Cult and Culture podcast Joy Division

mems of Blood Brothers, Locust & more discuss Joy Division on new podcast

Justin Pearson of the bands The Locust, Dead Cross and Head Wound City, and owner of Three One G Records, also has his own podcast, Cult & Culture (you can hear past episodes at the Three One G SoundCloud). The latest episode, Ep. 7, features Justin with his Head Wound City bandmate Cody Votolato (also of The Blood Brothers), John Brady (of Swing Kids), and Sam Stothers (of Narrows), and the topic for this episode is Joy Divison. It ends up going in all kinds of directions though, including the musicians talking about their own pasts and upbringings, their various definitions of punk, and more. Here’s a little more background:

In this episode of Cult & Culture, Luke and Justin lead a panel in front of a live audience with Three One G label-mates Cody Votolato (Blood Brothers, Head Wound City), John Brady (Swing Kids), and Sam Stothers (Narrows). This event took place at UCSD after a viewing of Anton Corbijn’s “Control”, a film chronicling Joy Division’s rise and ending with Curtis’s death. Though this episode is far from a conversation about Joy Division alone, it fluidly touches on influences the band might have had on each artist, the parallels of Factory Records and Three One G (A label named after lyrics from the Joy Division song “Warsaw”), the defining of seemingly undefinable subcultures, and the creation of bands both by chance and out of necessity. The panel also discusses how the San Diego music scene (and beyond) will live on, what made/makes it special, and in what ways it has changed and manifested moving forward.

Justin also tells us:

Episode 7 of The Cult and Culture Podcast was a weird one. It was recorded in front of an audience and in conjunction with a screening of Control at UCSD. Naturally we dove into parallels of Joy Division and that era of music in relation to the world that Cody, John, Sam, and I all come from. It’s impossible to say that we weren’t influenced by Joy Division, and that band was a great point in our musical lives to sort of fling ourselves from, hoping to land somewhere relevant, and somewhere honest. It helped us all focus on what we were subconsciously avoiding, which was defining ourselves as something that was already defined.

The new episode will be on iTunes tomorrow, but first we’re premiering it in this post. Listen: