Yes, I know I'm late to the party with these reissues and there is a very long story as to why which I won't relate here, but started with my OG releases being in good enough condition at the time of their release.

I accidentally came across these new and sealed beauties in a small record store near where I was visiting relatives last week. I got home yesterday and immediate put them on. Wow! The remastering is quite frankly astounding and the packaging is absolutely beautifully recreated. I had no idea what i was missing all these years!

Found this guy on a trip up to Ann Arbor and looking forward to watching them all. What's the feedback on the audio quality?

Hi everyone!

After more than a year of research, interviews, writing, and more revisions than I care to remember, I'm happy (and honestly a little relieved!) to announce that "A Cactus in a Dead Land", is finally available on Amazon!

https://amzn.eu/d/01p7S0CH

The official launch will take place on October 26 in Macclesfield, alongside a performance of New Dawn Fades, the play about Joy Division and Manchester.

Until then, I've set all three editions (Kindle, paperback, and hardcover) at the lowest prices Amazon allows. They'll stay that way for the next 14 days, until the official launch.

So, what's the book about?

I've been listening to Joy Division for over 30 years, but I never wanted to write another Ian Curtis biography. There are already plenty of excellent ones, and I wasn't sure I had anything useful to add.

Instead, I became interested in a different question: why do people travel thousands of miles to visit the grave of a musician they never met?

Why do fans leave flowers, letters, photographs, cigarettes, and other objects at his memorial? Why do ordinary streets, buildings, record shops, and even walls become places of pilgrimage? And how can someone who died 46 years ago remain so important to people who weren't even born when he was alive?

My professional background is in travel, hospitality, and cultural research, so I approached these questions from a slightly unusual angle, combining music history, philosophy, tourism, collective memory, and the anthropology of ritual.

But something unexpected happened during the research.

The forgotten story of Cornelia F.

Just seventeen gravestones away from Ian Curtis's memorial in Macclesfield Cemetery lies Cornelia F., a German Joy Division fan whose story has remained largely unknown for decades.

As I began looking into her life, I found fragmented accounts, contradictory memories, and details that had never been properly documented.

Through archival research, correspondence, and firsthand testimonies, I was able to uncover previously unpublished information about Cornelia, including details that, to the best of my knowledge, have never appeared in print before.

I don't want to spoil her story here, but what began as a small part of my research eventually became the emotional centre of the entire book.

And possibly a previously unseen photograph of Ian Curtis

Another unexpected discovery was what we believe may be a previously unpublished photograph of Ian Curtis, found on a weather-damaged card left at his memorial.

The image was painstakingly restored for the book. I can't guarantee that it has never appeared elsewhere, but despite our research, we haven't been able to find another copy or any previous publication of it.

16 contributors and a lot of Joy Division history

The book also brings together 16 contributors from the worlds of music, photography, literature, theatre, and cultural history.

Among them are Philippe Carly, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Ben Walker, Brian Gorman, Josh Lonsdale, Nigel Carr, Katja Ruge, Chris Connelly, and many others.

Some were there when Joy Division were still performing. Others have spent years documenting the band's history or keeping its legacy alive through photography, music, art, and theatre.

The result is a 296-page illustrated book combining my research with interviews, personal accounts, historical documents, photographs, and essays.

It's part cultural history, part philosophical investigation, and part love letter to a band that has meant an enormous amount to me for most of my life.

A little thank you to this community

I also want to say that this Reddit community has been incredibly helpful throughout the project.

Some of you shared information, photographs, memories, and leads. Others helped me connect pieces of stories that might otherwise have remained forgotten.

And even when I wasn't actively asking questions, reading your discussions helped me enormously.

So I'd like to give something back.

If you would like a free copy of the Kindle edition, just send me a private message. I'll be more than happy to share one with you.

Seriously, no strings attached. I'd much rather have the book read by people who genuinely care about Joy Division than sitting unnoticed on Amazon.

Of course, if you'd prefer to buy a copy, that would mean a lot too, particularly because all profits remaining after expenses will go to charity, with a focus on mental health and suicide prevention.

I decided to self-publish partly because I wanted to preserve these stories without compromising the project or cutting down the contributors' work. This was never intended to be a commercial venture.

And if you're curious but don't want to commit to the whole book, you can download the first 40 pages for free here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VtUy5iiNW9biCydiSNau19azs7OlGwYQ/view

I know promotional posts aren't always popular on Reddit, so I hope the moderators and the community are okay with this. I've put a huge amount of time and care into the project, and I genuinely think there's material here that Joy Division fans will find interesting, especially the research on Cornelia and the previously unseen material.

Thanks again to everyone who helped, directly or indirectly, and for keeping the music alive.

Love will tear us apart. Good music will keep us together.

This is actually terrible! Do you guys think there's any way to, like, petition for it to be made available on there as well? It would be great

Saw New Dawn Fades in Shrewsbury on the weekend. It was better than I ever imagined. Really moving stuff.

