when routine bites hard, and ambitions are low

Rewind to Autumn Fall 2005. It's Sunday night; I rock up to apartment 3a in the Lower East Side to hang out and pick up a camera (for a photo project) I walk into what was then the living room to find myself staring at a huge rasterised poster on one wall. It's a striking - and familiar - image, and at some point during the evening it becomes clear that it's Joy Division (if there's one thing I got from New York, it was a musical education; my knowledge was pretty limited before I moved there). Later on, I look up JD, listen to them, realise I actually know a bunch of their songs - just never realised who they were by. I listen again. And again. And slowly Joy Division become one of my favourite, most-listened to bands.

Fast forward to - well, now. The lyrics I've used to title this post couldn't feel more apt: London is grinding me down, the seemingly neverending job hunt is so depressing and dispiriting, the temp job I'm at is doing my head in. It's time for an escape.

Friday we drive up North, via the old Alma Mater for a brief pit stop (quite odd going back there), then across to the Peak District, where I'm visiting my oldest friend who now lives in Buxton. As we're eating dinner, she asks if there's anything in particular I'd like to do that weekend. Well, I say, now you mention it...

Saturday comes and the driving rain of the night before has disappeared, though the wind tries to rip the car door off its hinges as I open it. We drive across the Peaks to the next big town over, Macclesfield, hometown of Ian Curtis, Joy Division's tortured lead singer, who committed suicide at the age of 23, in 1980.

As we drive through the cemetery gates, a part of me feels a bit odd about this. I'd talked to my friend Dan about the possibility of visiting the grave before I came, my doubts about it - but as he said, What else are pilgrimages? We park and look at the map of the graveyard as I'd read that Curtis's stone was the only one actually mentioned on the map. It isn't. His is a small kerbstone marker... one among very many. We walk around the cemetery for about half an hour - and of course it ends up being ten feet from where we'd parked (if only we'd circled the cemetery anti-clockwise..!)

I stand in front of it, not sure what to do or how to feel. Others have left small trinkets - some daffodils, a plastic windmill, even a box of cigarettes and a lighter. There's a tupperware tub there as well, which I'd read about on a memorial website; the author had opened it out of curiosity to find birthday cards to Ian, with the top one being from his mother. I don't touch it, it feels like it would be too intrusive. My kind friend, the non-Joy Division person, is starting to get cold and doesn't quite understand why I wanted to come here in the first place - and to be honest, I'm not sure I can even explain it myself.

There's a strange feeling, caught somewhere between my stomach and throat, as I stand there. That someone with that much potential has become a small stone marker, bedecked with plastic toys. We turn and head back to the car, and on the drive home I plug my ipod into her car stereo and play Joy Division to her ("Oh I know these songs", she says) and the feeling won't quite fade, but as the music fills the car and we drive through the old mining town and landscapes that formed the music, it morphs slowly into a sad kind of happiness and I realise that my friend Dan was right, that this was a pilgrimage of sorts, and that they don't always have to be religious. Sometimes they're just about a brilliant band that affects your life.

listen to the silence, let it ring on

So after months and months of waiting, finally Control is in cinemas, and I had myself a ticket for the special screening and Q&A with director Anton Corbijn at the Curzon Soho (yay!)

I'm sure the film doesn't need much of an introduction as I've rambled on about it before on here, but as imdb has it, it's "A profile of Ian Curtis (Riley), the enigmatic singer of Joy Division whose personal, professional, and romantic troubles led him to commit suicide at the age of 23." Except it was more than that.

The film was just beautiful. There are some images that are just stuck in my head - the scene where they're recording 'Isolation' in particular, and when Debbie Curtis comes home to find Ian's body (not that the audience is ever shown, as we linger on the outside of their terrace house once Debbie has gone in), and is crying and sobbing for help in the street, I actually got goosebumps. Or perhaps that was just when they cranked up the air conditioning.

The acting was spot-on, Sam Riley and Samantha Morton were amazing. I loved the film and want to see it again.

However. The guy next to me laughed too loudly at totally inappropriate and not-funny moments (to the extent that I started to wonder if he maybe knew the actor/s involved and had some weird private joke going on), which really bugged me (so I'm a cinema purist, so sue me).

