Jon Savage on Joy Division: the longing for beautiful things

forty years Ago, has taken Ian Curtis, lead singer of the English Band Joy Division, the life. He left behind a wife, a daughter and two albums belong in the Canon of pop music. The anthem "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is considered one of the best pop songs of all time, the Cover art of the debut album, "Unknown Pleasures" from 1979, Teenagers wear today T-Shirts. What, in turn, as a proof of that formula, which had found Curtis and his three band mates, at that time, will be considered for the timelessness, in the broken Manchester of the late seventies. A city that has become, thanks to Joy Division and the Bands that came after them, to the Mecca of pop music.

Tobias Rüther

editor in the Feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

Such founding myths are common: A group of young people together in a particular place at a Sound, to write history, you think of Techno in the re-United Berlin of the early nineties or Rap in black New York in the late seventies. The connection from Manchester and Ian Curtis was already feeling often followed, there are movies ("Control" by Anton Corbijn, "24 Hour Party People" by Michael Winterbottom), there are monographs, participating observers, such as Dave Haslam, there are the memoirs of the widow – and now also an Oral History. Selected has reported the British Pop historian Jon Savage, who as a young Journalist for the music magazine "Sounds" with fiery red ears, about Joy Division and the new scene around the legendary Factory Label, and this moment, in fact, his career owes.

euphoria encounters late finding

"Searing light, the sun and everything else" to tell again the story of Joy Division: Four guys from Manchester, the, hardly, that, in 1976, the Punk broke out, even start a Band. Whose minimalist acting tables Cool with a maximum of a loud heartbeat style-forming. They learn their instruments on the stage, to take quick as a flash, two plates, and are on the go to America, as the most talented and most charismatic among them at the age of twenty-three years, hanged. The other three members, reasons, soon, the next Band, New Order, and initiate a decade of the most beautiful, post-modern pop music from Manchester, but it is in this book, no place.

Because the Savage uses for his book with Interviews from the years 1979 and 1980, Ian Curtis to speak for themselves. Then again, his band speak to colleagues and other musicians, Fans, and producers, managers and journalists – however, from the review. Euphoria hits so late finding, and the longer the reading lasts, the more half-baked, this method will appear. At least now you know how all the other young Curtis see: a reader of Nietzsche, an ambitious Tory, a self-waster in the Tradition of Rimbaud, who suffered from epilepsy.

from whence came the strength?

This approach undermines the claim to distill something of the final Version of the story of Joy Division from all available sources. Especially Savage documented the cult of the Band. Would not have needed it, and certainly not from this author, the mentality of Dreaming stories as "England's" or "Teenage" socio-economic basis for the understanding of today's pop culture.

remains Totally unclear how, from the ruins of the former metropolis of capitalism is a metropolis of pop music could be created. This question in the case of the progressive reading is always pressing. Whence came the force, why the people stayed? You know what a book is in this book, if one reads the voices of wise witnesses such as Peter Saville, Mark Reeder or Liz Naylor. "Because everything was so ugly, was constantly looking for something Beautiful to look out, if perhaps only subconsciously," recalls Bernard Sumner, guitarist of Joy Division and lead singer of New Order. "Until I was about nine, I had not seen a tree. There was a longing, a Madness to beautiful things, because it was half in a state of sensory Deprivation.“ So Sumner has created with his friends, even beautiful things, Songs that other people have to live melodies.