Heart and Soul : Joy Division

Bernard Sumner: I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of thin air, we never, any of us, were interested in the money it might make us. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to and stirred our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career, or any of that. We never planned one single day.

Peter Hook: [Ian Curtis, the late lead singer of Joy Division] was the instigator. We used to call him the Spotter. Ian would be sat there, and he’d say, “That sounds good, let’s get some guitar to go with that.” You couldn’t tell what sounded good, but he could, because he was just listening. That made it much quicker, writing songs. Someone was always listening. I can’t explain it, it was pure luck. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. We never honestly considered it, it just came out.

Stephen Morris: He was pretty private about what he wrote. I think he talked to Bernard a bit about some of the songs. He was totally different to how he appeared onstage. He was timid, until he’d had two or three Breakers, malt liquor. He’d liven up a bit. The first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage, I couldn’t believe it. The transformation to this frantic windmill.

Deborah Curtis: He was so ambitious. He wanted to write a novel, he wanted to write songs. It all seemed to come very easily to him. With Joy Division it all just came together for him.

Tony Wilson: I still don’t know where Joy Division came from.

Mark Reeder: I met Ian when he was working at Rare Records. They were very elitist in that shop: all beards and long hair, tweed jackets, and they all thought they were something else. I always thought if I ever worked in a record shop, I’d never want to be like them. Totally unhelpful, ignorant of the people coming into the shop. If you made a mistake in the pronunciation of a track, you’d be ridiculed to death.

Ian wasn’t like that. He was always trying to sell me reggae records. This was about 1974. Ian was totally into reggae music. Dub. He wasn’t there very long—about a year—and he was the youngest one in the shop, and he was the only one you could talk to. We talked about all kinds of stuff, and usually the topics would cross over from music to history and the war. He was fascinated by the war.

I started working at Virgin Records when I was about 14. Just part-time initially, and I got paid in records. They needed someone to stock up the records on weekends, while they were all in the shop. Just helping out, and then I ended up working there. It was back in the 70s. Real hippie days: lots of long hair and ’staches and stuff.

There was this seating arrangement, because people kept stealing headphones. They’d either break or they’d be nicked. So somebody came up with this idea where they’d have this seating arrangement at the back, covered in this vomit-green bri-nylon carpet covering, and the loudspeakers were put in the headrests. And people would sit, obviously, next to each other, and it was impossible to hear anything. You could move these speakers, put them next to your ears in the hope that you could not hear the person next to you.

But Virgin was a place where people just liked to hang out really. That’s why it stank of incense in there as well, to disguise the smell of marijuana. It was more rock music than disco then. In 1973, they’d just had this massive success with Tubular Bells, and then came Tangerine Dream, and they were the kind of records that put Virgin on the map and made the Virgin shop in Manchester special. All the other record shops were a bit elitist.

I was captivated by the idea of electronic music. I remember in 1968 when you had to have a stereo. We’d seen some bloke offering them in the paper, so one Saturday afternoon we went round to this bloke’s house to look at this stereo. It was this massive thing stuck in the middle of the room, like a cabinet, a sideboard with loud-speakers at each end and a drinks bit in the middle, and to demonstrate this stereo he put on Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos, and I was like, “What is that?”

Before that, my only exposure to electronic music had been Doctor Who. And “Telstar.” Then, for years and years, I didn’t hear anything synthetic at all, until I came to this bloke’s house and he put on Switched on Bach. Which was like the Brandenburg Concerto played on a synthesizer. I’d been exposed to classical music cos I played violin at school, but this was something completely different, and it was in stereo. From that moment I was captivated by the idea of electronic music.

In the Court of the Crimson King came out when I was about ten, and I was just overawed. It was avant-garde, ambient, and I’d sit in total silence, listening to this record. Looking at the cover, absorbing it all. And that was my background to working in Virgin. When they started releasing the early Tangerine Dream records, German music didn’t sound like British music at all. And the weirder it was, the more fascinated I was. The first Kraftwerk albums were like jazz rock, with flutes and stuff, totally unlistenable to for all my mates.

