joy division

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The Dr
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joy division

Post by The Dr »

Peter Hook has announced that he will perform the complete works of Joy Division at a one-off concert at Christ Church, Macclesfield in May. The date marks exactly 35 years since the death of the band's singer Ian Curtis.

image: http://nme.assets.ipccdn.co.uk/images/a ... 300714.jpg
Hook and his current band, The Light, will play every single song the band recorded in chronological order, including both studio albums 'Unknown Pleasures' and 'Closer'. They will also play the posthumously released 'Still' as well as B-sides and rarities.

Speaking to NME, Hook explained that he feels Joy Division's legacy was somewhat neglected due to the subsequent success of the band as New Order.

He said: "When we were together as New Order, it seemed OK to ignore Joy Division. The very fact that we concentrated on New Order made us a huge international success. If we'd tried to be Joy Division it wouldn't have had the outcome it did. It was only after we split up in 2006 that it struck me that Joy Division were a huge force to be reckoned with, all round the world, and we’d never celebrated anything to do with it at all. That seemed weird. During the last five years I've been all around the world playing Joy Division's music, and the crowds have been full of young people who've been turned on to the power and the beauty of Ian's words and Joy Division's music.”

Looking ahead to the Macclesfield show, Hook added: "For the 35th anniversary I decided that to do a proper celebration we need to play all the music. It will be every song that Joy Division ever wrote and recorded in one go. It's a bit of a marathon! It's 48 songs, comprising all the singles, B-sides, and album tracks. You know what – there's not a duff one in it! I wish I could say that about New Order!"

The show will be called 'So This Is Permanence', taking its name from the lyrics of 'Twenty Four Hours' from 'Closer'. The same title was used for a book of Ian Curtis' writing last year.

All proceeds from 'So This Is Permanence' are to be donated to The Epilepsy Society and The Churches Conservation Trust with the donation to the CCT earmarked for the redevelopment of Christ Church.

Tickets for the gig go on sale on Wednesday March 25 at 9am.
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'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.

'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
Muscles
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Re: joy division

Post by Muscles »

I hope there is a youtube of this. Loved jd in high school. Seems like a marathon.
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olan
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Re: joy division

Post by olan »

Muscles wrote:I hope there is a youtube of this. Loved jd in high school. Seems like a marathon.
I won't be going. There will be an insane number of tapers at this show though. I would be amazed if there was not at least 3 or 4 different versions, including video, available pretty rapidly after the show.
runaway
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Re: joy division

Post by runaway »

Conflicted. Like the fact that the proceeds are going to charity, but is this really about honoring the legacy?
angelsighs
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Re: joy division

Post by angelsighs »

Conflicted too. This is more about giving Barney the finger right?

It's a great and ambitious thing to do, but can't shake the feeling that he's become his own cover band.
plastic37
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Re: joy division

Post by plastic37 »

The Dr wrote:
Speaking to NME, Hook explained that he feels Joy Division's legacy was somewhat neglected due to the subsequent success of the band as New Order.
That cracks me up.
angelsighs wrote:Conflicted too. This is more about giving Barney the finger right?
Sad isn't it?
I regret missing this.


Sounded (and looked) far more exciting.
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olan
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Re: joy division

Post by olan »

plastic37 wrote:
The Dr wrote:
Speaking to NME, Hook explained that he feels Joy Division's legacy was somewhat neglected due to the subsequent success of the band as New Order.
That cracks me up.
angelsighs wrote:Conflicted too. This is more about giving Barney the finger right?
Sad isn't it?
I regret missing this.


Sounded (and looked) far more exciting.
I saw that JD reworked at The Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. I thought it was a bit shite really, especially the Ian-in-a-tin effect in the encore of LWTUA.
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Re: joy division

Post by mojo filters »

angelsighs wrote:Conflicted too. This is more about giving Barney the finger right?

