1997 12 Joy Division Uncut

Torn apart

Joy Division and the death of Ian Curtis

Joy Division were the most crucial of all the post-punk bands. But, on the eve of their first US tour, lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. Within a year, they regrouped as New Order to become one of the key acts of the Eighties. Now, two decades on from their live debut, Joy Division release a definitive box set, and original members Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner talk about the rise and demise of Manchester's greatest export before Oasis. By Dave Simpson

Futurama, Queens Hall, Leeds, September 1979. "The world's first science fiction music festival" - in an oversized tramshed reeking of beer and glue. But the future hasn't arrived yet, so people mill around, waiting for it to happen. Suddenly, a besuited 30-ish-year-old who, it turns out, is Granada Television presenter and fledgling record company boss Tony Wilson, emerges onstage to announce "The awesome Joy Division". The awesome who?

A buzz like an electronic storm fills the air as the drummer, Steve Morris - hair as black as his kit - begins to pound a deathly pulse. Ian Curtis starts singing... "We were strangers... who waited TOO LONG!" He seems engulfed in his words. At his side, guitarist Bernard Dicken, looking like a truant schoolboy, lashes out foreboding chords as Curtis' voice increases in tension. The music is unremitting, relentless. Peter Hook places a well-worn boot on the stage monitor as he thrashes out the unforgiving and electrifying bass introduction to "Transmission". Curtis' dancing is intensifying now, charging, pulsating. He's like a demented marionette or a man in flames. The audience are swarming ever closer to the stage and the security men are looking edgy. Occasionally, they cast an eye behind them to see what on earth is provoking the unexpected reaction. The band power into "Dead Souls" and the audience erupts.

The following week, it seems like half of Britain is talking about Joy Division. "Unquestionably the real stars of the night were Joy Division," writes Paul Morley in NME. The band's performance at Futurama had upstaged some of the hippest bands of the day including John Lydon's headliners, Public Image Limited. Their music was exhilarating because it confronted the darkest horrors of the human condition: broken romance, weakness, instability, betrayal, voyeurism and torture. Joy Division courageously kicked their way through doors that were "opened, and shut, then slammed in our face".

Eight months later, it was all over as John Peel broke the news, Ian Curtis had committed suicide, aged 23.

They left behind two LPs, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, as great as any albums ever made. Side two of Closer is as soothing as Mozart, as profound as Bartok, as confrontational as Wagner or The Sex Pistols. Joy Division changed the sound of rock music and all notions of its content, along the way influencing thousands, including U2 (Bono admits Joy Division were their primary influence), Robert Smith's The Cure and - more unlikely - George Michael (Closer is his favourite album). When the surviving members of Joy Division regrouped (With Gillian Gilbert) as New Order, they changed the sound of music once again. But they never quite escaped the shadow of their mythologised past.

“I've often wondered how the fuck we made music so heavy," admits Bernard Sumner now. "the only conclusion I've come up with is that it was something to do with growing pains. Manchester wasn't like it is now. You didn't leave school and go, 'Fuckin' great, I'm gonna go out clubbin', loads of bars. Which you can do in Manchester now. Thanks to us! In those days, when you left school you got a fuckin' shit job which you hated. You grafted, and it rained all the time. Manchester then was the sort of place Morrissey abuses himself about. Mass unemployment. The old factories were coming down. Unoccupied buildings, all the windows smashed in. It was virtually a ghost town. You left school and  went, ‘Oh, God. This is it.’ So I guess the music of Joy Division was (a) a reaction to our environment, and (b) about facing up to our future, which was depressing and frightening. Also, it was a bit like picking up psychological stones, and seeing what worms crawled beneath them."

At the start, there was nothing really world-beating or unusual about the four young men who rehearsed above The Swan public house in Salford. Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner (then Dicken, his stepfather's surname) grew up in the industrial wasteland of Seventies Salford. Hook, a council worker and disillusioned Deep Purple fan, was brusque and laddish; Sumner (a graphic designer and former skinhead scooter boy whose fondness for Motown and Led Zeppelin had been usurped by a love of Iggy Pop) quietly mischievous and resourceful. His ground-floor flat looked out onto a tree laden with condoms and used sanitary towels which people dropped from the windows above. Fed up with people stealing petrol from his motorcycle, he used an electric coil from a lorry to send 43,000 volts of electricity from his bedroom socket surging through the glistening machine. He had no further trouble. Raised by his single mother and grandparents, Sumner’s adolescence was marred by a large incidence of illness and death in and around the family.

