OK, confession time. This is my ninth or tenth listen to this and I'm still not sure I'm getting it. I think I was expecting a kind of machine gun hit hit hit of classic after classic, but the truth is I didn't recognise most of them on the first run through. Disorder I know from the great BBC4 doc that Ryan and Richard (and Alan) all had a hand in. It's a cracking opening. I remember hearing it in an H&M somewhere and shazaming it, I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard the track before. And of course She's Lost Control is instantly recognisable from 24 Hour Party People. I guess it's just a lot more - goth? - than I was expecting. Which really isn't that unexpected. Day of the Lords could be a Seventeen Seconds outtake. Candidate sounds like how I imagine Bauhaus sound, never having really heard Bauhaus.

It's a thin catalogue, ultimately. Perhaps that's where the glamour, the appeal, comes in. If they were twelve albums in now I doubt it would have quite the same cachet. Peter Hook still seems to make a good living playing both albums in full, but it strikes me as bizarre that anyone would be down the front shouting for Candidate or Insight, but perhaps I just don't know the songs well enough. And of course the elephant in the room is that the really big hits - LWTUA, Atmosphere, Transmission - aren't on either of the albums.

New Dawn Fades in my mind is always caught up with New Day Rising, the Husker Du album, though in truth they couldn't be more different.

I don't mean to sound down about it. I can understand the allure, the mystique. So much of it just sounds flat though, plodding. Here comes She's Lost Control to underline the point, the pace zipping along, and suddenly you can understand the appeal again. Maybe there's an alternative album just of the fast songs that would work better for me.

Shadowplay was covered by The Killers I think. I guess I can see that, Brandon hamming it up down the front. Fair play to them. Probably more than a few kids ended up buying the album off the back of that.

I dunno. Maybe I'm being harsh, maybe, like so many other bands, it's just not quite for me. I think I expected this one to be the revelation, the "where have you been all my life?" moment. I'm not getting that though, not yet. Or maybe, where the Smiths are a band that has album tracks loved better than singles, Joy Division are a band who just work better as a compilation exercise rather than a studio thing. That feels very patronising, but I don't know how else to put it. Interzone is great. More like this! It does have a very obvious Stooges debt but that is 100% okay. And then it's back to the plod again of I Remember Nothing. Maybe the comments about how unhappy the band were with the production have some merit - perhaps if it were a bit messier, more raucous, it might have a bit more soul?

I'll keep coming back to this. I'm not giving up yet.