A scribbled note is tacked to the wall of a Virgin record shop in Manchester: Band seeks singer. Thus begins the story of one of the most influential groups to emerge from the postpunk Manchester scene: the note summoned Ian Curtis, who became the frontman for Joy Division with a voice that has vibrated for generations.
That story is laid out in fascinating detail in Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order, which dropped its first season in December 2020. Over eight episodes, the podcast took us from the Sex Pistols concert that started it all – the gig inspired guitarist Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook to start their own band – through the Factory Records days with Tony Wilson, the release of Unknown Pleasures with producer Martin Hannett, the death of Curtis, the opening of the Hacienda nightclub, and the birth of New Order.
It’s a sharp and expansive account of the making of music, the forging of friendships and the kind of arbitrary decisions and strange serendipity that can lead to the creation of works of lasting art. Narrated by the actor Maxine Peake, who grew up in the Manchester area herself, the first season of Transmissions provides an exhaustive account of a defining moment in musical history. The Cup & Nuzzle team behind this audio journey have done an impressive job locking down interviews with band members (including the essential but estranged Hooky), wives, managers, graphic designers, producers, journalists and some high-profile musicians testifying to the bands’ influence – Liam Gallagher, Neil Tennant, Karen O and Bono among them – taking us all the way to Blue Monday, which is where the season ends.
Four years later we finally have our first taste of season two, this time narrated by the BBC broadcaster Elizabeth Alker. What else, you may ask yourself, could there possibly be to say after eight episodes and the release of Blue Monday, a club banger for the ages and the definitive mark of a brand new sound? Plenty, it turns out, as season two of Transmissions opens against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain with some juicy anecdotes about a raucous miners’ benefit concert – the actor Keith Allen talks about his short-lived gig as warm-up act: he was booted off stage by security – and the band being wooed by American producers in flashy suits and ultimately working with the legendary Quincy Jones.
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There’s a close look at the New Order album Low-Life, when the entire band was tricked into a photo shoot that ultimately produced the album’s iconic cover. And we’ve yet to get to Brotherhood and Bizarre Love Triangle, True Faith or Technique and the acid-house sound, the rifts that led to Hooky’s departure, and so much more.
All of this, of course, is soundtracked by the ground-breaking music that Joy Division and then New Order created, and that’s the boon of this audio format: we hear in this podcast not just the mischief and antagonism that were part of the bands’ DNA, nor the political and cultural contexts within which they operated and from which they evolved: Transmissions is also, ultimately, a tribute to the miraculous and affecting art created by Joy Division and New Order. They made music that made us feel so extraordinary, and to hear it thread through this impressive, multisourced narrative feat is to feel it all over again.
