Still

Still is a posthumous compilation album by Joy Division, consisting of previously unused studio material and a live recording of Joy Division’s last concert. Originally planned for release in August, it was eventually released on 8 October 1981. The CD version was released in March 1990. A number of the studio recordings have “added post production”, including over-dubs by the surviving members of the band.

The performance 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 undeniably poor quality 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 ruining one of only two recordings the band made of the song. Recent CD reissues of the album on London Records have replaced this live version with the other known recording, a 1980 demo 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.)