I knew Tony Wilson from very early on. He’d come in at weekends, just before closing time. I was the person designated to unpack the boxes in the morning and then write up all the records and put them into stock. So I knew every single record that was coming into the shop, even more than the people who actually worked there. I’d have to tell them what had come in—they had no idea. They’d just look at the list, and they had no idea if things that they’d ordered had actually come in or not.

Tony would ask me to put a record aside for him so he could have a listen, then I could put it back in stock on the Monday if he didn’t want it. He’d come in, and it would be all, “Darling!”—and that’s how I got to know him. I got to know Rob Gretton because he used to come into the shop all the time and just hang around. It’s what I would do as well—go into record shops and just hang around there all day, talking about records and about music.

Ian would come into Virgin when he started working in Manchester and just hang around, complaining about things. He said, “You can smell the drugs in Virgin.” I told him that’s why we burn incense to disguise it, but he thought that was the smell of the drugs. He was always joking, very funny, playing tricks and stuff.

Paul Morley: We had head shops like Eight Miles High, the Manchester Free Press and the Mole Express, and the lefty end of things. That was your great salvation at the time—music and the lefty press and weird bookshops where alternative culture seemed to be thriving. Down in London obviously there was Compendium, and we had weird little versions of that where you might find some sanity and discover things. Everything was not easily available; you had to search it out and find it.

I worked in this bookshop in Stockport, and the shop sold all the great Pelican blue books, which were my education. I didn’t get educated at school, I got educated in this bookshop, and they had a science-fiction section—Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, all the J. G. Ballard novels—they would have really weird magazines, underground magazines, and weird folk singers from the backwoods of Derbyshire would come in to get their weekly fix of odd alternative culture.

But we made money in the bookshop out of the soft porn and the Mills & Boon, so you had a weird kind of strange thing where old ladies would totter in every month to get their ten Mills & Boon, and men would come in to get their soft porn, which we had to order off a van that came in every week. Then I would be selling second-hand records. I would go into Manchester, buy bootlegs for £2, bring them back to my bookshop and sell them for £2.50.

You’d get the people coming in to buy war books, all those Sven Hassels. Of course, if you were going to open that kind of independent bookshop in the northwest at that period, you would have lefty tendencies, so you’d be pushing that, but to make your money you would have to sell Whitehouse and Mayfair, and the dreadful thing is you could bring them back to exchange, so these grubby copies of this soft porn would come back glistening with some suspect substance.

But what was interesting were the creatures that would come in to check out the weird combination of books, which sounds fairly standard now but at the time was unformed and raw: Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Burroughs. William Burroughs was definitely part of it. They were prophets of something that we were about to enter, this weird commercial entertainment landscape that would become where we are now sat, but at the time it was very odd, and it was a beautiful attachment to your love for weird music. There was no doubt that it was connected. There didn’t seem to be any difference between reading Ballard and Dick and Burroughs and listening to Faust and Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges: you were constantly curious to find out strange things that might explain your situation, even though it didn’t directly have anything to do with where you were.

And there were characters. There was a guy that used to come into the bookshop called Paul, and he did the first fanzine I’d ever come across. It was called Penetration and it was basically obsessed with Hawkwind. He used to come in and he always used to wear all black. He had the whitest skin I’d ever seen, and his girlfriend would always wear white lace, and they used to float in bringing ten copies of Penetration every so often. In fact, that’s where I first wrote. I wrote a piece about Lenny Bruce for Penetration, which Paul pasted up in the wrong order, incidentally. I think it’s influenced my writing ever since, because I quite liked it being in the wrong order.

But there were lots of characters like that floating around and, obviously, Ian Curtis. I get the sense wherever he was at the same time—’74, ’75—he was coming across similar sorts of routes, similar source material out of which he could piece together his vision.

Stephen Morris: I’d get the train and go in to Savoy Books—before it was Savoy Books it was called The House on the Borderlands—and we used to have a right laugh at the old blokes looking at the porn. There was science fiction, weird books, and over in a corner there’d be naked ladies, and surprisingly enough the science fiction had little appeal for the vast majority of the clientele, who were going over to the naked-lady corner. I’d just be trying to negotiate some sort of discount on a large, expensive book: “Yeah, have you got Michael Moorcock’s new book?”

Ian had The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, and also a collection of Jim Morrison’s poems. I seem to remember that you could go to W. H. Smith’s and they had a lot of Burroughs and a lot of Ballard, and it was just mixed in with the rest of the stuff.

