Basslines #5: Peter Hook’s basslines with Joy Division don’t just anchor the songs – they often provide the lead melody.

My favourite is this song, Twenty Four Hours, though there’s no live footage so I’m posting the better known She’s Lost Control; I could equally have gone for Transmission, which I’ve previously posted.

It’s hard to think of another band – or another bass player – who performs such a leading role in a group.

In this song, She’s Lost Control, Hooky plays his instrumenet with his left hand high on the neck, eschewing low root notes for a melody that could almost have come from a six-string guitar.

At the same time, the repetitive pattern of notes also performs the function of anchoring the song, with Curtis’s disturbing lyric about a woman having a violent epileptic seizure.

Curtis drew his inspiration for the lyric from a young woman he met while working as an Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer at a Macclesfield occupational rehabilitation centre between 1978 and 1979.

The woman had epilepsy and had been desperate to find employment, but suffered seizures whenever she came to the exchange, which would greatly disturb Curtis, who himself suffered from epilepsy.

When she missed an appointment, Curtis assumed she had found a job, but later learned she had died of an epileptic seizure, prompting the song.

His own epilepsy was never far from the surface: whenever I saw him perform live, I was startled by his trancelike state and jerky twitches, and often had the uneasy feeling he was about to have a fit onstage.