JOY DIVISION/Transmission
I remember leaving a Secret Affair concert at the London Rainbow, oh, during some month or other in 1979, or was it 80. Anyway, I'd left early, being an NME critic and all that, and some skinheads attacked me, thinking for some crooked reasons that I was a 'mod'. They slashed my mouth with a stanley knife. I remember crying out something along the lines of 'I am not a mod, I am a brave, rigorous and austerely clad fan of Joy Division', but they took no notice, and just kicked me a bit in the ribs before smartly leaving me to feel sorry for myself. I really did struggle home, and as the blood poured out of me, I spent hours playing and playing this track, taking it seriously, cursing every ignoramus and ass in the world that didn't. By morning I'd played it, oh, fifty times, and found that I was writing about Joy Division using words a little like the following: 'With instinctive unanimity, they hate all firmitas, because it bears witness to a healthiness quite different from theirs, and seek to throw suspicion on firmitas, on conciseness, whilst celebrating a fiery energy of movement, on abundant and delicate play of the muscles. Joy Division have agreed together to invert the nature and names of things and henceforth to speak of health when we see weakness, of sickness and tension when we encounter true health. Why the fuck aren't they being played ten times a day on Radio 1.' I don't know why, but people started to say that I took Joy Division just a little too seriously. So what! I had the scars, I felt the holy wrath, and even today when I play this track anywhere up to fifty times a day, I still feel, after everything and after all that that any number of astonishing things are possible. The greatest song ever written. /PM
When I was 17 I worked on BBC2's first 'yoof' programme, Something Else. Joy Division played this song. My moment of fame was the fact I stood at the front and my head could be seen on screen bobbing up and down. People expected you to be deep about Joy Division, but all I can remember is wanting a two-tone shirt like lan Curtis's. I never got one. Steven Morrissey did and the rest is history. /SRmd
JOY DlVlSlON/Love Will Tear Us Apart
I remember a disc jockey called Ray Teret, a sickly slick Mancunian reduction of Sir Jimmy Saville, introducing the video on some late seventies Saturday morning kids show called Go Stupid Fun! or something. 'You know about Joy Division,' he slickly sicked, 'l know about Joy Division...' I wondered what on earth he meant, looking so happy and hale and hearty, and I couldn't begin to work out how differently he and I know about Joy Division, although I suppose in our own far apart far fetched ways we both thought they were magic. 'Here they are at number fourteen in the charts with Love Will Tear Us Apart.' I remember thinking I really do that the ghostly afocussed indifferent video, the extravagant introspection of a song where everything had been remembered in the just cold light of day, the way the confused past was interpreted using the intelligence of the future, the way an exalted lack of understanding was channelled through a system of opening and closings that this lack of understanding alone set into motion and kept in motion, that whole relation between absence and presence between too many things and never enough things... I remember thinking so much that I just knew some people would say I was taking it all too seriously. So what! So what did they know, the fucking philistines. It is no small thing to make a game out of human time, and I'm not joking that this is what I assumed Joy Division to be doing. Ray Teret assumed them to be in the pop charts, the hot parade. After the video had finished, somebody hit somebody else over the head with a water filled balloon. The greatest song ever written. /PM
The track-the quintessential Factory track-the precursor of the Madchester sound, the moment when people realised they didn't have to go to London to make it; it was all here and it was all happening. Throw one weird hippy named Martin Hannett into a studio with a bunch of kids who used to call themselves Warsaw and you end up with this bass-heavy driving anthem to teenage angst. The bitter irony is how true the title turned out to be for Ian. /CPL
JOY DIVISION/Wilderness
The never-ending stretches of Wilbraham Road, late at night. Getting pulled by the police once a week. Assembling the Factory Sampler. Martin in Strawberry Studios. Ian crawling up the walls at the Free Trade Hall. MH: 'He was one of those channels for the gestalt: a lightning conductor. He was the only one I bumped into in that period.' /JS
JOY DlVlSlON/Atmosphere
For about four years every other demo tape I heard was washed with Atmosphere. In fact, now that Eastern Europe has opened up and the demo tapes are coming from Ionels, Mischas and Georghes as well as from the Daves. Mikes and Andrews-actually, what I was about to say isn't true. Most of them sound like Motley Crue, or Depeche Mode. Pity really, I'd rather they had Atmosphere as a source of inspiration. /JP
'Dead Souls' is my core JD experience - like Dante's vision of Hell but this Spectorian companion piece freezes the group in grace. Jean-Pierre Turmel: Joy Division passes beyond simple entertainment to retranscribe musically the worlds of half-light and the intensity of ecstacy. /JS
It's only rock and roll but I like it. Thanks, Mick. Thanks, Ian. /AHW
The NME banned me from ever writing about this song. I remember thinking that it seemed like the whole world was telling me that I took it all too seriously. Funnily enough, I never really thought I took it seriously at all, well, not seriously enough. I don't think I'll take this song, or anything else for that matter, really seriously. For now, for then, for whenever, sound and movement and thought can only rarely sound and move and think the way this does. When I play it, I'm quite happy to imagine that nothing else is ever going to happen, and I quite seriously take the song to be the best ever written. The NME banned me from writing words more or less vaguely and vainly much like those l m writing now, because they said I would send people to sleep, or worse, to another paper. I told them to fuck off. This song helped me define myself, to find the most comfortable place between 'here' and 'nowhere', to almost come to terms with the suicide of my father, to learn how to cheer up in the eyes of the world. Seriously though, it's nice, isn't it? /PM
CPL CP Lee
PM Paul Morley
JP John Peel
SRmd Steve Redmond
JS Jon Savage
AHW Anthony Wilson
Mike deWit Victoria BC Mike deWit Victoria B.C. Mike deWit Victoria B.C. Canada Mike deWit Victoria BC Canada Mike deWit Victoria Canada