Peter Saville

RETROSPECTIVE: What’s Henri Fantin-Latour Got To Do With It?

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New Order – Power, Corruption & Lies: A Retrospective Review

The Sleeve That Rewrote the Rules

Before a note of Power, Corruption & Lies reaches the ears, the eye is confronted with Peter Saville’s sleeve, a design that has gathered its own mythology over the passing decades. At first glance it is simply a reproduction of Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1890 still life of roses, delicate and faintly melancholic, a far cry from the cold geometry Factory Records had become known for. Yet the real twist lies in the seemingly innocuous coloured blocks that sit in the corner like a quiet rebuke to conventional typography. Long regarded by fans as a form of visual poetry, the blocks were eventually revealed to be Saville’s attempt at a coded alphabet, a kind of secret linguistic handshake that gave the record an air of clandestine modernity.

What has emerged through later interviews is just how mischievous the whole thing was. Saville had been increasingly bored with the constraints of standard lettering, so he set about devising a system that would let him “write” the band’s name and album title without actually writing anything at all. Factory, in characteristically perverse fashion, embraced the idea. The result was a jacket that felt like a puzzle box, a Victorian painting interrupted by a futuristic key, a design that made no immediate sense yet seemed perfectly in step with New Order’s own uncertain transition from the gloom of their past into something more colourful and unpredictable.

Over time the sleeve has come to be seen as a statement of intent. It suggested that this was not merely another post-punk artefact, but a curious hybrid of heritage and innovation. It also set the tone for countless later designers who treated album packaging as a riddle rather than a label. Even now it retains that rare magic, the sense of being both timeless and ahead of its time, a piece of art that hinted, long before the music began, that New Order were about to reinvent themselves.

New Order Power Corruption and Lies by Peter Saville and Henri Fantin-Latour


The Music That Reprogrammed The Band

History tends to sand down the sharp edges of even the most tumultuous bands, but in the case of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, the decades have only sharpened its silhouette. It remains an album perched squarely on the fault line between grief and reinvention, the moment Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert turned their backs on the monochrome shadows of Joy Division and stepped, blinking, into a brash new technicolour world, although one still streaked with dread.

Now with more than forty years of hindsight and a small library’s worth of scholarship behind it, the album feels less like a second album (I detest sophomore) release and more like a manifesto. The lingering presence of Ian Curtis haunted Movement, but here the ghosts do not dictate terms; they merely observe. The record opens not with a funereal echo from the Factory corridors, but with “Age of Consent”, a bright, jangling rush of liberation that still carries a nervous quiver beneath its surface. Sumner’s vocal, tentative and slightly frayed, sounds like someone learning to speak again. Hook’s bass, by contrast, strides forward with the immodest confidence of a man who knows he is holding the melodic centre of gravity.

What modern listeners can appreciate, thanks to years of interviews and excavated studio notes, is just how bare-bones their toolkit really was. The band were teaching themselves synthesisers on the fly; Gillian Gilbert in particular has since recalled how she pieced together melodies with a mixture of curiosity and blind faith. Stephen Morris was programming early drum machines in ways their manufacturers had never intended. One later admitted he genuinely had no idea how Morris coaxed certain patterns out of the Oberheim DMX without the casing overheating. The album’s mechanical pulse, so crisp and self-assured to contemporary ears, was in fact held together by the sheer nerve of four people who barely knew if the circuitry would hold until the final mix.

“Blue Monday” inevitably casts a long shadow whenever the PCL era is mentioned, though it technically sits outside the album. But it was the PCL sessions, along with the band’s growing fascination with the dancefloor, that birthed it. Factory archivists unearthed, years later, a handwritten note from designer Peter Saville estimating how many copies the label would need to sell just to break even, owing to the sleeve’s notoriously expensive die-cut floppy-disc design. They underestimated wildly. The single became a commercial leviathan, and its success dragged Power, Corruption & Lies along behind it like a passenger stumbling onto the last train home.

