it's weird being vastly older than everyone else here - because i can remember a world without Joy Division in it, and then suddenly there was a world with Joy Division in it
i can remember seeing them on TV, by accident, in real time - Ian doing the dance, those arm movements, with the fixated trance gaze
i can remember them rising, emerging as a phenomenon - the first thing i noticed was Peel playing "Transmission" a lot, and then a few of the more daring early evening Radio 1 deejays playing it too, so it was something that would come on while you were doing homework.
they seemed to escalate into being the band very swiftly - it was them and Public Image Ltd as twin leaders of postpunk
then Closer and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" - which happened to coincide with a very glum summer, my first heartbreak, so that's what i associate it with, although none of the contents of the album actually suit that, lyrically, and "Love Will Tear" is about the break-up of a long established relationship, whereas i'd never been in a relationship, so yeah no real resonance there - but certainly unsurpassable as a bleak soundtrack to a dismal summer.
one thing that i always like to point out is the fact that we didn't know anything about all the stuff that is now considered the Story, inextricably entwined with the music
we didn't know about the marriage falling apart, the affair, the epilepsy
'we' being the general postpunk public, people who read the music papers
it wasn't common knowledge, only a few people close to Factory would have known, there wasn't a gossip culture, at least not for a group at Joy Division's level - and the group didn't do any interviews, and even if they did they would never have talked about this stuff anyway, since they are intensely private, typical Northern English (or just English), emotionally-repressed, laconic types - they didn't even talk about with each other while it was happening - even at the funeral, I gather.
so it's kind of weird to see in the wake of Deborah Curtis's memoir and the two films etc, all of that being turned into the Meaning of this Music - feels reductive
at the time it was a surprise that he killed himself - and it was never explained, then