Introducing…The Ultimate Music Guide: Joy Division and New Order
Fine time!
Fine time!
As we look forward into 2026 and find big anniversaries awaiting celebration – 50 years since their formation, for example – with our latest Deluxe edition Ultimate Music Guide, we’ve taken the opportunity to reflect in depth on the genius of Joy Division.
When we spoke to him to introduce the first edition of the mag in 2019, drummer Stephen Morris told us that although the group were formed during punk, Warsaw, (as they were then called), quickly moved beyond their heavy guitar riffing and boyish posturing – and all the “1-2-3-4”, as Stephen puts it – into something far more considered. With the explosion of the movement having laid waste to the ground, Joy Division were free to make something completely new in its place.
“In Warsaw it was all about the riff,” he said, “but Joy Division was all about the space.”
It was a thrilling but exposed new terrain, in which an individual musician had no place to hide. The tragedy of Ian Curtis taking his own life is indivisible from the gravity of the band’s work, but the solemnity of their visual language suggested that they imagined their music as being a monument to a brief existence even while it was ongoing.
The passing of Ian Curtis, however, wasn’t the end of the story for the remaining members of Joy Division. Having started to discover a music that was elegant and modern, the group were unwilling to give up their calling. “Not to denigrate Ian in any way,” says Stephen, “but we wanted to take it on somewhere. The question we were asking is, ‘What are we doing?’.”
The answer to that, it turned out, was investigating the possibilities of a hybrid electronic/guitar music with New Order. The succeeding years have delivered exceptional albums (the darkly melodic Low-Life, celebrating its 40th anniversary, is a current favourite round here), a few of history’s all-time greatest singles, and – more recently – some powerful new one-off collaborations.
All round, it certainly doesn’t feel as if this is the end of the story. “You always want to do something better than last time,” Stephen Morris told me in 2019. “I think we all find it daunting starting with nothing. It’s like you’ve got a mountain to climb and no-one can remember where they’ve put the ropes. But when New Order’s good, it’s fantastic.”
The issue is in shops today. But you can get your copy here now.
