Music11 October 2026 · 2 min
The most famous lines in music aren’t lyrics
Joy Division's 1979 "Unknown Pleasures" sleeve shows 107 seconds of radio pulses from a dead star, plotted by a PhD student. Peter Saville's contribution was to remove the explanation.
You know the image: a stack of jagged white lines on black, the cover of Joy Division's 1979 debut album. It is also a scientific figure with an author, a caption and a page number, none of which made it onto the sleeve.
Here is what it measures. The lines are radio pulses from CP 1919, the first pulsar ever found, discovered at Cambridge in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish. A pulsar is the spinning remnant of a dead star. This one sends out a pulse every 1.337 seconds, and the chart stacks eighty of them. The whole image is about 107 seconds of a dead star turning round.
The author was Harold Craft, a PhD student at Cornell, who plotted it by computer at the Arecibo observatory for his 1970 thesis. It ran in Scientific American in 1971, white on blue, and in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy in 1977.
That is where Joy Division's guitarist Bernard Sumner found it, in Manchester Central Library. The band passed it to the designer Peter Saville through their manager. Saville has said it was the only time they ever gave him an image for a cover, and that he had not heard the record.
His design was mostly subtraction. He reversed the plot to white on black and left off the caption, the band's name and the title. Every rule of chart-making says to label your axes. The most reproduced chart in the world has no labels at all, and that is why it works. With nothing to read, it can be mountains, a heartbeat, grief or nothing in particular.
Craft had no idea any of this had happened until a colleague told him. As he later told Scientific American's Jen Christiansen, he went to a record shop and, "son of a gun, there it was".
Nobody quite owns it, either. In 2012 Disney sold a version with Mickey Mouse's ears worked into the waveform for $24.99, then withdrew it after complaints. The band's bassist Peter Hook shrugged, said the image was in the public domain and added that he was used to bootleggers.
That may be the real secret. A picture that explains nothing and belongs to no one is free to go anywhere. Joy Division lasted a few years. The star has pulsed every 1.337 seconds throughout.