Warsaw (Joy Division): Warsaw [OUTSIDER]

Why you'll love it

This LP gathers the eleven RCA Sessions recordings from May 1978 together with the band's very first demos, recorded under the name Warsaw. Early versions of "Transmission," "Shadowplay," "Interzone" and "No Love Lost" are all here.

This edition

• RCA Sessions recordings (1978)
• Bonus 1977 Warsaw demo tracks
• Includes "As You Said" from the Komakino single

About the album

Every great band has a rough draft. Joy Division's lives here: the album they cut for RCA in May 1978 at Arrow Studios in Manchester, before the label's post-production work left them cold and the deal fell apart. The songs went on circulating among collectors for years, almost always under the name the band had started with, Warsaw.

Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner (credited as Bernard Albrecht), Peter Hook and Stephen Morris play with a punk rush that would soon slow and stretch into the sound of Unknown Pleasures. "Transmission" is already a thrilling thing, "Shadowplay" and "Interzone" are recognisably themselves, and "No Love Lost" and "Leaders of Men" show the darker shapes forming. The five tracks from the July 1977 Warsaw demo, with Steve Brotherdale on drums, take it right back to the start. The RCA tracks were cut over two days, May 3 and 4, and "As You Said" comes from a 1980 session at Britannia Row in London.

Four of these songs appeared in earlier versions on the An Ideal for Living EP, and the rest became the backbone of everything after. Think of it as the band's first rehearsal for history, with the volume already where it ought to be.

Also at Kops: more Joy Division on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Outsider, a reissue of the 1978 album.