Amazon.co.uk Review
Here are the young men with weights on their shoulders, the grandmasters of irretrievable loss. Steve Morris and Ian Curtis were interviewed by Richard Skinner for BBC Radio One upon the release of the
Unknown Pleasures album in 1979, which is officially available here for the first time. Joy Division's drummer and mausoleum-voiced singer come across as relaxed, personable, satisfied, ambitious and flushed with youthful optimism. "Joy Division started as a fun thing" says Curtis, as if a member of The Monkees. Yeah right. He committed suicide less than a year later and the myth was born. Joy Divisions' two black-of-heart and dark-of-soul John Peel Sessions (the first of which was broadcast, with unintentional irony, on Valentines' Day 1979) still sound magnificently urgent. They include the jerky and early-U2 influencing "Transmission", the rigidly de-personalised rock of "Colony", the twangy ode to epilepsy of "She's Lost Control" (to which Curtis would dance like a man trapped in a spin-dryer) and a song called "Sound Of Music" which owed absolutely nothing to Julie Andrews, or for that matter, anyone else.
--Kevin Maidment
CD Description
The pioneering post-punk sound of Joy Division is experienced here with stark clarity and an up-front feeling that belies the somewhat distant production approach on the group's studio efforts. While the coming-from-the-next-room sound of CLOSER and UNKNOWN PLEASURES adds to the overall feeling of alienation that is a large part of the groups raison d'etre,THE COMPLETE BBC RECORDINGS offers something more immediate. In this live-in-the-studio setting, the cold smack of electronics, the bare desperation in Ian Curtis's voice, and thegritty post-punk rattle of the guitar and bass gain a new viscerality. Even such warhorses as "She's Lost Control" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" gain a new resonance in this context".