Leaders of Men
They had just changed their name. Six months earlier they were Warsaw, a band with a rougher lineup and a more mechanical sound. By late 1977 they had settled into something more deliberate: Ian Curtis on vocals, Bernard Sumner on guitar, Peter Hook on bass, Stephen Morris behind the kit. On December 14, 1977, they drove to Pennine Sound Studios in Oldham and recorded four songs in a single session. The budget was £400, self-financed. "Leaders of Men" was one of those four songs.
The EP, An Ideal for Living, was released June 3, 1978 on the band's own Enigma label in a pressing of around 1,000 copies. Sumner drew the original cover, a Hitler Youth drummer rendered in pen, the band name printed in blackletter gothic. The inside foldout held the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy alongside a lyrical excerpt from "Leaders of Men." The juxtaposition was not careless. The band name Joy Division comes from "The House of Dolls," a 1955 novella documenting women held for sexual slavery in Nazi labor camps. These were not random references. The 12-inch reissue in October replaced the original cover with scaffolding artwork. The original said more.
"I think you could point to that whole EP as where Ian began to find his feet in both writing and singing... The songs seemed to flow out of him, and he didn't put a foot wrong after that point. He didn't write a bad lyric after An Ideal for Living right up until his death."
"Leaders of Men" is about what produces leaders. Curtis's lyrics do not romanticize the people who rise to power. The song argues they are born not from strength or vision but from collective desperation, from populations looking outward because looking inward is harder. The music matches the words. Hook's bass presses forward without release. Sumner's guitar cuts rather than rings. The whole thing sounds like something under compression that holds without breaking. This was the first record Joy Division released under that name. They pressed a thousand copies and sold them at gigs and through the mail. Two years later everything about them would be different.