Joy Division and the secret history of the most famous t-shirt in rock

In his 2014 autobiography Chapter And Verse, written with New World alumnus and all-round top man Charlie Connelly, the band’s guitarist Bernard Sumner says: “The image itself is a graphic representation of a pulsar, the soundwaves of a dying star, which I’d found while leafing through an encyclopaedia of astronomy in Manchester’s Central Library… I gave it to our designer, Peter Saville, and he took it from there. 

“In the encyclopaedia, the image on the page was black ink on a white background, but Peter inverted the colours so it became white on black and reduced it to a much smaller size. I thought it was great. What Peter did was incredibly clever: the image is still selling on t-shirts even today.”

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There were no official Unknown Pleasures t-shirts during the band’s brief lifespan (I had a badge), part of the self-sabotaging business credo of their label Factory Records, entertainingly chronicled in films and books like Michael Winterbottom’s Twenty-Four Hour Party People and JD bassist Peter Hook’s The Haçienda : How Not To Run A Club. In 2019, drummer Stephen Morris told GQ: “When we first saw the final cover I said, ‘That’ll look really good on a T-shirt.’ Rob (Gretton, manager of Joy Division and successor group New Order) said, ‘We don’t do T-shirts. That’s a shit idea.’”

A bootlegger called Scotch Tommy cleaned up instead, doing so well that he guiltily offered a compensatory cheque to Gretton, who ripped it up. That proved another unsound decision.

Hook writes that when HMRC investigated Factory years later and demanded receipts for sales of the t-shirts, “we went to great lengths to explain ourselves: how we didn’t believe in self-promotion; we didn’t believe in ripping off our fans; we didn’t do merchandise because we thought it was blatant profiteering, the work of the devil, etc. He listened patiently then said, ‘How come wherever I go I see Joy Division t-shirts, then?” Thus, they became “The only band ever to get fined for not doing their own t-shirts. £20,000.”
Factory collapsed in 1992 and official Unknown Pleasures t-shirts first appeared in 1994. They seemed to crop up everywhere; suddenly as ubiquitous as those black-and-white Ramones t-shirts, a phenomenon mocked in Half Man Half Biscuit’s song Joy Division Oven Gloves (2005). They have been spotted on Lionel Messi, Kristen Stewart, Paris Jackson and Australian PM Anthony Albanese. Olivia Cooke’s character wears one in Ready Player One (2018); much more impressively, Ellie from Gogglebox occasionally does too.

Lucy Powell owns one, and so does my son – inherited from my friend Leeds Paul, who saw Joy Division at the Futurama festival in the city in 1979 and on a handful of other occasions, and who has long since walked in silence. 

You can buy a high-end t-shirt from HMV, Rough Trade or Urban Outfitters website or a cheaper one from Affleck’s Palace, the indoor marketplace where thousands of ‘On The Eighth Day, God Created Manchester’ t-shirts at the height of the Madchester era. At a coffee shop across the road from Affleck’s, you can sip your flat white under a mural of the wavy white lines.

In recent weeks, as Joy Division and New Order prepared for their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame on November 14, I found myself wondering how much of that elevation could be credited to the Joy Division t-shirt. It is somewhere in the mix of all their genius and myth – the brilliance and tragedy of Ian Curtis, the drive and danger of Sumner, Hook and Morris, the rebirths of New Order as a new four-piece with Gillian Gilbert and then as a thrilling electronic dance act, and the weighty contributions of Gretton, Savile, producer Martin Hannett, impresario Tony Wilson; with raincoats, sequencers, costly Blue Monday sleeves and ecstasy tablets.

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Inactive since Curtis’s suicide on May 18, 1980, Joy Division have a rich afterlife; the live box set Eternal was released in September to rapturous reviews, tribute bands like Joy Diversion and Shadiowplay tour the UK and the bio-play New Dawn Fades, advertised using those familar wavy lines, has just finished a nationwide run. The Joy Division t-shirt has its own afterlife too; in 2012, to general bemusement and anger from the band’s remaining members, Disney began selling t-shirts showing the pulsar design in a circle with Mickey Mouse ears. A Saville-produced 2021 version for the climate campaign No Music On A Dead Planet shows the waves flattened; you can now also wear the original black-on-white design spotted by Sumner.

Many other unofficial variants are available. I own two – a none-more-Madchester one with the pulsar waves superimposed on a yellow smiley face, and a divisive one that shows Saville’s original design with STEELY DAN (who I love as much as I love JD) across the top. “That shirt… it’s NOT RIGHT!” spluttered a bewildered punter in the gents at a Cabaret Voltaire gig a few weeks back.

I wasn’t wearing either on the day I bumped into Lucy Powell, nor did I ask about hers. I have learned not to ask people about their Joy Division t-shirts.
A decade or so ago, I agreed to run the bar at a community event, but the person with the keys to open it didn’t turn up on time. As the queue grew more and more disgruntled, he eventually showed; a young man with a sheepish grin and a Joy Division t-shirt. Time had got away from him, he said.
When the thirsty had been served, I was still annoyed. I asked whether he actually liked Joy Division, or just the t-shirt. When he said it was mostly the t-shirt design, but that music was a big part of his life and he’d actually been late because he’d spent the afternoon at Abbey Road, I felt smug.
“Having your photo taken on the zebra crossing?”

“No,” he said. “I play keyboards for Kate Bush.”