A combustible combo

Once upon a time there was the arche-typal Manchester band — half of which came from Macclesfield, in leafy Cheshire, and a quarter of which grew up in Salford, a city in its own right, full of fans of a famous football club equally confused about its true home. This combustible combo was Joy Division — or it was after they dropped Warsaw, because of its Nazi connotations, adopting instead a moniker given to the brothels in Nazi concentration camps. Not a mass of contradictions, then.

Bathed in such muddy waters, Joy Division remains a band in need of serious re-evaluation 40 years after the release of their debut LP, Unknown Pleasures. And Jon Savage seems the perfect choice to do posterity such a service, being one of three national music journalists who lived in Manchester in its post-punk heyday.

Back then, that trio would take turns to champion this band of miscreant public schoolboys and dyed-in-red-wool football hooligans when their music, at least, could barely get arrested. Mick Middles and Paul Morley — the other Mancunian punk pensmiths, whom readers of NME and Sounds devoured in their post-punk heyday — shot their own literary wads in 2006 and 2016 covering Division in posterity’s dusky afterglow and applying (some spurious) shades of meaning.

Now it’s the turn of the esteemed author of England’s Dreaming. But it is one Savage has consciously abrogated — which is a crying shame. I wanted to read Savage Does Division, not the rambling latter-day reminisces of the three survivors of the band, all of whom have already published their own memoirs (the last of which, from the drummer Stephen Morris, came out only a few weeks ago).