Music DVDs

This DVD, which contains all of the band’s promo videos to date, has been rushed out as an accompaniment piece to the Best Of CD released by EMI, as a sort of counter to Radiohead’s now infamous going solo gesture, effectively releasing their ‘In Rainbows’ album for free on the internet, inviting fans to pay as little as £0.00 for the album if they so wished.

This is worth checking out, not just for the famous videos such as ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Just’ – you can have fun freeze-framing the video and trying to work out what the guy on the street is saying – but for the less well-known latter-day Amnesiac/Hail to the Thief stuff such as ‘There There’ and the strange wireframe glitchscape of the ‘Pull Pulk/Like Spinning Plates’ video(s), which looked to us like a cross between a car advert and the movie Tron (also worth renting by the way, especially if you’ve got an HD set).

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Control is the beautifully shot biopic of Ian Curtis – the frontman for the short-lived but immeasurably influential post-punk group Joy Division – the screenplay of which is loosely based upon the widowed Deborah Curtis’ memoir Touching from a Distance.

As such, the film documents the slow-burning rise of Joy Division, playing numerous toilet venues before being lined up for a two-week American tour, which is inversely paralleled by Curtis growing illness, withdrawal from his surroundings and eventual death.

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