"Channeling Kafka, Burroughs, Munch, the 20th Century"

"We're all post-punk. Punk happened, and then—at some point—we did. For bands in the era of Joy Division, it meant music that sounded like ideas. Tony Wilson, trickster-broadcaster and high theorist of the Manchester Geist, signed them to his new label, Factory. 'The degraded city was part of Joy Division’s life,' said Wilson. 'The idea of the city is a theme that runs through this whole thing, Manchester being the archetypal modern city.' Martin Hannett became their producer—dimensional slippage was his fixation, the little blips and space-smears and echoes of otherness with which he would open up the Joy Division sound."

James Parker at The Atlantic reviews Jon Savage's This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else.