Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

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.

Ok, i lied, just clicked around to see if I was missing something and this is just total garbage. Are we just posting garbage covers of Joy Division on death anniversary day?

I love Wussy--lots of people do--and like that cover.

yeah, the band is certainly respected and fairly well known, never got into them myself but lots of folks I know dig them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eld9wMh7c1g

I switched to this clip so I could hear what they were doing but, yeah, nice cover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cynHWf0gAXw
2xp

xp the flip of the Russ Abbott cover is of course also on youtube and I think I like it even more https://youtu.be/OokDhevymOI

So This Is Permanent will be broadcast across the Joy Division YouTube channel and both Joy Division and The Light’s Facebook pages, remaining online for 24 hours. Hook was set to perform “Joy Division 40: A Celebration” this month, but the coronavirus pandemic forced the postponement of those plans.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMnHk6_QgQT1KQkbUlxhTYw

(that's all 49 JD songs played live on the 35th anniversary)

xp

yeah the video works a little better but not so sure about the music

Thanks, NV, that's a lot better--the sound's not great on the other one. I don't doubt for a second that they're doing the song with all due reverence.

The gig has just popped up on the YT channel, set-list is almost 3 hours long, they open with At A Later Date, looks like they're playing *every* recorded JD song, gotta admit Hooky's adherence to completism.

Are we just posting garbage covers of Joy Division on death anniversary day?

well now we are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ien9FVOfYWQ

jk i love that cover and think it rules

Kinda crazy he was only 23.

the only joy divsion/new order cover far as I'm concerned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1MbL4NYf0

I'll also rep for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRX7CqLvO9o

What about?
https://youtu.be/3YthRnraF-s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YthRnraF-s

Will stan for Low’s cover of Transmission.

I've always been partial to this one...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZwXCDqlE9I

Kinda crazy he was only 23.

I'm a passive JD fan -- I like them fine, they didn't change my life, I never listen to them on purpose but when i do hear them I think "yes, they were onto something' -- but it's this that makes me sad for them in complicated ways. there is a sense in which I feel that their legacy -- the shadow it casts -- diminishes the loss of a 23-year-old fellow from a working class family whose lyrics touched greatness, a young father without a sense for how to deal with the strains of life & how to live it. that was a person, not a giant; that was a kid, not a visionary. this perspective, for me, enriches the work, when i hear it.

My thread was more well-intentioned than well-intended.
And all this time seems to have made every link/video a blank.
But I did this: Best Metal Joy Division Cover

The photos from his works do up-thread are so great.

my fave jd cover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3qRVqJmKfo

A couple of Toronto-specific posts have shown up on my FB wall the past few days, about how they were scheduled to play here May 25 at the Edge. (One of the FB comments: "That was my bartender shift. It changed everything.")

http://phildellio.tripod.com/edge.jpg

Not sure how readable that is. That would've been when I went to club shows constantly--positive I was at the June 9 Cramps show, but I doubt I'd even heard of Joy Division yet.

A bit more on that if you're interested.

http://sonicmoremusic.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/joy-division-were-set-to-play-toronto-on-may-25th-1980-ticket/

http://www.joydiv.org/cancel.htm

Thank You clemenza