The words for “Novelty,” an early Joy Division track, were written by Peter Hook, the band’s bassist, and it’s funny to hear a line like “You’ll just fall behind like all the other sods” sung by Curtis. Notable extracts from his lyrical vocabulary: “life,” “time,” “feeling,” “sensation,” “isolation,” “control,” “failure,” “stranger,” “blood sport,” “obtained.” The language tends toward loaded ideas, clinical terminology. The three other members had their instruments Curtis had words, and they were notoriously dense. What Curtis said is central to the Joy Division story. The austerity forces attention on what’s being said and the fact of it’s being said.

In the lower registers, the young frontman sounds like a bad opera singer, and you can hear the effort it costs him to get the notes out. Personified, it would be a Freudian father figure or a mid-level bureaucrat.

Should it have a color, it would be UPS brown. But Curtis’s voice is a blunt instrument. This sort of reflexive thinking is hard to come by when listening to, say, Whitney Houston, whose vocal gymnastics make “why” or “what for” seem beside the point. Reproduced in this beautiful clothbound volume are Curtis's never-before-seen handwritten lyrics, accompanied by earlier drafts and previously unpublished pages from his notebooks that shed fascinating light on his writing and creative process.Īlso included are an insightful and moving foreword by Curtis's widow Deborah, a substantial introduction by writer Jon Savage, and an appendix featuring books from Curtis's library and a selection of fanzine interviews, letters, and other ephemera from his estate.TO LISTEN to Ian Curtis sing is to wonder why we sing at all. The fact of the band's relatively few releases belies the power and enduring fascination its music holds, especially in light of Curtis's tragic suicide in 1980 on the eve of the band's first American tour. So This Is Permanence presents the intensely personal writings of one of the most enigmatic and influential songwriters and performers of the late twentieth century, Joy Division's Ian Curtis. Print So This is Permanence - Joy Division Lyrics and NotebooksĪuthor(s): Ian Curtis Jon Savage (Editor) Deborah Curtis (Introduction by)

Joy division lyrics book