I left my memory to play its tricks, rather than fight it. It's only recently that l've been reminded that Warsaw were waiting for me in the Manchester city centre before they drove off to an underground bunker in the mourning Pennine wilder/ness, to record. To-days exaggeration considers that they waited four hours for my baby blue presence, but they probably paused for minutes before hissing open cans and hitting the silver road. I think that they wanted me to produce - a loose term covering four bald sins, I expect - their first recording, seriously called 'An Ideal For Living.' Who knows how my life would have been changed if I'd managed to squabble through a hangover out of my bed and keep that Sunday appointment. (How drunk could I have been when I made the promise, suggesting I could conjure up the crystalline mystique of Spector, Brod, Eno and Czukay combined?)

A change in my life? Probably none at all: things were blinking in and blanking out lazily and fast in those '77-heaven days, causing no effect that would stick fast. We were all pale hysterical ghosts of anything we were to become. I would have produced Warsaw, the record would have been no different because if the time isn't right the trees don't joke, and it would have been as important in my life as a stone in a date, and for Joy Division my association would have settled into social blandness. You see, and I knew this the time we all sprang up in our places at the Free Trade Hall to see Buzzcocks and Sex Pistols, it was all predestined what we were going to get up to. Even if I'd started out as a Stiff Kitten I would still have threaded my way into the position as top pop writer of the post-modernist times: and nothing except a real fine joke would have stopped Joy Division alighting on that empty space which stretches between person and person, between ignorance and knowledge, between one hand and another, and shocking those who were awake with what it was they did.

What it was they did . . . all those creeping inside here hoping to embrace the essence, the essential sinful pleasure, of what it was they did - a minute or a century past 'An Ideal For Living' should fade away: Back Off Boogaloo! as Ringo said, aptly. No such luck: not much luck is left. All the luck of the century is greedily snatched at and soaked up by young people like Joy Division, searching for nothing to do so that they might do something. Joy Division were drunk on luck before anything else, pernod or bitter. Joy Division were lucky, lucky that they turned the damned whore rock language back into a virgin, lucky that out of their common sense blossomed a peculiar beauty, lucky that amidst it all they were quite stupid, lucky if you assume that what they wanted to do was create something rich and better than some fucking decorative abbreviation. And we should thank our lucky stars that they were so lucky, if not think about what it was they did every other minute of the day. To look straight at luck, head on into the glare, is to have it disappear, twitch away, like a black spot on the eyeball: it hovers, in vision but out of it, irritating and enthralling, restless and nowhere, here and then. Luck; just like Joy Division, in vision but out of it. A grasp that can be found even in our artificial and fearful times.

In a way, and I say this alot to myself as my memory plays with its tricks, my connection with Joy Division and their particular halo is that of a minor character in a minor Beatles biography: I tell my story to a dim researcher, I went to school at 14 with Pete Best, I once almost asked out George Harrison's cousin or, in this case, I talked with Ian in ranches circuses and factories about glueing our personalities to the world through words and pauses. Nothing much, I wasn't there, but in the end I wasn't tar away.

Somehow, reminding us how much the pop writer was viewed disproportionately, I gained small time fame as the one who took a torch to this dark Division: shined a light on this . . . un-usual commitment to living. People will approach me at Rainbows and Odeons to say that if it hadn't been for my support . . . I blush, and might even boast, because I don't tell good jokes. But it was all so slight - what else? I mentioned Joy Division often enough for everyone nearby to know of them, and maybe look for themselves. I never said anything about the group: I did little more than talk about the weather, hoping that readers knew their Oscar Wilde and would be certain that I meant something else. (This also applies to the best ever interview with a member of Joy Division, when I asked their guitarist what he wanted to drink.) I was as quiet as I possibly could be allowing for my former urge to babble bouncily given the flimsiest encouragement, because what I feel about Joy Division is no business of yours. What New Order are to me is nothing, really, to do with you. What I let leak out may give you a clue, it may be a joke; when I use the word 'impatience' I'm showing you a glimpse of one of my biggest secrets.

So, they won't name any streets after Joy Division. At least they never tried to help anyone. They just took their chance, as everyone can, to reinvent the things around them. Until we are stopped. I think we're all aware in our own private ways that we can only respond, in public, to what spun out from what they did, to what surrounds what it is they do. The Division, the order, is all guessing, luck, wishing, indifference, impatience . . . to a point, and past that point we're forced to disentangle and wipe away our habitual conceptions of reality. We can never talk sensibly in public of 'the inside. ' No words reach that deep. I've often felt that those on whom the group's effect would be most beneficial are repelled, and on those on whom they most fascinate their effect may be dangerous, even harmful. And then, when I reach this far in, somewhere between patterned leaking and plain spilling the beans, I just have to tell a joke. Heard the one about the tragic Jew and the lucky scholar . . .?

I am inclined to believe that one should only listen to Joy Division when one is in an eupeptic state of physical and mental health and, in consequence, tempted to dismiss any scrupulous heartsearching as a morbid fuss. When one is in low spirits, one should possibly keep away from them, for, unless introspection is accompanied, as it always is with New Order, by an equal passion for the good life, it all too easily degenerates into spineless narcissistic fascination with one's own sins and weaknesses. Now we wouldn't want that would we?
Mike deWit Victoria BC Mike deWit Victoria B.C. Mike deWit Victoria B.C. Canada Mike deWit Victoria BC Canada Mike deWit Victoria Canada