The album’s mid-section still feels like a crystallisation of New Order’s internal tug-of-war. There is the icy romanticism of “Your Silent Face” (with Sumner’s now-infamous “Why don’t you piss off?”), the post-punk scaffolding that creaks through “Ultraviolence”, and the synth-pop shimmer of “Leave Me Alone”, a track that sounds like two elevated hands reaching simultaneously for joy and resignation. Critics have long debated whether PCL is the moment New Order shed their Joy Division skin or merely learned to live with the seams showing, but in truth it is both, a record that understands transformation not as an erasure but as an accumulation.

One of the more intriguing details unearthed in the years since comes from engineer Michael Johnson, who revealed in a 2010 retrospective that the band often worked in near-total silence between takes, communicating in nods and half-gestures. “It was like watching people rebuild a house they did not remember demolishing,” he said. That sense of fragile reconstruction thrums from the record’s core. Despite its reputation as the dawn of New Order’s dance era, PCL is an album built on restraint, with spaces left open, lines left hanging, and machines nudged into emotional service.

Today, Power, Corruption & Lies stands as the first true statement of what New Order were capable of when freed from both tragedy’s grip and expectation’s weight. It is a record that neither rages nor mourns, but simply moves forward, quietly radical, defiantly awkward and utterly singular. The decades have clarified its position in the canon, not as a footnote to Joy Division and not merely as a stepping stone to the superclub-friendly New Order of the 1990s, but as a work of invention from a band still learning how to be itself.

And like the best of New Order’s output, it remains a reminder that sometimes the future begins not with a bang but with a hesitant synth line, a guiding bass melody, and four people trying to find their footing on the other side of loss.

RETROSPECTIVE: Where Have They Been? Joy Division, Closer

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A detailed retrospective on Joy Division’s devastatingly timeless album Closer, exploring the band’s final and most haunting studio album in all its creative, atmospheric, emotional and historical depth. The eternal question, closer or closer?

Joy Division Closer (1980)


Rarely, an album arrives haunted before you even drop the needle. Closer, released in July 1980 just weeks after Ian Curtis’s death, is the ultimate example. It arrived like a final communiqué, a cold transmission from a place beyond exhaustion. If Unknown Pleasures was the sound of a band discovering the architecture of modern despair, Closer was the completed structure: stark, beautiful, desolate and impossibly refined. It remains one of the most unsettling records ever made, not because of the tragedy that surrounds it, but because of how complete it feels. Four young men, barely out of their early twenties, constructing a monument with the calm precision of veteran craftsmen.

Recorded at Britannia Row Studios in early 1980, Closer was shaped by the same constellation of characters that defined its predecessor. Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris formed the nucleus, still working under the shadow of Manchester’s derelict industrial gloom. Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus held Factory together with philosophy, flair and a certain reckless faith. Peter Saville designed the sleeve, this time a funereal photograph of a stone tomb from a Genoan cemetery. And Martin Hannett returned to sculpt the sound, more ghostly, more meticulous, more distant than ever. What they created no longer sounded like post-punk discovering itself. It sounded like something else entirely.

Curtis’s lyrics are the centre of gravity here. Written in short bursts of clarity amid worsening health, collapsing marriage and relentless touring, they possess a startling emotional precision. There is no flailing, no melodrama. Instead, Curtis writes like a man tracing the edges of his own disappearance. “A legacy so far removed” he intones on “Heart and Soul”, a line delivered with such resignation it feels almost weightless. On “Twenty Four Hours” he sounds caught between yearning and surrender, while “Passover” reads like a series of warnings he never expected anyone to hear. Curtis had always been precociously articulate, but on Closer his imagery crystallises. He writes with the concision of a poet and the clarity of someone who knows time is thinning.

Musically, the band had sharpened into an eerie, restrained machine. Hook’s bass leads most of the melodies, mournful but insistent. Sumner’s guitar is sparse, almost pointillist, teasing out glimmers of light through the haze. Morris remains astonishing, turning minimal drum patterns into emotional punctuation. There are moments that hint at what New Order would become, yet nothing here feels transitional. This is a closed circle.

