100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #20 Joy Division – She’s Lost Control

Released: 1979

A suspicion attached to Joy Division’s first album Unknown Pleasures – usually over ridden by the shrill cries of it’s latter day evangelists – is that it’s an excercise that’s the almost precise sum of it’s parts, a good album, perhaps even a great one, but not the capsule that’s hermetically sealed against criticism which it’s now become.

Some of the reasons for it’s status as a de facto 20th century classic are obvious, from the untimely death of singer Ian Curtis to the continuing pre-eminence of the acrid, monochromatic landscape he and the rest of the quartet created, a stylistic echo which has an undiminishable half life.

Maybe Unknown Pleasures continues to attract so much attention because of the gap in vision between the group and producer Martin Hannett, but on She’s Lost Control the doomed singer reveals that for the distraction it is. Written after witnessing the life changing effects of epilepsy on a woman he was tasked with helping, it’s effect shows guessing how the drums were recorded or whether the band were in the room for playbacks or not is a fools errand. In the song’s cold and sterile landscape his desperation and paranoia are alien feelings, screams trapped inside a mirror, whilst in turn the instruments become increasingly hostile and savage.

Ultimately, most music just is. She’s Lost Control shouldn’t be regarded as an exhibit in the circular debate about Joy Division’s greatness. A horror poem that transcends it’s vessel, its neo-gothic tragedy starkly frames a songwriter who became the victim of his ever darkening moods. Discussion over.