It’s crazy to think that this iconic band didn’ t have a website yet! It is true that Joy Division was born in the late 70’s, a pre-internet era, but we needed to correct this: the morose post-punk UK band has now an official website, with a very modern however rather sinister look, including a lot of trees and wet forests.
There’s a bit of history with a few videos, a biography, a photo gallery with very evocative black and white pictures by Kevin Cummins, a discography, and a store where you can order all the reissues of Joy Division’s albums in vinyl, since it’s gonna be the 35th anniversary of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ next month. The re-issues will include extra material and according to NME, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’ will be available on 180-gram vinyl from June 29, while ‘Still’ and an expanded edition of ‘Substance’ will follow on July 24. ‘As You Said’ and the Pennine version of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ are the featured bonus tracks.
The website also includes a listen section where you can stream the iconic ‘Closer’, set to ‘photographs by Charlie Meecham, the Lancashire-based artist whose work was used on the cover of Atmosphere’. They also promise us to add more ‘specially-commissioned videos, inspired by the band, in the future’.
And of course you will be able to buy the famous t-shirt featuring the cover of ‘Unknown Pleasures’, at the condition you are not sick to see it on the back of every hipster and post-hipster of the planet, at each music festival you have ever attended.
Now that Ian Curtis’ home in Macclesfield is gonna be transformed into a museum dedicated to the singer – a fan purchased the property for about $300,000 – there’s no limit to the band’s name exploitation but aren’t the surviving members in very bad terms? I wonder how the money is going to be distributed after the long feud between Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook.
As a matter of fact, things never go smoothly with ex-Joy Division members. Hook tweeted this a few hours ago:
‘After 8yrs of asking Warner Bros finally do ‘Official’ Joy Div site shame they didn’t include band in development/layout! Urge you to ignore’
So I guess the site is not Hooke-approved.