This is well produced and a pleasant read, but misses the chance to be the ultimate book on the bands. There are no photos, for example, of the childhoods of the band members; and the one photo of 'Bernard' circa 1974 is not a wise touch as it shows a child when in fact Sumner would have been 18 at that point. By far the most irritating aspects are the inaccuracies: it was Morris, not Hook, who was driving the van when Ian had his first fit; it was Sumner, not Curtis, whose hand was injured by a bottle. This, to me, ruins the book, and I have yet to complete it. Some of the statements, too: Ian's epilepsy coupled with his band mate's lack of emotion is described as 'a fatal aligning of the planets.' To sum up, a half decent intro, but a missed opportunity. I was expecting something of the standard of Kevin Cann's works on Bowie; but this doesn't hit the mark. Lovely photos, but the text lets it down.

Two of my favourite bands of the period. Worth reading if you have an interest in either the bands, Factory records or the period. Very nostalgic.

The weird thing with a coffee table book is sometimes you don't want a great deal of text. What it really should be is a delivery system for lots of art with a little bit of supporting text. Anything beyond that is really gilding the lily.

That's where this book excels. There are anecdotes and some discussion of each album etc. The photographs, the layout, the design etc all absolutely nail it.

There's not going to be a great deal that's surprising for any hardcore fans and this era is pretty extensively covered already. There's a Legion - like Deborah Curtis' Touching from a Distance, Tony Wilson's 24 Hour Party People or even Peter Hook's own Unknown Pleasures and Substance. There's dozens more, too, that I'll probably never get around to.

That's not the point though. As a coffee table this is perfect, really. Unlikely to blow your mind but definitely fulfils the brief.

Definitely not a book that can be read on a standard kindle!
Absolutely packed with pictures and information both known and the unknown of these bands.
Reading it digitally is ok but this is a book that is meant to be read, real book in hand!
This is a must for fans of not only these bands but of music in general.
I will be buying this book when it is released for my stepdad as I just know he will absolutely love it as he has always had a passion for music and this is his era!

Loved this look back at two amazing bands - tons of photographs; the information presented in shortish chapters that cut out the extraneous and highlight the important bits; the whole thing just thoroughly engrossing.

Thank you to Netgalley for sending me a copy.

An essential for any Joy Division and New Order fan. Although I read this digitally, seeing the physical book is a thing of beauty. This book is filled with high quality photos and is a mosaic of music, storytelling and photography.

This is a stunning book for any music lover.

If you're enough to have heard both Joy Division and New Order, you probably don't need much in the way of convincing to get this book by Jon Aizlewood. Destined to be a lovely addition to coffee tables everywhere, this book is full of astounding stories and beautiful full color photos of the band members who were so often shrouded in mystery.

A must-have for fans of the Factory era.

**Received as an ARC for an honest review. Thank you Palazzo Editions and Netgalley.**

Joy Division + New Order: Decades
John Aizlewood
Published November 15th, 2021
Palazzo Editions

Manchester in the late 1970’s: Bleak, cold, post-industrial, a moonscape. From this barren landscape emerges the punk band Warsaw, which was composed of four local chaps: Ian Curtis, Peter Hook (Hooky), Bernard (Albrecht) Sumner, and Tony Tabac (1977). Aizlewood’s book is a comprehensive look at the band’s development, the harshness and demands of the music business, and the relationships that influenced, manipulated, and eventually, destroyed the band.

Seems there was another band called the Warsaw Pact and so they decided to change their name so people wouldn’t get the bands confused. They decided on Joy Division, the name taken from the sex slave wing of the Nazi concentration camps and mentioned in the book, House of Dolls (1955). Aizlewood writes about the slighted detail so the reader can feel the grime on the streets and the coldness in the air. In 1979, Joy Division wrote She’s Lost Control, which John Peel showcased on his national radio show and soon, the band was getting some recognition.

After their lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide, the band broke free from the Joy Division’s raw, punk sound. They added synthesizers to the mix and started creating electric dance music in the modified band, New Order. The band’s name was snatched from “…a Guardian headline about the Khmer Rouge, ‘The People’s New Order of Kampuchea.’” Perhaps the addition of Gillian Gilbert on keyboards brought some luck because they were soon touring in the USA and became a worldwide sensation.

The book delves into how the band eventually fell apart. A loss to all of us fans.

I recommend Decades and give it 4 stars.
My honest review from an ARC made available by the @Palazzo Editions via @NetGalley. Thank you.

When I saw this book was up for grabs on Net Galley, my initial decision was to pass. Then, I went to a pub quiz and some questions about Joy Division and New Order came up and the nostalgia got the best of me.

I've listened to my fair share of JD music in my late teens/early 20s. I've never been a huge NO fan but I alway respected them and True Faith is one of my faves. I've read books and watched documentaries and movies about JD so I am quite familiar with the whole thing.

And while these other books I've read on this subject, were memoirs, this one isn't. It's a great book with concise history of both bands and their albums with thrown in anecdotes. It features extensive gallery of photos which enhance the experience. If you think of all the iconic JD/NO photos, they're in this book. It's truly a must have for all the fans of both bands.

However, I can't help but wonder if this book was really necessary. There has been so many books and movies/documentaries and musical issues and re-issues related to Joy Division over the recent years. The sources named in this book, I've seen/read pretty much all of them. This book didn't offer that much new information. I can't help but feel ita yet another exploitation of the cult of Ian Curtis for personal gain and right now I wish if everyone would just let Ian rest in peace and stop making money off of him. If this was a book on New Order only, I wouldn't have any reservations about it, but it isn't now, is it?

