NME Joy Division "Permanent" Review

DARKLIFE!

JOY DIVISION
Permanent (London/All formats)

HERE ARE the young men, then. The ultimate sixth-formers. When I arrived at college, 'Dead Souls' was blaring out of the next room. Not what I'd expected at all. I thought I'd be the only one who liked Joy Division. Their obscurity was one of their charms. Morons just didn't like this band because you couldn't like them for the wrong reasons.

Young Mr Curtis crystallised the faraway romantic desperation of any lucid teenager. Morrissey with a badge and a gun. Drunk on his emotions and Holy with Youth if you like.

The really powerful thing about the music is the primitive sort of counterpoint — you can hum all of Hooky's basslines, even the crap ones. Actually, love them just as much for being crap as for being godlike. Joy Division weren't great players. It was what they naively aspired to and sometimes glimpsed that made them like us and us like them.

So much wank has been conjectured about these "art school" skinny boneses it's tempting to be cynical. They are easy to dismiss but isn't anything? It's probably true that more girls read Playboy than listen to Joy Division albums but then the best girls do read Playboy.

I'd never have believed I could play the bass if someone hadn't showed me how to do 'Isolation' and 'Transmission'. I could imagine being in this band.

It's nearly 20 years since some of these tracks were recorded and packaged and everything is still relevant. New Order's success has made the abstruse side of Joy Division all the more potently mysterious. Ian Curtis sang about his mother, his illness, his weaknesses. Kurt Cobain — lightweight Coca Cola advert.

The suggestive power of this music is X-certificate, dangerous, capricious, ambitious, delicious. The best band in the world ever.

A beginning, a riddle, and an end. (10) 

AJ Sexmeal (aka Alex James)