It’s been hailed as an “indie Stairway To Heaven” but such a comparison arguably undermines its greatness. Almost 35 years since it was released in June 1980, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart remains a stunningly original and timeless classic.
No one sounded like Joy Division and Love Will Tear Us Apart is a testament to their unique creative vision. It’s visceral, intense, achingly sad and beautiful, with an emotive honesty that resonates across the decades.
Tragically, the band’s gifted and charismatic singer Ian Curtis never lived to see the song released. On 18 May 1980, on the eve of the band’s first US tour, he took his own life, which as journalist David Honigmann of the Financial Times noted in 2021, “sealed [the song’s] reputation as in essence a musical suicide note”.
Curtis was diagnosed with epilepsy in 1979 just as the band began their ascent, and frequently endured seizures on stage. Love Will Tear Us Apart deals with his profound struggles with this condition, as well as his internal conflict over his relationships with his wife, Deborah, and with the Belgian music promoter Annik Honoré: “Why is the bedroom so cold? Turned away on your side…”. It also documents the stress of holding down a day job while meeting the growing demands of his new role in Joy Division.
By the time the band wrote Love Will Tear Us Apart they were on the brink of becoming one of the biggest bands in the UK. Their debut album Unknown Pleasures had established them as a band that created a compelling and haunting sonic landscape.
Bassist Peter Hook and guitarist Bernard Sumner were friends from school and were both in the audience at the Sex Pistols’ legendary gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall on 6 April 1976. Virtually everyone who was at that sparsely-attended gig that night – including a young Morrissey – was seemingly inspired to form a band, fuelled by the DIY ethos of punk.
Sumner recalled attending the gig with Hook and them both making the decision that night to form a band. In a feature in Mojo in July 1994, Sumner told journalist Jon Savage that he felt the Pistols "destroyed the myth of being a pop star, of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship".
Within days, Sumner and Hook had formed Warsaw and like many who came up during punk, it was their very limitations as musicians that enabled them to develop wholly unique and innovative styles. For Hook, this meant using his bass as more of a lead instrument, playing swooping chorus-soaked melodic lines high up the neck.
Love Will Tear Us Apart originated in the band’s rehearsal space, some time in August 1979. The first riff came from Hook, and Curtis responded immediately by coming up with ideas for guitar and drums, before adding his lyrics.
“It was written on the bass and drums and then Bernard put the keyboard on it,” Hook told Gavin Martin in Classic Rock. “I was just playing around with a riff and Ian spotted the melody. He jumped on it and goes: ‘That’s good, that’s good. Now Steve, put some drums on.’ It was the way we always wrote. Ian didn’t write the music but he could spot it. We’d jam, he’d sit there and pick out the bits he thought were good.”
Despite its clear potential, the song perplexed the band. “It was a funny song for us because it was quite poppy, a contrast to the rest of the Joy Division stuff,” said Hook. “We weren’t that struck with it. The ones that were our favourites were ballsy and angsty, like Shadowplay or Transmission, because you could hide behind the song. Love Will Tear Us Apart was fragile and a lot lighter. We knew it was good but not great.”
The band included the song on one of their John Peel sessions, which was aired in November 1979 and the song quickly became a staple part of their live shows.
On 8 January 1980, Joy Division went into Pennine Sound Studios in Oldham to record the song. They played it the same as they did live but Ian Curtis and their producer Martin Hannett were not happy with the results.
Hannett would become the pivotal figure in shaping Love Will Tear Us Apart. He was a mercurial figure in the Manchester music scene and had produced the first independent punk record, Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP. Hannett, who died in 1991, was a gifted producer and a maverick, sometimes dubbed ‘the fifth member of Joy Division’ and he was an original partner/director at Factory Records.
In March 1980, Hannett took the band to Strawberry Studios in Stockport, one of the first professional recording studios outside the capital.
Tony Wilson, mercurial head of Joy Division’s label Factory Records, had already suggested that Curtis meld his deep baritone into an imitation of Frank Sinatra. Hannett loved this idea and ran with it.
“That was Martin Hannett’s doing, something I thought and was hoping would be impossible to do,” Hook told Classic Rock. “But it’s the subtlety that makes it last. Bernard and I would just have done it balls-out, legs akimbo like Status Quo and probably would have f***** it up in the process. Martin gave us a depth that I don’t think 20-year-old kids could have got on their own.”
Hannett slowly became obsessed with the song. He recorded each instrument separately and positioned the elements within the mix to highlight the sombre, haunting timbre of Curtis’s baritone voice.
