1994 07 Joy Division, Mojo

 

Someone takes these dreams away

We thought it was artistic exorcism, but was it sheer unrelenting autobiography? Where did such darkness come from and why did we so willingly enter it? Jon Savage disturbs the tomb of Joy Division and sheds new light on their driven and desperate leader.

August 27, 1979 Joy Division are headlining a ridiculous festival in a field outside Leigh, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. The leading independent labels of both cities – Zoo and Factory – are meeting to showcase their talent: A Certain Ratio, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes. To the local police, this is tantamount to an alien invasion: they’ve closed down the town and are searching everyone on entry for drugs. One of my carload is already in custody.

In the twilight, Joy Division start their journey. What you get is this: at the back, a lanky drummer who pounds out rhythms at once intricate yet simple. At climatic moments, Stephen Morris attacks a syndrum for those ‘pou pou’ noises that you’re starting to hear on disco records like Ring my bell. On the left, a slight person with the face of a debauched choirboy and the clothes of a polite young man – Bernard Dicken as he is then called – hunches over a guitar which is issuing rhythmic, often distorted blocks of noise. The sound scythes through the air.

On the right is the bearded bass player with his dyed blond thatch, engineer boots and double – breasted jacket: bent at the knees, he swings his instrument round like an offensive weapon. Peter Hook's basslines are prominent in the mix: Joy Division use them to carry the melody as so much else is texture. In the centre stands the singer: very pale, sometimes sweaty, tall, dressed in different shades of grey. He has the severe haircut of a Roman emperor.

At the beginning, Ian Curtis is still, singing as if with infinite patience. Then, as the group hit the instrumental break. it’s as though a switch has been flipped: the stillness suddenly cracks into violent movement. The running joke is that he does the ‘dead fly’ dance – the leg and arm spasms of a dying insect – but he is more controlled than that. As the limbs start flying in that semicircular, hypnotic curve you can’t take your eyes off him for a moment.

Then you realise: he's trying to get out of his skin. out of all this, forever, and he’s trying harder than anyone you’ve ever seen. This is extraordinary: most performers keep a reserve while they’re onstage: only giving a part of themselves away. Ian Curtis is holding nothing back: with the musicians behind him every inch of the way, he’s jumping off the cliff.

("Ah, the mud of Leigh", remembers Tony Wilson. "That was the night of the turd, wasn’t it? A very big moment. Bernard told me years later that he and Ian had gone to the bogs and Ian had come out terribly excited, because there was a piece of shit as long as half an arm, and they all went down to have a look at it. It made their day").

Near the end of the set comes a new song, Dead souls, which begins as a rollercoaster of soaring guitar and lurching basslines. After a couple of minutes Curtis starts to sing: "Someone take these dreams away". He’s seeing visions, of figures from the past, of mocking voices – a terrible beauty. By the time that the song reaches its coda, he's shrieking "they keep calling me, keep on calling me, they keep calling me", and the hairs on our necks stand up. This is it, no way round it: Ian Curtis is raising the dead. 

"I was into, I suppose nowadays you'd call it slacking, but in those days I called it being a lazy twat", says Bernard Sumner today. "I couldn't believe that I was now a professional musician: my whole ambition was to do something that I enjoyed, but not actually work hard at it. Just let the ether flow through me – ha! – and I'd be this medium for this music from the spirits that came through me. I’d just lie there and the music would come through my fingers, because I imagined that’s what art was.

"It’s difficult to speak for everyone, but one of the funny things was that we never talked about the music: we had an understanding which we never felt the need to vocalise. I felt that there was an otherworldliness to the music, that we were plucking out of the air. We felt that talking about the music would stop that inspiration, In the same way, we never talked about Ian’s lyrics or Ian’s performance. I felt that if I thought about what he did, then it would stop. I thought, If something great is happening, don’t look at the sun, don’t look at the sun".

Just over 14 years ago, in the early hours of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis died by his own hand. It came as a total shock: the group were due to go to America a day later. With a single, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and the album 'Closer' ready for release, Joy Division were poised for a break-through: as Chris Bohn wrote later, "The suicide didn't so much bring (their) journey to the heart of darkness, to an abrupt halt as ... freeze it for all eternity at the brink of discovery".

Manchester is a closed city, Cancerian like Ian Curtis. The main participants didn't openly mourn, but carried on under a different name, New Order, into the group we have known and loved during the 1980s. The label that Joy Division had helped to build, Factory Records, became the model of non-metropolitan success. Everything culminated in the summer of 1990, the last summer of love, when Happy Mondays broke through and New Order finally went to Number 1 with the World Cup theme, World in motion. Grey and black had turned into dayglo, darkness into light.

