Preston 28 February 1980

The grim labouring of heavy machinery. The voice of a drugged god. The bottom falling out of heaven. If these are a few of your favourite things, step right up. Joy Division were a band left stranded on the western front, fighting a doomed rearguard action against the creeping dread of Thatcher's England at the turn of the last decade, armed only with minimalist Stooges/Velvets moves and the coldest of krautrock artillery. They specialised in desperate prayers directed at unlistening deities, set to music that sounded like it was being played by robots intent on cannibalising each other for spare parts. Oh, what an atmosphere!

But you know all this. What you mightn't know is that Preston . . . is a warts 'n' all document of one JD gig, reproduced in real time, replete with malfunctioning equipment, fuck ups, bleeps and blunders. The prevailing air is one of car-crash fascination - at the conclusion of 'Heart And Soul' you can hear Curtis declare, "Everything's falling apart", probably the only occasion in that year he wasn't referring to his band's mental state. And yet, beyond the drowning-man flailing of songs like 'Incubation' and 'Wilderness', these tapes afford the opportunity to reassess pieces like 'Twenty Four Hours' and 'The Eternal', great pregnant thunderclouds composed of Stephen Morris and Peter Hook's brutally dispassionate metronomics, Bernard Sumner's barbed wire guitar (particularly vicious on 'Shadowplay'), and Ian Curtis' colossal voice.

Out of all this blackness, Joy Division produced the most uplifting music of their time, the sound of a soul bottoming out then slowly recovering. They were often despairing, often furious (listen to the kill-everything splendour of 'Transmission', or the synaptic surge of 'Disorder'), but they were never, ever tepid. Preston . . . might be a strangely compelling shambles, but at least it's real.