Sumner’s guitar is a defining feature of the song, with its frantic, edgy, urgency. Opinions vary wildly on what guitars were actually used on Love Will Tear Us Apart. An Eko 12-string is cited in a number of accounts, but it seems likely that Bernard Sumner would have also used his Shergold Masquerader or Gibson SG Standard into a Marshall amp.
Ian didn't really want to play guitar, but for some reason we wanted him to play it
In September 1979, the band’s road manager Rob Gretton bought Curtis a 1967 white Vox Phantom VI Special guitar, which he used during the band’s 1980 European tour and on the official video for Love Will Tear Us Apart. Some sources claim this guitar appears towards the end of the recording of the song.
Ian Curtis rarely played guitar. “Ian didn't really want to play guitar, but for some reason we wanted him to play it,” Sumner told Pat Graham for the book Instrument. “We showed him how to play D and we wrote a song. I wonder if that's why we wrote Love Will Tear Us Apart, you could drone a D through it. I think he played it live because I was playing keyboards.”
The keyboard Sumner used on the song is the ARP Omni String Machine. This instrument is used for the memorable lead motif, which is underpinned by the same haunting melody on Hook’s bass.
Details are hazy on what kit drummer Stephen Morris used on the track, although it seems likely it was a black Rogers kit as that was the kit he used on the Closer album, which was also recorded in March, 1980. Like Curtis, Morris was inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk and Neu!, and was an early user of electronic drums such as the Synare PS-1 synth drum, synths such as the E-MU Emulator and drum machines such as the Roland CR-78.
There are reports of a drum machine being used on an earlier recording of Love Will Tear Us Apart, but on the version that was released as a single it seems that Morris used his acoustic Rogers kit.
From the moment he first heard Love Will Tear Us Apart, Martin Hannett sensed its greatness. Like all great producers, Hannett forged the sonic elements in a way the band themselves had not even considered. Hannett worked relentlessly and the band were just as committed. But there were moments when even they felt Hannett had pushed them too far.
“Martin Hannett played one of his mind games when we were recording it,” Stephen Morris told journalist Lee Gale of GQ in 2012. “It sounds like he was a tyrant, but he wasn't, he was nice. We had this one battle where it was nearly midnight and I said, ‘Is it alright if I go home, Martin – it's been a long day?" And he said [whispers], ‘Okay ... you go home’.
“So I went back to the flat. Just got to sleep and the phone rings. ‘Martin wants you to come back and do the snare drum’. At four in the morning! I said, ‘What's wrong with the snare drum!?’. So every time I hear Love Will Tear Us Apart, I grit my teeth and remember myself shouting down the phone, 'You b******' ... I can feel the anger in it even now. It's a great song and it's a great production, but I do get anguished every time I hear it.”
I couldn’t understand why he was constantly remixing it – four or five times in different studios
Peter Hook
Peter Hook recalled in Classic Rock magazine that when it came to mixing the track, the producer really pulled out the stops.
“Hannett obviously saw the song as a jewel worth polishing. “I couldn’t understand why he was constantly remixing it – four or five times in different studios. I remember getting phone calls at 3am off Rob Gretton – I had to get down to Strawberry Studios immediately because Martin was remixing Love Will Tear Us Apart again. He was obsessed with it. Martin sensed it was a song that was going to last forever and wanted to make it really special.”
Love Will Tear Us Apart was released on 27 June, 1980 and reached No. 13 in the UK Singles Charts although something so perfunctory as chart placings seem almost irrelevant when it comes to a song so timeless and majestically sad as this one.
In his piece on the song in The Observer in May 2025, Sean O’Hagan noted how the Love Will Tear Us Apart endures and still sounds “oddly awry and oddly contemporary” at the same time. The song has been covered more than 100 times, observed O’Hagan, by artists as diverse as the Oyster Band, PJ Proby, Simple Minds and Paul Young, although nothing comes close to the “strange beauty” of the original.
“What sets the song apart is the lyrical starkness," wrote O'Hagan. "Curtis’s graphic delineation of love gone wrong. The clattering start, as if the group can’t quite contain their energy, or have been counted in before they are ready, does not quite prepare you for the bleak poetry of that opening line: ‘When routine bites hard and ambitions are low’. Pure northern gritty realism, not the kind of line one could imagine Sinatra or Tony Bennett, or anyone else but Ian Curtis, crooning.”
