having invested as much effort as I possibly could in actually liking foals and deciding I don't it's that time in the afternoon where I'm hankering after something dependable to get me through to teatime which today happens to be joy division but wait there's something not right with that its not like I'm just listening to closer which I ripped from the cd I bought to backup the album I got back in 1980 oh no its something much worse. I'm listening to 'the best of' on napster. now, if I were for a moment to put aside any latent musical fascist tendencies and step down from the pedestal marked 'I was was there the first time you can't really understand joy division like I do' which is populated with middle-class art school envy types who now work in IT or online media and write miserable little blogs about IT and online media or worse still, listening to joy division on napster, then I might think that actually listening to 'the best of joy division' released in the wake of control was a perfectly acceptable way to spend an hour in your home office. but no sooner have I written that last dribblesome sentence than I'm slapping myself with the wet fish of procrastination and I'm telling myself that, really, I should know better than to defile the mighty division by not listening to the albums as they were originally released and instead getting drawn into the out-of-sequence vaguely cashing-in less-than-tactile experience of online recycled nostalgia.

but I have, so never mind. I think actually that's what I've really wanted to do for ages, but being a middle-aged joy division stalwart is a bit like being a member of some insane catholic sect where you're expecting some laconic thunderbolt to strike you down at the merest suggestion that you might be taking the piss with the back catalogue. I mean, I'll dig out my 12" of ideal for living later and listen to the whole miserable thing on a proper record player by way of self-flagellation, so hopefully I'll feel better about myself tomorrow and continue stroking my chins about the relative merits of interpol or editors and whether actually its alright for the wombats to be quite so blasphemously ironic about it all when they weren't even born, dammit (always good to finish with that chestnut).

© Tim Caynes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Disclaimer: I work for Sun Microsystems, but this is nothing to do with them and it's all my fault, even though I might sometimes mention Solaris or something.