Review: Joy Division / Eternal (live)

There’s an enduring bit of Joy Division mythology, repeated by the surviving members almost any time the subject comes up. It goes like this: Joy Division were a punk band until they walked into Strawberry Studios, where Martin Hannett took their ragged post-punk apart and rebuilt it as something cold and alien and transforming, elevating and future-proofing the songs but, certainly in the band’s eyes, losing something along the way.

It’s a neat story. It’s also, on the evidence of Eternal, only half true. Listen to the first disc, a scrappy, newly unearthed audience tape from the tiny Hope & Anchor in Islington in March 1979. This is a Manchester band with a self-financed EP and a couple of tracks on a Factory sampler to their name, down in London for the night a few weeks before the Unknown Pleasures sessions, and the myth starts to wobble.

This is absolutely a punk gig in a venue that is still, to this day, very much a sweatbox basement, in front of a gobby (quite possibly literally) punk crowd, one of whom greets the end of a song with “Hey you cunts, more! Mooooore!”, a sentiment that doesn’t exactly sync with the mythologised view of the band’s arty austerity. It’s also, presumably, the last gig to happen anywhere in which someone in the audience is yelling passionate requests for ‘Leaders of Men’. There’s absolutely punk here, on ‘Warsaw’, on ‘Glass’, on a ragged ‘Ice Age’. And yet the other Joy Division, the one we’re not supposed to have met yet, is here too. You can hear it in the clipped, mechanical drums and spacious arrangement of ‘She’s Lost Control’, in the effects zapping through ‘Interzone’, and in the slow dread of ‘I Remember Nothing’.

Stephen Morris, asked by Rolling Stone recently whether this is how Hannett first heard them, laughs: “That’s actually what we sounded like and how we thought the record was going to sound.” He’s more right than perhaps even he realises. The arrangements, the gaps, Morris’s drum-machine discipline were all in place before Hannett touched them. What an audience cassette can’t tell you is how much of the atmosphere was his: the reverb, the delay, the sense of a band recorded in an empty building at four in the morning. That’s precisely the thing a tape deck in a sweaty crowd can’t capture. The architecture was theirs; the dressing was Hannett’s. His genius was less invention than recognition.

Joy Division never lived long enough to become a major live act.

Simon Armitage, in his characteristically sharp essay that comes with the box, offers the opposite theory: that once Hannett had created “the Joy Division sound”, the band went away and copied it on stage. The tapes don’t back that up either. At the Factory night at Manchester’s Russell Club in July 1979, a month after the album came out, ‘She’s Lost Control’ has barely moved from where it was in the spring. Sumner’s guitar is a bit cleaner and further back, but that’s a better PA talking, not a change of heart. The version ground and growled out at a YMCA hall in London that August isn’t far removed from the one the band delivered in combat with their audience at the Hope & Anchor in March.

The live Joy Division were always both bands at once: the spectral version that Hannett heard and the leaner, more physical, more human version that existed on stage. You can hear it in ‘Shadowplay’, which turns up at almost every show here and is the best thing on nearly every disc. The physical and the ethereal occupy the same space.

Joy Division never lived long enough to become a major live act. Morris remembers playing “every night to maybe 200 people”, and they never recorded a true live album. Bands at that level don’t, as a rule. Every live record since has been posthumous: the Birmingham disc of Still, the album of their February 1980 gig in Preston, and Les Bains Douches, recorded in Paris the previous December, all of which are represented here. Almost none of it was recorded by anyone who thought they were making a record. The radio broadcasts were mixed on the fly. The band’s own desk reels “mysteriously disappeared, as these things do” and resurfaced as bootlegs. The rest is kids with cassette recorders. It’s been a cottage industry for four decades.

