Fact 10 Joy Division Unknown Pleasures 1979
Joy Division’s debut album was released in 1979 on Factory records. Unknown Pleasures, Fact 10, was produced by Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios, Stockport. The album sold poorly on release, but due to the subsequent success of the 1980 single Love Will Tear Us Apart, Fac 23, Unknown Pleasures became much more well-known and is now considered to be one of the strongest debut albums ever, capturing not just a city, but a moment in time. Factory boss Tony Wilson had so much faith in the band that he contributed his £8,500 life savings toward the cost of producing the initial run of 10,000 copies of the album.
There was no contract at Factory but as Peter Hook says “We had a sheet of paper saying that the masters would revert to us after six months if either of us decided not to work with each other. That was it. It was amazing the agreement lasted so well.” The album was Joy Divison’s first breakthrough, on the opening track, Disorder, Ian Curtis sings ‘I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand’, the following nine tracks are a definitive northern Gothic statement: guilt-ridden, romantic and claustrophobic. Martin Hannett’s production for the album is a reflection of Manchester’s dark rainy spaces of the late 1970s: vacant industrial buildings, cars speeding along urban clearways and the glow of orange streetlights.
The album cover is one of the most iconic cover images of the post-punk era. The cover image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background. It presents exactly 100 successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered (a pulsar is a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation). The image was suggested by Bernard Sumner and the cover design is credited to Joy Division, Peter Saville and Chris Mathan. The back cover of the album contains no track listings, leaving a blank table where one would expect this information to be. The initial release came in a textured sleeve.
The original LP release contained no track information on the labels, nor the traditional ‘side one’ and ‘side two’ designations. The ostensible ‘side one’ was labeled ‘Outside’ and displayed a reproduction of the image on the album cover, while the other side was labeled ‘Inside’ and displayed the same image with the colors reversed. Track information and album credits appeared on the inner sleeve only which also includes an uncredited photograph; the image is by an American photographer, Ralph Gibson, it is untitled and comes from the photo series The Somnambulist and is taken from the book with the same name.
Ralph Gibson Untitled from The Somnambulist Series 1970
The sleeve was printed by Garrod and Lofthouse who also printed many early Factory albums, singles and other items. They were responsible for the printing and construction of various classic sleeves – for Factory and others – often bearing the enigmatic inscription ‘G+L’. Like Factory, the company went into liquidation in the mid-1990s.