Like many in the North West, Bernard and Peter formed a group after seeing The Sex Pistols at Manchester Free Trade Hall in June, 1976. Neither could play an instrument. They wrote their first song “Gutz For Garters", using teach-yourself literature and guitars wired to the needle of Bernard's gran's record player. They eventually made their debut at the Electric Circus on May 19, 1977, supporting The Buzzcocks. Peter Hook remembers glimpsing Pete Shelley watching as his “mind went blank with fear".

The drummer at that gig was one Steve Brotherdale. Over the next few weeks, a succession of sticksmen led eventually to a shy Can/Captain Beefheart fan from Macclesfield, Steve Morris, whose metronomic signatures would be crucial in holding the embryonic sound together. The singer, Lou Reed fan lan Curtis from Macclesfield, had been recruited from an ad, although Hook and Sumner remembered him from punk gigs. When they first met him, he had the word "HATE", writ large upon his jacket.

During 1977, Warsaw (Curtis took the name from Bowie's "Warzawa", from Low) blasted out a rough punk rock that found few friends, although journalist Paul Morley wrote of an “elusive spark of dissimilarity from the newer bands".

Radio One’s Marc Riley remembers Warsaw thus: "Every gig you went to, they seemed to be supporting. Hooky used to wear a croupier's shield, and he had a 'tache. They weren't very good. But they really did look like nobody else, particularly Hooky.”

At the turn of '78, Warsaw (the name clashing with London's Warsaw Pakt) chose a new moniker from the concentration camp book, House Of Dolls, which Curtis owned. The “Joy Division" was the wing of inmates kept as prostitutes for the gratification of SS officers (according to Hook, the alternative was "Slaves Of Venus"). At the band’s very first gig as Joy Division (Pips, Manchester, January 25), Ian played the stark, shimmering sounds of Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express" over the PA as the band went on. This was the first time the rest of the band had heard it.

Soon afterwards, the band released a self-financed EP, An Ideal For Living, recorded at Pennine studios. Hook’s bass had drifted out of tune and he remembers the engineer complaining, calling him an amateur. Although the quality of the record was disappointing, the surging “No Love Lost" (again featuring a quote from the pulp novel) showed considerable promise. The EP was ignored by the London media. Soon afterwards, the band name (coupled with the single’s sleeve imagery of a Hitler Youth drummer boy) would lead to some unwelcome publicity, and the first absurd accusations (that would dog them well into New Order) that the band were “Nazis". The only reality in those accusations was that Curtis - as confirmed by Hook - ‘had a definite interest in the mass hypnotism angle of Hitler”.

“He was interested in the psychology of it all.” explains Sumner now. “We all were. The thing was, we'd all grown up in the post-war era. Like, I lived with my grandparents and there was a room upstairs and it was full of gas masks, tin helmets, flags. In those days. the telly was always showing war films and documentaries. It permeated into your childhood. So when we grew up there was a need to try and understand what the fuck had gone on just before we were born. The world had been at each other's throats. and there was a need to try and understand why.”

Tony Wilson once suggested that the name Joy Division was “making a connection with those oppressed by fascism and a reference to the nature of the pop musician as prostitute”. A nice idea, but it's one now denied by Sumner. He says the name was picked purely to rile people. Especially journalists - who already “hated” the band.

“It was just like, 'Fuck you. We don't need you.’ it was offensive. but the whole punk era was about being offensive. Wearing a dog collar or a ring through your nose - which I never did.

“People did it because it would offend straight people. It was sticking two fingers up at all the stiffs in the world and a rejection of that society. ‘We don’t need your society. we’ve got our own."

Joy Division were outsiders even within punk. The other Manchester groups were usually middle-class slummers, but, conversely, Joy Division's music was progressing far beyond a three-chord thrash. To further distinguish themselves, the band now adopted a more distinctive look: austere, quasi-military, with Scout shirts, pressed trousers, shiny shoes and short hair.

Live, Joy Division looked as though they had stepped out of a black and white film from the Forties. With the band an insular unit, the music became an intuitive means of communication between the four. There was no stage speech and no band chats about the actual tracks. "No language, just sound is all we need know." Curtis sang in "Transmission", written early in 1978. When they debuted this song at a soundcheck in Belle Vue, the other bands on the bill stopped what they were doing and gazed in astonishment.