And presiding over it all, Martin Hannett. If his work on Unknown Pleasures turned the band’s rawness into atmosphere, on Closer he goes further, transforming space into an emotional instrument. His production leaves acres of room between the notes. Drums crack like snapped bones in a cathedral. Basslines hover in negative space. Curtis’s voice floats somewhere between the living and the dead. Hannett built these tracks with the attention of a watchmaker, each mechanism ticking in isolation until it formed a whole that feels strangely inevitable.

Side one is almost liturgical. “Atrocity Exhibition” opens with a lurching rhythm and guitars that clatter like loose machinery. It is disorienting, provocative and brilliant. “Isolation” introduces a brittle electronic pulse, as if the band are already stepping into their next form. “Passover” feels like a whispered confession, “Colony” storms with controlled frenzy, and “A Means to an End” ties it all together with one of Hook’s finest basslines.

Side two is something else entirely. It is not a descent so much as a surrender. “Heart and Soul” is spacious, drifting, suspended in its own gravity. “Twenty Four Hours” is devastating, built on one of the band’s most violent dynamic shifts. “The Eternal” might be Joy Division’s most heartbreaking song, Morris’s drum pattern funereal, Sumner’s synths thin and trembling, Curtis sounding utterly alone. And then “Decades”, the closing track, a cold sunrise over ruins. Hook’s bass loops like memory itself while Curtis sings with a calm that chills the spine. It ends not with drama, but with a kind of acceptance.

When Closer arrived, it was instantly framed as a posthumous statement. It is not. It is a fully realised work by a band operating at the peak of their powers. The tragedy does not define it, but it certainly haunts it. Even without hindsight, the emotional gravity is unmistakeable. It is an album made with astonishing clarity by musicians who had no idea it would become a memorial.

Forty-five years on, Closer still stands apart. It is not a companion piece to Unknown Pleasures but a culmination. The purity of its production, the maturity of the writing, the confidence in its restraint. These were four young men building something timeless while their world was falling apart around them.

If Unknown Pleasures is the moment of ignition, Closer is the monument left behind. A cathedral of quiet despair. A masterwork of control, tension and emotional truth.

Enthusiasts return to it not because of its mythology, but because of its craftsmanship. It is immaculate, unsettling, and strangely beautiful. It remains one of the finest records ever to emerge from Britain, and one of the few that still feels like a closed door you can never fully open.

A band at the edge of collapse. A producer at the height of his powers. A label built on belief. And a singer writing with a lucidity that still feels impossible.

Closer endures because it sounds final. And because, in its own stark way, it is. Where have they been?

RETROSPECTIVE – Joy Division Unknown Pleasures

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A stark, immersive deep dive into Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division’s 1979 debut that transformed post-punk into something spectral and eternal. Exploring the collision of Ian Curtis’s lyrical brilliance, Martin Hannett’s ghostly production, and Factory Records’ visionary chaos, this retrospective revisits the album that defined modern alienation and still sounds like the future.

Joy Division Unknown Pleasures, the ultimate retrospective review.


Some records don’t just capture a moment. Unknown Pleasures wasn’t merely a debut but a collision of working-class intelligence, creative genius and industrial desolation that turned late-Seventies Manchester into a kind of spiritual proving ground. Released in June 1979, it remains one of those rare works where every element; band, producer, manager, label, sleeve designer and city fuses into perfection. A flashpoint that changed everything.

Joy Division were four awkward young men who didn’t look the part. If the local council office workers put a band together this was it. No poses, no smiles, no pretence. Ian Curtis stood at the centre: pale, intense, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the crowd. Bernard Sumner, all nervous energy, turned thin air into electricity with brittle, searching guitar lines. Peter Hook, with attitude and melody, played bass like lead, as if he’d grown weary of the instrument’s traditional place and decided to reinvent it. Stephen Morris, unflappable and precise, was the human metronome keeping it all from imploding. Together they made music that sounded less performed than conjured.