Michael Butterworth: Bookchain was opened in 1977. It was alternative and youth-culture stuff, both second-hand and new. I must clarify, though, that this was the most famous of our shops and the one everyone remembers, but it is not the shop Ian Curtis first came to. There were two Savoy shops before this one, and David Britton’s most vivid memories of Ian are of him coming into the first shop.

All three shops were modeled on two London bookshops of the period: Bram Stokes’s shop in Berwick Street, Soho, called Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed—which sold comics, sci-fi, drug- related stuff, posters, etc.—and a chain called Popular Books. David Britton used to visit a branch of the latter in Camden Town when he was living in London in the late 60s. They sold everything from Private Eye, girlie books, pin-up stuff and Penthouse to film stills, posters and any sort of media ephemera.

These two bookshops inspired David (with his then partner, Charles Partington) to open a bookshop on Port Street, off Newton Street, in Manchester centre. The shop they opened was called The House on the Borderland (after the William Hope Hodgson novel), and they had all this kind of stuff in the window. There was a strong emphasis on alternative culture and American imports. The window looked very exotic, and this is what probably attracted Ian and Steve Morris inside, once they had followed the yellow-brick-road poster trail leading to the shop. The attitude radiating from the shop was, “Fuck everybody in authority,” and that’s what they responded to. The shop played loud rock’n’roll over the speakers, which sounded out into the street years before other shops were doing the same kind of thing. And I mean loud.

They were disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They probably saw the shop as being a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the early 70s. Ian was interested in counter-culture and science fiction. David remembers them being enthusiasts about Michael Moorcock, whose hard-edged fantasy writing and lifestyle were a great influence, very rock’n’roll.

Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Moorcock, which was doing something very different, promoting Burroughs and Ballard, and it’s possible Ian picked up his interest in these writers from these magazines. In exchange for their help in the shop they were allowed to take whatever books took their fancy. They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Steve was the most frequent. This close contact came to an end gradually, as Ian and Steve’s interest in a band was getting more serious.

Stephen Morris: Once I started going out, my first concert was Hawkwind and Status Quo. I was into psychedelic music really. Apart from Hawkwind, the first two groups that I got into were Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and the week after that it was the Velvet Underground, and that was it. I liked collecting groups and I remember I liked Alice Cooper until everybody else started liking Alice Cooper, then I decided I didn’t really like Alice Cooper that much. That’s a bit pretentious really, but that’s the way it was.

After that glam happened. Actually, after saying that Macclesfield was a cultural desert, once a year there was a discotheque—there were two discotheques, one at the rugby club, where you could go and dance to the Faces and Jeff Beck and get in a fight, or you could go to Boddington Civic, which was later on, where there was a big glam-rock following and you had the Sweet and Bowie and Roxy Music, and so we went from psychedelic to glam rock—again, till everybody started liking it.

I discovered Krautrock about that time, and Can—I was into Tago Mago. I should say we were forming a band, me and this other guy from school—Mac, he was called. We were going to form this avant-garde jazz combo called the Sunshine Valley Dance Band. Everyone thinks it was just going to be like a dance band, and Hooky thinks it was jazz, but no, we were going to be avant-garde, and people would book us on the strength of the name and we would shock them with our appalling performances.

It never got off the ground, but through Mac’s elder brother I got into Can and then, after Can, Amon Düül and Neu!. I was into the punk rock before punk rock, which was the MC5 and the first Stooges album, which I bought from Kendals in Manchester. Anything that wasn’t disco. I later came to regret that opinion, but at the time disco was shit, and so it was anything that was a little bit long-haired but not like the boys in the year above me, who would wear RAF greatcoats and walk about with copies of Disraeli Gears or The Best of Cream. I wasn’t too mad on anything bluesy; it was just anything a bit unusual that was not Eric Clapton.

Paul Morley: You were looking round to see if there was anybody like you. There was nobody like me at school. Eventually we all found each other at a particular show, but for two or three years before that happened we didn’t really know where each other was. If you went to a Pink Floyd or David Bowie concert at the Free Trade Hall, you didn’t really find anybody else. They were probably there somewhere, but you didn’t find them because there was a bigger disguise going on.

