There’s nothing uniquely special, spiritual, meaningful, or even slightly out of the ordinary about my mind-numbingly obvious introduction to Joy Division. It was my older brother’s doing – not that it was in any way intentional.

I was maybe fourteen years old at the time, I was sitting in my bedroom at the front of the house listening to music and my brother was sitting in his bedroom at the back of the house listening to his music. His, as always, playing much louder than mine – he was my older brother after all.

I turned off my music and walked out of my room and knocked on his door. He opened it after I waited for what seemed like maybe twenty minutes or so.

What is this shit? Turn it down.
It’s Joy Division. Fuck off!

I grew up in a working-class household in Manchester; a red-bricked town house of no particular description. I walked back to my little room. There wasn’t much else to do in those days; listening to music as the rain fell was unacknowledged respite from the ongoing boredom of everyday life. I thought nothing of my brother’s taste in music after our encounter, but that name haunted me: Joy Division. It sounded real. I knew nothing about them.

Three weeks later I bought a seven inch single in Woolworths on Piccadilly, Manchester City Centre. It was called ‘Atmosphere’. I took the number 76 back home and snuck the record into my room. Two days later when no-one was around I listened to it – I hated it! A depressing dirge, really. Nothing about it even remotely stirred me. I sat there feeling quite depressed. Why did my brother listen to this rubbish?

Twenty minutes later I was listening to ‘Atmosphere’ again. The room was quiet except for that voice:

“Don’t walk away in Silence / Your confusion – my illusion / Worn like a mask of self-hate / Confronts and then dies / Don’t walk away.”

It just happened naturally. It seeped into me. I was mesmerised. I listened to it again, and again, and again. That voice. My brother was out. I took his records. I listened to the whole of Unknown Pleasures. My skin tingled. I felt gloriously happy.

Even today, nearly two decades since that miserable afternoon, when I am alone on a boring Sunday morning or something, the rain lashing down onto the East London streets where I now reside, I can put on Joy Division and no matter what is going on in my life at that moment, good or bad, that same smile will reappear. And each time, like that first, I am gloriously, unashamedly, deliriously happy. I am transformed. I suppose I have my older brother to thank for this.

Lee Rourke is a Mancunian. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Scarecrow and a Co-editor [fiction] at 3:AM Magazine. His collection of short stories Everyday will be published by Social Disease in May 2007.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.