It's a great and ambitious thing to do, but can't shake the feeling that he's become his own cover band.
The other ex-Joy Division folks from New Order certainly have characterized it as such when he first began this, suggesting it's more a vanity project to satisfy Peter Hook's ego.

Regarding his comment about not playing Joy Division material previously - I thought that was the whole point of New Order, a deliberate choice to move forwards instead of crippling themselves creatively through focussing on the past rather than the future?
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Re: joy division

Post by The Dr »

mojo filters wrote:
angelsighs wrote:Conflicted too. This is more about giving Barney the finger right?

It's a great and ambitious thing to do, but can't shake the feeling that he's become his own cover band.
The other ex-Joy Division folks from New Order certainly have characterized it as such when he first began this, suggesting it's more a vanity project to satisfy Peter Hook's ego.

Regarding his comment about not playing Joy Division material previously - I thought that was the whole point of New Order, a deliberate choice to move forwards instead of crippling themselves creatively through focussing on the past rather than the future?
yes, now he is deliberately ignoring the fact that they made this decision to exploit his past
“You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness

'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.

'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
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Re: joy division

Post by angelsighs »

olan wrote: I saw that JD reworked at The Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. I thought it was a bit shite really, especially the Ian-in-a-tin effect in the encore of LWTUA.
Ian in a tin? tell me more... at least they were trying to do something new with the JD catalogue, I guess.

That quote from Hook that Joy Division's legacy was neglected made me laugh. You can say that about a lot of bands but not them... how many times has the legacy been raked over, and the same songs released?

It was really cool how New Order took a break from the past and stood on their own two feet (obviously part of this may have been way to move on from the tragedy that one of their best mates had taken his own life). I gather that they only played the very occasional JD song up until the second reunion (2001?) then they used to play a few,,, but as someone who heard their stadium rock versions of Tranmission and LWTUA in person, perhaps they should have left it alone ;)
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Re: joy division

Post by mojo filters »

The Dr wrote:
mojo filters wrote:
angelsighs wrote:Conflicted too. This is more about giving Barney the finger right?

It's a great and ambitious thing to do, but can't shake the feeling that he's become his own cover band.
The other ex-Joy Division folks from New Order certainly have characterized it as such when he first began this, suggesting it's more a vanity project to satisfy Peter Hook's ego.

Regarding his comment about not playing Joy Division material previously - I thought that was the whole point of New Order, a deliberate choice to move forwards instead of crippling themselves creatively through focussing on the past rather than the future?
yes, now he is deliberately ignoring the fact that they made this decision to exploit his past
Time differences between here and Malaysia have blunted my senses: I fear my comprehension is slower than the new McHonda after a few laps in the sun!

Forgive my misfiring mind, sleep deprivation has left me running on fewer than all cylinders - is the above sarcastic or straightforward?

Either's good for me, to be honest ... at least as honest as Ron Dennis talking to Bernie Ecclestone in a meeting about Nelson Piquet Jr's car insurance claim, with Flavio Briatore recording the minutes ;)
I'm like Evel Knievel, I get paid for the attempt. I didn't promise this shit would be good!
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The Dr
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Re: joy division

Post by The Dr »

mojo filters wrote:
The Dr wrote:
Time differences between here and Malaysia have blunted my senses: I fear my comprehension is slower than the new McHonda after a few laps in the sun!

Forgive my misfiring mind, sleep deprivation has left me running on fewer than all cylinders - is the above sarcastic or straightforward?

Either's good for me, to be honest ... at least as honest as Ron Dennis talking to Bernie Ecclestone in a meeting about Nelson Piquet Jr's car insurance claim, with Flavio Briatore recording the minutes ;)
straightforward- he seems to be manipulating his past to suit his current needs- not saying anyhting bad about him- he was in JD! but an earlier comment as to his motivation cannot help but make one tut and shake one's head ever so slightly!
“You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness

'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.