Yet Joy Division have remained a powerful presence, or indeed, absence. They have been recently cited by writers as diverse as Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Donna Tartt and Dennis Cooper, who entitled his second novel Closer. They also inspired the comic artist James O'Barr, who saturated the three parts of his novel, The Crow, with Joy Division lyrics, character names and an open dedication to Ian Curtis, "who showed me the indescribable beauty in absolute ugliness". It was during the filming of this dark story that Bruce Lee's son, Brandon, was killed by an accidental shot.

I began regularly visiting Manchester again after 1990, and experienced Curtis's absence as a powerful event that I hadn’t yet come to terms with. As things turned sour for both Factory and New Order, it was hard not to feel that his death remained unresolved for the 'main participants. It seemed like a good time to tell his story. I contacted Curtis’s group manager, label owner and wife, Bernard Sumner, Peter. Hook, Stephen Morris, Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson, Deborah Curtis – and they all, except Gretton who hardly ever does, agreed to speak.

In her forthcoming biography, Exorcise 1, Deborah Curtis writes about the reality behind the performance, the fact that Ian's mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that she had to cope with at home: as she says now, “People admired him for the things that were destroying him”. Ian Curtis’s death was a personal tragedy with wider implications: couldn’t it have been prevented? Was what we thought to be artistic exorcism sheer, unrelenting autobiography? Where did such darkness come from and why did we so willingly enter it?

Joy Division began, as did so much else, on the fourth of June, 1976. Invited by the fledgling Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols played their first Northern date in a tiny hall above Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. In a super 8 film shot that day, Johnny Rotten twists around the small stage in an already stylised ritual of aggression and withdrawal. "It was dead exciting and dead heavy, real laddish", says Peter Hook. "Something was happening and the music was secondary". 

"I went with Hooky and Terry Mason, our roadie", says Bernard Sumner. "He’d read somewhere about the Sex Pistols having a fight onstage and he dragged us down to see them. I didn't think they were good: I thought they were bad, that’s why I liked it. I thought they destroyed the myth of being a pop star, of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship.

"I first met Ian at the Electric Circus. It might have been the Anarchy tour, or The Clash. Ian was with another lad called Ian, and they both had donkey jackets: Ian had 'HATE’ written on the back of his but I remember liking him. He seemed pretty nice, but we didn’t talk to him that much. About a month later when we decided to try to find a singer – because Hooky and I had formed a group – we put an ad in Virgin Records: Ian rang up and I said, Right, OK: we didn’t even audition him.

"Ian brought a direction. He was into the extremities of life. He wanted to make extreme music: he wanted to be totally extreme onstage, no half measures. Ian’s influence seemed to be madness and insanity. He said that a member of his family had worked in a mental home and she used to tell him things about the people there: people with 20 nipples or two heads, and it made a big impression on him. Park of the time when Joy Division were forming, he worked in a rehabilitation centre for people with physical and mental difficulties, trying to find work. He was very affected by them".

Ian Curtis was born on the fifteenth of July 1956, the elder son: his father worked in the Transport Police. During his teens, his parents moved from Hurdsfield on the outskirts of Macclesfield to the huge '60s blocks of Victoria Park, near the station. Although only just beyond the furthest Manchester suburbs, Macclesfield is an older, small town, where the looming Pennines offer both an escape and a witchy emptiness: “It’s actually quite nice, the hills around”, says Sumner. “But if you drive round there on a winter night, and I’ve done it, you won’t see a soul on the street”.

According to Deborah Curtis, who met him when he was 16, Ian had a normal bohemian adolescence. Like many teens growing up in the early ’70s, he was fired by David Bowie, who placed in pop culture a whole set of self–destructive references both musical and literary: Jacques Brel, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, William Burroughs. At the time, this seemed like little more than the standard teenage dramatisation of misery: after leaving the King’s School, Curtis went to work every day and, in August 1975, got married. It seemed as though he was settling down.

With hindsight, its now clear that things went deeper. When he was 14, Ian would, like many teens do today, raid the medicine cabinets of anyone they visited, and try out the combination of drugs as a leisure option. In the summer of 1972, there was an ambiguous overdose with his friend Oliver Cheaver, where both boys had their stomachs pumped: overdose or suicide attempt? “I think he wanted o be like Jim Morrison”, says Deborah Curtis. “Someone who’d got famous and died. Being in a band was very important: he was very single-minded about it. He’d always said that he didn’t want to live into his twenties, after 25’. 

