“Everybody has a different memory. And none of it is true.”
– Peter Hook
“Every other band was on stage because they wanted to be rock stars, this band was on stage because they had no fucking choice,” sums up Tony Wilsons narrative. A camera pans across stark landscape of decrepit factories and abandoned warehouses. Wilson says, “I don’t see this as the story of a group, but of a city.” The group was Joy Division and the city was Manchester, England. It was 1976 and the group was about to change music, and their city, forever.
Joy Division, the true story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the most influential bands of our time, is the new documentary from director Grant Gee and producer Tom Atencio that traces the bands history through never-before seen footage, bootlegged audio recordings and rare photos, as well as through in-depth (and at times incredibly painful) interviews with bassist Peter Hook, guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner, drummer Stephen Morris, and Factory Records founder, the late Tony Wilson.
Joy Division formed in 1976 in Salford, just outside of Manchester, after Hook and Sumner caught a Sex Pistols show and decided to give punk rock a shot. The band’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, was released on Tony Wilsons Factory Records in 1979 and quickly established Joy Division as the aggressive yet atmospheric post-punk pioneers we know today. Theirs was music you could lose yourself in over and over again. But by February of 1980 the momentum of success had begun to take its toll on the band, most notably singer Ian Curtis, whose physical and emotional fragility was unable to sustain the pressure of expectation. On May 18 1980, a 23-year-old Curtis hung himself, mere days before the band was to hop in a flight to America for what would have been their first Stateside tour. The bands brilliant second album, Closer, was released after Curtis death. Joy Division was no more, but their story became that of legend.
The day after the documentary’s Los Angeles screening I met up with Peter Hook at Rhino Records for our interview…
Read our exclusive interview with Peter Hook on SuicideGirls.com.
