Cuttings

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/19/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-peter-hook-review Love will tear us apart, again Andy Beckett on a raw, surprising account of the classic post-punk band Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook 336pp, Simon & Schuster, £20 Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23. This solemn version of the Joy Div...

Love will tear us apart, again Andy Beckett on a raw, surprising account of the classic post-punk band Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook 336pp, Simon & Schuster, £20 Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23. This solemn version of the Joy Division story has endured for decades, periodically reinforced by authoritative accounts such as Touching From a Distance , a claustrophob...

  Reunited in a day New Order are back after their latest split with a new album and tour, and not before time. It s like they’ve never been away, says Ian Gittins Getting paid to play the songs we love is the best fucking job in the world,” declares Peter Hook, with some conviction. Then he pauses, and gazes ruminatively around the chic Alderley Edge brasserie regularly frequented by his near neighbours, David and Victoria Beckham. “It’s weird, that, innit?” he adds. Weird, that, innit? It’s a phrase used repetitively, almost reflexively, by both original bass monster Hooky and his partner-in-crime, perennial boy-child singer Bernard Sumner, as they muse aloud over the chequered and extraordinary history of New Order, the band they formed from the ashes of post-punk icons Joy Division after the suicide of singer Ian Curtis in 1980. This week, New Order begin their first national tour for eight years. After their last such outing, which climaxed at Reading Festival in 199...

JILL FURMANOVSKY JOY DIVISION, 1979 It was the first and only time I photographed Joy Division. I was shooting for one of the music press, and after the gig I went into the dressing room and took a few snaps. Nobody took any notice of me. It wasn’t like there was a bodyguard at the door. The band at that time were doing quite well, but they weren’t selling out stadiums or anything. It was probably a gig of less than 1,000 people. Ian Curtis was quite a cheerful fellow, not gloomy at all. They were just starting out and they were having a good time. It’s not posed. I’m a fairly discreet person. I’d say, "Do you mind if I take a few snaps?” I never spoke to Ian. I’m a photojournalist at heart. They do their thing, I do my thing. When I started shooting, I was only 18 and a nubile young lady. I used to wear baggy black clothes as a disguise. I was trying really hard to be a professional photographer in a fairly male-dominated industry and I didn’t want to be mistaken for a groupie.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/oct/06/popandrock Tim Jonze discloses the hidden past of the actor who plays Ian Curtis. This week, Ian Curtis hits movie screens across the UK played by the virtually unknown actor Sam Riley. The film itself is fairly so-so, but there are some great performances, most notably from Samantha Morton (as Deborah Curtis) and Riley, who not only looks the part but gives good celluloid as a man swamped with relationship turmoil, epilepsy and depression. For me, though, believing in his portrayal of Curtis is spoilt by one thing: the last time I saw Sam he was staggering drunk around the Archway Tavern, crashing into concrete pillars with his middle finger sticking out of his fly while his band ploughed through a dumb-rock ditty called Eating's Not Cheating. Sam was in minor indie band 10,000 Things before landing the lead role in Control, and, believe me, they weren't all that much like Joy Division. They were drunk, they were disorderly and ...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/10/popandrock.joydivision From Dostoevsky to Burroughs to pulp sci-fi, Ian Curtis devoured offbeat literature. Jon Savage, writer of a new film about Joy Division, explores the impact of the front man's reading on the band's lyrics Controlled chaos In March 1980, Joy Division released their third single, featuring the songs "Atmosphere" and "Dead Souls". Published in a limited edition of 1,578 on an independent French label, Sordide Sentimental, this was no ordinary record. Carrying a "warning" of one word - gesamtkunstwerke - it was, indeed, a total artwork comprising graphics, music, photographs and text, a world unto itself. On the cover of the fold-out was a painting by neoclassical artist Jean-Francois Jamoul, picturing a robed hermit looking out over mountain tops, the valleys obscured by clouds. Inside was a collage of a lone figure descending into the depths of the earth, with Anton Corbijn'...