“Everyone says Joy Division's music is gloomy and heavy”, says Bernard Sumner. “I often get asked why this is so. The only answer I can give is my answer, why it was heavy for me. I can only guess why it was heavy for Ian, but for me it was because the whole neighbourhood that I’d grown up in was completely decimated in the mid ’60s. I was born and raised in Lower Broughton in Salford: the River Irwell was about 100 yards away and it stank. At the end of our street was a huge chemical factory: where I used to live is just oil drums filled with chemicals.

“There was a huge sense of community where we lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid: we could stay up late and play in the street, and 12 o'clock at night there would be old ladies outside the houses, talking to each other. I guess what happened in the ’60s was that someone at the council decided that it wasn’t very healthy, and something had to go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved over the river into a towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantastic: now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster.

“I’d had a number of other breaks in my life. So when people say about the darkness in Joy Division's music, by the age of 22, I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s this void. For me Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood. It was absolutely irretrievable.

“When I left school and got a job, real life came as a terrible shock. My first job was at Salford Town Hall sticking down envelopes, sending rates out. I was chained in this horrible office: every day, every week, every year, with maybe three weeks holiday a year. The horror enveloped me. So the music of Joy Division was about the death of optimism, of youth. Just before Joy Division was a time of total upheaval for me: it came very early”.

The group took shape. Sumner claims they were always known as Joy Division. Peter Hook disagrees, and for the first few months they were more generally known as Warsaw – after Bowie’s Warszawa. “We had so much aggro then”, says Peter Hook, ‘Most of the musicians in Manchester then were very middle–class, very educated: like Howard Devoto. Barney and I were essentially working class oiks. Ian came somewhere in the middle, but primarily we had a different attitude. We felt like outsiders: it was very vicious and back biting".

Warsaw dithered with drummers until another Macclesfield native, Stephen Morris, joined in summer 1977: “Ian was a year or two above me in the King's School', he ways; “He remembered me because I got kicked out with a couple of friends for drinking cough medicine, and the older boys were advised to go round checking the pupils’ pupils”. The group played the Electric Circus; and recorded a four–song EP, ‘An Ideal For Living’, which showed them moving away from thrash to a more measured, heavier sound. ‘We were just having fun”, says Sumner; “Leaning where to put your fingers on the guitar and what sort of amplifiers to use’.

By the time the record was finally released, they were know as Joy Division – a name taken from the book that inspired the EP's final cut, No Love Lost: Ka–Tzetnik 135633’s House Of Dolls, a pulp nightmare diary of Nazi terror. The sleeve featured drawings taken from the Second World War: a drummer boy, a Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto. "Ian had always been interested in Germany”, says Deborah Curtis, “At our wedding we sang a hymn to the tune of the German national anthem. We went to see Cabaret a dozen times’.

"For me it was about the Second War", says Bernard Summer; "Because I was brought up by my grandparents. They told me about the war, about all the sacrifices people had made so that we could be free; we had a room upstairs with gas masks and sand bags and English flags, tin helmets. The war left a big on me, and the sleeve was that impression. It wasn’t pro Nazi, quite the contrary. I thought, fashionable or unfashionable, what went on in the war shouldn't be forgotten, so that it didn't happen again”. 

It would help to put this period into some kind of perspective. Punk was primarily libertarian, anarchist even, but there was a persistent right–wing trace that came from its opposition to the power politics of the day – the end of consensus socialism. In both English and American avant–garde rock – whether it was The Ramones or Throbbing Gristle – it had become important to say the unsayable, to examine the right–wing, to try to come to terms with the darker side of the human psyche. This is not a wise thing to do in pop culture, which is notorious for flattening out complexities.

Ian Curtis was a bundle of paradoxes; he was a Tory, yet he liked the writing of bohemian authors like JG Ballard and William Burroughs. At the same time as he wrote haunted lyrics and gave mesmeric performances, he was a great practical joker. He could be both a charismatic leader and highly suggestible; he hated confrontation and could be all things to all men. Even the people closest to him will disagree; according to Peter Hook, "Ian was interested in the occult”. Summer says he wasn’t.

During 1978, Joy Division left their naivete behind; they started to get good. In January, they played the infamous Bowie/Roxy disco, Pips; “That was the first time I saw Ian being onstage”, says Stephen Morris. "I couldn’t believe it: the transformation to this frantic windmill”. Their appearance at the chaotic Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge battle of the bands in April brought them to the attention of their future manager, Wythenshawe native Rob Gretton, and their most persistent propagandiser, Tony Wilson.

“Every band in Manchester played that night", Wilson remembers. “I sit down and then this kid in a raincoat comes and sits next to me and goes, You're a fucking cunt: why don’t you put us on television? That was Ian Curtis. At the very end of the night, Joy Division went on and after about 20 seconds, I thought, This is it. Most bands are onstage because they want to be rock stars. Some bands are on stage because they have to be, there’s something trying to get out of them: that was blatantly obvious with Joy Division".