The immortal JD noise came about partly by accident. Hook would play high notes and bass melodies to hear himself above Morris' driving, staccato drumming. Dicken/Sumner (now using the stage name Albrecht) developed a striking, minimal guitar style. as much through necessity as design.

By this point. the band were rehearsing at TJ Davidson Rehearsal Rooms. Marc Riley, then in The Sirens, recalls that “they used to rehearse like hell. They really did put the time in.”

Together, Joy Division would jam onto an "awful" old tape recorder. which distorted the sound incredibly. “We’d listen back and it was like it had gone through a washing-machine," says Bernard Sumner, “but out of the mush we’d hear one little bit, and make that one little bit into the whole song. I would arrange the song, and Ian would point us in what direction it should go."

Throughout 1978, the “Nazis" did hordes of Rock Against Racism gigs while the music just got better and better. The disturbing 1978 song, “Shadowplay", dared to consider the links between pop performance and public execution.

At this time, the band were beginning to discover the many hidden sides to their charismatic singer. Utterly driven, Ian Curtis was no standard punk rock frontman. Neither was he a standard person. He was a walking dichotomy. He was a lyrical humanist who found it difficult to express feelings in conversation yet was capable of cold cruelty. He read Burroughs and Ballard and voted Tory. His music was inherently ordered and disciplined and yet his own life would become a shambles. He was fiercely possessive of his young wife, his childhood sweetheart, Deborah, yet he would later have an affair.

“Ian Curtis was a person who was very into extremes,” says Sumner. “He wanted to make extreme music. You’d be working on a track and he’d go, ‘Make it more manic!’ He was interested in the mind. He’d read Nietzsche, Jung. His sister, or aunt possibly, used to work at a mental hospital and she’d tell him about the cases there. So he was into extremes of thought. If he got angry, it was extreme, mad anger. He used to get worked up into a funk about pretty daft things.”

Hook and Sumner agree that Curtis could be different things to different people. He kept his life compartmentalised, with private areas hidden from view.

IN DECEMBER, 1978, THE BAND (WHO HAD briefly recorded unreleased tracks for RCA) contributed two songs - “Digital” and “Glass” - to “A Factory Sample”, a double seven-inch of North West acts on the new Didsbury independent, Factory Records. Produced by Martin Zero (later Hannett) whose studio role would became integral to the group, the EP was eulogised by Paul Morley in NME. Raving about the songs’ “blurred depictions of desperation and desolation”, Morley asked, “How much longer before an aware label will commit themselves to this individual group?” Shortly afterwards -although FAC 2 earned them the grand sum of £87 - Factory (funded by Tony Wilson’s life savings) did just that. There was no contract, just a piece of paper saying that if Joy Division served six months notice on the label, all master tapes would revert back to the group. The band also attracted a championing manager, former Rafters DJ Rob Gretton. Everything was falling into place.

But Ian Curtis' life was about to take the first of several extreme twists.

ON DECEMBER 27, THE BAND DROVE BACK FROM their first London gig at Islington’s Hope & Anchor. The gig - poorly attended - passed without incident, apart from Bernard's suffering with flu. But afterwards, with the group relocated to a Greek restaurant, Ian Curtis seemed in a particularly bad mood, unusually complaining about the rice.

The band piled into their battered sky-blue Cortina Mk 3, with Sumner in the back. "I had a sleeping bag over me cos I felt fucking shit,” Bernard remembers. “We got to Luton and Ian started pulling the sleeping bag off me from in the front seat. ‘What are you doin', you twat? Can’t you see I’m ill?’ I pulled it back off him, thinking he was just messing about.  This happened a few times.

“So then he pulled it back, really hard, and I wrapped it round his head and started growling. ‘Grrrrrr-arr-rrr.’ It was obvious something wasn’t right. Then he started punching out. Punching the windscreen. Punching Steve. Punching the side window. Freaking out, basically. So we pulled the car over, dragged him out of the car, the three of us held him down flat on the hard shoulder. It lasted about 10 minutes, and after it he didn’t know what the fuck had happened. It was as if someone had hit him over the head with a cosh.”