Many fans of the erstwhile Warsaw will pick this up and dismiss it as far too pictorial to contain anything like the full narrative. Well, for me, a person who played their double cassette of Substance to death, this was perfectly fine – meaning that yes, there will be people who played their five-CD, longbox version of Retro to death and will think this too slight. To me all that the narrative missed was the audience – the outsider's appreciation; one chapter the band have a crowd of one person, the next a four-hundred head venue is 50% over capacity, and there's no look at things from their point of view. Clearly the audience would have been there, otherwise they would never have been making record after record, non-album single after non-album single, and so on, but it would have been nice to get their take on things.

As it is the story comes across very concisely, with a lot that will perhaps be new, at least to several eager readers. I don't think it's that common knowledge that one of the band was talked to in relation to a serial killer case. And what do you mean you didn't know what Tony Wilson's parents did for a job?! That last does bring me on to the fact that some of the minutiae are not fully relevant – so many places, from the estates they were born in to recording studios of old, and every magazine where relevant gets the date they were bulldozed or were last in print, as if NO must be congratulated for outliving them.

But on the whole the book is judged finely – and yes, those wonderful pictures do add a lightness and quickness to the pace of the page-turning. I think this succeeds at what it wants to do, which is be accessible, while toning down the side and bias regarding certain people and events. The calamitous rock band story can be told in many different ways, and I would always read a hundred pages about Fleetwood Mac shagging around as opposed to six hundred; in a world where both possibilities are on the market I don't think we need worry about this being too pusillanimous or slender a telling. A strong four stars.

Even if I was a goth in the 80s I wasn't a huge fan of Joy Division (even if Decades is in my top ten of fav songs) and didn't like New Order. I started to listen to them later in my life and appreciating their sounds.
This is an interesting biography that analyses the band, their story and talks about some aspects that are not so well known or remembered.
I appreciated the style of writing and how the author deals with a sort of "untouchable and seminal" band.
Well researched and well written, it's was also a lot of fun to read.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Unable to download via PDF via digital editions, tried multiple times so apologies but am unable to read and review this book
Edit thanks to the publisher for trying to assist but still cannot open to read except on the NG app but then the writing is too small and again makes it impossible to read
Really needs to be able to send to Kindle/Kindle App

There is no option to send to Kindle and when I download the PDF it saves as an acsm file (?) and cannot be opened.

Unable to review which is annoying as I was looking forward to this.

Full disclosure - I don’t really like Joy Division or New Order, but if ever a book was going to make me like them, then “Decades” by John Aizlewood would be the closest thing to it.
Forever the darlings of the music critics, there has always been a sense that both groups are bulletproof and beyond true criticism. Like Berlin-era Bowie, Morrissey and The Smiths, someone has decided that THEY ARE IMPORTANT, and we need to keep talking about them, even when they’re being rubbish. Luckily, John Aizlewood is very good at talking about Joy Division and New Order. This book is for both hardcore fans and those whose knowledge extends only to knowing that Joy Division did “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and New Order did that surprisingly good World Cup song.
As author John Aizlewood maintains in his history of the two bands, Ian Curtis “meant it”. Indeed, I think this is a crucial factor in their lasting importance. Dying young, ostensibly on the cusp of greatness, his legend remains preserved in aspic because he didn’t live long enough to become rubbish. Aizlewood writes vividly and economically on the early years of the band members and offers insightful analyses on each album and single; this is a real fan speaking. Lucid “sleeve notes” sidebars accompany the dissection of each album.
Emerging from the “dirty old town” of postwar Manchester, a deprived yet indomitable city, grammar school boys Bernard Dicken (later Albrecht then Sumner) and Peter “Hooky” Woodhead bonded at school (sort of) over a shared love of music and misbehaviour. On meeting the intense and married Ian Curtis, the band Warsaw was formed, to some acclaim, with Stephen Morris eventually warming the drum stool. As Aizlewood memorably puts it, only death would change the lineup. After a necessary name-change, Joy Division were born, honing their dystopian music as a reaction to the post-industrial surroundings of Manchester. Aizlewood writes unsensationally on the suicide of Ian Curtis, quoting music press obits of the time, one of which claimed Ian’s death “froze” Joy Division in an eternal moment of almost making it. To do that, they would have to reinvent themselves as New Order, recruiting Stephen Morris’ girlfriend, Gillian Gilbert, on keyboards.
All of that band’s hits & misses, highs & lows, splits & reunions, solo projects of varying quality and nightclub-owning shenanigans are examined by Aizlewood as New Order initially struggle to exorcise the ghosts of Ian Curtis and Joy Division. The biggest-selling 12” record (remember them?) of all time, “Blue Monday”, would change all that. New Order’s latter years are a litany of strained inter-band relationships, financial mismanagement and Hooky’s alcoholism; painful to read but sadly essential when discussing this particular band’s history.
Saturated with cultural references from one of the greatest ever music eras and fully illustrated with photographs, (complete with irreverent captions), “Decades” is erudite but also incredibly funny; John Aizlewood eschews the usual pretentiousness that Joy Division engender in favour of a writing style which borders on satire. But his admiration for the music comes through strongly. The result is as good a history of Joy Division and New Order (including all the awkward things associated with them) that we could ever hope for. “Decades” is an outstanding, coffee-table-friendly history of two of the most interesting bands ever to come out of Britain.