24 hr party people control ian curtis
And when the author listens to it? “What a great revelation – we were really good.” The rock star as fan writer about his own band is not, you fear, going to be the most rewarding of literary enterprises.
![24 hr party people control ian curtis 24 hr party people control ian curtis](https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/t_share/MTc1MTExMjUzMDEyOTgwODMx/performing-mimicry-re-representing-ian-curtis-in-control.jpg)
Hook recalls his eager acceptance of a just-recorded live tape offered by the promoter of a Warsaw show, “the start of what was to become a collecting obsession”. Even the group’s pre-history, as a less poised and original punk-influenced outfit called Warsaw, is lovingly detailed. Since their demise, he has been a leading curator in the Joy Division heritage industry, and gives over a substantial part of this book to a list of every concert the band played, sometimes with a set list as well. Much louder and more melodic than in traditional rock, his tough-but-tender throb and hum was the heart of their sound. This solemn version of the Joy Division story has endured for decades, periodically reinforced by authoritative accounts such as Touching From a Distance, a claustrophobic 1995 memoir by Curtis’s widow Deborah Control, an acclaimed 2007 band biopic, shot in reverential black and white and directed by onetime Joy Division photographer Anton Corbijn and finally, by all the musicians who have drawn from Joy Division’s seemingly inexhaustible well of young male angst and moody looks and riffs. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England.
![24 hr party people control ian curtis 24 hr party people control ian curtis](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMWY3YWU3MmEtYTVkNy00M2Y5LTgzMjctZGI4OGM2NDA3NmUxL2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDE2NzU2NjA@._V1_.jpg)
In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division.