By Jem Aswad
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Executive Editor, Music
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Few artists have cast as vast an influence in as short a time as Joy Division, the pioneering Manchester post-punk quartet whose dark, haunting songs and sound helped shape many genres and scenes that were to follow, from the obvious — indie-rock, goth, industrial — to the less-obvious, like electronic dance music.
Yet the fact that the group is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this fall — along with New Order, the band Joy Division became after singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in May of 1980 — is as ironic as the fact that the group is more widely known for T-shirts bearing the cover of its first album, “Unknown Pleasures,” than its music. Joy Division were considered post-rock or even anti-rock at the time, and they vehemently spurned cliches — at the end of the group’s live cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” Curtis says with withering disdain, “You should hear our version of ‘Louie Louie’ — woah.” While the punk rock scene that spawned them was about overthrowing the bloated rock royalty of the ‘60s and mid-‘70s, punk was still showy and flamboyant; Joy Division were nothing of the sort. They wore dark, businesslike clothes, had a dark demeanor, a dark sound and even darker lyrics.
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