(posted by quarsan)
Number Two: Shadowplay – Joy Division (lyrics)
One of the delights of Kazaa-Lite is that I have been able to track down a lot of the songs from my youth that have long since vanished from my collection. I belong to the punk and post-punk era. To be honest, I largely stopped listening to music in 1982, since then I have been largely been listening by proxy – listening to stuff pointed out by friends and the occasional chance discovery.
I haven’t missed much. But 20 years later I can see where the new-fangled young person’s music came from. I much prefer the originals. Who needs artists that re-invent themselves with every release? whatever happened to music that didn’t have to hide behind artifice? Who are those singing out with passion, with anger?
I remember seeing Joy Division for the first time in an underground club. From the first bars of ‘Dead Souls’ to the last beat of ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ I knew I was hearing something different, something just overpowering. They were the first band that actually scared me.
I recall feeling rather intimidated as I interviewed them afterwards, but their answers to my naive questions were polite, if curt. It was a strange feeling sitting with them, as though a burly bouncer was standing behind me, just out of vision. I left with a feeling of relief and a strong sense that my teenage angst was paper thin comapred to their vision.
Although their finest moment is probably the haunting and unforgettable Atmosphere, I have chosen Shadowplay, with it’s brutally insistant bass building up to crechendoes with a wildly discordant and cutting guitar. As an instrumental it would be challenging and disturbing, but when the vocals are added, full of power and angry questioning, it becomes something deeper, something that has a substance beyond the sum of it’s parts.
As I write this I am picturing the first time I saw them, the first time I was transfixed by their strangeness, their confidence and their sense of mission. As a naive young boy, I felt as though I was on the edge of something I just didn’t understand, but I knew it was something that captured the essence of the times, an essense that was going to take music somewhere different.
I have often wondered if, that night, I caught a glimpse of what was to come. Transfixed by Ian Curtis’s strange convulsions, his unblinking penetrating stare (photo), I did ask myself, just what was I watching. These guys weren’t faking and Ian was a very troubled young man.
I can’t recall how I felt when I heard of his suicide. It was a shock, but not unexpected. Perhaps that was one of the days when I realised that the world was a serious place and life was, sometimes, a great burden. I never since criticised anyone for killing themselves, because I discovered, that for some, the world is simply too much to bear.
troubled diva 
