Mourning England in Song. # 4 Love will tear us apart - Joy Division 1980

Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html

1980. Punk has become post-punk. New Wave is happening - though to be honest (and I had been paying attention) I was never really clear what New Wave really was. New Romantic is coming but not quite here yet, though The Blitz had been up and running for a year. Bands like OMD and Ultravox are breaking through - synthpop apostles of what was to come, without as yet the blouses and the eye makeup (I beat them to it on that 😉).

For me 1980 was my final year at school. A levels, then a futile attempt to to get into St Catherine's College, Cambridge. When that failed I was left with months to fill before going up to Leeds instead - something I never regretted as I had a great time there, and even ended up with a decent degree - finally laying to rest a run of exam underperformance that had messed with both my 'O' and 'A' Levels. I filled that time which nothing much - working in a dreary job at in accounts of a department store whilst contemplating stealing some women's clothes one weekend when we were all called in for an end of year audit and the security guards were away (I didn't). Otherwise, and having packed the job in, I mostly spent my time writing bad poetry and lying on my bed losing confidence in my ability to meet anyone who would love me, ever in my life. In fact my late teen existential crisis turned eventually into a kind of agoraphobia - I found it hard to leave the house and interact with anyone, especially if they were female, for several months.

Two things pulled me through.

First, dragging myself to a residential writing course in the summer at which I astonished myself when I did indeed meet someone - a weather-beaten 25 year old girl from a sheep station in Australia who was travelling in Europe and with whom I had an intense few weeks. Sex was better than the poetry it seemed - my poetry at least (though you can judge for yourself - I'm attaching at the bottom of this post a poem I wrote decades later about that week, and specifically the poet Pete Morgan who taught on it, having discovered that he had passed away.)

The second thing was Leeds University. A place where I could reinvent myself.

Though I had listened to Massive-Joy-Division-Fan John Peel religiously, and he played it alot when it appeared in 1980, my memory of the song I have chosen today really starts in the autumn of 1981 when I got to Leeds and started to hear it. All the time. Which was absolutely fine, because it was, and is, magnificent. I had very little real sense of Joy Division till then, but I will always remember this song being on the jukebox - real coins into a real machine playing real vinyl - in a basement coffee shop in the Students Union building that smelled of plastic seats, damp and unwashed undergraduates. Of course, Ian Curtis was dead by the time I started my course. Tormented by his epilepsy diagnosis and mental health issues, he hanged himself in his kitchen one evening. It was a tragedy on every level, and I know a lot more about all that now than I did then, so I can't say that it landed with me at the time as my love affair with Joy Division really only got going just as their remnants became New Order. Love Will Tear Us Apart is a swansong for Curtis I guess. At the time I simply loved Peter Hook's unforgettable bass playing throughout, the rhythm guitar layered over, with that brittle snare drum pace and the liquid keyboards floating around above. And of course Curtis's voice; that smooth, melancholic drone, restrained and hurting.  

I never saw them play it live of course, I was too late. But I have seen both New Order and Peter Hook (masterfully) perform this song in the years since - and there's a particularly poignant version online by the former - who went back to the Bataclan in Paris after the massacre there and performed it within their set. 

For me, the song will always mean being 19, everything ahead of me, a feeling of freedom and belief and immortality whilst finding my way in an edgy, energetic working class Northern city that I fell in love with and which at the time was quite unlike anywhere I'd ever lived before. It's the autumn trees of Woodhouse Moor, it's nights in the Pack Horse or The Original Oak in Headingley or being there as world class bands rotated through the university on tour. It's Rocky Horror at the country's oldest continuously running cinema, the Hyde Park. It's taking the radiator of my terrible, joke of a car out in a public car park, on my own, and installing a new one that I'd just bought and filling it with my housemates and coaxing it up to Otley. It's trips to 'Curry Mile' in Bradford. It's my third year, in Harehills, and noting that the BBC had just called it one of the five most deprived areas in Europe, and (weirdly) feeling proud that we lived there.

I can go back to that scruffy Union coffee shop right now, as I write - after lectures, listening to Love Will Tear Us Apart almost on repeat as every third person put it on the jukebox, punctuated by The Only Ones, or Wreckless Eric, or The Dead Kennedys. Down the stairs, along the corridor from the launderette and quite near the bookshop. Where did all those years go?

What else from 1980? If Ultravox's 1980 song Vienna had been up against almost anything else of the era I might well have chosen it. In other possible contenders, we've got That's Entertainment by The Jam, Messages by OMD and Mystery Achievement, one of my favourite Pretenders tracks of all. Great songs, but up against the one that in 2002 was picked by NME as the best single in history, they were never going to make it...

Till next time...

****