|
|
|
|
|
|
NewOrderOnline.com is supported by its members. Donations are always welcomed and appreciated.
|
|
|
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Joy Division: Piece by Piece: Writing About Joy Division 1977-2007
Nicolas LeBlanc
NewOrderOnline.com
|
Joy Division are the perennial cult post-punk band. Four young men with weight on their shoulders, the drama and tension of their music remains unsurpassed.
Paul Morley was their contemporary and Northern English compatriot, who wrote extensively and evocatively of the ‘mood, atmosphere and ephemeral terror’ that enveloped this unique group and their doomed front man,vocalist Ian Curtis. These are his complete writings on Joy Division, both contemporary and retrospective, forming a close personal account of the band’s brief, turbulent history: from primitive beginnings as Manchester punk band Warsaw, to Curtis’ near-fatal epileptic seizure following a London concert, and his tragic suicide in May 1980.
As Morley says, ‘The more that time moves on, the more I have to say about them.’ In addition to collecting all of the author’s journalistic writings on the band from the late 1970s/early 1980s, this unique work includes retrospective essays on the significance of the group, the post-punk era zeitgeist and the ‘psycho-geography’ of Manchester.
Contemporary elements include Morley’s articles on the background to Anton Corbijn’s acclaimed film, Control, recounting the brief life of Ian Curtis. Movingly, Morley also includes the original text that grew into his literary work Nothing, paralleling the two suicides that marked his life: those of his own father, and his young contemporary Curtis.
Paul Morley is the UK’s foremost pop-cultural commentator. At New Musical Express from 1977 to 1983 he pioneered post-modernist rock journalism. He staked his claim to the 1980s as co-founder of ZTT Records and The Art of Noise, and has since become familiar to TV viewers via The Late Show, his documentary series Without Walls: The Thing Is, Richard and Judy and Newsnight Review. He has also made two albums with James Banbury as Infantjoy. His other books are Ask, a collection of his NME writing, the highly acclaimed Nothing, a
meditation on the death of his father, and Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, a polemic extending ‘from Stockhausen to Steps’. He writes about music for the Sunday Telegraph and is critic at large for the Observer Music Monthly.
Buy this book on:
Amazon UK
Amazon USA
Amazon Canada
|
Excerpts taken from
.
© Copyright
2007
NewOrderOnline.com, except the works of other authors. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed.
|