At that point—’74, ’75—music fundamentally came to Manchester. We used to think of the local bands as not being right. Even bands that were local, like 10cc or Sad Café, didn’t seem to be Manchester. They seemed to be more LA, they were already in Las Vegas. There were a couple of kind of strange heavy metal clubs in Manchester where local bands would play, but you wouldn’t take them seriously at all because they just seemed like bands you’d see at school. There was just no way that that music would ever come from Manchester.

Excerpted from This searing light, the sun, and everything else: Joy Division: An Oral History by Jon Savage. Published with permission from Faber & Faber.

“I Still Don’t Know Where Joy Division Came From” By Jon Savage. LitHub , May 17, 2019.

Other excerpts here : 

The Birth of Joy Division.  Rolling Stone,  April 21, 2019.

‘Ian Curtis wanted to make extreme music, no half measures’ The Guardian , March 24, 2019 

Music journalist Jon Savage, 65, has wanted to write a book about Joy Division for as long as he can remember. But the spark for his new oral history of the band, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, is easier to pinpoint. He assisted on Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary film Joy Division and knew how much material had been left on the cutting-room floor. Lead singer Ian Curtis was long dead of course (he killed himself in 1980), but there were in-depth interviews with the remaining members of the group – Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – as well as material that Savage had compiled over four decades following, thinking and writing about Joy Division. The result feels like a definitive account of one of the most exciting and enduring bands of the post-punk era.

Why did you want to do an oral history? In some ways, it’s a more ego-less approach for a writer.

JS : That was an attraction for me because I’ve written a lot about Joy Division. And people tend to get superheated about the band, so I thought: “Oh God, let them speak!” Besides, I like the cadences of the way that they speak, there’s a kind of poetry. And it’s very immediate.

Did compiling the book change how you feel about the band or the personalities?

JS : Well, yes. There is disguised autobiography in the book: it’s about me moving to Manchester from London in 1979 and working with [Factory co-founder] Tony Wilson and becoming friendly with Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager] and Martin Hannett [the band’s producer] and seeing Joy Division a lot. And me trying to make sense of how powerful Joy Division were: they are probably the most powerful live group I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen hundreds.

And I really got a sense finally – which I haven’t before – of why what happened with Ian happened. It’s a combination of pressures. Also the severe nature of his illness, and the poor treatment he was getting for his illness, and it all just suddenly really made sense to me. He was actually having fits on stage, and that’s not sustainable. So in a way it was the laying of a ghost.

What do you remember about when Ian Curtis died in May 1980?

JS : I have no memory. It’s a blank. In a way, keeping on at this subject is a way of filling in the blanks. And I think that was just being young. I was 25 and I hadn’t really encountered death before, and so I just didn’t know what to do. Also back in the day there was not really the language to talk about it, and people say that in the book. And I was only on the periphery, so I think it was a completely shattering event.

How would describe your relationship with the band during the time you were writing about them?

JS : I was quite rigorous about not becoming that friendly with groups, because it could be a bit embarrassing; you don’t know whether they’d turn round and make a crap album and you’d have to say so and there would be trouble. That happened to me with Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of other people and I just got fed up with people coming up to me and calling me a cunt because I’d actually told the truth about their lousy art in that particular case. So I’d say I was an acquaintance.

It’s been 40 years since the band released their debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures. What’s the enduring appeal of Joy Division?

JS : The main thing about Joy Division is that they were great. The music really stands up; I still listen to Joy Division with great pleasure and it’s not just nostalgic. Also I had a very interesting experience: I did an event at the BFI and they showed [Anton Corbijn’s film] Control and the Joy Division documentary to a bunch of inner-city kids, 16, 17. They were slightly bored, polite but restless – as you’d expect. Then Ian came on in one of the bits of live footage and oh, they tuned right in. They immediately snapped to attention, because of his total intensity, total commitment. He was, in that degraded phrase, “for real”. So there is something about Joy Division that transcends their time and place.

Is this the end of your journey with them?

JS : I certainly won’t do another book about them, but I do feel that I’ve got a greater understanding of what happened then and why it’s continued to nag away at me until now. A very good friend of mine said to me once: “Jon, sometimes in life, you have to do the obvious.” Actually that’s very good advice and this book is an example of that, I think.

