If you want to ensure a lasting place in classic rock history then one of the surest methods is to pop your clogs.

By dying tragically young you neatly sidestep the inevitable trailing off in quality and the predictable greatest hits tour as you slip into your dotage.

Joy Division's Ian Curtis chose to end it all barely two years into a career that had delivered two critically-lauded albums - Unknown Pleasures and Closer.

Documentary-maker Grant Gee - who admits JD's first album was "the single most beautiful object I'd ever possessed" - has produced an unsurprisingly reverential chronicle of punk's miserabalists par excellence.

He's rounded up an impressive roster of talking heads ranging from surviving band members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris to pompous pop philosophers Paul Morley and the late Tony Wilson.

Sumner and Hook were inspired to form a band after seeing The Sex Pistols play Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976, a gig that seemed to have been attended by every proto-punk in the north of England.

(it still strikes one as dodgy even now that they chose to name themselves after the brothel in a Nazi concentration camp then go on to become New Order, the name of the Thousand Year Reich. "It's pretty bad taste but that's punk," Sumner would explain)

Hooking up with deranged alcoholic producer Martin Hannett, they forged a grim electronica popular in student bedsits and distinguished by Hook's melodic bass and the anguished vocals of Curtis.

They lasted for just two albums but managed to produce a handful of classic songs including She's Lost Control, Transmission and the spiky pop classic Love Will Tear Us Apart.

During their brief lifetime an increasingly erratic Curtis would develop epilepsy and eventually display the symptoms of bi-polar disorder. He committed suicide in May 1980.

While Morley and Wilson pretentiously rhapsodise about Joy Division's iconic place in the rock firmament it's up to Sumner to (probably) more accurately account for their success.

"We didn't know what we were doing," he says. "We didn't know why we were doing it. But it was pure chemistry."

Tim Evans