Which is what sets Eternal apart from the usual canon-band vault-rattling. When a band’s story closes early, their catalogue becomes a finished object and the archive becomes the only place left to find new chapters. The Beatles get their American mono albums reboxed and a Peter Jackson documentary. Nevermind turns 30 with four full Nirvana concerts bolted on, one of them, as it happens, from the same Amsterdam club as Joy Division’s January 1980 show here. But Joy Division had no Unplugged, no Live at Leeds, and certainly no Live and Dangerous, patched up in the studio after the fact until nobody could quite say how much of it was live. Morris reckons young people think Joy Division played stadiums. They never made it out of the clubs and small theatres. A polished live album doesn’t exist.

So what we have here is best described with a beautiful, minimal and very Joy Divisiony word: “document”, which could have worked rather well as a title. This isn’t the band as their label at the time would have wanted them seen. This is them as they were. That’s what makes it fascinating, because Joy Division are, like Nirvana or the Sex Pistols, one of the canon bands whose tiny body of work is obsessed over precisely because there’s so little in the evidence file.

That’s also the danger with archaeology on this scale. Done badly it embalms, turning every soundcheck into a relic and pushing the band further into their monochrome monument. Done well it shrinks them back down to the size they actually were. Eternal mostly manages the latter.

At Preston a woman grabs the mic to announce that the coach back to Birmingham leaves in five minutes.

Where its value lies depends on where your interest in the band sits. There’s no great revelations here, no lost gems, unearthed at last, aside from the missing opening minute of ‘Ceremony’ (more of which later). “Previously unheard” means different things disc to disc. The Hope & Anchor and seven songs from Acklam Hall, under the Westway, recorded that May, will be genuinely new to most fans. The July Factory show has been out in full since 2007, but this is a different desk reel, rescued from Rob Gretton’s attic, and the kick drum on ‘Insight’ has never thumped like this. The Lyceum in February 1980 gets nine unheard desk tracks. The first of the Moonlight Club dates in West Hampstead that April, with Closer freshly finished, gets six more. And Paris, at the tail end of a year that had taken them from Islington basements to supporting Buzzcocks in theatres, has been stitched together from two or three radio broadcasts to get rid of a chatty DJ and make a complete show.

The rest comes from widely circulated bootlegs, made official and remastered at Abbey Road. The infamously error-plagued show at the Warehouse in Preston has been in the shops since 1999. Devotees will probably own half of this already. What you get now is the best version of all of it, legitimately, in one place, with every taper credited by name: Jonathan Crabb, Duncan Haysom, Tim Bayes, Andy Hooper and co. Official releases almost never do that, and they absolutely should, because these people are the band’s live history.

But how much of it will you actually return to after a first play? Frank Arkwright’s remastering does about as much as anyone reasonably could, and the desk tapes and broadcasts have never sounded better, but it can’t turn the microphone on a ghettoblaster into a mixing desk. Some of these discs will get spun once, out of curiosity, and never touched again, and listening to these lo-fi recordings in succession, especially on headphones, will genuinely tire your ears. The September 1979 set at Leeds’ Futurama festival sees the band on a bill with PiL, The Fall and half of the north’s new wave hopefuls, taped in the Queen’s Hall, a cavernous former tram depot. The performance is solid, but it’s fighting the crowd noise and the echo of the room and losing. At Bowdon Vale Youth Club in Altrincham that March, Curtis is so hot in the mix he may as well be yelling directly into your ear canal.

The appeal here is not in the sonic experience, but rather in the storytelling.

The keepers are obvious, though. Paris is the best-sounding show here, and ‘Colony’, newly in the set as the band hurtle towards Closer, is furious. The Paradiso broadcast from Amsterdam that January is sharper still, properly panned and so clean every mistake is out in the open. Sumner is audibly out of tune on ‘Day of the Lords’, which somehow only helps. The Lyceum sounds hungry and has the only known live ‘Komakino’. The Effenaar in Eindhoven, a week after Amsterdam, mostly adds a rowdy Dutch crowd.

