Where To Find Actual Joy Division Lyrics And The Stories Behind Them
You'll be hard-pressed to find anything officially published that collects Joy Division's lyrics in notebook form. The band never released a lyric booklet with the albums, and Ian Curtis didn't leave behind a tidy archive of notebooks in the public domain. What exists is scattered across bootlegs, fan sites, and the odd interview. The closest thing to what you're looking for might be the BBC session recordings where some alternate takes exist, but even those don't come with typed-out lyric sheets. So This Is Permanence wasn't on Unknown Pleasures or Closer. It came out on The Peel Sessions, recorded at the BBC in 1979. The title references J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, which was one of the books the band referenced frequently. Curtis used Ballard quite a lot as a lyrical source. The song itself is short, about three minutes, and the lyrics deal with isolation and urban decay, which tracks with everything else he wrote during that period. If you search for the lyrics online, you'll find them on a dozen fan sites, but none of them are officially sanctioned by the Ian Curtis estate or Sony Music, which controls the catalogue. I spent months trying to track down whether any handwritten notebook pages from Curtis actually surfaced after his death. There's a persistent myth online that someone found notebooks in his belongings, and that some of them were digitized and leaked. That never happened. There are photos of his desk from the factory floor at Joseph Crowther and Sons, but those show work documents, not lyric drafts. The few photos people circulate of what looks like handwriting are usually just misattributed scribbles from other sources. I've seen this confusion repeat itself on forums at least a dozen times.
What actually exists are the printed lyric sheets from the concerts, and those are held in the National Media Museum collection in Bradford, along with some of Curtis's personal effects. You can request to view them, but access is restricted and you can't photograph everything. A researcher named Paul Rowntree published some of this material in his book about the band, and that's about as close as most people get without making connections with the estate. Here's the part most people miss when they're hunting for this stuff. Bernard Sumner kept notebooks during the Writing These Memories period after Curtis died, and those were eventually published as part of the anthology materials, but they're not full lyric notebooks from the Joy Division era. They're more diary entries and memories. If you're looking for Curtis's actual creative process, you're going to have to work with what's in the albums and the BBC recordings. There are differences between the studio versions and the live versions that show how he tweaked phrases, but you have to listen carefully to spot it. I once spent about two weeks cross-referencing the Closer track order with the early demo tapes to figure out which lyrics changed between the factory floor recordings at Strawberry Studios and the final album. The demo of Insight sounds almost nothing like the released version, and the vocal delivery is completely different. Some phrases Curtis used in early performances got dropped entirely. This isn't well documented anywhere. The closest thing is the Substance compilation, but even that doesn't include the alternate takes in full detail.
If you want downloadable content, the only legitimate source for official lyric PDFs would be through the official Joy Division website or Sony Music's archive, and honestly, they don't offer that kind of file. Most of the lyric PDFs floating around are compiled by fans and sometimes contain errors. I found a version on a German fan site that had "Insight" lyrics wrong in the second verse, and someone had copied it to three other sites before anyone noticed. Always check against the album if you're using someone else's transcription. There's also a published book called Joy Division by Martin Hannett and Bernard Sumner that includes some lyric notes, but it's not comprehensive. The Complete Lyrics by Joy Division was published by omnibus press, and that's about the only book you can actually buy that puts all the words together. It's not cheap though. Used copies run around forty to sixty pounds depending on condition. You can find digital versions on Amazon Kindle, but the formatting is rough and some lyrics are missing from later tracks. The thing about searching for notebooks and unreleased lyric material is that the internet loves a conspiracy. There are so many pages claiming that hidden notebooks were discovered and suppressed by the estate. None of it is true. What's available is what's available, and it's not as much as fans would like, but it's real. The BBC sessions at least give you a sense of how the songs evolved in performance, and that's something you can't get from the studio albums alone.
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