3. Joy DivisionUnknown Pleasures
This is the leap from high school to University. I grew up in a small town, and I was the kid who’d hide in his bedroom writing poetry and not telling anyone he was doing it. Suddenly when I got to University I was surrounded by people who wanted to be poets, writers and musicians, and I could relax a little bit, I didn’t have to pretend any more, I didn’t have to pretend to be one of the gang who hung around on the street corner with their Doc Marten boots on. I could say ‘yes, I’m going to write poetry, and be in a band and try this and that’. Punk was great for that, because punk said ‘it doesn’t’ matter what school you went to, or if you’ve got money, just get out there and try it’. I was scribbling stuff down and sending it off here there and everywhere. I was sending stuff to the Radio Times and there was a cat in hell’s chance they were going to publish one of my short stories, but I thought what the hell, I’m going to get myself out there and see what happens. So when some people asked if I wanted to be the singer in their band I said ‘yeah fuck it, why not?’ We were actually playing a gig in Cowdenbeith in Fife the night that we heard that Ian Curtis had topped himself. I remember going onstage and saying ‘this concert is dedicated to Ian Curtis’. I don’t think anyone in the audience knew who Ian Curtis was – we were the support band to a heavy metal group who had a laser. I think the only reason people were in the room was to see a laser.
To me there’s almost a narrative running through Unknown Pleasures. I’d love to write a novel that’d take lines from the songs. It’s be about an assassin who’s sent to a city that he can’t make sense of. It’s nighttime and he’s wandering through the city and he doesn’t know exactly who it is that he’s going to kill. I’ve actually gone through the lyrics and plucked out lines from the various songs that you could string together as a story.
