Ohhhh, Joy Division, a band by any other ironic name. I picked this book up because it was nearly Morrissey-adjacent and its morose black packaging reminded me of my own former packaging back when I was so unwittingly happy I had surplus sadness to fabrique into baggy black outfits. Even a fantastic band (like with so many 80's acts, it helps to ignore the vid and focus on the sound).īecause of this, it was ages ago I made the conscious resolution to avoid interviews with my favorite musical acts unless they were deliberately campy-dumb like The Cramps or dependably literate (if intolerably self-regarding) like Morrissey. You can certainly be one and join a band. You know what will never happen to us? We will never realize that the creator of the work of art we most adore is a dumb git. Told with surprising humor and vivid detail, Unknown Pleasures is the book Joy Division fans have awaited for decades. Peter talks with eye-opening candor and reflection about the suicide of Ian Curtis the band's friendships and fallouts the evolution of their sound and image and the larger-than-life characters who formed a vital part of the Joy Division legend, including Factory Records founder Tony Wilson and producer Martin Hannett. In Unknown Pleasures, founding member and bass player Peter Hook recounts how four young men from Manchester and Salisbury, with makeshift instruments and a broken-down van, rose from the punk scene to create a haunting, atmospheric music that would define a generation. Now, for the first time, their story is told by one of their own. Yet in the mere three years they were together, Joy Division produced two landmark albums and a handful of singles-including the iconic anthem 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'-that continue to have a powerful resonance. tour, the band was rent asunder by the tragic death of their enigmatic lead singer, Ian Curtis. The story is now legendary: in 1980, on the heels of their groundbreaking debut, Unknown Pleasures, and on the eve of their first U.S. Godfathers of alternative rock, they reinvented music in the post-punk era, creating a new sound-dark, hypnotic, and intense-that would influence U2, Morrissey, R.E.M., Radiohead, and numerous others.

Unknown pleasures peter hook