Hello. Welcome to my Joy Division web site. I felt the need to write a little about this site. Even though it is not necessary at all to read this before browsing it, some potential questions may be answered below.

This is a rather personal piece of writing, for Joy Division fans to understand the context in which this web site was conceived. So if you just came here to get the lyrics to 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' or 'Dead Souls', hit your browser's 'Back' button and go find it (if you've hidden your Netscape toolbars, you can click your mouse's right button, then click 'Back' on the pull down menu).


Why I made this site...

I like music. A lot. I'm the kind of person who dislikes most (not all) of the music charts, having instead a CD collection consisting of a handful of not-so-popular/no-longer-that-popular bands and artists. Quite a restrict collection, some may say, but a very personal one. I don't have all the albuns I love, but I love all the albuns I have, very much.

My CD shelves are something odd to see. Lots of older stuff, 80's, 70's and even some isolated 60's. "Alternative" bands, whatever the media may be calling "alternative" now. Some bands so underrated that even alternative is too "pop" to describe them. Heck, I've even got myself into 30's and 40's swing jazz, some time ago.

There are many kinds of fans. I belong in the information-addict kind. I'm one of those guys who read every word of the album booklets. Who spend hours at the Internet looking for pictures, interviews and other data about their favourite artists. Who delight with connections, like "A produced B who used to play with D who was married with K...". Being this kind of fan, I come across many web sites about my idols. Some are quite lame, but others are really impressive, well-crafted masterpieces worth pride and renown for its author. Serious efforts by someone who sacrifices its time to offer something useful for fellow fans. Some people deserve admiration for consuming time and effort researching for this kind of information. I would love to undergo these heroic sagas after such hard to find treasures, had I enough free time, which I don't. Alas, it's a failure of the modern man.

I'm getting to the point here. Being a web designer, ideas for web sites pop up at my head every now and then. But I couldn't answer one question I had: What good will this site do? What will it offer that hasn't been offered in other sites? If you type in a search engine the name of some popular artist, like Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson, for instance, you'll find thousands of web sites, a few good and original, most just copies that have really no difference between each other in terms of content, products of a fanboy who bought an album because of its latest single and felt like spending an afternoon ripping off other sites so he can "create" his own. This is where I wanted to stay as far away from as possible.

So there's this Joy Division 4-CD box, 'Heart and Soul', containing nearly all of the tracks ever released by the band in its short lifespan. Ever since I bought it I've had the impression that it would make a good web site. It has a massive booklet with articles, biography, lyrics (ever so hard to find), discography, books, almost everything there is to know about Joy Division. I just felt like making it available to curious fellow fans who cannot pay eighty dollars on CDs - and don't take me for rich, I had been saving money for months, ever since I read about the box.

So, summing it all up: having little motivation to create a fansite, I decided to turn the 'Heart and Soul' box into a useful, unique web site for information-addicted fans like me, fans of quite-hard-to-find music (other interested parties as well, nothing against those lyrics).

(I've decided not to put .MP3s or anything so I won't mess with anybody's copyrights. It's already too much to broadcast the box's flawless, clean design and contents without due permission. By the way, if this site is copyright infringement, please let me know.)


The site's design...

As I mentioned in the parenthesis above, this site is practically 100% fruit of the Heart and Soul box's design, being an adaptation of it to the web. It is not my intention to keep all the glories for myself when applause should really go to Jon Wozencroft, Peter Saville and Howard Wakefield. Credits for the box are listed at the booklet's last pages. Find them here, those are the guys.

But still some clarification must be made concerning this web site's design:

1. You'll notice some pages have blue text, others black/white. This is simple. All I've written is in blue, while the words printed in the box and its booklet are in black and white, their original colors.

2. Besides the "Explore the box" section, the rest is information contained in (and taken from) the box, but also available somewhere else. I could have left the site with the "Explore..." section only, but then I thought of organizing the information in a easier-to-find way, for those looking for lyrics, discography et cetera. Having been in this situation many times, I know how hard they are to find sometimes.

3. I've scanned the images to be roughly close to their actual size when seen in 800x600 resolution.

4. I don't intend to praise the quality of my scans, but bear in mind that most of the box's pictures are photos taken from a TV screen, therefore with limited quality. It's a bit obvious after you see them, but it doesn't hurt to remind.

5. My idea was to reproduce as closely as possible the box and booklet's design, but bear in mind that a web site has to be designed with typefaces and type sizes that everyone can see on their home computers, unlike printed matter, where you can do as you please. Therefore, the texts may not be 100% exactly identical to the box's layout (line breaks et cetera). This problem wouldn't happen if I had scanned the text pages instead of typing them, but I wanted to keep the site copy-paste friendly. Some pages use the Arial Narrow font, if you don't have it, download it here (314 Kb).

A little about me...

My name is Celso Lazaretti, born and living in Brazil. I am currently an undergraduate student of English Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, an enterprise which consumes most of my time. Upon graduation, I intend to start graduate studies and pursue an academic career in the fields of Literature and Literary Studies, which is bound to take even more of my time, though, of course, for a great reason.

As I said previously, I listen to a lot of older and/or unpopular stuff, as well as some pop music. Some artists have made me spend whole nights at the Internet looking for lyrics, discographies, images, interviews and all kinds of information, among them we may list Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Sisters of Mercy, Morphine, Siouxie and the Banshees, Kraftwerk, Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, Garbage, Primal Scream and, hmm, Joy Division, to name a few.

Since I have at least other four senses besides hearing, I'm also into other stuff besides music. Movies, literature, comics, RPG, and, of course, the connections between all these fields. By the way, there's a word for all that stuff: pop culture.



Well, I guess that was it. Enjoy the site!
Please send all questions, error reports, suggestions, criticism, flaming et cetera to me.

Home   Lyrics   Discography   Books   Sessionography   Film & tv   Explore the box


Somehow I doubt anyone will read this page, but the site wouldn't make sense for me without it.
I dedicate this site to all the people responsible for the legend Joy Division became, including (but probably not only) Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, Martin Hannet, Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson, Peter Saville and all the fans, who've taken a short-lived, low profile band and turned it nearly into a religion.