This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else - Joy Division -The Oral History - Jon Savage

 

'Tell me the story of The Beatles again Daddy.The greatest (rock) story ever told and told and told and TOLD.'

Charles Shaar Murray wrote this in his NME review of Shout! Philip Norman's biography of The Beatles in April 1981. Strangely, almost forty years on they have some pretty strong competition. Typically, from a Manchester band.

The Joy Division bandwagon keeps rolling and rolling. Considering they were only together for less than four years their legacy is incalculable. But anyone who has an even passing interest in the band and Rock culture will know the story back to front and inside out. So why tell it all again?

Because it's such a good story and such an important one frankly. Jon Savage's This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else assembled from interviews old and new with the main players is as good a piece of evidence to the significance and endurance of this particular myth as any you'll ever find.

Some bands are good, some mediocre, some poor but very few are actually important. Joy Division were and are important. They mattered and matter. Not just their astonishing music but the way that they gave everything in a way that few bands actually do. Where they came from and where they went. Also as a bold and permanent statement from the North .

This is more than a book about music. It's about the incredible contribution it and the band made to empowering and rebuilding a whole city and region with belief and unstoppable pride. This sounds glib but read the book.

You get a ridiculously strong sense of the main casts character's coming out to you as you read. Bernard Sumner's sensitivity, just how funny Peter Hook is and how eccentric Stephen Morris is. How profound and foolish Tony Wilson was. The terrible sadness of Debbie Curtis and Annike Honore.

But most of all this is Ian's tale of course. His incredible ambition, his astonishing talent his phenomenal pain but the beauty he wrought from it in partnership with the rest of Joy Division. In the last twenty pages once his suicide and funeral have been detailed, each of the main players assesses exactly why he did what he did. The accumulation of evidence of the previous three hundred pages led me to the conclusion that it's no real surprise at all. That there was an absolute and dreadful inevitability to where this was all going given the circumstances of his life and the nature of his art.

I've always really enjoyed Savage's writing but didn't buy the book immediately when it was published last year. I wondered whether I really fancied hearing this story one more time, knowing exactly where things were heading. I was wrong to doubt it. I've devoured it in a series of long sittings in the last week or so and recommend it enormously.