During the spring of 1978, the group recorded an 11–track album for RCA under the auspices of Northern Soul DJ Richard Searling, but they were moving so quickly that it was obsolete almost as soon as it was recorded. “There was suddenly a marked difference in the songs”, says Peter Hook. "We were doing a soundcheck at the Mayflower, in May, and we played ‘Transmission’: people had been moving around, and they all had stopped to listen. I was thinking, what’s the matter with that lot? That’s when I realised that was our first great song’.

Everything was coming together. Rob Gretton took over the group’s management: his first act was to commission a sequence of designs from Better Badges – this was era of the badge as underground communication. Tony Wilson put them on Granada Reports, a local news show (their performance of Shadowplay was overlaid with negative footage from a World In Action documentary about the CIA), and had them as headliners when the new Factory club opened in Hulme. After the group had sweated out their contract with RCA, they went into the studios with Martin Hannett to record what would become the Factory Sample.

“I’d seen them in Salford Tech”, Martin Hannett told me in 1989; “They were really good". It was a very big room, they were badly equipped and they were still working this space, making sure they got into the corners. When I did the arrangements for recording, they were just reinforcing the basic ideas. They were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue. The Factory Sample was the first thing I did with them: I think I’d had the new AMS delay line for about two weeks. It was called digital; it was heaven sent”.

“Joy Division had a formula, but it was never premeditated”, says Bernard Sumner. "It came out naturally. I’m more rhythm and chords, and Hooky was melody. He used to play high lead bass because I liked my guitar to sound distorted, and the amplifier I had would only work when it was full volume. When Hooky played low, he couldn’t hear himself. Steve had his own style which is different to other drummers. To me, a drummer in the band is the clock, but Steve wouldn't be the clock, because he’s passive: he would follow the rhythm of the band, which gave us our own edge. Live, we were driven by watching Ian dance: we were playing to him visually”. 

“Ian used to spot the riffs”, says Peter Hook. ‘We’d jam: he'd stop us and say, That was good, play it again. We didn’t have a tape recorder then: imagine! He spotted ‘Twenty Four Hours', ‘Insight’, ‘She’s Lost Control’ – all of them. If it hadn't been for his ear, we might have played it once and then never again. You didn’t know you’d played it half the time. It’s unconscious, but he was conscious”.

“Ian was a writer”, says Bernard Sumner. “He would always have a file box with him, full of lyrics. He'd sit at home and just write all the time, instead of watching telly. He’d stay up: I don’t know this, I’m just surmising, because he’d come in with reams and reams of lyrics. He never wrote any music but he was a great orchestrator. I’d arrange the songs and we all wrote the music, but Ian would give us the direction. He was very passionate at those moments: if we were writing a song, he’d say, Let’s make it more manic!”

While the ‘Factory Sample’ slowly sold out its 5,000 copies, Joy Division proceeded apace – in traditional industry terms. In late December 1978, they played their first London date, at the Hope And Anchor, Islington. The next month they recorded their first, four–song session for John Peel. In March they did five demos for Martin Rushent, preparatory to their signing to Rushent’s company, Genetic, a subsidiary of the WEA–owned Radar Records. It never happened.

"The more we went into it, the more we realised that it was going to be very difficult to work with these people", says Peter Hook. "Genetic were offering us a lot of money, like, £40,000, which was flattering, but so far out of our comprehension that it didn’t matter. Rob just decided that the to–ing and fro–ing with Tony was a) more interesting, and b) more frustrating, but c) ultimately more rewarding. He decided it was better to work with someone you could walk down and get hold of. Factory, for all its failings, if you had a beef, you could walk in and yell”.

The group were busy recording with Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. When they’d finished ‘Unknown Pleasures’, they took it to Factory. There was no contract, but, as Peter Hook says, "We had a sheet of paper saying that the masters would revert to us after six months if either of us decided not to work with each other. That was it. It was amazing the agreement lasted so well.

This was Joy Division’s first breakthrough: “Unknown Pleasures was our first outing into the real world”, says Bernard Sumner. "I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand", Ian Curtis sings on the opening ‘Disorder’, and the following nine tracks are a definitive Northern gothic statement: guilt–ridden, romantic, claustrophobic. On ‘Interzone’ the group take a Northern Soul riff, N.F. Porter’s Keep On Keepin’ On, but blast off to another place entirely: “Trying to find a way/Trying to find a way/ To get out".

