Joy Division

Career Outline

 * Joy Division were a post-punk band formed in 1976 in Manchester from an earlier congregation called Warsaw. They took their name from the prostitution wing of Nazi concentration camps, and the lyrics of their songs constantly detailed broken relationships and the futility of existence, and the music was often suitably minor key and highly emotive. The line-up mainly consisted of Ian Curtis (vocals and occasional guitar), Bernard Sumner (gitar), Peter Hook (bass) and Stephen Morris (drums). Throughout their relatively short lifespan, they released stark, rhythmic singles on the Factory label (the myth propounded by late owner Tony Wilson that he signed them and Durutti Column in his own blood was no more than that) and one LP, Unknown Pleasures.
 * Their proposed American tour was aborted after Curtis took his own life on May 18 1980, as a result of overwhelming depression caused by the breakup of his marriage and diagnosed epilepsy. Many of the songs he wrote contain references to his ill-fated life. The band decided not to continue as Joy Division without him, and Hook and Sumner were instrumental in forming New Order.

Links To Peel

 * The genesis of JP's relationship with the band can be gleaned from this extract from 1987's Peeling Back The Years, in which Peel and John Walters discuss their effect on music:

JOHN WALTERS: Here’s somebody I certainly didn’t get onto at the start, but you did…Joy Division, that are still, in a sense, a lasting force, Joy Division/New Order, of course, and I see we had a session in January 1979. The kids got onto it quite quickly…I remember walking by a big place like the Lyceum, and saying, ‘Who’s on tonight?’, there were crowds outside, and they said, ‘Joy Division’. I thought, ‘Joy Division?!?’…What was it? Was it the sort of gloom that attracted you? JOHN PEEL: Well, they weren’t initially of course all that gloomy, their early things, some tracks on the Factory sampler and so forth…they had some tracks on a 10″ LP from Virgin…They weren’t by any means punky, and they’d moved away from that sort of thrashy… JW: Do you know what I mean by gloom?…There is an aspect of teen life which is looking moodily into your bedroom mirror…and seeing yourself as gloomy, kind of as a rebel without a cause…Isn’t that almost something you’ve carried on into middle age in your own life, and…I wonder if it touched a chord as it did with the kids who went for Joy Division…with you? JP: I suppose it might have done, I mean, it wasn’t something I was aware of particularly at the time…I always think of them in a rather romantic way as being introspective and rather Russian, although I have no Russian ancestry at all that I’m aware of…I read somewhere that that kind of introspection was classed as Russian…it always makes me feel at least slightly central European if I get into one of these what most people would describe as feeling sorry for myself… JW: Did you get onto Joy Division because you thought, ‘Hello, there’s a bit of a buzz’, or did you hear some and think, ‘I don’t know who this lot are, but this goes’? What did your ears say to Joy Division? JP: …The first of the post-punk bands did seem to be coming out of Manchester, which is something I deeply resented…I didn’t at the time think that Joy Division were a band that I was going to prefer above any other…they were just one of a whole handful of bands whose work I was quite enjoying at that time. JW: They were not punky in the noise they made as I remember it, but they became a sort of seminal band just after, the first real seminal post-punk band…they influenced so many other people. JP: Well, that’s true and obviously the death of Ian Curtis sort of mythologised them to a degree to which I think the surviving members of the band must have found very difficult to cope with…a very melancholy thing to have to live with. I still get demo tapes from America and from Europe by bands which are quite clearly influenced by nothing as much as they’re influenced by Joy Division. You get a bit fed up with it, really.


 * John played 'New Dawn Fades', from Unknown Pleasures', near the start of his show on 19 May 1980, in tribute to Ian Curtis, and a year to the day of his suicide, played it again without comment at the start of 18 May 1981 and 'Decades', from the posthumous release Closer'', at the end.

Festive Fifty Entries

 * 'She's Lost Control' (FF 1980 #22, 1981 #51, and All-Time 1982 #41)
 * 'New Dawn Fades' (FF 1980 #20, 1981 #5, All-Time 1982 #4, and All-Time 2000 #15)
 * 'Transmission' (FF 1980 #10, 1981 #14, All-Time 1982 #26, and All-Time 2000 #28)
 * 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' (FF 1980 #3, 1981 #3, All-Time 1982 #3, and All-Time 2000 #3)
 * 'Atmosphere' (FF 1980 #2, 1981 #1, All-Time 1982 #2, and All-Time 2000 #1)
 * 'The Eternal' (All-Time FF 1982 #48)

Sessions

 * Number of sessions? Any commercial release of sessions?

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 * Song title / Song Title / Song Title / Song Title
 * Song title / Song Title / Song Title / Song Title

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Other Shows Played
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 * DD Month YYYY: Song (single/album) Label