Reverse Dolly Zoom

Listening to Joy Division at 06:30. Not a recipe for a happy day heh?

Ian Curtis must have had more in his mind than we can know. Put anything to that melancholy beat and those sad chords and it will sound powerful and unhappy but there is something in the delivery that takes it beyond mere angst and despair. Paul Morely would probably take this to an extreme but I cannot. There are plenty of things, as I said in some roundabout way yesterday, that are too painful to think about. None of Joy Division's songs ever touch me in any personal way other than being the catalyst for that general feeling of pain which makes teenagers so happy(!!) when they don't actually have that much to worry about. Take despair to an extreme and you would make most Joy Division fans into gibbering wrecks. It is all right to be unhappy as long as you can do it in a comfortable long coat while staring out of a rain-soaked window over a bleak cityscape. Make them walk over the mountains as displaced persons and they'd probably be wanting to listen to A Flock of Seagulls or Haircut 100.

God came down from the sky and he looked like a mirror. He showed you a few chords and that was it; an icon was born on that rooftop, a burning collection of meaningful words to give hope to the disaffected, purpose to the lost and sight to the blind. Well maybe not the last one but sometimes in front of them you felt like you could do that. Maybe it was the drugs and the thought of all those girls out there. Where did the words come from? They seemed to arrive in the night, fully formed in your head like little gifts from the sky. You knew they meant something but you did not know what that was. The grey city took you in its mouth and spat you out as inedible and you felt you had survived something that would kill a normal person. On the big bridge you felt like you could fly and some concerned older person put their hand on your shoulder to stop you jumping. You weren't going to jump but you looked sad enough to be contemplating it. That made you laugh and feel mixed up in whether that old woman (in this context - over.. say ... 45) was interfering or charmingly concerned. You try not to think about it for she put the idea in your head and for years the thought came back to you at random times and connected to no thought before or after. Had that been when the universe split in two? And every time there was a news story about some poor, sad student jumping from the bridge, you sat there like Brody in his deck chair and the Reverse Dolly Zoom. God came down from the sky and showed you how to step out of danger and that was it.