The band took their stricken singer to Luton hospital. He was later diagnosed as having epilepsy. The news came as a hammer blow.

People are either born with epilepsy or they tend to develop it in their twenties. Ian’s was a particularly severe case, as bad as it gets. The singer was prescribed large doses of barbiturates, which Sumner claims “really affected his moods”. The doses were large and the tablets were unusually strong. Serious disease and medication were something associated with older people, not a young man of 23. And the drugs didn’t always work. Shortly afterwards, Ian began having fits onstage.

AS CURTIS WAS NO DOUBT PAINFULLY AWARE, the lifestyle of a rock’n'roll band (late nights, stress, drinking) is at best unsuited to, at worst downright dangerous for, someone with an epileptic condition. The band would have constant battles with lighting engineers to stop them using flashing lights. Hence another cute irony and strange little twist - the infamous Joy Division stage show of blank, stark white light. As for the music . . . “The rhythm used to trigger it off,” says Sumner.

Basically, what was making Ian Curtis and Joy Division so great was actually starting to destroy him. At this point in the story, as myths and legends start to blur, the “truth" appears stranger than fiction. Deborah Curtis insists that Ian studied epilepsy years before he developed it, a theory confirmed by Sumner. Furthermore, Curtis did some work at a rehabilitation centre, finding jobs for people with mental problems.

“There was a girl who used to come in every week,” explains Bernard, “and he really liked her. Not in a sexual way or anything, he just thought she was really nice. He was a nice guy, Ian. Bit of a nutter, but he was a really nice guy. He really liked this girl, and one week she stopped coming in. His superior just said, ‘Oh, her epilepsy got worse and she had a fit and she died during the fit.”

The effect of this news on the newly epileptic Curtis isn’t hard to imagine. But it provided him with subject matter and inspiration for one of Joy Division’s first classics, the ravaging, hypnotic warped disco of “She’s Lost Control”.

AS A SONGWRITER, CURTIS was deeply fascinated by life’s failures. The funereal “The Eternal” (on Closer), was written about a Down’s Syndrome boy whom Ian had grown up nearby in Macclesfield. When Ian returned to the town as an adult, the “boy”’s world was still his back garden. Hence the lyric, “My view stretches out from the fence to the wall. ”

“Ian was interested in mental illness,” opines Sumner, “but from a sympathetic not a voyeuristic point of view. I don’t know if he realised deep inside he had some mental problems himself. Cos he’d never get that personal.”

In his lyrics, he did. Mancunians - and northerners generally - are renowned for being taciturn. But, back then, as Sumner puts it. “We weren’t part of the caring, sharing world. If you had a problem, you fucking sorted it out. Or went to a doctor."

More curiously, Curtis’ frenetic dancing seemed to consciously describe epileptic spasms. When Joy Division appeared with The Jam on BBC2’s Something Else, there were many complaints from viewers believing Curtis was on drugs. “He hadn’t even had a drink," sighs Sumner. But if you look at his eyes on that video, he looks like he’s somewhere else.”

Curtis “danced" in this fashion for over a year before he developed epilepsy. “You like to think he was just absorbed in the music.” says Bernard. "Did we talk about his illness? Gosh, did we?” A pregnant pause. “You got the impression he didn’t want to talk about it. I think it embarrassed him, yeah, especially after it started happening in public. Cos people’d come up. I remember some girls actually saying, ’Are you the singer that has fits?' I felt like fucking killing ’em."

Ian's wife, Deborah - increasingly excluded from the band's inner circle - was unaware of her husband's onstage problems. Peter Hook has another disturbing reminiscence. “We d find him fitting in the broom cupboard after some gigs." he says. “People’d walk in and say, ‘That bloke's possessed by the Devil.’”

PERHAPS FUELLED BY EVENTS WTTHIN THE GROUP, the spread of 1979 - the year of Thatcher's victory. Labour's collapse and a period of upheaval within the nation as well as the group - saw Joy Division's music progress further towards their hallmark mournful but confrontational sound. In April. Curtis became a father. In June, the band released their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, which proved a high watermark for rock. Shaped by Hannett’s enigmatic production, which provided a lasting framework for Hook's chiming bass and Curtis’ stern, harrowing, yet oddly tender vocals, the album included some of Joy Division’s finest songs: the rigorous “Shadowplay”. the esoteric “Wilderness” and the courageous, if profoundly sad. “New Dawn Fades".

