Still (Joy Division album)



Still is a compilation album by Joy Division, consisting of previously released and unreleased studio material and a live recording of Joy Division's last concert, performed at Birmingham University. It was released on 8 October 1981, through record label Factory, and was intended to combat the trade in bootlegs, and to give fans access to recordings that were not widely available at the time.

Background
The album includes the only time the group ever performed the song "Ceremony" live, which later became a New Order single. Another song featured is a cover of The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", recorded at The Moonlight Club in London on 2 April 1980.

Still is a point of contention among some of the group's fans, because of the unbalanced recording of the High Hall performance. This is not aided by the fact that the engineer that night mixed the vocals far too low for the first half of "Ceremony", making Ian Curtis inaudible and thus marring one of only three recordings the band made of the song. Recent CD reissues of the album on London Records have replaced this live version with another known recording, a 1980 rehearsal that originally surfaced on the Heart and Soul box set. An audience recording of the live version, while of lower fidelity, has all of Curtis' vocals and has circulated as a bootleg since 1980. A further point of contention is the omission of the track "Twenty Four Hours" from all subsequent CD reissues of this album; this was said to be due to time constraints. As a result, "Twenty Four Hours" only appears on some cassette and vinyl versions of Still and has yet to be released officially on CD.

Release
Originally planned for release in August, Still was eventually released on 8 October 1981. It reached No. 5 in the UK upon its release and peaked at No. 3 in New Zealand in February 1982.

The CD version of the album was released in March 1990. A number of the studio recordings have "added post production", including overdubs by the surviving members of the band.

Still, along with Closer and Unknown Pleasures, was remastered and re-issued on 17 September 2007. The remaster was packaged with a bonus disc of live recordings from the Town Hall, High Wycombe on 20 February 1980.

Reception
Joshua Klein of Pitchfork called the album "a ragged, enigmatic coda; an uneven odds-and-ends collection of lost tracks that fills in some gaps in Joy Division's history and legacy". BBC Music called it "a partly frustrating compilation".

Personnel

 * Technical


 * Martin Hannett – production
 * Chris Nagle – engineering
 * Grafica Industria – sleeve artwork