Joy Division - Still (1981)

I spent about six of my late teenage months so deeply immersed in Joy Division that even now, nearly forty years later, I have no idea whether they were really any good. I'm old enough to have enjoyed them when Ian Curtis was alive, when their records were still on Factory, and tend to disregard the testimony of anyone arriving at the party more recently because it will usually be pure dog shit, the usual recycling of Ian and the lads stood looking mysterious in front of the Parthenon because they've just been reading Camus. You know, they had their moments, but get a fucking grip.

Oddly, I never owned any of their albums. I had the singles, and my friends, Pete and Graham, had the other stuff, so I taped it and spent what little money I had on records I wouldn't be able to get from Pete or Graham. It was quite exciting when Graham got hold of a fourth or sixth generation tape copy of what we referred to as the Warsaw bootleg featuring all the stuff which never made it onto any of their official records, and which was at least as good, often superior despite the ropey quality. Still, which both Pete and Graham snapped up on the day it came out in that cloth bound gatefold hardback format, was almost as exciting, not least because it featured better quality recordings of certain tracks from the Warsaw bootleg.

It sounds decent in 2021, mostly, but this lot could never have lived up to their absurdly inflated reputation, forged as it was in the white hot intensity of a thousand acne-spattered bedrooms. They rocked hard back when they were called Warsaw, and Unknown Pleasures and the singles captured the magic of their better Black Sabbath impersonations, but Closer amounted to maybe half a decent album, and New Order's Movement was probably the best thing done by any combination of these people.

Still is two albums, one of them being at least as good as Unknown Pleasures, or would have been had they included something better than the ropey cover of Sister Ray. Unfortunately the other album is live. To be fair, it's about as good a Joy Division live album as you're ever likely to hear, but nevertheless suffers from the same problems as most of their other live recordings, the fluffed notes, the missed cues, and Decades, a song which carries the distinction of sounding exactly the same when you disconnect your turntable and push the record around by hand with one finger on the label. That said, it's nice to hear the Curtis version of what would become New Order's Ceremony. In fact, they probably should have slapped that on the end of the first disc instead of Sister Ray and made it a single album.

Did I mention that we have a tribute act called Joyhaus here in San Antonio? I gather it's one bloke with a drum machine and he covers songs by Joy Division and Bauhaus. Doesn't that just say it all? One day it will be possible to separate the music from their frankly fucking ridiculous legend, but sadly that day is still some way off. They had some nicely moody songs which sounded just right when you realised that some fellow teen was never going to grant you access to his or her underpants, but they really weren't the messiahs. They weren't even particularly naughty boys.