Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

Sometimes people are upset about things and turn to music an alcohol and the internet, and that's okay. I'm not the kind of pussy who grew up with Safe Spaces. I'm a different kind of pussy.

POLL Will Tear Us Apart – ILM Artist Poll #86 - JOY DIVISION – New Order solo or other groups Poll (aka the Electronic poll) – a NEW ORDER (#37) supplement poll --- Results Thread

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/kn3fY-2hrJC81YZ4JxBJXTu86y7C1Ts4GjUYmD_g40IENjgk4Rudbdq8mCb664I841-OFKp7lo50Mfj5XTatcXRD111NVF4S3UsIKrA_fdeR9b35v07qaNxZiuDMgCY4RLg0eEToiNPExUmnpdxrkj7u1_IU4USGol_Lpk42ZFWDKO3wd9xYZodmetRzjIahbGM3OQOu3G9EksBMuZY45cjToXx8Z5zUgXleXGSOfwuhjck1ChEpaGTdFQzjCJZC8OKS7bjgzDhzJelM5xJd5sytn0Wl6Zp42QN719zWYjcBfe7Hx7A6Gat7FhHwjC4Uxrsq4LwMrW1XyI-Pb5nE9bC08k5hPghpX_yYp82AAhhBIXgvQ_VAAnqNq3oROpfHn42LlqiDK5h5eCwl-1juZXZ5HyfPS_PS0avxm2JoH4kEPoGjmgODegCIdcRb921GyAQCzZgcY845H2YJwGGegaFp_yOvR7JZ7sXH7XBoPI7JE7cFVZQ07KqjmHVypk0MLTn4m5Tbl_tEjqil6c9_PGARR7IrUdcbtGyQ7KZN0jM4oZHjxZ3EtX8EmixpchqNblNmJfOn_W4Dk1TrQa5hzuifp2C6IEvZa_JCnvnNuJxRF5XSkcrcTTgimto4ODdoYnttlTHbXC32OKZvXzJPjXxieb9iBlMIdBg=w817-h417-no

18. A Means To An End 197 Points 6 Votes

<Such a great poll>

Last ILM artist poll...

(Until the next one opens)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/4143t5G5yGL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Gave Unknown Pleasures a run for the first time in about five years last night, and I feel like it's kind of way better and infinitely more resonating than when I first heard it in my early twenties.

Just fantastic music.

The way they released their music is a source of constant wonder to me. I knew Love Will Tear Us Apart and Atmosphere were non-album tracks but I never realized until recently that Dead Souls was also a non-album track, despite having listened to it dozens of times.

Yeah that was always curious to me. Transmission another one. Most of their famous songs aren’t on the proper albums.

Factory used to do that because it was considered a rip off to put already released songs on albums. That was pretty common with indie labels in the UK at least til the mid-80s. Sarah records were particularly militant about it

Kind of a rip off for the consumer though? Having to buy multiple singles instead of throwing down on a full LP that includes two singles or whatever + more songs. IDK, didn’t grow up in the singles era.

The thinking was that fans would buy everything anyway, so it was actually giving them better value for money by putting out songs as singles that didn't later reappear on the related album.

Right. Yeah, I guess it depends on avid fan v. casual.

The casual fan might well just buy the odd single and not the album so they'd be happy with the arrangement. Meanwhile, yeah, the serious fans would buy everything so it was a good deal for them to have no overlap of tracks. But of course it wasn't quite that neat and I'm sure plenty of people did prefer having singles on albums. You sometimes had them added as bonus tracks on the cassette, where there was more room.

And if you could wait then singles would often be collected on something like Hatful of Hollow, which was sold for budget price at first I think.

Yeah, was gonna say, all evens out in the end with the singles comps.

I used to think of them as a singles band because like a lot of americans of my age, my introduction to Joy Division was Substance, which was released with some fanfair and easier to find than the actual albums.

tbh I still only own Substance.

oh wait I do have Still.

substance I think was released by a major label. my first introduction to joy division when I was like, 14 or 15, courtesy of a review in rolling stone of all fucking places

Qwest, which was Quincy Jones imprint on Warner Brothers. He signed New Order and got Joy Division.