Jon Savage: ‘Something about Joy Division transcends their time and place’. By Tim Lewis. The Guardian , March 24, 2019. 

Another interview :

Joy Division and Jon Savage's Latest, 'This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else' By David Chu. PopMatters,  April 2, 2019. 

Jon Savage’s “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” documents the formation, brief life and sudden end of the phenomenal Manchester, England, band Joy Division.

Much has been written about this band; some of the sharpest music writers have given their best trying to capture its essence. As brilliant as some of this work is, Joy Division seems to remain in the shadows, just out of reach of critical assessment. Joy Division’s music doesn’t “rock” in the classic sense as much as shudder, roar and convulse. The songs are readings of temperature, light and lack of light. They walk silently for hours on city streets and return alone to small rooms with full ashtrays and no messages on the machine. It’s a fantastically difficult question to answer: Why do you like Joy Division? The more dedicated the listener, the more likely you’ll get an inhaled breath held for a few seconds, an exhale and a shrug.

Savage is one of those aforementioned very talented scribes, who perhaps understands all too well how difficult it would be for any one person to create a clear picture of Joy Division. What better way to tell the story than to ask others to tell its story? By interviewing remaining members and those who bore witness, Savage’s oral history of the band carefully connects the dots.

Joy Division was Peter Hook on bass, Bernard Sumner on guitar, Stephen Morris on drums and Ian Curtis on vocals. The band’s first release, from summer 1978, a four-track 7-inch record called “An Ideal for Living,” could be labeled functionally as post punk, one of the best results of punk music’s exhilarating flash-pot bang. The songs are great but show a band only somewhat in control of its talent. Hearing what came next, you wonder if at that time, the four had any idea of what they were capable of.

The following year, the band released its first full length album, the brilliant “Unknown Pleasures.” None of the demos or surviving live recordings hints at what the band would bring to bear with this record. The music seems uninfluenced by any music that came before it but instead by the sheer fact of existence, the sound of your blood rushing through your veins.

The band became immensely popular. The group performed live and recorded new material. On May 18, 1980, Curtis took his life at age 23. A month later, in June, perhaps Joy Division’s most well-known song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was released. In July 1980, the band’s second album, “Closer,” came out. Joy Division would reach its peak posthumously. Hook, Morris and Sumner carried on as New Order to great success all over the world.

I became a fan, never having heard “Unknown Pleasures.” Many years ago, I was playing my current favorite record for someone, who said I should cut out the middleman and listen to the band it was desperately trying to emulate: Joy Division. I’m not aware of anyone in any of the bands I was in having any interest in Joy Division’s music. I knew of the band but had heard only “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Then I remembered that in the remaining space of many of the tapes I had received in trades from a fellow cassette enthusiast, he had put on tracks from Joy Division shows. I listened to them and was knocked out by the incredible intensity of the band. There’s no way you would want to go on after Joy Division.

A key moment for Joy Division happened at a Sex Pistols show at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976. Reportedly attended by fewer than 50 people, the show proved to be quite a night. In the audience were future members of the Fall, Joy Division and two men who would prove to be of great importance to the group: Factory Records partners Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett. The Factory label was almost a perfect reflection of Wilson; rebellious, innovative and fiercely independent. Joy Division — and other post-punk art-bands like A Certain Ratio and the Durutti Column — found great support at Factory.

Post-punk music delivered on punk’s detonation of rock music’s predictability. Joy Division wasn’t the only band that started at some point in the punk din and evolved by leaps and bounds. Gang of Four, Killing Joke, the Fall, the Birthday Party and Wire were a few of the great bands that fell under the post-punk heading. (If you want to know more, the go-to book is Simon Reynolds’ excellent “Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.”) And one of the greatest acts of punk-to-post-punk morphing was John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) going from perhaps the most well known punk band of all time, the Sex Pistols, to the completely different Public Image Limited.

Yet what has baffled many a Joy Division listener is the band’s own evolution; how its members, all novice players, went from rudimentary bashing with songs like “Gutz” and “You're No Good for Me” in 1977 to utterly brilliant tracks like “Transmission,” “Atmosphere” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” just a few years later.

