A change in my life? Probably none at all: things were blinking in and blanking out lazily and fast in those ‘77-heaven days, causing no effect that would stick fast. We were all pale hysterical ghosts of anything we were to become. I would have produced Warsaw, the record would have been no different because if the time isn’t right the trees don’t joke, and it would have been as important in my life as a stone in a date, and for Joy Division my association would have settled into social blandness. You see, and I knew this the time we all sprang up in our places at the Free Trade Hall to see Buzzcocks and Sex Pistols, it was all predestined what we were going to get up to. Even if I’d started out as a Stiff Kitten I would still have threaded my way into the position as top pop writer of the post-modernist times: and nothing except a real fine joke would have stopped Joy Division alighting on that empty space which stretches between person and person, between ignorance and knowledge, between one hand and another, and shocking those who were awake with what it was they did.

What it was they did. . . all those creeping inside here hoping to embrace the essence, the essential sinful pleasure, of what it was they did — a minute or a century past ‘An Ideal For Living’ — should fade away: Back Off Boogaloo! as Ringo said, aptly. No such luck: not much luck is left. All the luck of the century is greedily snatched at and soaked up by young people like Joy Division, searching for nothing to do so that they might do something. Joy Division were drunk on luck before anything else, pernod or bitter. Joy Division were lucky, lucky that they turned the damned whore rock language back into a virgin, lucky that out of their common sense blossomed a peculiar beauty, lucky that amidst it all they were quite stupid, lucky if you assume that what they wanted to do was create something rich and better than some fucking decorative abbreviation. And we should thank our lucky stars that they were so lucky, if not think about what it was they did every other minute of the day. To look straight at luck, head on into the glare, is to have it disappear, twitch away, like a black spot on the eyeball: it hovers, in vision but out of it, irritating and enthralling, restless and nowhere, here and then. Luck; just like Joy Division, in vision but out of it. A grasp that can be found even in our artificial and fearful times.

In a way, and I say this a lot to myself as my memory plays its tricks, my connection with Joy Division and their particular halo is that of a minor character in a minor Beatles biography I tell my story to a dim researcher, I went to school at 14 with Best, I once almost asked out George Harrison’s cousin or, case, I talked with Ian in ranches circuses and factories about. gluing our personalities to the world through words and pauses. Nothing much, I wasn’t there, but in the end I wasn’t far away.