New-found sensitivity from the student disco's old guard New Order Brixton Academy, London  ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭       Bernard Sumner is in a repentant mood. "We never used to care if our audiences had a good time," New Order's frontman admits. "But now we're older we've mellowed. We care." Traditionally, it is true, one approaches a New Order gig with some trepidation, anticipating mumbled in-jokes and tuning problems; maybe an onstage squabble; perhaps, as at this year's Glastonbury, the perverse omission of their best-loved song, Blue Monday. No other legendary band seems so compelled to deflate its own mystique. But tonight is different. If a committee of New Order fans thrashed out their perfect setlist, this would probably be it: acknowledged hits (Bizarre Love Triangle), revered album tracks (Love Vigilantes), the cream of recent material (Turn) and some Joy Division classics (Transmission). To the delight of long-running fans - the Academy's slopi...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/17/dave-grohl-ringo-starr-secrets-star-drummers-stella-mozgawa-warpaint In Manchester, in the early 1970s, there was very little to do; it was all grey. If you wanted to hear music, you had to go to concerts at the Free Trade Hall and the Stoneground to see bands like Genesis. Phil Collins was an interesting drummer, and probably still is. When punk came along, you pushed all those records under your bed and pretended you never liked them at all. Joy Division were called Warsaw then. I saw two ads in a magazine. One was “Drummer wanted: Warsaw” and the other was “Drummer wanted: the Fall”. I thought, hmm, I could probably do both. But I phoned up [Joy Division frontman] Ian Curtis and got the job.  It was really difficult getting a gig because there weren’t that many venues. Nobody liked punk bands. It was us versus the establishment; we quite liked being on the outside of it all. There was the bloody Manchester mafia, where the Drones wou...

Love will tear us apart They married when they were both 17. Within three years he was a star, lead singer with Joy Division, and she was a mother. At the age of 23 Ian Curtis killed himself. Here, for the first time, Deborah Curtis tells her own story of their brief life together IAN was a performer from a very early age forever taking his fantasies to the extreme. Once, when he had decided to be a stunt man, he persuaded Tony to help him rig up a wooden sledge as a landing pad. After drumming up local children to watch, he donned an old crash-helmet and jumped from the roof of a one-storey garage. The sledge shattered in all directions and the showman walked away from his first stunt. Ian never did anything by halves; any interest became a vocation. Rather than just kick a ball around the field with a few friends he organised a football team called the Spartans — his childhood admiration for the Ancient Greeks helped him to choose the name. He arranged fixtures by advertising in a m...

One last thing... Kraftwerk in pants, and a grade two back'n' sides: there's nothing Bad Lieutenant's Bernard Sumner regrets, he tells Lee Gale Hello Bernard, why are you squinting? Have you not seen sunlight for a while? I’ve been in my home studio for 18 months. It’s a tiny room and you’re like a vacuum-packed sardine. After six months, you go mad; band members start looking attractive. The kids run in sometimes but the music puts them off. Is Manchester still banging and double top, man? It’s a bit gentrified. It’s changed an awful lot from the Victorian neglect which was so appealing and contributed to the music of Joy Division. To be honest, I quite like some of the changes. I like being able to go into Selfridges and YO! Sushi. It’s better than going in Wimpy (1) and getting a burger and chips.  You've been my hero for 20 years. Should we meet our heroes? Karl Bartos [of Kraftwerk] was a hero but when we made an album together we had a flat in London and I use...

Is this it? His bass goes so low he's got back problems but that won't stop ex-New Order man Peter Hook having it. Just don’t call him a fake DJ Where's your head at? I'm not bad. Although I've had a bit of internet trouble lately, with people slagging me off online, saying I'm a “fake DJ”. I've never claimed to be a DJ, I'm a celebrity. Come and laugh at the old git who used to be in a band, that’s the way me, Shaun [Ryder] and Mani do it. But these kids who’ve paid their dues and spent 20 years honing their craft have taken it upon themselves to expose me. My reply was, “Listen, mate, if you’ve taken 20 years to hone your craft, then you’re effing useless.” Which didn’t go down too well! Do you remember the first time? It was with the Buzzcocks at the Electric Circus in Manchester when we were Warsaw, although they had us down on the bill as Stiff Kittens. I was fucking terrified. I remember walking onstage and I remember coming off, but the rest is a ...