Unknown Pleasures explored the murky waters between an idyllic past ("I remember when we were young") and a myriad of uncharted. disturbing, futures. “A loaded gun won’t set you free/So you say. " The album was famously clad in Peter Saville's potent sleeve, from an illustration chosen by Bernard of the intergalactic scream of a dying star. The album received rave reviews and sold steadily but well.

Joy Division upped the ante several times during the summer of 1979. August saw the live debut at London’s Nashville of the staggering "Atmosphere", written on a Woolworth’s plastic organ. Shortly after Futurama, the “Transmission" single achieved sales levels to alarm the major labels. In October. Joy Division toured Britain supporting The Buzzcocks. The tour was a great success, with the band not only gamering widespread exposure and acclaim but also - according to most reviewers — blowing The Buzzeocks offstage night after night. By now. Joy Division had attracted a sizable cult following. Like the band, the fans looked different from everybody else, their attire a curious mix of leather jackets, long raincoats, neatly pressed shirts and brogues. But even with recognition the band were desperately short on finance. During the Buzzcocks tour, Joy Division were each on £2.50 a day. The Curtises couldn’t even afford a telephone. Within months, Joy Division would be offered a million dollars from WEA in America.

Because the band (who couldn’t always afford hotels) were so frequently driving between towns such as Leeds, Bradford, Preston and Manchester, Hook and Morris were both hauled in by West Yorkshire Police on suspicion of being - incredible as it may sound - the Yorkshire Ripper.

"l was pulled in and said I was in a band, so that was all right," remembers Peter Hook. “But then they got Steve, who used to drive the other car. And Steve - being nervous Steve - totally lost it and the coppers were having a celebration. They were goin', ‘Aw, bloody ’ell, we’ve got him here, lads!’ And they banged him up in the local nick. His parents had to come and bail him out. He was absolutely petrified. Wild times they were!"

The Buzzcocks tour was also a period of much light relief. The two bands would indulge in highly comic “japes” aimed at each other, involving mice, maggots, snare drums covered with talcum powder and hotel doors with hinges unscrewed. However, Ian was still struggling with his illness. When the tour arrived at Leeds University, Curtis had to be helped from the stage.

ON OCTOBER 16, 1979 - DURING A BREAK IN THE Buzzcocks tour - Joy Division appeared at a special concert at Plan K in Brussels, with author William Burroughs. It was a crucial turning point. Not only did Ian meet his literary hero (who, upsetting the singer, told him to “ Fuck off”), he also met the young Belgian woman who was to become his mistress. 

Annik Honore worked for Crepescule Records. She may also have moonlighted as - or even impersonated - a journalist. Bernard Sumner remembers her following the band back to London to “interview Ian. I think it was at a gig or something.”

In her book, Touching From A Distance, Deborah Curtis refers to Annik Honore as “very glamorous". Peter Hook remembers her differently. “She was very tomboyish. Very worldly, clever. Maybe slightly older than Ian.” The effect on Curtis was curious. He became “docile, and domestic”.

“Everyone - I thought, rather too cruelly - took the piss out of him,” reveals Sumner. “Bit over the top, really. Practical jokes. I dunno, there did seem to be a - dare I say it - certain jealousy between the band. In a jokey kind of way. But there were a few digs at her. Like, she was a vegetarian and Ian wouldn’t eat meat in front of her. We thought that was a bit pathetic. Little things.”

Ten days after Curtis met Annik Honore, the band debuted “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, an immensely moving song about the gradual breakdown of his marriage. Cue another strange twist. The Piccadilly Radio session version of "Atmosphere” - recorded as “Chance” four months before Curtis met Honore - seemed to anticipate an illicit coupling: “Rules are broken/False emotion."

“I think he was spinning a tale, in the way wordsmiths do,” ponders Peter Hook. “When you write lyrics, sometimes you write about things you want to do as if you’ve done them. It is like leaving a trail. So maybe those words were self-prophesies. He was a very, very clever man, Ian. But in his personal life he was just as daft and messy as anyone else. 

Gradually, Annik Honore infiltrated the Joy Division inner sanctum. A press officer now working for a major label and then employed by the Psychedelic Furs recalls that Honore and Curtis would often show up at Furs gigs together. "They were obviously very keen on each other," he recalls.