The standout song was 'She’s Lost Control’, a live favourite with its Stooges guitar and swooping bassline, quickly covered by gay disco diva Grace Jones. “It was about a girl who used to come into the centre where Ian worked to try to find work”, says Bernard Sumner. “She had epilepsy and lost more and more time through it, and then one day she just didn’t come in any more. He assumed that she’d found a job, but found out later she’d had a fit and died".

I’d just moved to Manchester the spring, and Unknown Pleasures helped me orient around the city. I reviewed it for Melody Maker in typically over–heated style: “Joy Division’s spatial circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking dream production gloss are one perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of the 19th century – seen gaping like teeth from an orange bus...”

‘Unknown Pleasures’ is one of the strongest debuts ever, defining not only a city but a time. Martin Hannett: “Ian Curtis was one of those channels for the Gestalt: the only one I bumped into during that period. A lightning conductor.” As Biba Kopf wrote in 1993: “No other writer so accurately recorded the corrosive effect on the individual of a time squeezed between the collapse into impotence of trad Labour humanism and the impending cynical victory of conservatism".

The group hated the record. “We played the album live”, says Bernard Sumner; "The music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars. The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we’d drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin had coloured it in for us. We resented it, but Rob loved it, Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the public loved it: we were just the poor stupid musicians who wrote it! We swallowed our pride and went with it”.

There were problems. “Ian was primarily a fun guy, a good laugh”, says Bernard Sumner; ‘But in a weird way. He wasn’t a straight person. Let me start with his moments of intensity, which was when he got frustrated. I remember him having this argument with Rob Gretton at our rehearsal room, TJ Davidson’s. He got so frustrated that he picked up the garbage bucket, stuck it over his head and started running up and down the room, screaming at Rob, and he was just completely mad. He had an explosive personality, but most of the time he was cool. He really was.

“His performance was a manifestation of this frenzy. He was Ian, Mister Polite, Mister Nice, and then suddenly onstage, about the third song in, you’d notice he'd gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart, ripping up the floorboards and throwing them at the audience. Then by the end of the set he’d be completely and utterly manic. Then you’d come offstage and he’d be covered in blood. But no–one would talk about it, because that was our way: we didn’t think he knew why he got himself worked up that way.

"One day we were doing a gig at the Hope and Anchor. I was really ill with ‘flu, and they had to come and drag me out of bed. Every time Steve hit the cymbals the whole room turned upside down: literally, in my head, my eyes turned upside down. It was horrible. There were only about 20 people there. We were driving back home in Steve’s car: I was really ill, shivering, covered in a sleeping bag. Ian just grabbed the sleeping bag and pulled it off. He’d been moaning about the gig, the audience, the sound: he was in a really negative mood.

"So I grab the sleeping bag back, and he grabbed it back again and covered himself with it, and started growling like a dog. It was scary. He suddenly started lashing out, punching the windscreen, and then he just went into a full overblown red state fit, in the car. We pulled over on to the hard shoulder, dragged him out of the car, held him down. Then we did about a hundred miles an hour to the nearest hospital, somewhere near Luton. We were in this horrible casualty ward and the doctor said, You've had a fit; you’d better go and see a doctor when you get back”.

This attack, which occurred in the early hours of December 29, 1978, marked the full onset of Ian Curtis's epilepsy. Throughout this demanding period for the group, Curtis was receiving medical treatment for what was becoming a serious condition: “With Ian it was the full blown grand mal”, says Stephen Morris; “They put him on heavy tranquillisers: the doctor told him the only way he could minimise the risk was by leading a normal regular life, which by that time wasn’t something he wanted to do. He liked to jump around onstage, and to get pissed: it was one of the reasons he got into the band in the first place”. 

The pressures were building up at home, as Deborah Curtis explains: ‘With Joy Division it all came together for him. I told myself at first that it as all part of the act, but it was all wrong. There wasn’t an Ian at home and an Ian in the world, it became like that all the time. The trouble started when my pregnancy began to show: he had that first fit. It sounds awful, but he liked to have the attention. One of the things he liked about me was that I did stand behind him, 100 per cent, whatever he did. When I got pregnant, everybody made a fuss of me, and I think he was a bit jealous”.

Natalie Curtis was born on April 16, 1979. Just over a month later, Ian had the most serious in a series of grand mal attacks, which involved hospitalisation. His solution to the pressures at home was, according to his wife, withdrawal, but there was no escape from the momentum of Joy Division’s success: ‘With being young, you think of yourself as being invulnerable”, says Peter Hook; "We were being driven by this thing called Joy Division, and basically you just did your damnedest to keep it going”.

