Joy Division: a shrine to themselves

By David Bennun

It is 35 years since the brief career of the Manchester quartet Joy Division was ended by the suicide of their singer, Ian Curtis, ahead of a planned tour of the United States. To mark the anniversary, a new website, joydivisionofficial.com, has been set up. It is currently promoting reissues of their two studio albums, “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer”, and two collections of songs, “Substance” and “Still”, both out later this month.

Over a blank white background, the homepage offers this plain statement: “The British group Joy Division wrote and recorded 43 songs and played over 120 shows in just 29 months between 1978 and 1980.” The verbal brevity and visual setting – stark backdrops, woodland landscapes – are telling. Joy Division were not only Britain’s most celebrated post-punk band, influencing Radiohead, Interpol, Depeche Mode and the Walkmen, among many others, with their spacious, dark, eerie sound, their condensed energy and Curtis’s haunted lyricism. They were also the first to become an unmistakable brand, and thereafter a mini-industry. Their merchandise has never stopped selling, and in the 20 years following their disbandment no fewer than eight Joy Division compilations and box sets were released. The sombre minimalism of Peter Saville's graphic design, which appeared on their album covers, is now so much part of the band's mythos that any other aesthetic would be unthinkable. Joy Division have come to resemble the stone tomb that Saville put on the cover of “Closer”, depicting a sepulchral mourning scene. They serve as a piece of monumental sculpture memorialising those 29 months.