Read History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs for Free Online

specters in the music. As the critic Jon Savage wrote in a review of the album, “the song titles read an opaque manifesto.” There were matters that could be shaped into songs—coherent, interlocking patterns that did affirm form and the possibility of delight—but which were not subject to merely personal, psychological, or sociological explanations. “There is always a social explanation for what we see in art,” Albert Camussaid in 1947. “Only it doesn’t explain anything important.” The songs were art, which by definition escapes the control, the intentions, and the technique of the people who make it.
    Art doesn’t explain itself. “He was Ian, Mister Polite, Mister Nice,” Sumner would say, “and then suddenly onstage, about the third song in, you’d notice that he’d gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart, ripping up the floor-boards and throwing them at the audience. Then by the end of the set he’d be completely covered in blood. But no-one would talk about it, because that was our way; we didn’t think he knew why he got himself worked up that way.”
    At the end of 1978, Curtis had his first epilepsy attack, in a van; his bandmates took him to the hospital. The next April, he began having fits on stage. “Some nights to the end of the set”—some nights lasting only through the end of “Transmission”—“Ian would scatter the mike stand, stagger speedily sideways and be rushed off the stage by Hooky or Barney or Terry their road manager,” Tony Wilson would write. “Holding him down was tough. Terry was best at it. ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘What?’ ‘You OK?’ said Rob. The van was quiet. A little aftershocked. ‘It’s nothing, shut up,’ replied Ian curtly.”
    in January 1980, Curtis made his first suicide attempt, cutting his wrists. In April he tried again, with an overdose of phenobarbitone. On May 18 he succeeded. But that explains nothing about why, in “Transmission” as it was capturedon record or on video, the song is not an occasion for explanation, but an event, where what seemed impossible before the event took place seems inevitable afterward. It’s no matter that the event, if that is what “Transmission” is, was staged, that it was the integrity of form on the part of the band that allowed Curtis to attack the legitimacy of form, the very idea; no one knew what was going to happen when the song happened. To Deborah Curtis, Curtis’s wife, Jon Savage has written, “Ian’s mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that she had to cope with at home”—but the biographical is just another mode of denying the autonomous nature of any work of art, for erasing art as a field where what is at issue, whatever that might be, is not only expressed but discovered. Curtis’s performance might have been a mirror of his epilepsy. But it might also have been a matter of intentionally replicating fits, reenacting them, using them as a form of energy and a form of music, as form as such. More deeply, it might have been a matter of Curtis’s using his fits as an idea, the idea for which the songs were only containers. Was it a matter of calling up the demon, and letting it take the stage? Curtis told Sumner how disturbed he was that while once he had struggled to write songs, now they arrived complete, unbidden: “The words were writing themselves.”
    An attempt to record “Transmission” in March 1979 was vague, muffled; everything sounded contrived. A few monthslater, the band recorded it again, in a version released as a single, with a lightness in the rhythm, the guitar languid, and, you could imagine, someone who’d wandered into the studio and started carrying on about nothing, until he wanders away. But the song was never about the recording studio. On 13 July 1979 the band played the Factory club in Manchester. For “Dead Souls,” Peter Hook’s bass playing feels as if it’s coming from out of the ground, as if mining