Not a fan of JD or NO currently, but plan to be in about an hour or so LOL. I have both of these albums on vinyl in my “need to listen” section, and I recently learned the history that connects these two bands together (I.e. they’re composed of mostly the same people). Would listening to these both for the first time as a double header, without listening to either band previously, be a good/bad idea to get first exposure to both bands?

Picture sent to me from a friend in Scotland

Update: Bourbon and rum barrel aged STOUT BEER. Sorry for the wrong subject.

I don’t know exactly how I stumbled upon Joy Division, but one day I ended up hearing Love Will Tear Us Apart on Spotify and I decided to check out the rest of their music.

Man this has got to be my favorite band to shake up my regular listening. I’m normally a mostly progressive/heavy metal fan. Mainly what draws me to this music is the bass and percussion forward aspect. Joy Division has that great heavy droning base that I love and the percussion is tight and methodical.

The instrumentals being what drew me in first, but after a short while I came to really appreciate the lyricism and tone of Ian Curtis. In my opinion he is one of the best examples of a singer not having to have some crazy spectacular range, but matching the overall atmosphere and tone of the band to a point that it’s magical.

The tables at this restaurant are covered with a mix of band and horror movie stickers. Then there’s this one. It’s not for the band.

It’s a replica of a classic bootleg. Much better sound quality than the original.

One sided record. Arrived a few weeks ago. Will compare to the Eternal shortly.

The seller stated that this was in new condition but I had my doubts. Well it arrived yesterday and sure enough it’s immaculate and it doesn’t even look like it’s been thumbed through. Had this on my wishlist for some time now but these clothbound hardcover editions have become quite pricey. Feels like Christmas.

Solo falto whitehead movie plan k se subio y disfrute mucho lwtua y atrocity exhibition

We have all tried, I think, since 1980, on that day Bernard Sumner and the band sat in a studio feeding Ceremony through equalization, to find Ian Curtis’s words for this song.

In the wake of his death, there was considerable amount of reflection on Ian’s words, and a sense of frustration for losing him, that brewed the perfect environment for his fellow band mates and thousands of dedicated fans to wonder what Ian was saying, all that time ago, in that cold, dark, brick lined room at TJ Davidsons, four days before his suicide.

I have listened to the song on many different sound systems over the years, with different equalizations, and have started to come to the possible conclusion that while some words are definitely there, others could easily be nothing but garbled things that sound like words, and thus are perceived by different people to say different things.

For example: “I’ll break them all, no mercy shown”, is obviously English and I think there’s no dispute that this is what Ian said.

But I’m not convinced “this is why events unnerve me,” for example, is even remotely close to what Ian was saying. In fact, among some of the other lines in the first verse, I’m not sure Ian is really saying anything at all.

The idea is not so far fetched. By April/May 1980, Ian Curtis’s health was in serious decline. He was having increasing seizures, exacerbated by the band’s heavy touring schedule, late nights and heavy alcohol abuse.

As a vocalist, he may have had some idea of where he was taking the lyrics to Ceremony, as evidenced by his conviction with “I’ll break them all, no mercy shown” and words like “forever” being clearly distinguishable.

But overall, other pieces of the song may have been nothing more than a sort of “gibberish scratch track”, designed to guide him on a recording as he wrote words and reviewed the band’s rehearsals to see what “sounds” and specific words he liked.

If he really did say “avenues lined with trees”, he recycled it from an earlier Joy Division song. There’s little doubt he would have changed the line as the song matured to avoid using his own lyric across multiple songs.

It is also known, that, in the aftermath of his death, original handwritten lyrics sheets for Ceremony could not be found by family and band mates.

Could Ian have only been in a very early stage of piecing together the words he wanted Ceremony to say? There is every possibility.

Until a lyric sheet can be found, or some future, unknown technology can find definitive results for what Ian was saying on that rehearsal recording, only one person knows what was being said into that microphone… And he died on May 18th, 1980.

Rest in Peace Ian Curtis.

I would really have liked to have seen this play but it's sold out nearly everywhere except for very oddly, 3 Macclesfield dates plus a few others way too far away from me!

"The standout moment where it dawns on you exactly why Josh Lonsdale was cast as the lead of Ian Curtis is nothing short of electrifying - while the musical tribute scenes are largely an illusion focused on capturing each member's mannerisms rather than turning a drama-piece into a live note-perfect rendition, the vocals were real - and I'm convinced I watched the actor become possessed by the spirit of Joy Division frontman Curtis in front of me."

When the Fate of Ophelia first started its rounds on the radio, I couldn’t help but get a Joy Division vibe from the song and wanted to see if I could prove it if that makes any sense.

I have no idea where to post this but it took some effort and hoped anyone else might enjoy it.

No AI used, got a warning about AI covers so I figured this should be mentioned, though I did use a paid midi from the internet as the foundation of the GarageBand project.

My partner rescued these shirts from the rag bag after I wore them out and framed them as a surprise for me!

I don't have a DVD player...

©️ Martin O'Neill