they had as much to go on as any group twenty years later. with Joy Division, you hear a group with a great record collection, who have great discrimination, and whose intention was to absorb and dominate these influ- ences, to equal and surpass. Their music has this betranced European detachment - arted, parted, departed, stop and started separateness, music that oozed out of the great European cities - that they picked up from the likes of Can and Kraftwerk. When they started to get so good, they started to rub noises together, to blend temperatures, to mix rude rock directness with shy nervy avantgarde indi- recteness. They drifted even as they shifted. they gIanced as they flashed. They floated as they attacked.    There was this sarcastic alternative American thing about them that they nicked in their bedrooms from The Doors, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground - the way they used guitars as an abuse, melodies as a sign of bitter-sweet intelligence, beat to beat up beat, the way hate was as great a subject as love, the secrecy of thought as sexy a subject as sex. These surly, sacrificial Americans revealed to them the edgy. Then there was even this deadpan sensation seeking camp outsider thing snatched out of the studded back pocket of the smart aplombish Eno, Roxy Music and Bowie. The sleek bleak and S&M bruised Roxy of 'For your pleasure', the colder, fishier, tenser Bowie of 'The man who sold the world' and 'low', the allusive Las Vagueness playfulness of Eno the singer/songwriter. In the wet dead north west such delec-table subversive stuff was the surreal thing: there was a way out over the grey walls and the sharp and hostile things of everyday.    And so all these distant decadent musicians banked up in the lives of the four impressionable young men shared this thing about "not belonging" and not wanting to belong and they had this flamboyant and tenacious urge to tell the truth about the world about them through magnificent and liberating lies.    And so as if the world could be a better place and... why not. And so at just the right time in this order of things came punk rock (turning private emergencies into public urgency) named after somebodies uncle or some- thing (still counting), and that fitted in just right with all that other stuff. The Sex Pistols, vomited out of the mouths of The Stooges, harassed the group that would be Joy Division into action, and they adapted to and pretty soon transcended this frenzied coincidence of The Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and the Doors. (and you never know, Peter Hamill, Nick Drake and Black Sabbath. And you never know, more JG Ballard, Mary Shelley and Alber Camus. And you never know more than Franz Kafka and Dostoevski). And so there was more to help this tran- scendence, this disorderly magic. There was the Manchester damp and the shadows and omens called into dread being by the hills and moors that lurked at the edges of their vision. It wasn't soft, where they lived. It was stained green and unpleasant. It seemed to be at the edge of the edge of the world. You had to dream your way out of such a tranquillised, inert stretch of Iand/mind scape. You had to use your imagination to believe that there was anything else but nothing else. In these slow suburbs, your mind would ache for release. And so would your body.    There was sexual frustration battering the air from all directions. There was godless depthless nightclub music desperately seducing these serious young men with remorseless promises per minute: the adventue of art and the chaos of the mind versus the mindless temptations of the rhythms of the moment, and eventually as New Order the remains of Joy Division would somehow solve this absurd dichotomy without compromise, introducing north- ern lights to northern darks. And so anyway, circus minded glam pop, with all its bump and grind, something of the comedy meat of this stuff (count the stuffing) made into the JD pot, into this wilderness of the familiar and the freshly compelling, this atmosphere of futuristic cataclysm. So they hapenned.    And so they thought.    And so they had the daring of the mind.    And so they knew what they were doing.    And so they did.    And so things happened to them.    And so there was tension and a release of tension.    And so all hell let loose.