The whole thing with standalone singles that didn't appear on the albums was a bit of a hangover from the '60s where it was mostly standard practice, at least in the UK. Plenty of bands in the '70s did this too, and it wasn't just indie labels doing it.

My introduction to JD was through The Crow graphic novel (lol) my older brother had when we were kids. Full on song lyrics printed between chapters or something. Book is way corny but it hit me hard at 12ish. Didn’t actually get to hear them until a few years later. Took me a while to make sense of it. Sprouting young industrial child in the late 90s. NIN and like WaxTrax stuff was the benchmark and JD wasn’t at all what I expected. Was a small world for me at the time.

heh I don't like much else on it but I actually bought The Crow soundtrack specifically for the Dead Souls cover. (I already had the JAMC song).

Oh yeah, I promptly bought that. I guess that NIN cover of Dead Souls was really the first JD related thing I heard.

It was the first time I heard that song, by anybody! I were but a slip of a lad

it had never actually occurred to me until just now, but the first thing I ever heard by Joy Division was the nine inch nails cover of dead souls.

that means that nine inch nails was my introduction to Joy Division, Aphex Twin and Coil (the 2 latter through their work on further down the spiral).

Oh man, same. NIN was definitely a stepping stone for me and others in my circle growing up.

In 1987 my older sister's friend left a dubbed-from-vinyl tape copy of Still in my sister's room (sister later told me she played it for approximately 2 minutes and was like "ugh, no") so I borrowed it for a few hours and dubbed myself a copy. Her friend found out I had done this and was livid, since I was a grubby Cure fan and not worthy of access to such a rarity. She wouldn't tell me what the song titles were! Months later she relented and showed me the vinyl when we were hanging out at her house after school. I remember being very impressed with how heavy it was. And writing down the track listing on a scrap of paper.

my JD origin story is that in the midst of a period in high school where my favorite bands were dave matthews band and ben folds five, i somehow ran across a magazine that talked about how joy division were legendary and awesome. so before my shift at long john silvers i stopped by the cd store to pick up Closer (all of this feels like several lifetimes ago). i remember being taken aback by curtis' voice - i had never heard anything like that in music, to that point, and i didn't find it bad so much as just confusing. i made the mistake of consulting with my closest friend who was into music - a britpop guy who would drive an hour and a half to the hometown of Rush Limbaugh and buy imported copies of Q. i asked him if he thought joy division was good. he looked confused for a second, himself, then said that they were awful. i moved on to listening to manic street preachers and kind of forgot about JD til i picked them back up in college with more experienced ears and thought they were amazing. it turns out that the JD-hating britpop friend was a real, actual pathological liar, the only one i've ever met. there was an early 2000s band called The Cansecos, and one night he claimed that it was made up of baseball's Jose and Ozzie Canseco. he refused to back down on this claim. he also said that he helped to produce Oasis' Standing on the Shoulder [sic] of Giants, and refused to back down on that either. not in a funny way, but in a very frightening way, week after week, even after getting into real fights about the obvious lie and losing friends over it. anyway, given the initial look of befuddlement when i asked him about joy division, i'm pretty sure he had never heard a note by them and couldn't remember if Q were fans or not, either.

lol those are amazing lies!

A bit like the dude I met that insisted that Nick Lowe was the bass player for Mott the Hoople. In a broad Yorkshire accent.

I don't think he was a liar as such, I think he was beamed down from an alternative universe.

My first exposure to Joy Division was Paul Young's cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart, I must confess that as an 11 year old I loved it.

i think the first time i consciously heard a joy div song was the cover of "love will tear us apart" by swans in the early nineties which i still find better than the original.

My first exposure to Joy Division was Paul Young's cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart, I must confess that as an 11 year old I loved it.

Same here (though I was 12) - I still have the 7"! This was 1984, next I bought Substance when it came out and only then came the albums proper.

I can't recall when exactly I heard JD for the first time but I distinctly remember the afternoon where my 13 y.o. self discovered that two of his very favorite bands, JD and NO, were connected. I carefully looked at both of my 'Substance' CDs dumbstruck, mouth agape.

