This Is Not A Joy Division Shirt-ah!
From the “Making Bootleggers Look Bad” department:
An enterprising DIY-for-profit T-shirt merchant somewhere apparently decided that the world needed Joy Division T-shirts that they could sell on eBay. Fine.
Continuing this line of thinking, they decided that the shirts should depict Joy Division’s iconic late frontman, Ian Curtis. So far so good.
Unfortunately, when they googled for pictures of said iconic late frontman, they came up with this:
Depicted on the above shirt (sold at this eBay link) is not Ian Curtis, but an equally iconic frontman from the same hometown (Manchester, England) as Joy Division: Mark E. Smith of The Fall (yes, the same Mark E. Smith that does a guest appearance on the new Gorillaz album, out today!)
Recap: This is Ian Curtis around the time Joy Division was breaking out:
And this is Mark E. Smith around the same time period:
And just to keep things up to date, here’s Mark E. Smith today:
and Ian Curtis today:
(Yeah, I snarked on a sacred cow of indie rock, but at least I didn’t repeatedly forge his signature on merchandise like one of his ex-bandmates did!)
So, who wants to send a letter to the bootlegger in question regarding his Mancunian Post-Punk Frontman Faux-Pas? And in the spirit of Mark E. Smith himself, would it be fitting to start said letter with the salutation, “Hey there, fuckface! Hey there, fuckface-ah!”?
Thanks to Other John for the eBay link.