Unknown Pleasures broke new ground in several ways. In staying with Factory, the group showed that a non–metropolitan, independent label sector was viable. There was Peter Saville’s brilliant, baffling sleeve design. Despite releasing a powerful record full of raging emotions, Joy Division refused to open themselves up any further in print: after a couple of mistakes, they did no interviews. “Rob thought the music was such a beautiful notion that he didn’t want us daft bastards fucking it up for anyone,’ says Peter Hook.

Joy Division were on a roll, constantly writing new songs, some of which are collected on Substance and Still: Something Must Break, Sound Of Music, and a trio of classics – These Days, Dead Souls, the Spectorian Atmosphere. “That was the best track that Martin ever mixed”, says Sumner; “I thought it was beautiful”. In October, they began a 24–date UK tour supporting the Buzzcocks, which enabled them to give up their day jobs. In a break from the tour, Joy Division played their first concert abroad, at the opening of a new arts centre, Plan K in Brussels. It was there that Ian Curtis met Annick Honore and fell in love. “Ian wasn't having a very good time with Deborah”, says Peter Hook; ‘They were married before the group came in, and they had a reasonably normal life. The sad thing about your girlfriends is that you leave them behind. You move on and you're subject to temptations”.

Annick loved him and understood him”, says Tony Wilson. This triangle dominated the last months of Ian Curtis’s life. "I knew something was desperately wrong”, says Deborah; "But I didn’t think it could be that. He was so possessive with me, that it didn’t occur to me that he might go the other way”. The affair resumed during Joy Division's short January 1980 European tour: on his return to the house that he shared with Deborah in Macclesfield, Ian Curtis collapsed after drinking a bottle of Pernod and cutting his wrists. 

At only 23, Curtis was facing one of the most difficult life situations of all: falling in love with another women while he had a child. “I’ve been through it as well”, says Peter Hook; “You do get very confused, and it’s easy to lose your head, especially where kids are concerned”. In March, the group spent two weeks in London’s Britannia Row Studios, recording what would become their second LP, ‘Closer’. Ian stayed with Annick in London, while Deborah had finally found out what was going on.

‘Factory was like a family’, says Deborah; “They’d exclude anyone who wasn’t what they were looking for. I remember when I was expecting Natalie, standing at the door of the Factory, Tony looked me up and down. It was obvious what he was thinking: how can we have a rock star with a six months pregnant wife standing by the stage? It wasn’t quite the thing. Then this glamorous Belgian turned up: she was attractive and free. I don’t blame Ian: most people need a partner and if you exclude that partner you have to find somebody else. It's only natural. He needed someone to look after him".

It’s easy to see now that Ian Curtis’s torment went into the songs: those that didn’t refer to his emotional dilemma were taken from the darker sources of literature – Colony from The Heart of Darkness, Atrocity Exhibition from JG Ballard’s novel – or his own experience. “The Eternal was about a little mongol kid who grow up near Ian”, says Sumner; "He could never come out of the house: his whole universe was the the house to the garden wall. Many years later Ian moved back to Macclesfield and by chance he saw this kid: Ian had grown up from five to 22, but the kid looked the same. His universe was still the house and the garden”.

Ian might have been, as Tony Wilson says, “trancelike” during the sessions but the group remember them with pleasure. “Hooky and I always felt that Martin Hannett did his best stuff when he did it quick”, says Sumner; “We recorded a lot of it by direct injection, straight into the board, but we wanted some real life ambience on it, so Martin put some speakers in the Britannia Row games room. We pumped most of the album out through the speakers and recorded them, to make it sound live”.

"When we heard the lyrics, we knew they were very very good”, says Peter Hook; “They were very open, weren't they? He was telling us a lot about himself, his fears and his doubts, but you were too young and caught up with the excitement: it was like a snowball going downhill. It’s a great shame because you should have been able to just hear it and say, Ian, can we have a chat with you? What’s the matter? But when you're young, you don’t notice things”.

"The mood he was in when he wrote that stuff is a very big question”, says Tony Wilson. “It’s almost as if writing that album contributed to his state: he immersed himself in it, rather than just expressing it”. In many ways, Closer stands as the definitive Joy Division album, not the least because the sheer pleasure of the music – which looks forward to New Order’s electro - buoys up the often bleak lyrics and vocals. It was also the group's most successful record – reaching Number 6, UK in summer 1980 – by which time it had been overtaken by events.

"It ended up with Ian having fits onstage”, says Bernard Sumner. ‘In early April we did two gigs in one night: supporting The Stranglers at the Rainbow, then the Moonlight Club. At the first gig he started dancing, but he didn’t stop at the end of the song. We were trying to stop the song, and he was dancing faster and faster, went into a spin, span into the drums and knocked the kit over. We realised he was having a fit and we had to carry him offstage. By the time we got him to the dressing-room he’d come out of it, and he just broke down in tears. He was so ashamed. We didn’t know what to say, or what to do”.

