Stephen Morris, the drummer from Joy Division and New Order, has rewritten the editor’s notes for the remastered version of Unknown Pleasures on Apple Music. He gives a track by track recollection of the recording of each song.

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Disorder

Quite a frantic song. The three songs that should never be played together are ‘Disorder,’ ‘Interzone,’ and ‘Transmission’ because I collapse at the end. So of course that happened quite a lot. I really liked the lyrics. Going in the studio was really the first time that we’d been able to hear them properly. Before then, the only bit that I was certain about was the spirit/feeling bit [‘I’ve got the spirit but lose the feeling’].

Day Of The Lords

I always think of ‘Day of the Lords’ and ‘I Remember Nothing’ as a pair. They’ve both got that iciness, but they’re both nail-you-to-the-wall numbers. We did it in an afternoon probably. We were doing it in isolation, cut off from the rest of the Manchester music scene. We had this nobody-would-give-us-a-gig thing, so we were just stuck in the rehearsal room, writing songs: ‘Well, this will show them—we’ll write the best song ever.’ We certainly didn’t think that what we were doing was going to be something that would stand out 40 years later, at all.

Candidate

This was made up pretty much on the spot. We were sound-checking the drums and bass, jamming with Hooky, and Martin recorded it. Ian went away and wrote the words pretty quickly. He got ideas from films and TV as well as books. I can’t remember what the film was, it might have been The Manchurian Candidate—there’s someone in that who gets assassinated. I think that’s where the title came from.

Insight

This has my first drum synthesizer sound. I discovered that if you turned the filter knob right up, you could turn it into the sound of a Star WarsImperial Stormtrooper laser battle, which was always a highlight live. I didn’t understand that the volume increased exponentially as you turned the knob up, so when we did the break, it was deafeningly loud. It’s another typical Joy Division song in that it doesn’t really have a chorus. It’s just two moods—it goes from quite reflective to very, very sort of angry, then back to being reflective. Ian’s lyrics are absolutely perfect. We knew this one definitely didn’t sound like anything else, and again, it just arrived one Sunday afternoon

New Dawn Fades

I remember thinking, ‘Oh god, this is really, really fantastic.’ And then, yeah… Martin accidentally erased the cymbals. I am absolutely amazed at how the album still sounds modern. We were very interested in the future, but we weren’t aware that what we were doing was something that would end up there.

She’s Lost Control

The version on Unknown Pleasures is pretty much the same as we’d been doing it live, but after that we got taken with the idea of a 12-inch disco remix. In order to embellish the drum synth rhythm on it, Martin sent me into the tiny vocal booth to spray tape head cleaner in time to the drums. I think we went through two tins in half an hour. I should really have noticed the picture of the flames on the side of the can—it was highly inflammable. When we’d finished, I was going to light a cigarette, but fortunately [manager] Rob Gretton had run off with my lighter. Otherwise the whole thing would have just gone bang

Shadowplay

This always reminded me of ‘Ocean,’ the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed song. Ian’s lyrics are fantastic, a science fiction landscape thing. I remember listening to it for the first time, you could see this place, like out of a J.G. Ballard book. I’ve always played it exactly the same, because it’s just like a reflex action, a muscle memory thing. But the other day I sat down and tried to work out what the hell I was playing, and it’s like… God, you would never really play that. It was just a reaction to what everybody else was playing, and when I tried to analyze it, I just got lost

Wilderness

The stop-start-y one. I can remember Ian going on about an old ’60s black-and-white film about pirates who get marooned in the Sargasso Sea and cross the ocean with balloons on their feet… This sounds like I’m making this up, like some sort of psychedelic nightmare I once had. It was the idea that these people were just sort of stranded somewhere, and I think Ian got some lyrical inspiration from it. It’s a very peculiar song, very unusual rhythmically: I had one more drum than was strictly necessary for a drum kit, and I couldn’t figure what to do with it, so I wrote a pattern using this drum which otherwise would never get hit

Interzone

We all wanted to do something that was a bit like ‘The Murder Mystery’ on the third Velvet Underground album. Two lots of vocals going on; one’s on one side and one’s on the other side of the stereo. Ian wrote two lots of lyrics for it. He’s singing one and Hooky’s singing the other. In the end, when Ian’s epilepsy became really bad, ‘Interzone’ became the song that we had to do because Ian couldn’t sing anymore, Hooky could sing it

I Remember Nothing