 Without Wilson and Hannett, it could be argued, Joy Division's potential would have been greatly compromised. Wilson believed in the band completely, allowed it to flourish. But in “This Searing Light,” Sumner describes an isolated and workman-like environment at practice, where each player was in his own world. “We were not bouncing off each other,” he says, “we just completely ignored each other, we were all on our own island, and we just made sure that what we were doing sounded great, and we didn't pay any attention to what the others were doing, not consciously anyway.”

While this might sound like the members didn't get along, it is a quite Mancunian posture, when you consider that the greater Manchester area was infused with factories, warehouses and remnants of World War II. It's not surprising that being raised in this environment might engender a somewhat stark outlook and utilitarian work ethic.

“You were always looking for beauty because it was such an ugly place, whether again on a subconscious level,” Sumner says. “I mean, I don't think I saw a tree till I was about nine. I was surrounded by factories and nothing that was pretty, nothing.”

Manchester bands like Joy Division, the Fall and Buzzcocks were greatly distanced from the outrage and fashion that fueled the London punk scene, a little over 200 miles south, and while their surroundings could be grim, it made for quite a creative setting. In “This Searing Light,” you get the idea that it was a “resist or submit” proposition.“It gave you an amazing yearning for things that were beautiful,” Sumner says, “because you were in a semi-sensory-deprivation situation because you were brought up in this brutal landscape, but then when you did see something or hear something that was beautiful, you would go, 'Ooh, new experience,' and really appreciate it.”

Still, how do four young men from the working class, in one of the toughest parts of a tough country, almost suddenly create not only some of the most enduring music from the late 1970s and early 1980s but also easily one of the most astonishing debut albums ever, “Unknown Pleasures”?

In the pages of “This Searing Light,” we get many clues from the testimonies of those in close proximity to the band.

Peter Saville, Factory co-founder and art director, is responsible for the “Unknown Pleasures” cover, one of the most recognizably reworked and repurposed music-related images of the last century. Saville isn’t the originator; it is a found image, part of the materials in a folder given to Saville by the band’s manager, Rob Gretton. There are, no doubt, people all over the world wearing a version of this pulsar spread out on a T-shirt who have no idea what it’s relating to. That being said, if you had to describe “Unknown Pleasures,” the image works perfectly; separate, straight lines randomly disrupted; peaks and valleys and then flat again. Such is life.

Hannett, who produced “Unknown Pleasures,” was a true visionary. There is no way the album would sound anything like it does without him. At times, Hannett seemed almost dismissive of his young charges: “They were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue.”

Hannett was notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult, and the band members endured him as much as worked with him. Hannett was obsessed with isolating and manipulating sound — the studio was his world; Joy Division was just hanging out in it for awhile.

“The studio was Martin’s,” says Morris, “and when you were in the studio you were working for Martin and his whims. There was an awful lot of pot smoked: whether Martin was completely stoned or did have a different outlook on what he wanted, he would be obtuse. He wouldn’t say to you, ‘I want you to do it like this.’ It was, ‘Great, do it again but more cocktail party’ or ‘a bit more yellow.’ Whether it was pot or whether it was the Zen school of production, it was definitely interesting, because he turned us on to the studio being a musical instrument.”

Kevin Cummins, the great photographer who took some of the most recognizable images of Joy Division, was witness to the band’s rapid growth and the mesmerizing stage presence of Curtis. “It always felt dangerous, because you always felt he was slightly out of control, and I’d not really experienced that with any other band,” Cummins says. “I’d seen the Clash and the Jam and all these bands, and I never felt that they were more than the sum of their parts. But with Ian, it was dangerous. The only other person who was that dangerous onstage was Iggy Pop.”

These are some of the nearly 40 people from Joy Division's inner circle whose accounts Savage, who was also there at the time, has deftly woven into an almost detective-style MRI of the band and the forces and factors that formed it. Almost particle by particle, from descriptions of Manchester's industrial beginnings to the area's cultural void, Savage makes you understand that the members of Joy Division were driven to create something of immense beauty, as if there were no other choice.

As matter-of-fact as the interviews are, and as carefully as Savage has laid out his case, the "how" of the band's amazing music is all but impossible to put your finger on. Liz Naylor, a writer at the Manchester fanzine City Fun, captures the band's close distance: “My thing about Joy Division is that they're an ambient band almost: you don't see them function as a band, it's just the noise around where you are.”