The appeal here is not in the sonic experience, but rather in the storytelling. What the box does brilliantly is let you hear the band change night to night. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ arrives scrappy but noticeably different from the rest of the set, and within weeks its opening shows. At the first Moonlight night it’s played without keyboards and sounds oddly hollow. The keys come back the following night and it snaps into shape, which tells you exactly how much that synth line is carrying, and how much of the atmosphere people credit to Hannett the band were already building into the arrangements themselves. ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ settles into the slot before the encore and kills every time. ‘Isolation’ becomes the late highlight, cranking up in intensity with every show, and the Warsaw-era holdovers drop away one by one until much of the set is songs that didn’t exist when the box began. The whole evolution takes just over a year.

There’s also real pleasure in the gaps between the songs. Curtis was not one of rock’s great raconteurs. “Good evening, we’re Joy Division”, a plea for more foldback and “thank you, good night” is about the size of it (Armitage says he identified his Paradiso bootleg by the foldback requests; in fairness, Curtis makes them at practically every gig). But the tapes are full of other people’s nights out. “Anybody got any speed?” asks someone at Futurama. A punter at Derby’s Ajanta Theatre in April 1980, one of the last handful of shows the band would ever play, informs nobody in particular that it’s ‘Dead Souls’, with “great guitar”. You don’t get that on Live and Dangerous.

There’s some rare fun and, equally, some frustration to be had at Preston when the sound breaks down. The bass dies, Sumner and Morris pad for time with an embryonic ‘The Eternal’, somebody explains that everything’s bust so it’s all going through the bass amp, and a woman grabs the mic to announce that the coach back to Birmingham leaves in five minutes. You hope they made it. Curtis fills time by pretending to take requests, the closest Joy Division ever came to cracking a smile onstage. The mess is charming until it gets as annoying for the listener as it must have been for those in the room, and most live albums wouldn’t have kept a second of it. When the power comes back, the rest of the gig is ferocious, which is a shame for anyone who left on the Birmingham coach.

The other big, advertised selling point is, for the first time, a complete Joy Division performance of ‘Ceremony’. It comes from the band’s final show at Birmingham University’s High Hall on 2 May 1980, a fortnight before Curtis died, with an American tour booked for later that month. The gig has been released before, but the first minute or so has always been missing from the desk tape. Alas that restored minute, sourced from an audience recording, sounds horrible; captured in the thick of the crowd on what sounds like one of those Fisher-Price tape decks beloved of children of the ’80s. It’s interesting, but it’s certainly not much fun to listen to, and the Abbey Road boffins could only do so much.

The book is beautiful and the music is often thrilling. That same music, though, is often poorly recorded.

Then the screen widens and the pristine desk tape takes over, though Curtis’s vocal takes a maddeningly long time to emerge. When it finally sits in the right place it’s astonishing. ‘Ceremony’ has always been a great pop song, and the New Order version released the following year is justly celebrated. Here, though, we get a glimpse of the Joy Division take that never made it out into the world. Delivered with the drama and commitment of an Ian Curtis vocal, it soars into something that, captured by Hannett, could have been astonishing. This was the next calling card: a band with two masterpieces, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Ceremony’ in its pocket, about to fly out to America. It’s all there in one ragged recording, and that’s all there is.

The rest of that last show is remarkable mainly for being unremarkable. It’s a great band doing the thing they do, a little ragged here and there, but if this set teaches us anything it’s that Joy Division were always a bit ragged here and there. There are few clues in the audio that anything was coming undone. What happened next exists in the ear of the listener. We’ve spent forty-six years reading the ending into every note Joy Division played. On the night, the music didn’t know.

Meanwhile, if any further proof were needed that Joy Division were never the band the T-shirts suggest, it’s in the two DVDs, because barely anyone thought to film them. The footage consists of Malcolm Whitehead’s short film, built around a 1979 rehearsal and that March’s Bowdon Vale gig, a clip from the BBC’s Something Else and footage from two nights at the Manchester Apollo in October 1979 on the Buzzcocks tour, the band’s first taste of theatre-sized crowds in their home city

Each one is essentially a single camera zooming in and out of the murk.

