Credit: YouTube
Sat 12 September 2026 6:00, UK
“Who puts one of their best songs on a limited-edition single available only in France?” Joy Division bassist Peter Hook asked in his own 2012 memoir about the band, before answering his own question: “Us, that’s who”.
Hook was referring to Joy Division’s 1980 classic ‘Atmosphere’, widely regarded not only as one of the band’s finest moments, but as one of the better tracks in quite a few different categories: greatest goth singles, greatest indie singles, best singles of the ‘80s, most requested funeral songs.
This does make it a bit bewildering that Joy Division were content to give this powerful song such a niche release, handing it over to the French label Sordide Sentimental as the A-side for an odd concept EP called Licht und Blindheit, German for ‘light and blindness’. To review, that’s a French label, a German name, and a genuine risk of putting out a great song that nobody would end up hearing.
To understand the band’s motivations, though, you have to start by removing the context of the last half-century; all the acclaim and legendary status that Joy Division have accrued since the tragic loss of their singer, Ian Curtis, and the subsequent transformation of the group into New Order. Back in the summer of 1979, when Joy Division’s debut studio album Unknown Pleasures was released, the album failed to crack the UK charts, and half of the 10,000 pressed copies were famously put into storage, unsold, in the apartment of Factory Records co-chief Alan Erasmus.
That’s not to say that the band were seen as failures, but they were, in a kinder sense, a mild commercial disappointment. The reviews for Unknown Pleasures were largely positive, and a further buzz grew around the band after the release of their first stand-alone single, ‘Transmission’, in October 1979. Even so, Factory boss Tony Wilson’s high hopes for that record fell short again, partly as a consequence of Factory’s own philosophy on how to promote its artists.
As Peter Hook explained it, hiring a “radio plugger” to help a single get traction “went against the Factory ethos,” and so ‘Transmission’ failed to chart, moving just 3,000 initial units out of the gates. That was the situation when they were deciding what to do with ‘Atmosphere’, a song they’d finished recording the same month as the release of ‘Transmission’. An early version of the track had been recorded for a Manchester radio station back in the summer of ‘79, but this studio version, produced by Martin Hannett, was epic and chilling and in desperate need of being heard.
After the disappointments, Joy Division’s manager, Rob Gretton, proposed a rather bizarre strategy for ‘Atmosphere’. Rather than just putting it out as the next Factory single, Gretton was fascinated by what the boundary-pushing industrial band Throbbing Gristle had recently done, releasing their 1979 single ‘We Hate You (Little Girls)’ on the upstart French imprint Sordide Sentimental, which had given the record some nice packaging and a sense of specialness.
The decision was made to work out a similar arrangement for Joy Division, and ‘Atmosphere’ and another song, ‘Dead Souls’, were selected for Sordide Sentimental to work with. Peter Hook appreciated what was done for the Throbbing Gristle record, but he also recognised that the two bands were not necessarily thinking along the same lines with their respective strategies.
Credit: TIDAL
“The tracks that Throbbing Gristle put out on Sordide Sentimental were never going anywhere else,” Hook wrote in Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, “I mean, they were harsh even by the standards of Throbbing Gristle. Whenever I put that EP on, my cat used to run out of the room. Us? We put two of our best songs on it.”
When Sordide Sentimental finally put out its Joy Division EP/single in March 1980, under the confusing title of Licht und Blindheit, there were fewer than 2,000 copies made, and none were sent to UK record shops. Fans had to mail-order a copy, or else try to tape ‘Atmosphere’ off the radio when it aired on the John Peel programme. Then, just two months later, Ian Curtis was dead at 23, and interest in his band’s music started to grow exponentially, as more and more people began to realise that Joy Division weren’t just another English post-punk band.
The single ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, released just a month after Curtis’s death, was a hit, and by the autumn of 1980, ‘Atmosphere’ was re-released as a proper single on Factory, with ‘She’s Lost Control’ as its B-side (the two songs were swapped on the US version of the single), with the song topping the UK Indie Chart and reaching the top 40 of the mainstream singles chart. It also became inextricably tied, more so than any other Joy Division song, to the loss of its frontman, as the tone and lyrics of the track felt like a funeral dirge sung by the departed.
“’Atmosphere’ is a massive song,” Peter Hook wrote in his book, “A lot of people say it’s their favourite Joy Division song, but it’s not mine. It reminds me too much of lan, like it’s his death march or something, and it figures that it’s one of the most popular songs to play at funerals. Robbie Williams has got ‘Angels’ for weddings, and we’ve got ‘Atmosphere’ for funerals. Becky [Hook’s wife Rebecca Jones] says that when I die she’s going to play ‘Atmosphere’ at my funeral, but [the very different 1985 single] by Russ Abbott. Thanks, love.”
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