The magic of Joy Division is more than music, it´s more than Ian Curtis´ timeless suicide. The magic of Joy Division is to create a new generation of superfans every year, year after year. The magic of Joy Division lies in its ability to appeal, on a very personal level, to scared, insecure and lost teenagers. Joy Division is a once in a lifetime band. I should know, I got hooked 40 years ago. They never left me. Part of it is attachment to those teenage years, to the strength and exuberance of your emotions during that foundational period, to the fact that later nothing ever had the same importance, felt more exciting, felt more meaningful.

Nirvana comes close, although they lack Joy Division´s intellectual grandeur (more about that later), and maybe The Cure, if they would have quit after Disintegration. Now we have then Fontaines D.C. It doesn´t matter that there is a good 40 years between Joy Division´s demise (or second coming as New Order) and the emergence of Fontaines D.C., some things are special and only happen occasionally. It is not unusual to compare Fontaines D.C. to Joy Division musically, but the kinship runs deeper, is more related to character and attitude, to the way the singers and primary lyricists of both bands, describe and deconstruct the human condition and all of its implications for society.

I can picture myself 40 years younger, eagerly searching for meaning, moldable and anti-social in equal measure, listening to “Televised Mind”, thinking and feeling it was written for me, was all about me, experiencing that very special imaginary relation between song and self:

“Swipe your thoughts from Broadway
Turn ideas to cabaret
Water dreams of yesterday
Fall behind
All your laughter pissed away
All your sadness pissed away
Now you don’t care what they say
Nor do I”

Teenage boys grow up to be different men, because life has a habit of playing with us, and while dreams might never end they somewhere along the lines get replaced by a different notion of self, one where forward-looking ambition gradually gets replaced by acceptance of day-to-day obligations, which effectively turns those boys, now men, into everything they once rebelled against. In the words of T.S. Eliot:

“Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow”

(T.S. Eliot – The Hollow Men)

Joy Division´s history ended with the death of Ian Curtis, Fontaine D.C.´s is unfolding as we speak. Flames might die but torches get passed on.