None of it would make a satisfying concert film, but here too there’s value, because Curtis’s dancing is the one part of Joy Division live that no tape can carry and no photograph quite gets. At the mic he’s rooted, intense, absolutely committed, eyes shut, everything going into the words. The moment the line ends he steps back and the body takes over, arms windmilling, jerking and twitching. It’s deeply odd and strangely compelling. No-one else has ever done it quite like that. The contrast between the stillness and the dancing is part of what makes Curtis fascinating.

We also get the Plan K show in Brussels that October, the band’s first gig outside Britain, shot on VHS from behind a pillar with audio so mangled that trying AI stem separation produced, per Morris, “six tracks of washing machine”. So the box also offers the same footage with audio from Paris and Amsterdam laid over the top. It’s clearly labelled and well meant, and it’s the one moment in Eternal where somebody blinked and the truth fell away. Fourteen discs make the case that true documentary, bum notes and coach announcements and all, is more interesting than the tidied-up version, and here, for once, the box offers a better-looking fiction instead.

The accompanying book pulls in the other direction, and I suspect deliberately. The photography, from Anton Corbijn, Kevin Cummins, Jill Furmanovsky and others, is superb, and it’s Joy Division exactly as the legend has them: monochrome, grave, lit from one side, Curtis eyes closed at the mic like a man taking confession. It’s the monument, beautifully made. There’s nothing dishonest about the photographs; the point is how powerfully images like these have come to define the band. Flick from them to the gobbing at the Hope & Anchor or the Birmingham coach party at Preston and the box has, whether it means to or not, packaged the myth and the evidence together and left you to work out the truth for yourself.

Armitage’s essay sits somewhere between the two. It opens with him getting thumped outside a Marsden pub at Easter 1982 for wearing a Joy Division badge. That’s as good a first line as any box-set essay has managed, and a reminder of how quickly the band became a totem once Curtis was gone. But he was also there, sixteen and probably not supposed to be, in the crowd at Futurama, and his memory of it is closer to the tapes than to the photographs. As he tells it, Curtis’s “Good evening, we’re Joy Division” was met with not so much as a whoop. If they were famous yet, nobody in Leeds had been told.

Even the cover plays along: a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph of Sirius shot through a defocused telescope. The brightest star in the sky, deliberately blurred, is about as good a description of fourteen discs of audience tapes as anyone could come up with.

Whether the whole thing is worth the price tag will depend very much on what you’re looking for in it. The book is beautiful and the music is often thrilling. That same music, though, is often poorly recorded. These sound like bootlegs because, despite the best efforts of all involved to present them in their best form, that’s absolutely what they are. Not everyone is going to be need that. Anyone after a great Joy Division live album can make do with the Paris show, which has been available on its own since 2001, and newcomers will bounce off Futurama inside ten minutes. This is for the committed, the people with a shoebox of tapes or a hard drive full of FLACs, and for them it delivers the best available versions of the known shows, a handful of genuinely new things and a complete ‘Ceremony’ at last.

Curtis had a knack for taking plain, clinical words and making them feel monumental: ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Isolation’, ‘Digital’, Closer. Eternal runs that trick in reverse. It takes a band carved into granite decades ago and puts them back at human scale: four lads from round Manchester (and one from Salford — a very important distinction) playing to a couple of hundred people, fighting the PA, losing the bass, fielding heckles and requests for songs they’d rather not play. Hannett didn’t invent them, and they weren’t gods of gloom. They were already doing it themselves, in a basement on Upper Street, before most people had heard of them.

Which is both the case for this box and the case against it. It’s a document, a story, a folder of evidence, the most honest record of Joy Division on stage there will ever be, and for exactly that reason not always an enjoyable one. It won’t be the Joy Division release you reach for most often, but it may well be the one that tells you the most about them.

Review by Marc Burrows. The Eternal box set is out now.

Sign Up For the SDE newsletter

Submit