Some stories in music you hear retold so often you wonder if there could possibly be anything left to tell. Take the legend of cult Mancunian post-punk quartet Joy Division, for example, and their phoenix-like reincarnation as hedonistic electronic art-rock trailblazers New Order. A tragi-comic chronicle recounted so many times so many different ways over the last 40 or so years it has ascended into the larger-than life stratosphere of music mythology.
Two biographical films – Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007) – each put their own spin on the fable of how four lads from Manchester became inspired by a Sex Pistols concert in 1976 to form a band whose steely, gloomy sound would echo forever. Both films go on to show how, following the suicide of singer Ian Curtis in 1980, the three surviving Joy Division members – guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris – reassembled together with keyboardist Gillian Gilbert to begin again as a group arguably even more groundbreaking. Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter There have been books by all from Hook to Curtis’s widow Deborah Curtis and journalist Paul Morley, as well as innumerable TV and radio documentaries.
Because I can’t seem to get enough of this kind of thing, I recently finished listening to the podcast Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy .