1994 07 Joy Division Mojo - views on Ian Curtis

The Eternal

Ian Curtis was "all things to all men". Even the people closest to him couldn't agree about him.

Interviews by Richard Boon, former manager of the Buzzcocks.

Kurt Cobain

(In July 1993)

I stayed away from Joy Division, because I’d heard a few of their songs and I knew that I would really like them. The stories that I’d heard about the band, I knew that’s the band to listen to out of all of them. I’m just waiting. I’ve always felt there’s that element of gothic in Nirvana.

Bono

The holy voice of Ian Curtis... They were an original of the species that later became goth. Never mind.

Courtney Love

When you hear a great song it touches your life. It affects you, it’s like a scent, it reminds you of something. You fuck to it, you feel blue to it, you feel great to it. It’s like Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control — that song meant so much to me when I was younger.

Malcolm Whitehead

Video director (The Birthday Party, The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, etc)

I filmed them in rehearsal, then, through a mate, got them a couple of gigs in Altrincham, at The Check In and Bowden Vale Club — live footage from which is my unreleased 8mm movie Joy Division. They were so powerful. Some of the film was on a Factory Records promo compilation made for TV companies, and those bits are on bootleg video. Ian was definitely the nicest one then — quiet, nice, the boy next door. The myth doesn’t bear any resemblance to what it was about. It’s laughable, really. We get loads of letters and calls from around the world about the film and Ian. When you tell these people he was just an ordinary bloke, they’re really pissed off, like you’re a traitorous bastard and you don’t understand how deep and meaningful he was. Ian saw the film and was complimentary — the only one who wanted to talk about it. He was pleasant. The important thing was, he didn’t wear leather trousers, so you knew you could trust him straight away... Then the bastard died on us.

Martin Rushent

Producer

I suppose I was the first to offer them a serious recording deal. I saw them at Liverpool’s Eric’s and offered Rob Gretton [manager] a deal there and then. I asked them down to London to demo, and that went really well. They liked it and we were up to the point of recording the LP properly, although people thought the demos were probably good enough as they were. My production company was contracted to Radar Records, who were funded by WEA. They had a huge row over what the money was being spent on and terminated the deal overnight. One morning I walked into the office and it was full of accountants and people moving out the furniture. As well as Joy Division, with an album arguably finished and ready to sign, I had Ultravox and Spandau Ballet in the same position and a finished Visage LP. WEA asked to hear all my material and hated everything, especially Joy Division. Someone said to me, Martin, you should be producing the Angelic Upstarts, which shows what WEA knew at the time.

I thought Ian was a nice man and a great singer. They were very quiet and just got on with it. We did 15 tracks, essentially the first album and some others. My favourite was Ice Age and I still maintain my version was better than the final one. But they haven’t been heard. I have people prepared to commit hari-kari to get at them, but there’s not a chance.

Andy Cairns

Singer/guitarist with Therapy? who covered Isolation on their Troublegum album.

They didn’t play Belfast, but I saw them on the Old Grey Whistle Test doing She’s Lost Control. Ian impressed me, it could’ve been someone emulating epilepsy. I backtracked and bought Unknown Pleasures. All their tracks are incredible, they had an awful impact on my life at 14 or 15, expressing teenage angst, despair, the politics of adolescence. I used to live my life by New Dawn Fades, there’s that pseudo-gothic sound and air of feeling sorry for yourself which isn’t healthy, but you don’t care because you’re so wrapped up in yourself. There’s no objective view of adolescence.

The way we came to cover Isolation was that I really loved the song, it’s someone trying to explain his feelings and there’s a grandiose sense of despair in the original. I started playing the bassline as a guitar riff in rehearsal and at soundchecks, and got, Great! What’s that? from the others, so we worked it up. It projects a sense of a degenerating person with no way out, old themes like Camus’s Outsider, the eternal misfit. But the actual sound of the record — it sounded like the loneliest place in the world, full of anxiety, richly dark.

