A high bass against a failing marriage
The drums start as if the song had no interest in suspense, and then Peter Hook’s bass enters up high, a melody pretending to be a rhythm part, brighter than anything the lyric will allow. Ian Curtis sings with that flat, exhausted precision, the voice of a man reading a verdict he wrote himself. Love Will Tear Us Apart is the pop song Joy Division did not mean to own, and could not put down. The title answers a cheerful American hit he disliked, love will keep us together, by changing one verb and ruining the comfort.
They recorded the single version in March 1980 at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, Martin Hannett producing, the band already fraying. Bernard Sumner’s synthesizer holds a cold light. Stephen Morris plays straight, which on this track is a kind of mercy. Hook’s line is the argument the voice is too tired to make. An earlier attempt, at Pennine, had not satisfied Hannett, who sent them back until the parts locked. The song is about Curtis’s marriage to Deborah, a fact the lyric barely bothers to disguise and the biography has not been allowed to forget. He died on 18 May 1980. The single came out in June. The order of those dates is the cruel editing the record did not ask for and has never escaped.
What the arrangement understands is space. Hannett’s production leaves air around the snare, a little cruelty in the reverb, the vocal dry enough to sound like a man in a small room rather than a ghost in a cathedral. Live, in the last months, it could be faster, more desperate. The studio cut is the one on the gravestone, the title cut into stone because the song had already said the thing the life could not unsay. Britain took it into the charts, modestly at first, then again and again on reissue, a hit that arrives late and keeps arriving.
It was the best thing we ever wrote, and it was Ian writing about his life coming apart. We turned it into a pop song without meaning to.
(Peter Hook, on the single)
New Order would spend years not being this song, and playing it anyway, Hook’s bass still the signature no one else could quite inhabit. Covers have tried the tenderness and missed the flatness, or tried the flatness and missed the tune. The original holds both, which is why it still feels like news. A marriage ending is not a rare subject. A bassline that sings the ending while the singer reports it is rarer, and Hannett’s distance keeps either of them from sobbing on the listener’s behalf.
What remains is that high melody, indecently lovely under a title that does not blink. Love Will Tear Us Apart is not a curse and not a promise. It is an observation set to a part you can hum. The studio in Stockport is an ordinary building. The take is not. It starts, it states, it fades, and the verb stays torn.
