Joy Division and Daniel Meadows

Control is a film about the euphoria and the anguish of being a member of Manchester rock-band Joy Division during one of the most musically creative periods in the city’s history.

Cardiff photographer Daniel Meadows was in the middle of it all, and for him the film was a reminder of youthful days. 

“It was like watching a home recording,”  Daniel said: “My wife and I were both in tears watching the movie.”

Control charts the rise of Joy Division, from gritty Manchester suburbia to stardom and also the eventual suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, after his marriage and health disintegrated. For Daniel the film had powerful echoes of his own life.

“Our situation was very similar to Ian’s and his wife Debbie’s. I was the artist guy working in TV and my wife had given up her job to come and live with me in the North.

“It was very moving to watch it because at the time it was set I had just got married and my wife was pregnant. It felt like a film about our own lives.”

Daniel’s path first crossed with Joy Division’s when he worked for regional TV firm Granada with Tony Wilson, the presenter of leftfield music show ‘So It Goes’.

Daniel said: “I was making a documentary about a photographer called Charlie Meacham. It was made in the snow and Charlie was using an old-fashioned large format camera. Charlie was on the edge of a wood while the snow was melting. We were filming him photographing and he was giving a commentary.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but Joy Division were sitting around at [Tony] Wilson’s house. They were watching the programme and they were discussing the artwork for their new 12-inch single Atmosphere. The cover of that single is the shot we were making with Charlie. It’s just black trees, the wood and the snow.”

Manchester in the late 1970s was a hot bed of musical activity, as the punk movement, spearheaded by bands like Buzzcocks, cleared away the excess of 1960s rock and roll.

At the centre of itall was larger-than-life character Tony Wilson. As head of Factory, Joy Division’s record label, Wilson spearheaded much of Manchester’s punk movement. His legacy was later immortalised in Michael Winterbottom’s film 24-Hour Party People.

Daniel said: “Wilson would tell me when gigs were happening and he would ask me if I wanted to take pictures, although I don’t think he ever paid me.

“The first time I went to Wilson’s Russell Club, Buzzcocks were playing and so was John Cooper-Clark, who I went to photograph. Then Wilson introduced me to Joy Division through the Atmosphere cover and invited me to photograph them at their recording studios. 

“On the band’s single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, there is a flip-side with another version of the same track, and that other version is the one I photographed them recording.”

But the man who really impressed Daniel was the band’s enigmatic producer Martin Hannett, who many critics credit with creating Joy Division’s uniquely atmospheric sound.

“I liked Martin Hannett a lot. I always felt like he was misrepresented because no one took any notice of him as a celebrity person,” Daniel said.

“I loved watching him work. I would just sit watching him taking the band’s sounds and turning them into something completely different.”

Manchester provides the backdrop for Control and proved the inspiration for some of the most important bands of the period, not just Joy Division, but also Buzzcocks, The Smiths, and later Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses.

Daniel said: “Manchester had a fierce independent spirit, especially in terms of the North versus the South.

“It was shitty, that was one of the things they got just right in Control. It had been the crucible of the industrial revolution 100 years before and gradually everything had run down; the cotton mills, the docks, it really was pretty shitty.”

Before Wilson’s death from cancer in August 2007, Daniel caught up with his old friend one more time.

“I met Wilson at Hay Literature Festival two years ago,” Daniel said.

“My son was incredibly impressed that we spent the whole afternoon with him. He was most like himself. He was about to die so he was just telling it how it was.

“He was always very charming, very bright, but he could be dismissive as well.

“I remember when I left Granada and I went to say goodbye to him. He said, ‘well, neither of us like the idea of the Thatcher era Daniel, but we are both enterprising enough to survive it; Good Luck.’”

Survive it Daniel did, and in fact Control is such an intriguing film because it showed a poorer, more politicised and even more purposeful Britain before Thatcher swept it all away.

Entering into the spirit of the Manchester music scene, one Cardiff man added his own touch to a very personal and fascinating period in British music.

Feature by Thomas Frost

Photography By Daniel Meadows

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