And yet, at the heart of it all, stood Curtis, not simply the singer, but the reason Unknown Pleasures still feels like revelation. His lyrics weren’t slogans or statements; they were serious literature. Curtis was a working-class intellectual, a devourer of Kafka, Ballard, and Burroughs, a man who could translate alienation into poetry without losing the grit of everyday life. He wrote with eerie precocity, his words carrying the depth of someone twice his age. “Disorder” opens the record with “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand”, a line that already sounds like a plea from the edge. “She’s Lost Control” was drawn from his encounters at the employment exchange, the story of a woman whose seizures mirrored the illness that would later contribute to his demise. In “New Dawn Fades”, he faces despair with devastating clarity: “A change of speed, a change of style, a change of scene, with no regrets.” Curtis never dramatised his pain; he documented it. Every lyric feels lived, every silence deliberate.

Around him, the band moved with precision. Sumner’s guitar shimmered with nervous energy. Hook’s bass carried the emotional and propulsive pulse. Morris locked everything into place with mechanical rigour. They didn’t just accompany Curtis’s words; they inhabited them, building soundscapes of claustrophobia and strange beauty.

Then came Martin Hannett, the producer who turned Joy Division’s live fury into something spectral. A sonic visionary and a mercurial eccentric, Hannett treated the studio like a laboratory. He recorded breaking glass, lift shafts, and literally empty space, turning silence itself into an instrument. The band wanted raw power*; Hannett delivered atmosphere, detachment, immortality. Hook complained it was too clean, too cold. But Hannett understood that this wasn’t a record about noise, it was about isolation. What he built in Strawberry Studios wasn’t just a mix; it was an environment.

(*for a heavier Joy Division listen to the live side of Still and the BBC John Peel Sessions available on the ‘Best Of’ CD)

Overseeing it all, Factory Records, Anthony H Wilson’s impossible dream. Tony Wilson was the showman-philosopher-TV presenter and new music advocate, preaching art over commerce. Alan Erasmus his quiet lieutenant, Peter Saville the young graphic designer and aesthetic genius who gave Factory its visual language. Saville’s historic sleeve design for Unknown Pleasures, the white-on-black pulsar from a Cambridge astronomy textbook, became the perfect visual echo of the sound within. No title, no band name, no marketing. Just a transmission from the void. Inspired.

The record unfolds like a descent. “Disorder” rushes in with nervous urgency. “Day of the Lords” trudges through a wasteland. “Insight” floats in eerie calm, as if overheard from another world. “New Dawn Fades” devastates with Hook’s bass in lament, Sumner’s guitar shimmering like fluorescent light. Then side two opens with “She’s Lost Control”, a mechanised tragedy pulsing with inevitability. “Shadowplay” prowls through dim alleyways, “Wilderness” and “Interzone” flicker with punk afterglow before “I Remember Nothing” ends in collapse, static, glass, and Curtis’s voice dissolving into silence.

When it was released, Unknown Pleasures barely registered commercially. Factory’s distribution (like Rough Trade in London) was chaotic, and Manchester’s cultural importance had yet to be mythologised. But those who found it; the lost, the restless, the disillusioned recognised something transcendent. Punk had been about confrontation; Joy Division turned inward and found a new vocabulary for despair. They had created the post punk meisterwerk.

Within just a year, the story turned tragic. Curtis, battling epilepsy and emotional turmoil, took his own life on the eve of the band’s first American tour. Closer followed posthumously an austere requiem with prescient sleeve to match, but Unknown Pleasures remains the genesis, the moment the ordinary became eternal.

It endures because it was never really of its time. Curtis’s lyrics read like prophecy; Hannett’s production sounds perpetually modern. Sumner, Hook and Morris would carry fragments of its brilliance into New Order, but they never recaptured this particular alchemy, the balance of tension and restraint, intellect and instinct, belief and doom.

Unknown Pleasures isn’t just the greatest post-punk album. It’s the blueprint for everything that followed. The hum of fluorescent light in an empty flat. The heartbeat of a city rediscovering its soul. The poetry of disconnection made sacred by four ordinary lads, one visionary producer, and one man’s terrible genius.

Forty-six years on, it still sounds like the future, it still hurts but as Tony Wilson later mused, a record that launched a band responsible for the renaissance and redevelopment of an entire city.