'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
niamhm
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Re: joy division

Post by niamhm »

Pretty sure it was a decision made in 1980, and New Order had softened their stance by `86 and were playing JD songs semi regularly after that, don't see why Hook should be held to that decision now.

I was a big New Order fan in the `80/90`s, but lost interest after the Get Ready ( Crystal is classic New Order though), but I`ve no enthusiasm for the band now, or watching Hooky do a 3 hr run through of the JD catalogue, but to anybody that's willing to buy a ticket I say fill your boots,
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Re: joy division

Post by spzretent »

This will bring a smile your your face I hope.
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angelsighs
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Re: joy division

Post by angelsighs »

yeah Hooky is well within his rights to do this, it's up to the punters whether they wanna pay their money and he seems to be doing okay out of it.
I saw him a few months ago and it was a pretty good show if nothing mindblowing. The New Order songs came across better than the Joy Division ones which lacked a bit of gravitas.
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Re: joy division

Post by olan »

angelsighs wrote:yeah Hooky is well within his rights to do this, it's up to the punters whether they wanna pay their money and he seems to be doing okay out of it.
I saw him a few months ago and it was a pretty good show if nothing mindblowing. The New Order songs came across better than the Joy Division ones which lacked a bit of gravitas.
I have something of a 'long history' with Joy Division and New Order. I saw NO play many, many times between 1981 and 1987. I've seen Hooky do his thing a couple of times. I thought the Movement thing was alright, but he absolutely butchered the songs on PC&L. The JD gig I saw PH&TL play was pretty average to say the very least. I think Jon is being very fair when he says it 'lacked a bit of gravitas'. In my view it was little more than second order pub rock. Having said this, I have only seen NO four times since 1988 and they were not much good at any of them. I figure that the magic was lost long ago..... :cry:
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Re: joy division

Post by davedecay »

located Still, thank you.
Last edited by davedecay on Sun Oct 18, 2015 4:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The Dr
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Re: joy division

Post by The Dr »

just reserved a copy from the library :D


----


Ian Curtis was aged just 23 when he committed suicide on 18 May 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour, causing the band to dissolve and reform as New Order.

Yet his cultural legacy has proved far from short-lived: the tragic narrative of his brief life has since inspired films and books, and his songs have become a permanent fixture in the story of British music, while his enigmatic persona has encouraged endless poring over his life and career in search of answers. You might wonder, therefore: is there any new light to shed on him?

A new book does just that. Co-edited by his widow, Deborah Curtis, and Joy Division aficionado Jon Savage, So This Is Permanence collects together various Curtis writings including previously unseen musings from his notebooks and facsimiled, handwritten lyric sheets for unreleased and celebrated songs alike. With an appendix including fan letters, fanzines and other memorabilia, it conveys what Deborah describes as Curtis’s “complex theatrical personality” from a prismatic range of perspectives, as well as his varied interests, from politics to poetry.

The project was initiated by Lee Brackstone, a commissioning editor at Faber, who called Deborah in early 2013 suggesting a book and wondering if, in fact, there might be any fragments of Ian’s original lyric drafts; in fact, there was even more extant material than he had hoped for. It is drawn from several sources, including an A4 ring binder, three notebooks and a large sheaf of A4 paper, as well as miscellaneous scraps. Curtis used to carry his writings around in a plastic bag. “When Ian found his direction, the notebooks, the scraps of paper and the carrier bag became an extension of his body. All he was able to express on a personal level was poured into his writing, and so his lyrics tell much more than a conversation with him ever could,” explains Deborah in her foreword to the book. The bag went everywhere with him, and he kept it in “the blue room”, the room in the Macclesfield home that he and Deborah bought in 1977 where he wrote and which he had carpeted and painted light blue.

