It’s impossible not to wonder what would have happened to Joy Division in the long run. If Curtis’s death reinforced their image as funeral and morbid, it also fixed their legacy in amber, preserved it for all time through circumstances that in retrospect seemed artistically inevitable.
— Simon Armitage in the liner notes for Eternal
Last month Rhino gave us what is probably the definitive collection of Joy Division live material, Eternal. The box set is comprised of a dozen CDs and a pair of DVDs, along with a gorgeous booklet that includes liner notes written by Simon Armitage, the UK’s current official poet laureate. The packaging is excellent, though with all the surfaces in black you’ll want to make sure you wash your hands before handling so as not to leave any inadvertent smudges or fingerprints. My one quibble is the use of four four-disc CD wallets which only reveal the very outer edge of each disc, meaning you have to pull them out with your fingertips while also risking rubbing them against the inside of the wallet. There are so many better ways to package CDs to make the discs easily accessible while also saving space and maintaining decent design.
But that’s quite literally my only nit to pick, because these shows sound incredible. The 12 CDs contain 14 concerts starting with London’s Hope and Anchor on March 1, 1979, and ending at Birmingham’s High Hall on May 2, 1980, just two weeks shy of Ian Curtis’ suicide at the age of 23. I have a handful of Warsaw / Joy Division live recordings, but these new digital versions put them to shame and frankly make me wonder if I will even keep those records – it’ll be hard to go back to them given the wealth of recordings in Eternal. I’m told that some of these performances had never before been released, though given the sheer volume of Joy Division bootlegs and unofficial recordings, combined with my utter lack of expertise in this area, I can neither confirm nor deny.
The band only put out two official albums during their all-too-brief lifetime, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, along with a handful of EPs and singles. But per the Joy Division Central website there are roughly 250 different bootlegs. Let that sink in for a minute – that’s an insane amount of unofficial releases for any band, let alone one that probably put out something like 30 songs during their three or so years in existence. And 46 years after their last show they continue to be viewed as seminal, written about by experts and re-discovered by new generations.
What is the appeal? As Armitage mentions in the liner notes Curtis’ tragic life and untimely death certainly add to the mystique. Would we be talking about a 16-disc Joy Division box set if they’d simply broken up? It’s impossible to know, of course. Or, even more compellingly, what if they’d continued on for another decade? How would their sound have evolved? But even then, we’d have lost something entirely different – without the dissolution of Joy Division we likely would have never had the band that emerged from the collective grief of the surviving members – New Order. And I can’t imagine a world without “Blue Monday”.
I must confess that as of the time of writing this I have not yet listened to all 16 discs in Eternal. It’ll likely take me a few months to get through them all, and even then I’m not interested in doing a disc-by-disc breakdown. But I’ve listened enough to have some pretty solid impressions. First and foremost, the sound quality is outstanding. Look, these aren’t soundboard-quality recordings, but technology has improved to the point where producers and engineers can do a lot to clean up these crowd recordings. You can feel the coiled tension of the performances. Even when Curtis’ vocals aren’t as clearly articulated as one would like, the emotion pours forth from him in a way that remains palpable. The most intriguing thing though, at least to me, is the way the synthesizer is used on some of these tracks. Sometimes it comes across as simple waves that give the tracks an even greater otherworldly feel, at others the sound comes pulsing out at you like lasers in a 1960s sci-fi movie.
Eternal isn’t for the faint of heart – this is is a whole lot of live Joy Division. And at $139 retail it will likely deter the casual fan who would perhaps prefer (and buy) a 2xCD version. But at the end of the day, $139 for this much music is a bargain. So if you know you want this much Joy Division, don’t hesitate to pick up Eternal.