Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that their first album sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures sold only 20,000 copies in its initial period of release, but the T‑shirt emblazoned with its cover art — an image of radio waves emanating from a pulsar taken from an astronomy encyclopedia — has long since constituted a commercial-semiotic empire unto itself. That speaks to the vast subcultural influence of the band, despite their only having been active from 1976 to 1980. When we speak of the genre of post-punk, we speak, in large part, of Joy Division and the artists they influenced.
Less than a year after the 1979 release of Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. The band had already recorded Closer, their second and last album (at least before the subsequent, more successful reformation as New Order). Scant though it may be, their studio discography has only drawn more and more critical acclaim over the decades.
Still, fans who weren’t around to witness the rise of Joy Division first-hand will suspect they’ve missed out on something essential. “Live, Joy Division were heavy,” remembers band historian Jon Savage. “Performers — and David Bowie is a good example – know exactly what to give and what to withhold, but Ian Curtis didn’t have that stagecraft. He just came on and gave everything.”
That sort of intensity, Savage adds, is “not infinitely reproducible”; even at the time, it seems that those who witnessed Joy Division in concert understood that their peculiarly compelling energy was driving toward some kind of final combustion. You can get a taste of it in the collection of the group’s every televised performance, originally aired on BBC2 and Granada TV in 1978 and 1979, at the top of the post; just above, we have a 70-minute compilation of all their filmed live shows. Much of it consists of footage shot over two nights at the Apollo Theatre in 1979, which the uploader describes as of poor quality — but “according to people who were there, the gig’s quality was poor in person too.” As much as generations of fans have done to mythologize the band’s brief existence over the past 45 years, here is evidence that even Joy Division had an off night once in a while.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