Compiling Curtis’s writings was a challenging task, says Savage. “There was one night driving back from Deborah’s [in Cheshire to my home in North Wales] when I got totally lost and I never get lost. I have a really good sense of direction. And that was a direct result of dealing with all that.” For, despite Curtis’s sky-coloured hideaway, the emotional palette of his lyrics was dark. He was diagnosed with epilepsy a year before his death while Deborah was pregnant and she writes of how “feelings of isolation, loss and spectacle” seeped into his work: “His writing didn’t so much develop as ripen, so much so that you can hear the bruising in his voice.” Yet far from being all bleakness, Joy Division were “perfectly poised between white light and dark despair,” says Savage.



So This is Permanence paints a portrait of the young man growing into an artist. In the lyric sheets, we see evidence of ferocious rewriting. “He was an obsessive writer. He worked very hard, it was a discipline, he wasn’t a dilettante,” says Savage. Take the drafts of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” which feature multiple variations of lines – in small words hanging at the top of one draft are “FLAWED FEELINGS RUN DRY”, while “ambitions run dry” is written on another page, and the final lyric in the central text runs “our respect runs so dry” – as well as abandoned phrases such as the scribbled-out “turn to dreams of the night” and “tired but can’t sleep”, perhaps forlorn expressions of his state of mind. In our extensively digitised age, these manic, handwritten words, showing the very loops and trains of thought, the crossings out and late additions, exert a primal power.

The book also highlights Curtis’s voracious reading and sweep of cultural influences from Dada to Dostoyevsky, in one section printing the covers of books from Curtis’s library. The emphasis here is on dystopian fiction, from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; such was the vision that seeped into his lyrics, in songs such as “Transmission” (1978), for example, which imagines a world in which eyes are “frightened of the sun” and the speaker is “left to blind destruction”.

“It’s important to note how much these dystopian ideas were available to young people because of paperback publishers and bookshops,” says Savage, who details in the introduction how the early- to mid-Seventies was a golden age of paperback publishing. Modernist ideas also echo through his writings, inspired as Curtis was by T S Eliot. A lyric of one unreleased song runs: “Hollow in their meaning, / Hollow in their thinking”, a seeming reference to Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”.

Curtis himself may have made a fine novelist: also abandoned to the back of a cupboard was a fiction Curtis aspired to write which remained “unwritten apart from a few paragraphs full of unspecified despair”, as Deborah describes, and a vein of sci-fi, almost apocalyptic, fantasy creeps into some notes as Curtis explores the idea of a “diseased” world, spiralling into destruction.


Such imagery was inspired by place, too, and this book paints a vivid portrait not only of a young man as an artist, but of a city, 1970s Manchester, which crucially shaped Curtis. As Savage describes in his introduction: “Both in words and music, Joy Division mapped the depressed city of Manchester, an environment at once degraded and deserted but, in a strange way, futuristic.”

In his notebooks, meanwhile, what is captured is Curtis’s perpetual search for “a better word to describe our state of mind”, one seemingly haunted, in his case, by a sense of life’s transience and uncertainty. The notebooks are filled with questions: “WHAT ARE YOUR VALUES?”, he asks. “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? (a question scribbled over the question “WHERE IS YOUR PAST?”) WHERE ARE GOING” (sic). The phrase “used to” recurs, a lament for a lost time: “I used to dream a lot”, he writes in one note, but “we grew up too soon and our fears took the place of our dreams”.

It’s likely that the book will only add to the cult of Curtis that has grown ever stronger over the past 34 years. So why have Joy Division had such longevity? Pop music at the time “allowed people who weren’t privileged to say something, make art, that’s what Joy Division were doing, they were making art,” says Savage. The music was “fantastically exciting, terrific right the way through” and also offers “emotional authenticity ... Ian was for real – that much-maligned phrase. He’s putting every- thing into his performance and he means what he says, which is a tricky road to go down, but in Ian’s case it’s that intensity which is one of the reasons they’ve survived.”

For all that Curtis’s intensity is now rock lore, these writings serve as a visceral and indelible reminder.

‘So This is Permanence’ is out now, published by Faber & Faber
“You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness

'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.

'Dostoevsky's dead,' said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
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