A new Joy Division book is coming out next year. It is titled: This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division – The Oral History.
John Savage (author of England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945) has collected a series of interviews with the band which never made it into the 2007 Joy Division film. The description on Amazon reads:
“Jon Savage’s oral history of Joy Division is the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on 18 May 1980. It weaves together interviews conducted by the author, but never used in the making of the film Joy Division (2007) which told the story of the band in their own words, as well as those of their peers, collaborators, and contemporaries.
Here are 15 or so vivid witnesses to the band’s genesis, meteoric rise, and tragic demise, including Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Annike Honore, Deborah Curtis, Paul Morley, Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Martin Hannet … It is the story of young men driven to create and cause rock n’ roll havoc inspired by literature, radical ideas, and the wasteland that was post-industrial Manchester in the late 70s.”
It adds: “It is as intense and funny and alive on the page as only an oral history can be, recalling masterpieces like Edie by Jean Stein and Meet me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman. It is essential reading.”
This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division – The Oral History will be released on April 23 in the US via Faver & Faber and March 7, 2019, in the UK.
