JOY DIVISION
Joy Division were an English rock band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester. Joy Division soon moved beyond their punk roots to develop a sound and style that made them one of the pioneers of the late-1970s post-punk movement. Joy Division’s debut album Unknown Pleasures, recorded with producer Martin Hannett, was released in 1979 to critical acclaim. The band’s second and final album, Closer, was released two months later; the album and preceding single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” became the band’s highest charting release. Although their career spanned less than four years, Joy Division have continued to exert a vast influence on a variety of subsequent artists. (More from Wikipedia)
In 1982, Certain General signed with the New York independent record label Labor Records and issued their first release, an EP called Holiday of Love. The mini-album was produced by Peter Holsapple of the dB’s and mixed by Michael Gira of the experimental rock band Swans – “an interesting pairing if there ever was one”, said Nick West in a review for Bucketfull of Brains. (I don’t know much about Swans, except for their startling 1988 cover of the Joy Division masterpiece, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”). According to Wikipedia: “Holiday [of Love] garnered rave reviews, among them a Trouser Press piece that cited the disc as being created ‘for all the teenage devils of the world’.”
(March 2015)
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In seemingly no time, the music scene was crowded with top bands and artists whose work has held up well over the decades since, among them Patti Smith Group (whose debut album, Horses came out before Ramones, in December 1975), Television, Richard Hell, the Heartbreakers (the punk band not Tom Petty’s group, though he was a part of the scene as well), Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, Blondie, the Clash, the Cars, Elvis Costello, Pat Benatar, Joy Division, the Specials, the Go-Go’s, the Police, etc., etc., etc. There were so many that rock critics and others began distinguishing bands in the safety-pin set as “punk” and others that were less confrontational as “new wave”.
(December 2016)
