The Drummer

"I am nothing more than a drummer and rallier"

Adolf Hitler, interviewed in 1922

"We’re not fucking Nazis. We’re from Salford"
Peter Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

I mentioned in my previous post Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler, and something struck me in an early chapter of the book, when Kershaw's writes about Hitler's burgeoning skill at inflaming the Munich beer halls with nationalist fervor. Hitler considered the role of the drummer a vocation, he became the agitator who understood how to shake the masses from their acquiescence to the Versailles Treaty. The image of the drummer is a powerful one and two representations immediately sprang to mind from the page - David Bennent's little drummer boy from The Tin Drum, and the sleeve of Joy Division's 1978 debut release An Ideal For Living, which features a drawing of a drumming Hitler Youth. The Joy Division EP is in fact loaded with Nazi references throughout. The type used for the band name leans heavily towards Germanic styles, and inside the fold of the sleeve is the famous 1943 picture of the frightened Warsaw Ghetto Boy discovered by the SS in a hide-out just before the ghetto was liquidated. The Nazi references carry over to the music too: the very name of the recently rechristened Joy Division was taken from Yehiel Feiner's disturbing 1955 Holocaust memoir House of Dolls, while a short passage from the book is spoken on the track No Love Lost. Furthermore, the first words spoken on the EP, the oblique count-off 3-5-0-1-2-5 Go! which opens the track Warsaw was a reference Rudolf Hess's prisoner of war number.

Obviously the four members of Joy Division were not drummers for fascist ideology but I was curious to know Peter Hook's reflections on the matter in his 2012 memoir Unknown Pleasures. 

After the name change, of course, the Nazi shit hit the fan. Changing our name to Joy Division, calling the EP An Ideal for Living and having a picture of a Hitler Youth banging a drum on the front of it – well, looking at it now, I can see the problem. I mean, An Ideal for Living? It even sounds Nazi.

But there was nothing more to it than a bunch of lads – Barney and Ian in particular – who were a bit obsessed with the war. Everybody was back then. We’d grown up with bomb craters behind our houses. It was the time of the big epic war films like A Bridge Too Far, and of Warlord and Commando comics.

Looking back on the preceding years there was most definitely something in the air: The World At War, the landmark 1973 series introduced the spectre of the Nazis to a new generation, while films like The Damned, Cabaret, The Night Porter, Salon Kitty consciously or not, fetishized Nazi uniforms and symbols. In 1973 Brian Eno and Robert Fripp collaborated on the experimental album (No Pussyfooting) and called one of the side-long compositions on the album, Swastika Girls. That same year, glam rock band The Sweet appeared on the Christmas day Top of the Pops performing their sole, solitary hit Block Buster! with bass player Steve Priest camping up as an effeminate Adolf Hitler and brandishing a swastika armband, an example of that curious English phenomenon of the Comedy Nazi. In 1976 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood began putting together their punk uniform which featured the swastika, here intended to cause as much offense as possible to the older generation. In December of that year Bromley Contingent member Simon Barker appeared alongside the Sex Pistols, on the Today Show wearing the swastika armband. It was in this milieu that the design of An Ideal For Living emerged. Peter Hook recalls:

It was about being shocking, not about ideology. We didn’t have a political bone in our bodies – none of us did, not even Ian. Arty stuff was what he liked, not political. Yes, we were naive and stupid and probably trying too hard to get up the noses of the older generation, but we weren’t Nazis. Never have been and never will be.

But for all their naivete, the Nazi connections would prove, to borrow from a later Ian Curtis lyric, a weight on their shoulders. Sounds' review of the EP on the 24th June, opened with the line Another Fascism for Fun and Profit Mob, while Hook admits in his book that the band lost out on signing with the Fast Product label, an early home to the nascent post-punk scene. It was therefore a relief to the band when Rob Gretton took over management duties in the second half of 1978 and re-issued the EP with an improved sounding pressing and perhaps more importantly, a new sleeve which featured a forest of scaffolding, a striking shot which I think is superior to the drummer sleeve. 

The image of the Hitler Youth drummer remains a loaded symbol and perhaps it was inevitable that Death In June (whose early sound was very much influenced by Joy Division) put out an album in 2006 entitled The Phoenix Has Risen, featuring on the cover, a shot of Douglas Pearce in the guise of the drummer, forging yet another unsavory connection with fascist ideology. But, luckily for me, the thorny subject of Death In June is a post for another day...