I love them so much

This is great! I'm in a Macclesfield group on Facebook, and someone put up a picture of his dad's work Christmas drinks from the 70s. He worked at Macclesfield Unemployment Office and Ian Curtis from Joy Division is one of the colleagues. pic.twitter.com/JbPGHsC7f1

— Geoff Lloyd (@GeoffLloyd) December 25, 2018

Wow

just slightly popular with the ladies there

pic is exuding powerful 1970s sitcom energy

it is extremely weird to see ian curtis as an actual human being and not a monochrome martyr

and there's more!

More from that same event. pic.twitter.com/z5PmPcFe8k

— Jake Rudh (@JakeRudh) December 25, 2018

Outstanding.

hey. my friend Nate the K interviewed Jon Savage on WFMU to promote his (Savage's) new oral history of Joy Division and he invited me on to talk and play some "rarities". You can listen here:

https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/85873

Was just going to post about that, nice set! I meant to jot down the name of a power pop group you mentioned who changed their sound after hearing JD but it slipped my mind. Could you repeat that (I know I could pull up the archived stream but...)?

Anyone read the Savage book?

Just finished it, was an enjoyable breeze, but no big revelations really apart from a pic of this crazy note that IC made out to Gretton some time in March/April 1980 after the completion of Closer.

"Judged purely on my own terms, and not to be interpreted as an opinion on reflection of mass media or public taste, but a criticism of my own esoteric, elitist mind of which the mysteries of life are very few and beside which the grace of God has deemed to indicate in a vision the true nature of all things, plus the fact that everyone else are a sneaky taping load of tossers, decree that this LP is a disaster, Ian Curtis"

I was referring to Disco Zombies...compare the first few songs and the singles (first songs on the Drums Over London compilation) to the unreleased live stuff later on the album.

Not the best example, but, see also The Lines, compare White Night (melancholy power-pop )to On the Air through Cool Snap (angular post-punk) to Nerve Pylon/Transit and the material on the two LPs which are much more atmospherically produced.

Also compare The Outsiders to the Sound.

Also bigger bands, like The Cure definitely. U2. Simple Minds. Simple Minds is a bit of a different thing as they went from straight punk to a totally Roxy Music by way of Magazine thing, then got the Joy Division and Kraftwerk bug around the same time, then mixed it all up in their own way for a while till they lost their bass player and their plot.

I just finished Savage's book myself and honestly I think it hit me harder than I would have expected beforehand. It really has a feeling of a final accounting, now that so many principals beyond the surviving members are gone (Wilson, Hannett, Gretton -- besides New Order past/present, only Alan Erasmus and Peter Saville remain from the original Factory core, and Erasmus just ain't talking). Even though Sumner/Hook/Morris's thoughts are from the mid-2000s documentary interviews it's almost like, what more can they say? Deborah Curtis as well, and Annik Honore is also now gone. The crushing regret and sadness everyone has over what they did and didn't do vis-a-vis helping Ian is huge -- there's a lot of recognition, especially from his bandmates, about how they were just too young to really see or understand what was going on, how their upbringing had shaped and socialized them to react in different ways. And I think the observation that crops up a lot about how Ian was a people-pleaser in the end, in combination with his epilepsy, the prescriptions he took...it's not my place to speculate in the end, really, but you sense how, not that it HAD to end for him as it did, but that you sense, however through a glass darkly, why it could be so. It's very unsettling in the end, I'm glad it exists, but there's something ultimately terrifying here that that makes the music that remains so crushingly sad -- in a way that I don't know if I will ever feel as strongly about re other groups or musicians who have faced similar. And that's not to discount what happened to them at all, just that maybe I'm still too shaped by the inevitable mythmaking I experienced at a young age (first learned about Curtis in early 1988, when I was still 16 and had never heard a note) that even the three times as old me feels ill at ease.

40th anniversary of the death of the singer of the band that went on to be Kajagoogoo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i62NoUnsK1k

hmm, band name Wussy, old grey beard, immediate NO from me dog.