Those were the days: when artistic, intense young men and women (although it tended to be men) could see not only what was great about Rimbaud or Kafka, but also what was great about the Sex Pistols – and then form a band. ” You needn’t read too much into such omissions, but you can spend a fruitful few minutes speculating on why the lines were dropped. Turn to “She’s Lost Control” and there’s another line that didn’t make it to the record: “and in horror that one day I’d learn the truth. Well, here you can see the lines surrounding the couplet, and Curtis’s crossing-through of an alternative line from earlier in the song: “to see what went wrong”. (Verso publish a similar enterprise centred on some of Walter Benjamin’s notebooks later this month, and I imagine there’s some overlap there, too.)ĭo Curtis’s lyrics, which were never hard to decipher on record, merit this, and can they sustain the scrutiny? What is gained by being able to see lines such as “We’ll give you everything and more / the strain’s too much, can’t take much more” (from “New Dawn Fades”), which are not, on the page, great poetry, rather than hearing them in their musical context, when they become so? (Curtis killed himself in 1980, aged 23 where there are no surviving notes in his hand, the song is left out.) This is the kind of production normally reserved for literary big hitters: Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, TS Eliot. It contains not quite all the band’s lyrics (seven songs are missing, says the editorial note, but I make it more), printed as sung on the recto, with pages from singer and songwriter Ian Curtis’s notebooks reproduced on the verso.

T his big, beautiful, austere book, a totemic artefact, is of a piece with every other officially sanctioned Joy Division product: a visual counterpart to their sound, which was otherworldly and intimate, a hitherto unheard mixture of haunting melody and metallic clash.

Ian curtis so this is permanence