here are the young men

Last week, without any warning or fanfare, a Joy Division record arrived on site. It didn’t turn up in Freshly Ripped, and if not for a message board post about it I would have missed it myself. It’s not an official studio record, but it highlights a lot of things I love about Joy Division that seem to get overlooked in all the florid prose that’s been written about them.

For starters, the studio Joy Division and the stage Joy Division were, for all intents and purposes, two completely different bands. In the hands of uber-producer Martin Hannett, Joy Division were as dank and dark and airtight as a mausoleum. Steve Morris’s drumming was astonishingly dead — apart from the initial thud, there was no reverb, no echo, nothing. The sound hit and was extinguished – snuffed out within seconds of existence. It was creation by asphyxiation — the guitars twitched and expired, the bass groaned, Ian Curtis’s voice rose up and pulled apart into the air like smoke.

Live, though, the group was shrieking and wraithlike, all sharp edges and blunt force — and you can hear a good bit of that on Let the Movie Begin. Not all of the songs are live recordings — a good chunk of them come from the demo Joy Division cut for RCA which has been released elsewhere as Warsaw. But all of them offer a glimpse of the group without Hannett. This is a different kind of horror — an urgent cold dread that catapults forward, a panicked man trying to outrun the killer at his heels. I’d like to argue that “Digital” is one of the greatest songs Joy Division ever wrote, and the performance included here captures everything that makes it great. Peter Hook’s bassline is thick and thudding and barely on-key when Bernard Sumner’s icepick guitar part starts cutting holes into it. Curtis is the last to come in, wailing and bellowing, building up to that glorious refrain of “Day in! Day out! Day in! Day out!” Just as good is “Ice Age,” whose clock-strikes-doom intro gives way to a bad-omen chorus. Sumner’s strangled solo, which arrives in the song’s closing moments, chills to the core.

You can find the origins of all the songs on Movie here. And for added pleasure: a few years ago I tracked down a sub-legal DVD version of the concert film Here Are the Young Men. The movie was recorded direct-to-VHS by Factory head Tony Wilson, and will probably never see release in cleaned-up/remastered format if only because I can’t imagine the master tape is anywhere close to salvageable.

Below is the version of “New Dawn Fades” from Young Men that captures the group in all of their ominous glory.