Alan Hempsall

Former vocalist with Crispy Ambulance

Rob Gretton had helped my band Crispy Ambulance and later we signed to Factory Benelux and supported Joy Division several times, so we knew each other well. Early in April 1980, about five weeks before Ian’s death, Bernard called me saying Ian wasn’t well, and could I step in at a sold-out concert at The Derby Hall in Bury that day? Tickets were £1.50 and being touted at a fiver! He said to pick my favourite of their songs and they’d do those. I was like a kid in a sweetshop. I was a bit confused to find Ian there when I arrived. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but he helped me sort out some of the words. Section 25 came on and Simon Topping from A Certain Ratio, Bernard, Hooky, Steve and I joined in on their last number. Section 25 and Simon left and we carried on, starting with Digital and Love Will Tear Us Apart, which was unreleased but I was familiar with from a Peel session. At that point I left and Ian came on for Decades and Eternal, really slow, all he felt up to. The audience didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Ian went off and I came back with Simon, Section 25 and anybody else around who’d join in for a decidedly rakish version of Sister Ray, which I’d not heard before. Bernard said to make it up as I went along. People felt distinctly cheated. Bottles began to fly, bringing a massive Victorian glass chandelier down on the stage, which was a carpet of shards of glass. We retreated to the dressing-room, people were pounding its door with bottles. The roadies had waded in with mike-stands, one had his head split open. All we needed was the upright piano player for a full-blown Western! Hooky, like some mad thing from Salford, totally incensed, charged out on to the stage, his hands full of empty Pils bottles. It took both Tony Wilson and I to get him backstage to safety, where Bernard was saying, I hate violence, it’s so... temporary. It was a glistening moment.

Paul Morley

Writer and broadcaster

I was young, and when you’re young you need things that open up your wounds and talk directly to your emotions, so they were very important to me. I remember when I first interviewed them [for New Musical Express] they were so silent, which I put down to their majestic enigma, but later realised was just painful shyness. So I wrote it up trying to fill in the gaps for them, probably contributing to things they’re held to be responsible for. There’s a tendency to play with it but, as with Kurt Cobain, what happens is you realise they really did mean it. All those things they said weren’t made up. And that’s both appalling and glamorous. There’s something good that in a way they were so local and small and shortlived, despite Wilson’s attempts to turn them into The Doors, which somehow never quite came off.

Perhaps Ian’s suicide was necessary, to make that little pocket of activity more real. It’s shocking, but you can look back and say, We really lived through something. At least Ian avoided that problem of what to do in your late thirties. I’m glad it’s a band like Joy Division I’ll be talking about in my eighties.

C.P. Lee

Singer with Manchester-based satirists Albertos Y Los Trios Paranoias. Performed in the musical Snuff Rock, about a singer who opts for suicide in order to become a legend.

What they meant to me in the Albertos was a lot of cheap jokes at the expense of Manchester miserablists. It wasn’t until they'd become established that one was forced to seek a reappraisal. Ian’s death shocked us all, not in a musical wav, because we didn’t give a toss anyway, but on a personal level it affected everybody in the band, in that we didn’t know how far to go with our jokes any more. As to the long term, however, as Chou En-Lai said when asked to comment on the effects of the French Revolution, “It's too early to tell”.

Liz Naylor

Former press officer for The Shamen and The Sugarcubes, now runs Catcall Records.

I was paid £200 for the script of a film called Too Young To Know, Too Wild To Care. The cheque even had a Factory number: FAC22, I think. [Tony] Wilson saw the movie as a hybrid between The Girl Can’t Help It and Ferry Cross The Mersey. It featured most of the then Factory roster, and was about A Certain Ratio and The Distractions attempting various forms of terrorism around the city, kidnapping Ian and blowing up Joy Division. But in my ending The Distractions blew themselves up because they weren’t very good. It never got made in the end.

Margi Clark

Actress (Latter To Brezhnev, The Good Sex Guide, Making Out, Blonde Fist, etc.)

My band Margox And The Zinc supported Joy Division at Eric’s. I thought Ian was the ultimate punk because he never smiled. I only fancied men who never smiled because I thought it meant they'd be good in bed. He had that air of a poet, completely damaged, instantly consumptive. I loved She’s Lost Control. I was mad then and wanted attention, particularly I wanted Joy Division’s. I went into the dressing room and showed my tits. Ian laughed. It’s the only time I remember him laughing. We had a fucking laugh, then. Some really romantic things came out of punk. Now it’s like it didn’t happen in one way, but we all hang on to it.

Richard H. Kirk

Cabaret Voltaire

To me, Ian was just one of the guys, up for a laugh, and a dynamic performer. We had a common interest in William Burroughs and I recall playing a music and arts festival at Plan K in Brussels, sitting round a table with Ian and Burroughs, but I can’t remember what we talked about. Probably about how boring Belgium was.

