Joy Division - New Dawn Fades - HD Audio & Video Master

Peter Hook - Unknown Pleasures turned out to be the only album we made where we were focused, and relaxed, and enjoyed the wonderfulness of being young and in a band and going in to record your debut album on your new label with a producer who had mad hair and looked like a wizard and spoke in riddles. He told us we needed forty minutes’ worth of music for the album so we presented him with a batch of songs. Of those we recorded sixteen, ten of which were used on the album, all recorded at the weekend. We all had jobs in the week. No advance, remember. And it was cheaper at weekends. Even cheaper if we worked at night, which suited Martin down to the ground, of course, because he liked to work at night. So the band would arrive at the studio straight after work on Friday, record until seven in the morning, then return later in the evening on the Saturday and work until seven in the morning. We’d be going home at seven on Monday morning, trying to escape before the cleaner arrived and started Hoovering. Even now the sound of a Hoover goes right through me. We recorded for the first two weekends and Martin mixed the third weekend. So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Usually when a band went into the studio, back in the late seventies anyway, you’d have one eye on the clock and be concentrating on not messing around. The accepted way of doing this was to get the band in the studio and get them sounding as live as possible. There was no such thing as click tracks or backing tracks in those days. It was all recorded live. So for the most part what we used to do was go in and run through all of the tracks in one go, with Ian in the room – he’d do the vocal in isolation later, when we had the take. Now, normally when you record a band you have a microphone on each of the instruments, and each records to a track on the master tape, but you get a bit of leakage from one microphone to another, so you’ll get a bit of the bass down the guitar mic and so on. If you want to feature, say, the guitar more prominently, then you turn up the guitar track, but because of the sound spill the other instruments come up, too. Martin hated that. Martin being Martin wanted the live feel of the band playing but without sacrificing the clarity of the instruments. So he set us up to get maximum separation, and the way he did that was to record us separately, especially the drums. Martin wanted them isolated so he could work on the drum sound, which of course he ended up doing a lot, creating that very clean, precise-sounding, almost clinical drum sound that became his trademark. New Dawn Fades is too slow, if you ask me, and when I play it live now I speed it up a bit.