Noel Gallagher’s cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart will have Ian Curtis turning in his grave

Ever wanted to hear Joy Division‘s bleak paean to doomed romance Love Will Tear Us Apart transformed into a jaunty Phoenix Nights-style karaoke singalong? Well, friends, today is your ‘lucky’ day – ahem – for thanks to Noel Gallagher, the world has now been blessed with such a creation. 

Gallagher performed the cover while guesting on the BBC Radio 2 Piano Room series today (June 1).

“We are at the BBC and you can’t get out the BBC without doing a cover,” the former Oasis bandleader joked when asked why he would do such a thing. “When [the BBC] asked me to do this I was like, ‘I’m afraid I’m all Bob Dylan-ed out… I don’t know what to do.’

“I would play this song, this version of it, at home down the years,” he revealed. “When they asked me to do it, I was like ‘How can I get away with that?’ Because it’s such an iconic [song] and, being from Manchester… well, this is going to be tricky.

“But now I’ve got my own studio, I went and did a little demo of it and I was like ‘You know what? I think I might be able to pull this off’.

Readers, he did not “pull this off.” Unless the intention here was to turn a post-punk classic into a blob of gloopy schmaltzy wank.

Gallagher also referred to Joy Division as “the Divs”.

Sigh.

Watch / listen to this bold new re-imagining of Love Will Tear Us Apart below, if you must:

Last week, as the endless talk of an Oasis reformation continues, Noel called Liam Gallagher “a coward”, and Liam Gallagher responded by labelling his big brother a “bell end”.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.