John Peel

I never saw Joy Division live. It’s the story of my life; circumstances dictate I never see anybody. I didn’t go to any of their sessions either. I think the last thing bands need at these things is a tourist. We all went through that awful two or three years of demos and records of people trying to sound like them. We all have a streak of melancholy that they tapped into, but thankfully most of us not obsessively. People subsequently needed to feel the same about The Smiths, despite Morrissey being so funny. Not that there weren’t any jokes with Joy Division, there was an 'up' side. I don’t often play their old records; I have a horrible suspicion they wouldn’t seem to have stood the test of time.

However, I always claim that I met Ian Curtis. Someone at a gig in Manchester gave me their Sordid Sentimentale record, apparently claiming to be in the group. I’m not sure if it was him, but it makes a better story. Just as I say the last session I went to was Hendrix, though that’s not quite true. If it was one of the others, frankly I wouldn’t want to know.

Pete Shelley

Buzzcocks

I met Ian when he came to see us early on at one of our self-promoted gigs at The Electric Circus with Chelsea, then he was in this would-be Salford band. We met in a pub on Frederick Road to discuss the pure rocket science that being in a band means to those who aren’t in one. We tried to help by coming up with names. We tried to foist Stiff Kittens on to them, and advertised them as such for a gig we put on with us and Penetration. They plumped for Warsaw. It could’ve been that or Pogrom. Later, though, it might’ve been Gdansk. It was the old Bowie/Berlin thing of the darkness of Eastern Europe. Apart from us, Slaughter And The Dogs, The Fall and The Worst, they were the only other band around town.

Ian, like so many others, displayed a dark side in the songs. She’s Lost Control stood out because it always reminded me of Iggy Pop doing his Jim Morrison bit, singing in that low, slow croon. I never saw him as the doomed, dark, depressive voice of a generation. If you listen to the music, it was a different thing than seeing him around, he wasn’t other-worldly. Every generation needs a character epitomising its brooding fucked-upness, it’s a throwback to 18th and 19th century doomed romanticism, all that Dionysian myth of the young poet for whom it’s all too much. It’s an archetype that lurks around, waiting for a tortured romantic to adopt the mantle. He became a martyr for the wrong reasons and more famous for killing himself than for the music, which was always a pity.

I have no unhappy memories of Ian, except that he killed himself. It seemed like a silly thing to do really. I was under the impression that a bottle of whisky was involved. If you drink a bottle of whisky, don't have a gun around, or ropes. You feel like death the next morning anyway. I remember great times on their last tour with us — cops being called to the hotel we were in in Glasgow after we’d raided the closed bar — a good time all round. I was talking to Barney last year and he was moaning about hating touring. I reminded him how they’d done 30-odd dates with us. He said, No wonder Ian topped himself.

But we didn’t know about the suicide at once. We were working in London with Martin Hannett early in May 1980, and had to get back to Manchester for a gig broadcast live from Manchester Poly, which was when we heard. We played a new song, Strange Thing, which has the line “Got to control this depression”. I was so moved I dedicated it to Ian. It was a shock, you couldn’t believe it.

Morrissey

Ian would occasionally stay with his grandparents who lived on Milner Street in Old Trafford, just off Kings Road where I lived. He was very sweet-natured, frustrated but unscheming. He always welcomed my blabber on the New York Dolls, knew even of The Harlots Of 42nd Street [New York-based Dolls rip-off circa 1972/’73] which delighted me, although Ian’s shutters came down at the mention of Sandie Shaw. Later, mine would at the reference of Joy Division, whom I don’t recall anyone ever liking. In the world of pop music, of course, in order to be successful it isn’t enough to be a great songwriter or singer; you must also be a decent racketeer, solicitor, juggler, financier, and maybe Ian wasn’t scurrilous enough to face all that moguldom head-on. Some people actually dislike what being a star involves.

Craig Scanlon

The Fall (guitarist)

I don’t remember them as this mythical doom-laden band at all. They were just a bunch of lads out on the piss. I found them quite ordinary, to be honest. When they played the Bowden Vale Club in Altrincham they were pissed out of their heads, it was a laugh.

The Fall had a song, That Man, a spoof of Teenager In Love, with the last line “That man died for you”. We were all sick when Dave McCullough used it in his obituary in Sounds, the whole “he died for you” thing. It was bollocks to say he died for his fans. I thought he killed himself because of marital problems, drinking, his mounting epilepsy and not wanting to tour America. Eulogising suicide is simply stupid.