It's not up for debate. Joy Division was one of the most original bands of the last century and an influence on countless others that came afterward. “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” brings us a little closer to understanding the band and its incredible music. But still, even after the careful examination of almost every aspect of the band’s brief existence, its music still lurks deep in phenomenon and shadow.

Why Joy Division? Henry Rollins examines Jon Savage’s oral history of the post-punk band. By Henry Rollins.  Los Angeles Times,  April 18, 2019.

Inside a catalog of forthcoming books, Faber & Faber refers to Jon Savage's This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History as "the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on May 18, 1980." It seems a little presumptuous to say that this book will be the "last word" on the subject of Joy Division, not that some closure wouldn't be welcome at this point. Between Peter Hook's memoir, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (It, 2013) Bernard Sumner's memoir, Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division, and Me (St. Martin's 2015), Deborah Curtis's memoir, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division (Faber and Faber, 2005), both a biopic (Joy Division, Gee, 2007) and a documentary, and some repackaging of the same songs fans have known and loved over the decades, it feels as if Joy Division has been discussed into the ground, sucking all of the mystery out of a band that was once shrouded in the stuff. Is there any marrow left in that bone? Or is This Searing Light just another way of giving people their Joy Division fix when the cupboards are all bare?

Author Jon Savage (interviewed with David Chiu, here on PopMatters), the compiler and editor of all the interviews here, was a source close to the band as well as the Factory Records team that helped launch a musical movement in Manchester. Given all of the front line accounts during this furtive punk moment in the late '70s, it appears that Savage was able to come away with some new angles to the old story -- Ian Curtis's personal dilemmas in addition to his epilepsy, the severity of said epilepsy, the band's inability to understand it all, the manager and the label boss's failure to act properly, and the multitudes that witnessed it first hand and have never forgotten the impact it left on them. As much as the story of this band has been pillaged, This Searing Light proves that there were still more Joy Division stories to be told. As far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly okay if there's now nothing left to tell.

This Searing Light pulls together recent interviews with the surviving Joy Division members, members of their contemporary bands such as the Buzzcocks and Cabaret Voltaire, photographers, and eyewitnesses, and is supplemented with past interviews with the now-departed Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, record producer Martin Hannett, the band's manager Rob Gretton, and journalist Annik Honoré. Surviving Factory players Alan Erasmus and Peter Saville are there to round out the picture, with a few rare reproductions of Saville's distinctly cryptic graphic designs. Photographers including Kevin Cummins, Jill Furmanovsky, Daniel Meadows, and the legendary Anton Corbijn describe snapping pictures of the band, both onstage during their mesmerizing sets and offstage when no one knew how to pose like a rock star. Music journalists Mary Harron (now a director) and Paul Morley share stories of interviewing the band and reviewing various shows. Eyewitness accounts from fans like Jon Wozencroft and writer Liz Naylor provide a surprisingly reliable narrative to compliment the professional angle.

Unlike other oral histories, Savage lists the interview subjects and their roles in the story in a table of contents at the start of the book rather than giving them the full description as they are introduced. As a result, a reader not equipped with an iron-clad memory may find themselves flipping to the beginning of the book quite often when they come across a new name. It's a minor detail, but it certainly disrupts the flow of the book, something that it sorely needs in its early pages. The first chapters are where everyone is setting the scenes of '70s-era Manchester with its urban decay and lack of natural beauty. This is also the moment when the interview subjects begin to chronicle their individual childhoods, something that can only be of interest to people from Manchester, seeing as how they are constantly peppered with geographical tidbits and some local color. The differences described between Salford and Manchester don't exactly leap off the page.

It isn't until the third chapter when the story begins to move. Tony Wilson was looking to expand his musical influence outside of presenting cutting-edge rock bands on his Ganada Television program So It Goes. This included activities such as giving Manchester gigs to the Bolton-based punk band the Buzzcocks and sprucing up the town venue known as the Lesser Free Trade Hall. The Sex Pistols played a set there in 1976 that proved to be serendipitous for Manchester's forthcoming music scene. Despite the fact that this fortunate gig has gone down in the record as a turning point in the history of British rock 'n' roll, Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner and Joy Division bassist Peter Hook don't seem to recall it being all that great of a show. Memorable, yes. But great? Apparently, the Sex Pistols had set the bar so low, musically speaking, that more than a few people left the showing thinking "I can do that!"