Peter Hook: “For him to get up there, suffering from epilepsy, perform like that, be exposed, must have been absolutely awful. I think we were to blame for rail–roading him into doing it. He was in a no-win situation: he didn’t want to let us down, he didn’t want to let himself down, and yet was making himself ill. It’s our own weakness, we make ourselves ill. But to have the brains to realise that if you carry on doing it, one day you’re not going to wake up. That takes a lot of guts”.

Three days after the Rainbow concert, on April 7, Ian attempted suicide with an overdose of phenobarbitone. The next night, he was expected onstage, at Derby Hall, Bury: “It was a complete disaster”, says Bernard Sumner. ‘We had to pull Ian out of psychiatric hospital. He came to the gig, couldn’t go on, and Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio went on instead. The crowd freaked, and a full scale riot went on. A lot of people got bottled. Ian saw this and of course thought it was his fault. He just broke down again.

“He was in hospital for another four days. His wife already knew what was going on. He needed to get out, so he stayed at my house for two weeks. During that time I tried to drum into him what stupid thing it was to take an overdose. We came to an agreement. He wanted to leave the band, he wanted to buy a corner shop in Portsmouth or somewhere, he wanted to go off and write a book. We didn't want him to, but we understood his predicament. The agreement was that he wouldn’t do any gigs for a year, we’d just write.

"But around this time, he’d agree to anything he told him. His reaction to a problem had been rage: he was like a human blowtorch and he’d burn you out of his way. Now his other solution was that someone would come along and play God, tell him what to do. You can’t do that with a person's life. We were loath to advise Ian, because what we’d have said, he’d have done it. I remain convinced to this day if someone is going to commit suicide, they’re going to do it, no matter what anybody says to them. Ian was going to do it”.

During April, Deborah Curtis instituted divorce proceedings. Ian stayed with Bernard and Tony Wilson, finally ending up with his parents. He continued with his hospital and therapeutic visits. It was business as usual for Joy Division – some concerts were cancelled, but the group were busy shooting a video for the forthcoming single, Love Will Tear Us Apart, and preparing for their first visit to the US on the nineteenth of May.

“The way they described Ian dying was so far from the way I perceived it that it’s not worth getting annoyed about”, Rob Gretton says in Johnny Rogan’s Starmakers and Svengalis. “There was no great depression, no hint at all. The week before, we went and brought all these new clothes; he was really happy. A lot of his problems were personal: we could advise him, but we couldn’t do anything about it. I wasn’t worried as a manager; I was worried as a friend”.

“I don’t think Ian was worried about the American tour", says Bernard Sumner. “I would have been extremely worried. If we’d agreed that we were going to keep the band together, but we weren’t going to do gigs anymore, how come a month later we were going on an American tour? It wasn’t right. People start getting all the wrong priorities once you start becoming successful. They don’t know when to leave you alone and give you a rest. You need more than one kind of sleep in this profession'.

To the other members of the group there was no indication of what was to come. “If he was depressed, he kept it from us”, says Peter Hook. “On the Friday I drove him home to his parents and we were in the car, laughing away: Yessss! We’re going to America on Monday! Screaming with excitement, so happy. I think he was mood–swinging because of the drugs. When he got of the car and I went home, I could barely contain myself. I was so excited”.

“The Friday night we went out with this lad I used to work with called Paul Dawson", Says Bernard Sumner. “He called himself The Amazing Noswad. he was a psycho: we took him out to observe him. I know it sounds horrible, but we were fascinated by this lad. I was supposed to see Ian the next night, but he rang up and told me he was going to see Debbie. He said he’d meet me the next day, as we were going over to Blackpool to water–ski. But he never turned up”.

On the Saturday, Ian Curtis returned to the Barton Street house he shared with his wife. When Deborah returned from work late in the evening, they had a discussion about the divorce. Deborah returned to her parents: Ian insisted she should. “I’d had enough”, she says know; “I was working so hard and my mum was looking after Natalie. I could have stayed with him that night, but he made it clear he didn’t want me there. I was dead on my feet. I could have woken up the next morning and he’d have done it while I was asleep. I think he’d decided, and was just trying to pick his moment’.

Ian had been watching Werner Herzog’s Stroscek, the plot of which concerns a German musician who travels to America, is swamped by the alien culture, and commits suicide. After Deborah left, it was the early morning of the Sunday the eighteenth. Curtis played Iggy Pop’s The Idiot incessantly. After writing a note to Deborah, he went into the kitchen, put the rope from an overhead clothes rack round his neck, and jumped. Deborah found him the next midday, by which time any attempt at resuscitation was too late.

