island Iced Teas at Happy Hour.
(7) “Passover”
“This is a crisis I knew had to come, destroying the balance I’d kept” – and not merely because we forgot to pack junior’s snorkel, so now he’s having a middle-class meltdown about it in front of the bewildered locals. “Passover” is creepy as fuck – grinding bass, icy reverb on the drums, spidery gothic guitar, “watch as they drop by the beach” indeed.
(8) “Twenty Four Hours”
The three concluding tracks on Closer, Joy Division’s second and final album, are where the sunstroke really sets in. That said, as morbid as “Twenty Four Hours” undoubtedly is, there’s still a bit of punk-rock fire and fury to it – until the harrowing culminatory verse, in which Ian “looks beyond the day in hand” and sees that “there’s nothing there at all.” Eesh.
(9) “The Eternal”
Quite honestly, the Joy Division beach party conceit is getting harder to sustain at this point, except that “The Eternal” sounds like the sky clouding over, black as night, whereupon a tropical storm lashes the golden sands for, well, for the rest of eternity. A macabre, monged-out, piano-driven funeral dirge, and surely emblematic of Ian finally deciding that it was time to check out, the poor bastard.
(10) “Decades”
The coup de grâce of Closer, and oddly, eerily detached, given the morgue-like symphony that preceded it. Ian even manages to contextualise his own plight as symptomatic of the broader malaise of “young men, the weight on their shoulders.” By the time the chilling fadeout sets in, it’s clear that the deckchairs have been stacked away and holiday season is over, probably forever, given the likely Google reviews.