A big thank you







JOY DIVISION:
"Still" (Factory Records FACT40).

  "Still" - a commemorative double LP - shows the humility of Joy
Division beneath the ice-sculpted productions of the past.
  Including the last Joy Division performance (at Birmingham University
on May 2, 1980), a version of the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", 
the french release "Dead Souls", and the "A Factory Sample" tracks 
"Glass" and "Digital", it adds to the most powerful angst in pop 
history by displaying the vulnerability, the fragility of Joy Division
as a chemical accident unsure of what it was unleashing, what it was 
touching on or where it would lead.
  Joy Division were not depressing or morbid - just a fully developed, 
highly articulate consciousness expressing itself through the most
powerful of art forms - pop music. It's the human condition: life is 
too painful to live, but death is too horrible to end it.
  One likes a lot of music. But one can only give oneself completely 
to one music. A kind of soul. The soul of Donny Hathaway, of Otis 
Redding, grew from the ghetto, but to Joy Division the soul was their
ghetto. They asked for answers from the impossible question, they
obsessively sought justification for that for which they bore no 
responsibility, they tried to understand the incomprehensible.
  "Still", including the deep-set, sullen "The Final Mistake", is as
strong, proud a temple of sadness as "Closer". Obviously fragmented, 
but that's acceptable. The music is as perfect as eternity, but as 
dangerous to Ian Curtis as if a firework display was going off on top 
of his head.
  It didn't ever worry me, not even the words of "New Dawn Fades". I 
had the opinion that it helped Ian Curtis, but when "Closer" arrived
posthumously the words "I've got to get some therapy, this dreaming 
takes too long" struck me as making Curtis' words indicative of 
fantasy. Was he flirting with it as well as feeling it? A kind of 
shadow-play.
  Ian Curtis died for no-one except himself. Maybe not even for 
himself. I make no assumptions from his suicide and refuse to draw from
the intense insecurity and loneliness of Joy Division's music to 
explain it. I want to avoid helping to make Curtis one of those hideous
symbols - like Jim Morrison. It would be great if we could keep him as 
a human being.
  I think the real tragedy in Joy Division's music and of Ian's death, 
of the unending sorrows we have to suffer, the inexplicable agonies, 
and betrayals, is that there is no-one to blame.
  "...this is the crisis I knew had to come, destroying the balance I'd
kept. Doubting, unsettling and turning around - wondering what will 
come next. Is this the road that you want me to live? I was foolish to
ask for so much. Without the protection and infancy's guard it all 
falls apart at first touch.
  "Watching the rear as it comes to a close, brutally taking it's time.
People who change for no reason at all it's happening all of the time.
Can I go on with this train of events disturbing and purging my mind. In
account of my duties when all's said and done, I know that I'll lose
every time..." (Passover).
  They didn't change us as people, they understood us as people. They
meant more than T-Shirts, badges, and the hideousness of after-death 
commercial success. Our regard for Joy Division should be less 
demonstrative. It may seem inadequate but I think it's best just to say 
thank you. - NEIL ROWLAND.         












* the 'Passover' lyric quote is as written in the article, despite the temptation to correct 
the errors in it.

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