Still: Why Joy Division’s Archival Collection Continues To Endure

There was much to cherish elsewhere, courtesy of Dead Souls, two further Unknown Pleasures outtakes – Walked In Line and The Kill – and the little-known Something Must Break. Though rarely performed live, the latter song (which was recorded during a session at Manchester’s Central Sound studio in July 1979) occupies an important space in Joy Division’s history.

“It was an interesting song for us, being the first time the band had used a synthesiser,” Peter Hook wrote in his memoir Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. “Martin [Hannett, producer] had used them on Unknown Pleasures, but the thing about us in Joy Division – especially me, Bernard [Sumner, guitarist] and Steve [Morris, drummer] – was that we were sponges, constantly learning off Martin. So you’d have this situation where on Unknown Pleasures, me and Bernard were moaning about using a synth, but then a couple of sessions down the line we were using it ourselves. Bernard embraced all that and on Something Must Break, he used a synth instead of guitar – there’s no guitar on the song at all.”

In hindsight, it’s clear that Something Must Break hints at the electronic future the surviving bandmates would embrace as New Order as early as the summer of 1979. Perhaps even more significantly, however, Still revealed how Joy Division’s staggering rate of evolution allowed them to leave tracks as colossal as Sound Of Music or The Only Mistake languishing in the vault, or – as they did with the majestic Dead Souls – give them away for obscure, limited-edition EPs.

“Who can tell where they would have gone?”

Consequently, fans were delighted when Still finally came to fruition. Initially released on 8 October 1981, its first 5,000 copies were housed in a (now extremely collectable) hessian cloth cover with blue or white ribbons – with subsequent pressings coming in a slightly more utilitarian, if still attractive, cardboard embossed gatefold sleeve, both of which were designed by Peter Saville. The album did well on the charts, peaking at No.5 in the UK at the height of a five-month run.

Effectively closing the door on the band’s brief but brilliant career, Still remained the only Joy Division compilation of note until Factory issued Substance in 1988, and – as most contemporary appraisals suggest – it remains a necessary adjunct to Joy Division’s two widely acclaimed studio albums.

“The studio material fares especially well, with Dead Souls as crucial as anything on Unknown Pleasures or Closer, while the post-punk glory of Glass contains the DNA of white R&B in its grooves,” the BBC wrote in their well-observed 2013 retrospective. They also noted that Still raised an inevitable question: “Who can tell where they would have gone had Curtis lived?”

Visit the Dig! store for Joy Division vinyl, T-shirts and more…