Let Joy be unconfined

Matthew d’Ancona on Paul Morley’s latest book

In 1980, the Manchester pop impresario, Tony Wilson, showed Paul Morley the dead body of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who had hanged himself. Wilson hoped that Morley would one day write the definitive account of the band and Curtis’s martyrdom. He also knew that Morley’s father had committed suicide, and that, alone with the body in a room in Macclesfield, the young journalist would be confronting much more than the earthly remains of his favourite singer.

Another book about Joy Division? No, the book. Although Morley has not obliged the devious, brilliant Wilson — who himself died last year — with a conventional history of the group, he has done something much more intriguing and innovative, which is to collect his writings about the band over the last three decades, and to explore afresh the evolution of his critical response over the years and of the band’s role in contemporary culture.