Annotations - Dead Souls

Wherein we pick up with Mark a couple of years before his first appearance and we find out why his mum abandoned him to the Ghost Town. It's a Thursday night in 1981 or thereabouts, a couple of years before Ghost Town, and Mark is doing everything he can to be grown up and responsible. I like the way that this piece dovetails with Mark's later (chronological) appearance. In both pieces, you get the impression that Mark is struggling to become something more than he is. Here he's tring to be one of the older, cooler kids, to meet his mum's expectations, to be more than his father, to keep his sister safe and to figure out what to do with all these strange new urges. There's no way he's going to manage all of that, and this story exists at the moment when it all falls down. If there's a central tragedy to DW then it's this: Mark only ever wanted to be good.
I also like that it's almost a direct parallel of The Word Is - Two stories about semi - abandoned children who retreat into music at every opportunity,drift into dreams about nuclear wastelands and silver stars, then wake to find that something has been taken from them. Again, there are certain recurring plot threads and symbols throughout the whole of DW.
Other than those thoughts, there isn't a lot to say about this one. The title is a track by Joy Division, later covered by Nine Inch Nails for the soundtrack to The Crow, a goth superhero movie. Here it refers to the whole Wilson family, living out their squalid little lives as if they were already dead, the ghosts in Mark's dream, the M.A.D. global wipeout and of course, Messrs Peel and Curtis who appear in the first paragraphs. This is Peel's first published appearance in DW, although he also crops up in an unfinished Sarah piece set in the heyday of pirate radio boats.
Chronologically, we're all over the place with this one. Curtis died in 1980 but Bucks Fizz didn't get to number one until April the following year. The only Joy Division track likely to get a play on Top Of The Pops is Love Will Tear Us Apart, which was released posthumously, although Peel appears to introduce the band live in the studio. Oh, and Peel didn't start presenting Top Of The Pops until 1981 and probably never introduced a band by predicting the aquatic demise of the human race. But I like to think that if Curtis had lived, if Joy Division had appeared on the same episode of Top Of The Pops as Bucks Fizz and that if John Peel had introduced Dead Souls to a shellshocked nation, those are precisely the terms he would have used.
In a similar vein, bonkon and spaz are hardly the most PC of terms these days, but both were in common playground parlance back then. You may not agree with their usage here, but it's true to the character and the time.
The man with the guitar by his knees is Peter Hook. And he does look cool. There will be no argument with this.
Going Underground by The Jam fits nicely with the ideas of reinvention and a counter culture that run through a lot of DW, while the Visage song is probably going to be Fade To Grey, both because of the scenes which follow in Mark's dream and because it's the only song of there's that anyone remembers...