And then there was the Q&A. This seemed like a golden opportunity: see the film I've been dying to see and get to hear the director talk about it after. Now maybe I'm a little more aware of how questions are asked now I've conducted a few interviews, but the guy hosting would make a lengthy statement about some aspect of the film and then basically just leave room for Corbijn to give some kind of yes-or-no answer - so it's to his credit that the director managed to reel things out some. Then there was the audience. People were all trying to be way too "Hey look at me, I know technical shit about film, I'm so clever; were you trying to demystify the legend of Joy Division??" (to which Corbijn replied "Errr no?"). It's just disappointing that he was there for us to grill and no one came up with any truly interesting or original questions (myself obviously included, but I didn't stick my hand up and ask an inane one just for the sake of doing so. Perhaps I should have).

But the film was still great. And I'm not even going to mention The Killers' cover of 'Shadowplay'. Oy vey.

diamond in the rough

So technically this isn't procrastination, as I've already mentioned before that there's a small Joy Division-related project going on, but - well, pissing around on the interweb this evening I came to the conclusion that although there's a lot of shit on youtube, but sometimes you come across some real gems:

in memoriam

So it's taken me like a week to post anything about Tony Wilson's death; a week during which I've listened to Joy Division and New Order repeatedly and re-watched 24 Hour Party People (had forgotten how great it is).

I remember New Order as a kid - who could forget the England song? ("We're playing for England - Eng-er-land!") - I knew Joy Division songs before I knew who the band were (if that makes sense), and I remember being aware of the Happy Mondays and that whole 'Madchester' scene, but I was a kid while that was going on. I was a late bloomer musically and Factory Records didn't mean much to me until I was out of university, but I'd say Joy Division are probably one of my most listened to bands now (still can't get into the Mondays though...)

This evening I paid my own private homage as I sat in my makeshift studio (a.k.a. my sister's room while she's away travelling...) and stuck Unknown Pleasures on and tried my hand at drawing Ian Curtis, for something I'm working on:

Better words from other people:
Five Ways Tony Wilson Changed the Music Industry
The BBC's obituary
The Independent's obituary

i've lost control again

Last summer I was asked by one of the magazines I freelance for to do an urgent piece for them, an interview they'd just been granted that they wanted to get in the issue they were about to close. A day's turnaround is what they said. But fuck it, when they told me what it was, I jumped at it. It was a phone interview with Sam Riley during a break in filming Control. He seemed a sweet lad. It was pissing with rain, typically for England towards the end of August, and we spent a little too long taking the piss out of Nottingham (sorry Notts) where they were filming - and where I lived for three years whilst at uni. Obviously when it came to writing it all up I left that stuff out...

This recent buzz about it emanating from the Cannes Film Festival made me think of it again, and hunt down the trailer on youtube. Oh my. It just looks - well, I for one can't wait for this film to come out. Isn't Samantha Morton just a doll? And Sam Riley looks great. And I swear I see the Lenton tower blocks that I used to live right next to in Nottingham for all that time... Ahh the Church Estate and your crack whores, pre-teen delinquents, shootings, frequent fires and joy riders. Good times.

Read the article here. Watch the trailer (apols for the French subtitles, couldn't find a clean version) below.

My final thought on the matter: as the sister of an epileptic, should they really show Ian staring at a static tv screen?? I'd've thought he'd be writhing on the floor with just one look at it, like my sister would be. Meh.

The Cobrasnake went to Reading...

... and managed to snap one of the boys.

Alas, I was not there: a mixture of being broke, being sick, not noticing when tickets originally went on sale, having small children to look after [not mine, I might add] and not really being bothered enough to find a way in, all conspiring to keep me in the Smoke, where I spent an incredibly lazy bank holiday weekend sleeping, reading three books in three days, and watching Reading/Leeds highlights on the Beeb. Oh, and writing up last minute Flux mag Joy Division assignments [cue the soundtrack to my weekend...]

In other Reading/Leeds news, I discovered:

1. It's pronounced Max-eeemo [yeah, like emo] Park [I'd been wandering about that for ages]
2. Reading crowds like to throw things
3. What Zane Lowe actually looks like
4. Franz Ferdinand are - sorry - actually a little boring. Maybe it's a being-there thing.
5. Live tv fuck ups are still funny