I had already been introduced to bassist Peter Hook, years before, by Ian Curtis. I once spent an enjoyable evening with New Order and their entourage after they had played at the Reading Festival in the 1980s. Their first album, Movement, obviously contains some works in production intended for Joy Division, and the band echoes there, the only note missing being the sad, deep croon of its dead singer. The band’s game-changing hit “Blue Monday” set a musical trend for pop/dance music. Thus Curtis on “Interzone”: “I walked to the city limits / Attracted by some force within it.”Īfter Curtis’ death, the remaining members of Joy Division added a keyboard player, the drummer’s wife, and became New Order, the name doing nothing to disassociate the band from a trace element of Nazism. “I’m sorry that I hit you but my string snapped,” sings Siouxsie Sioux on “Suburban Relapse.” And the lure of the city, the fierce glamour it puts on the suburbans, creates a dynamic of its own. This I know, having grown up in the margins of London. The suburbs of great cities are interesting areas. He was not Antonin Artaud, Syd Barrett, or Brian Wilson, out there and pushing the limits of illegal drugs. His was a suburban madness of angst and prescription drugs. The band’s short life was an odyssey of mental unbalance for singer Ian Curtis.Ĭurtis’ insanity is all the more disturbing for its ordinariness. Just look at the cover of their EP, An Ideal for Living. This was part of a simmering controversy concerning the band, who were often linked with Nazi imagery. However, Joy Division took their name from House of Dolls, a pulp novel about concentration camps, the “joy division” being Jewish women used for the sexual gratification of camp guards. Joy Division was briefly called Warsaw, and almost went with the suggestion made by Pete Shelley of another Mancunian band called Buzzcocks, which would have made their name Stiff Kittens. Shortly after Curtis’ death, the band’s album Closer was released. He died on the eve of what would have been the band’s inaugural tour of the USA.
Their critical acclaim lasted from 1979 and the album Unknown Pleasures, until May of 1980, when singer Ian Curtis watched Werner Herzog’s bizarre film Stroszek alone in his semi-detached house in Manchester, then hung himself in his kitchen. The band members met in their hometown of Manchester at a Pistols gig in 1976 and went on to record two studio albums and several singles. The same is often said about Sex Pistols gigs, one of which was certainly responsible for English post-punk band Joy Division. It is said that, although not many people bought the first Velvet Underground album, everyone who did formed a band. Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.
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