Last week I started reading 'Unknown Pleasures - Inside Joy Division' bassist Peter Hook's take on life within one of Britain's most original bands.
It was very late in the day when I started properly listening to the band. Apatr from 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' and the handful of songs they performed on TV I was largely ignorant of their music. It was true that back in the day I had mates that were huge fans and conformed 100% to the JD fan stereotype. I am sure they wore their macs in bed! I took the band at face value and thought the misery exhibition stance to be a bit ridiculous. Thinking back I should have taken a look at myself, a big fan of those laugh a minute folks from Crass!
It was only when I saw the film 'Control' that I waded a bit deeper into their murky Mancunian waters buying the 'Heart and Soul' box set. Hook's book presents another side of Joy Division, an intense and driven band certainly, but not without humour. He expresses and issue with the perceived deification of Ian Curtis. Whilst Peter Hook recognises the poetic, romantic, other worldliness of his former lead singer he paints an alternative side to him that one would expect of a bloke in his early twenties in an up and coming band with a bunch of other blokes in their early twenties.
Here then is a session the band did for local Piccadilly Radio in the summer of 1979.
FLAC: https://we.tl/p6dqmzfi2u
01. These Days
02. Candidate
03. Chance (Atmosphere)
04. Atrocity Exhibision
Feeling in the mood I also created a lino print of Ian Curtis on stage.
Ian Curtis (Joy Division)
Lino print 30cm x 40cm
Black in on grey card (1 of 10)