Sumner and Hook ride their scooters through the city, searching for an outlet for their newfound "skill". Ian Curtis makes an unassuming and paradoxical entrance on the Manchester music scene at around the same time. He wore a jacket with the word "HATE" scrawled on the back, yet he was very polite to everyone he met. He was drawn to William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard just as strongly as he was pulled to the titans of glam and punk, namely David Bowie and Iggy Pop. He was married yet wanted to ingratiate himself into a scene that marriage (and subsequent child-rearing) went against punk rock ethics. If Curtis ever struck you as a larger-than-life enigma that you couldn't wrap your mind around, everyone's personal accounts logged in This Searing Light helps to humanize him without demolishing the myth. The skeletons residing in his closet are easier to forgive once you remind yourself that he was only 23-years-old at the time of his death.

Indeed, it would be more difficult to imagine a rock band from this time that didn't stay up too late at night, drinking themselves silly while engaging in reckless mischief. He became very close to the Belgian journalist Honoré, an affair that, according to everyone concerned, never led to anything physical. This was more a matter of intellectual fulfillment, as Honoré was always giving Curtis the accolades his wife Deborah could never supply. At one point in the book, Deborah admits that she doesn't blame him for thinking this [NOTE: Savage lifts passages from Curtis's memoir to round out parts of the story]. Having epilepsy certainly wasn't his fault. The members of Joy Division and their manager take themselves to task for being ignorant of Curtis's physical as well as mental state. Crippling depression and grand mal fits? How are a bunch of 22-year-old men supposed to handle that? Somewhere in the second half of the book, you're reminded that there's hardly any adult supervision in the equation of constant gigging, constant traveling, poor health, and marital difficulties. Wilson and Gretton were older than the members of Joy Division, but not that much older. Everyone would have to come to grips with their maturity the hard way.

Depending on whose account you believe, Curtis's personal problems were exacerbated by the prospect of Joy Division touring America. According to Peter Hook, he was excited about leaving for the States. According to others, he was dreading the trip. The truth is, likely, a combination of the two. Curtis is portrayed as a people-pleaser, a man who would say whatever it was you wanted to hear, not least for his wife, his band, or his label boss. Rather than reconcile all of the differing promises he made to others, he let it all build to a painful tipping point. The night before Joy Division were to leave for America, Curtis hung himself.

Not surprisingly, everyone's recollection of that day is vivid. Tragedy certainly has a way of burning itself into your memory. Deborah Curtis was angry at Ian for having the "last word". Stephen Morris, Joy Division's drummer, had a reaction that was not dissimilar to the rest of the band: anger towards Curtis and disappointment in himself. He and everyone else are perfectly willing to admit that all of the red flags were there in hindsight, but they just couldn't bring them into focus at the time. The reader even gets the impression that Curtis's previous attempt at suicide didn't ring the alarm bells loud enough. To their credit, Curtis's need to please came through even during the worst of times. A simple "I'm fine" from him was enough to keep everyone rolling along, despite the fact that he was certainly not fine.

On page 304, Deborah Curtis admits that her late husband was "a very good liar, he was very convincing." It was at this point that I realized that there's room in the Joy Division universe for a book like This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else (the title comes from a series of words Tony Wilson throws together in a state of euphoria when describing Joy Division's sound, in case you were wondering) -- one that brings Ian Curtis back down to the status of a human being. She and many others close to Ian Curtis take turns chipping away at the Jim Morrison-sized myth that of Ian. Not to bring him down a peg, but to tell it as it was; Ian Curtis was a young man with a romantic angle, looking to channel his love of writing into a musical outlet. Life then became very, very tough as his band went on to surpass his expectations. The crowds grew as the reviews improved. Road manager and founding drummer Terry Mason puts it this way on page 316: "Everyone thinks there's some deep, dark, mystical secret, and there's not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way that he would think of out at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets. Cut."

There's Room in Joy Division's Expansive Universe for Jon Savage's 'This Searing Light...' By John Garratt.  PopMatters , April 19, 2019.