Day In, Day Out *

*or 'oh no, not another bloody piece about Joy Division'

It is always a fairly dubious experience when one's obsessions, particularly those most internalised, most personal, become public property; become, my God, spread all over the newspapers. I am happy, in the main, pottering along with a little set of interests few others care about - or, certainly, no one in my immediate enviroment, in my (God help me) peer group. As a young man, being very taken with Louis-Ferdinand Celine or, say, Kenneth Anger wasn't the best way to make friends - it wasn't, let me tell you, the quickest route to getting the girls interested.
I recall the release of Cronenberg's provocative but very flawed adaptation of Naked Lunch - suddenly you had poorly informed articles about William S. Burroughs appearing in the mainstream press ... shocking, that was, to me. I had thought I was on pretty safe ground with Uncle Bill, here was an interest of mine, surely, never designed for overground consumption.


Now here we go again - a sudden flurry (I originally wrote, parapraxis-wise, slurry) of Joy Division related activity; the imminent release of the Ian Curtis biopic Closer, a documentary about the band currently picking up awards at international film festivals, the repackaging (again!) of the back catalogue, the recent , very sad, death of Tony (that's Anthony H. to you and me) Wilson - all these conspire to push the lads back under the beady eye of Grub Street ... the one place Joy Division doesn't belong. Jesus, I even picked up a copy of The Observer yesterday to be confronted by another lengthy article about the film and the group - the second in a month or so (albeit one penned by Paul Morley and featured in the Observer Music Monthly glossy magazine ... still, it sits awkwardly between the adverts for booze, expensive sound systems and James Blunt's new album). The mainstream media, it seems to me, is particularly ill-suited to dealing with pop music - one glance over the album reviews in The Guardian, say, is enough to convince one of the futility of (in the main) Oxbridge-educated snobs struggling to get to grip with the gnarly soul of pop music - an art form both too trivial and far, far too important to be left to the mainstream.

Joy Division, and this seems such an embarrassingly obvious thing to write, was always the obsession of the loner. Every performance of theirs I saw, I saw alone - playing a copy of 'Transmission' to some friends (doctrinaire punks, in the main) to complete incomprehension, watching them perform on the TV programme Something Else to a background rumble of guffaws and laughter ... these are moments designed to make you love them all the fiercer, but alone. Joy Division's music seems to inhabit a peculiar interzone between community and solitude ... they made the sort of records designed for hunching over the stereo, alone in your bedroom. Of course, at the gigs, it used to be a shock to see others dressed in the Factory style ... wasn't that just me?

Going home on the Tube after seeing them, for instance, at the Electric Ballroom (A Certain Ratio supporting ... is this the gig I saw Simon Topping take a Coke can full on the head? "Fuck off!" he said) , who could you tell what you had just seen? No one else I knew would have cared, and it would have been hard to put it into words in any case. Was it a great gig, by conventional rock standards? I don't know, I couldn't care less ... I do know that seeing Curtis perform in that way was nothing to do with entertainment.

Factory workers taking a break

Joy Division's music, it seems to me, always sounds so bloody archetypal ... the songs sound so right, so inevitable, almost as though they had always existed and were just waiting for someone to actually hear them, to pull them out of the air and give them form. Every song, every album seems carved in stone (not, I think, merely a response to the Factory predilection for tombstone imagery) - one can hardly imagine a note, a word changed now we have them in their final, their canonical forms. As they went on (during their sadly truncated lifetime) they, unlike my beloved A Certain Ratio, seem to become more and more like themselves. The music became more and more Joy Division. Every element of Joy Division seems absolutely integral to the overall design; not just the contribution made by Curtis' lyrics and performance style but Stephen Morris' drumming (surely one of the most under-rated musicians in pop music? Up there with Moe Tucker and Klaus Dinger), Hook's bass, Albrecht's/Rubble's/Dicken's/Sumner's angular guitar ... every element fits.

The young men in situ

(The whole Factory set-up, the ethos, appealed to me; it was exactly what I was looking for - serious young men in grey and black demob clothes and Hitler Jugend haircuts, the sly sense of humour, the unapologetic high-art gloss, the groups creating a way out of the morass music found itself in after the initial charge of Punk had burned itself out, leaving us with the ludicrous and lumpen likes of the U.K Subs.
Factory artifacts were so tactile, so beautiful; the heavy paper sleeve of A Certain Ratio's 'All Night Party'/'The Thin Boys' 7", Lenny Bruce dead on one side, Tony Perkins on the other; the plastic wallet and insert of ACR's tape release The Graveyard and the Ballroom; the mysterious image adorning the textured sleeve of Unknown Pleasures; the sandpaper sheathing The Return of The Durutti Column (designed to destroy your record collection!); even the embossed sleeve of the Crawling Chaos 7" 'Sex Machine';

(and I never think of Joy Division as morbid or death-obsessed, rather as life-affirming and uplifting. They made, for my money, the most human, the most vunerable music. Paradoxically, the more electronic, the more machine-like they became, the more human. They were, for me, the real Northen Soul. I believe Curtis genuinely meant it when he sang "love life, makes you feel higher." Even now, listening to their music (and that of New Order) makes me feel alive and responsive, makes me feel moved, engages my heart and guts and brain. Isn't that what art is supposed to do?);

(and I hate all those awful rock'n'roll cliches, "live fast, die young" and all that claptrap. Joy Division was so unrock'n'roll - it was so perfect that they looked like weird bank clerks from some science fiction 1930s that never existed. They struck me as four young men who worked hard and achieved something of real and lasting value. The admirable thing about Joy Division is the honesty; they just got on with the job - playing live, practicing, recording. So much 'entertainment' these days has palpable designs on you, on your money, on your attention, on your sense of worth ... Joy Division didn't clamour for your love, didn't bully or cajole, just got quietly down to work. Art, real art, stays with us, long after the people who made it or the conditions that obtained have disappeared - stays and exists on its own terms. That's art, that's music, that's life);

(and I love Barney's description of his response when he got the phone call telling him of Curtis' suicide - "I put the phone down and went and washed my face with cold water. Then I got back on the phone and took it like a man." I like that, they had real courage, the men of Joy Division, real spine. it makes me feel very proud of the lads);

(and it's none of my business why Curtis did what he did ... perhaps, at the end, he was too tired. What is enough, for me, is that he had a hand in creating something of definitive value and meaning, music that inspires and exorts. Something that had an impact on me in ways that I can only guess at. I grew up listening to the music of Joy Division and New Order, is it absurd to think it had a part in making me (for better or worse) the person I am today? Tony Wilson wouldn't have thought so. That's good enough for me)).