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1950s, who knows exactly where, who knows exactly when....
Mangiafuoco, a kid with a precocious grin, watches, during the school festival, the performance of a classmate singing "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis.
Oh, the wonder in his eyes and everything that can be amazed...
But not only that...
What happens is also a strange bodily phenomenon, as our youngster, in a strange and syncopated frame by frame, starts moving in jerks...
Besides, if even cowgirls get the blues, sometimes kids who don't deserve sweet Euchessina turn into rock'n'roll turkeys.
But why Mangiafuoco? Our little grinning being is far from resembling a bearded little ogre, actually...
He's a slender, gaunt, emaciated type.
And that grin, that grin which will never leave him, is nothing but a coy and atrociously feminine grimace imprinted on his face by who knows which Aunt Gwendaline or Rosemary.
Then, okay, his name is not even Mangiafuoco, I'm the one calling him that way. And, besides, I shouldn't even talk about it, at least not so extensively.
Only that...
Only that our friend appears, albeit just for a moment, on the first pages of this book.
And he does so in the guise of the great puppeteer, or maybe a fox, or rather as the one who attracts you, ensnares you, calls you to arms,
In short, the most splendid flower for the bee or, remaining in the insect domain, the lamp where the moth always ends up....
So let's see that moment that would be just a moment if it weren't much more, so much more that I doubt you'll even believe it.
But we have to jump ahead about twenty years...
And so...
Manchester, 1976...
Mangiafuoco is outside the club.
All dressed in black leather, a bizarre reddish hairstyle makes him look like a bizarre kind of fox.
After all, he's there to lure as many Pinocchios as he can.
Sure, the cat is missing, who is then a little cat, or maybe a witch, however (so to speak) he can handle it very well on his own.
Yes Yes Yes...
It might be about his strange smile, which is then that of a Stan Laurel who somehow turned wicked.
Or of that funny and ancient jerking movement that, as we know, relates him to the most sullen of fowls.
And then, if you think about it, how can Mangiafuoco look like a fox and how can a fox look like a turkey? Well folks, the answer is simple, Mangiafuoco is a manager. And managers know one more than the devil.
Who else would have thought, after all, to take four scoundrels and make a rock band out of them? Who if not someone who wants to make mountains of money with chaos?
Primordial chaos (Jerry Lee Lewis) and the chaos of intelligence (Debord). The first will be handled by those four scoundrels, he'll take care of the second.
Pointing out, not exactly something trivial, how and when to strike.
Who knows if he knows the story of that boxer who, almost blinded by his opponent's punches, could no longer see just one opponent, but three.
It was the coach who got him out of trouble, giving him, in a flash of truth/wisdom, the only possible advice, namely "if you see three hit the one in the middle".
But let's get back to the beginning...
Even if not before saying that the chaos interested the fox turkey puppeteer as much and perhaps more than money, even if this is just my opinion...
Manchester. 1976...
Mangiafuoco is outside the club and is there to sell tickets...
Here come Bernard and Peter, two who, like Pinocchios, are absolutely perfect and, upon seeing that strange figure, are left stunned.
"Must be some kind of punk!!!", they think.
They approach and feel like a cold wind, but they don't even have time to notice since in a moment they are already inside the club where another 40/50 Pinocchios are waiting.
The show begins and the support band isn't much...
Then Mangiafuoco's four enter and bam!!!!
Bam!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bernard and Peter see the light.
Not so much for the music, a sort of indistinct noise. But for that damned singer.
"He smirked and growled in your face, looked at you as if he hated being there."
And then Peter thinks: I can do it too/I want to do it/damn, I need to do it....
The next day he buys a bass. Bernard already has the guitar.
They punk themselves up as much as they can and look for a singer who's lousy, but lousy in the right way. However, all the candidates are just lousy.
Then at the second concert of Mangiafuoco's boys, they meet Ian. And Ian is wearing a jacket with HATE written on the back.
Bam!!!!
Bam for the second time...
That if Bernard and Peter (Peter especially) are a couple of fools. Ian is not. Ian is Mr. Courtesy. With almost old-fashioned manners. Also he is married.
But it's all appearance. You can see it from the eyes, dimly lit, lit dimly.
At home he has three folders: one for stories, one for poems, one for I don't remember what. And his writing style is exactly like his eyes.
Thus recruited: voice, lyrics, and even leadership.
He is the one to come up with the first band name, "Warsaw," a clear homage to Bowie's "Low." And from him come all the suggestions that immediately take the band beyond punk. Although, punk or not, they are still raw, powerful, obsessive...
Only then comes Martin.
And Martin, a kind of fabulous connection between Merlin and Phil Spector, is a wizard who speaks in riddles. A producer who hates musicians.
His musical mind, surrounded by a bush of hair and always immersed in a cloud of smoke, conceives sound as an essential place.
Because he's someone who doesn't just hear the sound, he sees it, he sees it damn it!!! Because of those clouds of smoke, sure, but also because he’s completely out of it himself.
Then he spends nights constructing it, deconstructing it, like an architect struggling with his glass palaces.
Because sound is a glass palace, indeed the glass palace is where that sound has to be heard, which then might even be better as an industrial warehouse of that obscene, gray, dilapidated, polluted, dirty Manchester.
The sound is a ghost, a spirit, a damn aerial, gaseous, sublime, ethereal thing that will illuminate the ruin, the sound will capture the space, will purify it, will be the elsewhere of here, the here of elsewhere.
So what he architects is an insane work of reclamation of that vortex/swamp those musician fools present to him.
Records, overdubs, records the drums one drum at a time, works to avoid as much as possible the sound dispersion of individual instruments from one channel to another.
What he's looking for is an impossible clarity.
He comes close though, as everything goes in and out of a kind of decanting chamber that returns a music so essential and echoing that it seems like you only hear the breath and the beat of a human machine in the distance.
Add to this the work on Ian's voice no longer caught in the punk scream, but set on a low and sepulchral register that with that music is one and the same.
Listen to Peter: "To keep them fantastic forever, Martin took our songs and put them inside little capsules."
Perfect, it couldn't be better said. But his is a retrospective judgment, as at the time while all this was happening, he and Bernard were quite pissed off...
"What the hell have you done to our music, Martin? You gutted it and then ripped its balls off."
Fantastic, right? That seems to echo the words of the classic rockers of the era, saying they were astonished is an understatement. But also, turning it into a positive, the most perfect definition not just of all new wave, but almost.
This is the beginning of the Joy Division story...
Peter Hook tells it very well, without taking himself too seriously. Obviously, he also talks a lot about Ian (the suicide, the sense of guilt) but he does so avoiding those ridiculous romantic tones that we fans love so much...
Of Ian we've all talked too much, me included since I've written two reviews on Joy Division that are a continuous Ian here, Ian there...
So this time I talked about something else...
The book is good...
Tra-la-la...
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