118. Joy Division - Atmosphere (Factory)

One week at number one on 2nd July 1988It’s another strange backwards step for the blog. “Atmosphere” was originally released in the UK in 1980 and topped the MRIB Indie Charts in October of that year. That occurred, however, around six months before the NME introduced their nationally compiled indie listings*, so for our purposes, it’s the 118th new number one. Its re-release was greeted with a certain amount of criticism, being regarded in some quarters as exploitative, using Ian Curtis’s death and some deeply morbid visual imagery as a way of increasing sales of Joy Division’s “Substance” compilation. New Order were interviewed on Snub TV on BBC2, where the subject was somewhat testily broached.In the interview, you can see Bernard Sumner bristling slightly, while Peter Hook responds calmly, stating that “we felt that the Joy Division ‘Substance’ was more valid than the New Order ‘Substance’, which Rob and Tony thought was more valid than the Joy Division ‘Substance’, so we decided…