"I was the first of the group to be told", says Peter Hook. “I was just about to sit down and have my dinner and the phone rang: I’m Sgt. so and so, and I’m sorry to inform you that Ian Curtis committed suicide last night. I went back in, sat down and had my dinner. I didn’t say anything for about an hour. Shock. It was such a huge thing to cope with: I don’t think you ever really come to terms with it”,

"I went water-skiing anyway”, says Bernard Sumner. "I came back to friend’s house and the phone rang. It was Rob. He said I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. Ian’s committed suicide. You mean he’s tried to kill himself? No, he’s done it. And it was like the cymbals at the Hope and Anchor: the whole room just turned upside down. I put the phone down, went and washed my face with cold water. Then I got back on the phone and took it like a man.

“It was the breakdown of his relationship, accentuated by the amount of barbiturates he was taking to subdue his epilepsy. Barbiturates makes you so you’re laughing one minute, crying the next. He’d had a physical breakdown, a relationship breakdown, which caused an emotional breakdown. I came to terms with it straight away, because I could put my reason on why I thought he’d done it. Now I accept these things: if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. Also I don’t really believe it ends there”.

“I went to great lengths to push everything to the back of my mind at first”, says Deborah Curtis. "I threw things away, momentoes I wish I’d kept now. I thought it would help. How can you be angry with someone who’s dead? They aren't there, you can’t shake them. You’re totally impotent: it's horrible. I felt angry with him because he had the last word. Seeing articles that dismissed his death as, ‘oh, he had marital problems’ really annoyed me. He didn’t commit suicide because he had marital problems. He had marital problems because he wanted to commit suicide.

"I think Ian invented scenarios that would come true. Annick could have been anybody: he needed to find justification for doing what he was doing. It was something he talked about from when we met, but as we got older, and it got nearer the time, the more I had the feeling that he hadn’t forgotten about it. But he wouldn’t talk about it: when I tried to once, he actually walked out of the house. I think he enjoyed being unhappy, that he wallowed in it. When we were kids, lots of people were miserable, they grew out of it: I thought Ian would”.

"We all knew quite early that we wanted to carry on”, says Peter Hook. “The first meeting we all had, which was the Sunday night, we agreed that. We didn't sit there crying. We didn’t cry at his funeral. It came out as anger at the start. We were absolutely devastated: not only had we lost someone we considered our friend, we’d lost the group, Our life basically. It isn’t someone I will ever forget: in my studio at home, I sit writing between two massive pictures of Ian. He’s always there, always will be".

“Our first album as New Order, Movement, was really horrible to make’, says Stephen Morris. “We said we had to carry on, but it was a real struggle. I couldn't listen to Movement for ages: making it was hard because Martin took Ian's death harder than we did. He took it really badly. I don't think you notice the day you get over a death like that: I had a dream about Ian just before we made Republic: telling us not to be cruel, which I thought was really odd”.

"Ian made it all more serious", says Tony Wilson. “It made it something that wasn’t just a business, a game that was played. Bizarrely enough, several deaths followed: their US agent Ruth Polski, Dave Rowbotham of the first Durutti Column, Bernard Pierre Wolff, who shot the Closer sleeve. Outside of Ian’s personal family, the worst affected was Martin Hannett: he was an inspirational producer and a remarkable man. When Martin died, I was terribly upset”.

"Suddenly we didn’t have any eyes", says Bernard Sumner. "We had everything else, but we couldn’t see where we were going. I was really depressed after Ian died, very unhappy and disillusioned. I felt that I didn’t have any future. I was listening ta Lou Reed, Street Hassle, really down music. I started smoking draw, and found that electronic music sounded great. Mark Reeder, a friend from Berlin, sent me over records like E=MC² by Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, early Italian disco. I discovered a new quality in music, which was to pep you up: suddenly, this was the new direction.

“With Joy Division, I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of thin air, we were never, any of us, interested in the money it might make. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to, and stirred our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career or any of that. We never planned one single day. I don’t think we were messing with things we should not have done, because our reasons were honourable”. 

All the quotes in italics are from Ian Curtis's lyrics. All the Joy Division albums are available on London Records. The film, The Crow, is premiered on Entertainment; the soundtrack album is on Atlantic Records and includes a version of Dead Souls by Nine Inch Nails. A full Martin Hannett interview is available in Vagabond magazine, Issue 1. Mark Johnson's history of Joy Division and New Order, An Ideal For Living, is published by Omnibus Books. Exorcise 1, Deborah Curtis's memoir of Ian Curtis is due next year by Faber & Faber.