And I wondered if any similar ideas played into you putting the book together and whether you came at it wanting to protect, in amber, the mythos that has gathered around the band, or if you wanted to dig around, uncover something new? I felt the shame because I realised that was just a really shit way of thinking. I found that really jarring, but then that sensation was followed by an immediate sense of shame for perceiving Joy Division as a band of such pure, personal sacrifice that even speculating on the idea of Ian going on to be a visual artist, or a novelist, or anything other than just being in Joy Division, felt almost blasphemous to me. The parts of the book I found most shocking were when people would speculate about what Ian Curtis might be doing now, if he were still around. It’s the story of Joy Division, and it’s a good story because it takes place over a short time-scale.
I don’t go on and say, "… and then New Order played Joy Division songs", etc. Or even one year later! So I stop with Ian’s death. As a historian, I’m not interested in what people think 40 years later. Because no one knew Ian was going to commit suicide until he did it – the idea that the work of Joy Division is retrospectively smeared by Ian's death is just wrong, because that’s not how it was experienced at the time. In calling the book This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, I wanted to take the Joy Division story away from the received ideas of gloom and doom. Both service the same kind of consensus culture – it’s the same subcultural clips over and over, all attached to the same strands of newsreel footage… Those BBC4 talking heads docs are quite similar to the "I Love the 80s" ones on Channel 4. Everybody we spoke to kept trotting out the same Beatles stories – we had to get really brutal with them and say, "Look, we’ve heard all this a hundred times – just fucking tell us what happened!" All the music documentaries on BBC4 are so cliched they reduce something that was very exciting and involving and new into mush. I made a documentary about Brian Epstein 20 years ago. Yes, and the problem for me, as a pop-culture historian and youth-culture historian, is exactly that – those received ideas. You can have a million people who’ve all been touched by the same experience, but if they’re not articulating it in an interesting way, all you get is massed layers of filler. I think a lot of that kind of writing serves to pad out a consensus, as well. The stories are invariably dull, yet they form the basis of so much music writing now – "I was there" "I went to see X then," etc, etc. I get very irritated by the fact an enormous amount of music writing is about personal experience. Jon Savage: Oral histories are great, because you get the words of the people who were most involved directly, rather than me trying to explain what was going through Joy Division's heads. VICE: Why did you want to present the book as an oral history? It is a wonderful book with a beautiful title. It's called This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else. Overall, the book serves to tell the at times unbearably vivid and absorbing story of a band who seemed to operate at the behest of some unseen guiding hand, playing music from somewhere else. The pop and youth culture historian Jon Savage put it together, gathering testimonies and anecdotes from a symphonic cast of voices that includes everyone you'd expect – the surviving band members, Factory boss Tony Wilson, the band's manager Rob Gretton and producer Martin Hannett, the music and culture writer Paul Morley, Curtis' wife Deborah and his mistress, Annik Honoré – and plenty more who you perhaps wouldn't: fanzine writers who were active at the time, live witnesses, a Wigan Casino DJ, forgotten friends, an investigative photographer. This spring, a new oral history of Joy Division emerged into the world. The fact that it served to do just those things is also unavoidably true. The idea that it was to preserve and protect his band’s music, to ensure it never lost any of its strange power and potency, is almost certainly wrong. It’s likely that no one will ever know for sure why Ian Curtis killed himself. It's this mystery that has seen the event elevated by lore to a macabre kind of prominence, an act of unknowable impulse in a moment of private desperation that seems to have been transliterated over time into something else entirely – suicide as artistic duty, a public service, hardline civic upkeep. History deplores a mystery, and Curtis' death is ultimately impossible to interpret.
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