The band, however, weren’t overly keen on the situation. "I think if you get any band member, especially the singer, who falls in love with a girl or goes off with someone, you’re always gonna get the Yoko Ono factor,” muses Sumner. Bernard - as someone on good terms with Ian’s wife, Debbie - tried hard not to shoulder Ian’s guilt.

"My attitude was that it was Ian’s life. I’m sure Debbie would readily agree with me, but you could not control Ian. You couldn’t turn round to him and say, ‘Look, what you’re doing, stupid? You’ve got a kid, you’ve got a wife.’ Because he’d just blow. He’d blow and fucking start throwing chairs around, start banging his head around and running around with a waste paper basket over his head! Which he has been known to do. But he’d react, probably in that way, and then a few days later he’d ask you what he should do about it.”

Both Bernard and Peter agree that Ian felt extreme guilt. Whether by accident or design, Curtis' life was falling apart.

"You just got the feeling that something was gonna happen,” says Sumner. "He was in a state of confusion, but he’d engineered that state of confusion. He wasn’t an incredibly logical person, really.”

FOLLOWING A BRIEF EUROPEAN TOUR IN January, 1980 (where Joy Division were accompanied by Annik Honore), Ian Curtis returned home. Deborah found him the next morning asleep, holding a knife, his chest cut to ribbons. In front of him was a slashed Bible open at a page referring to “Jezebel”.

Bernard Sumner remembers the incident as if it were yesterday: “He came into rehearsals and we saw some marks on his arms. He didn’t slash his wrists, though. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Oh, I was writing lyrics last night. I woke up this morning and I’d slashed myself with a knife. I don’t remember anything about it.’ He had horizontal cuts across his chest and his stomach, and his arms. Quite deep gashes with a knife. He just says he woke up covered with them. I didn't think that was a suicide attempt, though. It was more self-mutilation. I guess he knew more than he was telling us.”

Curtis’ lyrics took on several new and startling dimensions. They were profound, searingly revealing, (tales, or so it seemed then) about his personal situation and burgeoning confusion. On “Passover” (debuted in Paris, December 18, 1979), Curtis sang of, “The crisis I knew had to come/Destroying the balance I'd kept. ” Surely this line, or this song, refers to the increasingly treacherous tightrope he was walking between Debbie and Annik.

Peter Hook is unconvinced: “He wrote more about his life with Debbie. Annik was just a diversion. Basically, she came at a time when he needed loving cos he’d fallen out of love. His marriage was breaking up. I don’t think he was in love with [Annik]. He didn’t treat her very well. But then, he didn’t make a good job of separating from his wife. He didn't make a good job of the way he juggled his career against it all. When you look at his lyrics you think, ‘Crikey, this guy knows what’s going on.’ But in real life he couldn’t deal with things.”

Sumner concurs: “It’s unusual for someone to put such personal details into songs. I wouldn’t like to get that personal. But also to have such problems at such a young age was pretty fucking unusual. ’

The sheer maturity of Curtis' lyrical insights was astounding. His language was full of fascinating visions and shattering experiences. Ian Curtis was a 23-year-old lad writing like a 75-year-old man.

More perplexing still are the earlier versions of the songs themselves. Sometimes, between a song's live debut and the final recording, Ian would hone his words, obviously to make them better, but sometimes - perhaps - to make them less easy to understand. to cover his tracks. Further analysis of some of the original versions throws up some interesting distinctions. The Central Sound demo of "Transmission", for example (July, 1979), offers “Staring at the mirror . . . /Look into the future to see what might have been."

Bernard Sumner: “There is a theory that he planned suicide all the time. I wouldn’t know because I didn't know him before the group. But I was surprised when I got interviewed for Debbie’s book and she told me that he'd tried to commit suicide before.’ In 1972, Curtis and a friend took an overdose of Largactyl, a heavy psychiatric drug. “See, Largactyl’s real slap-you-down stuff,’ says Bernard. “But was that planned or an accident? Ian might have had suicidal tendencies. But, then again, you know what kids are like: ‘Great. We’ve got some drugs. Let’s neck 'em.' Could have been just that.’

Similarly, Deborah's revelation that the teenage Ian was fascinated by the Jim Morrison/James Dean school of dying young hardly makes him unique among youngsters. On the other hand, as Sumner explains, “Everything that Ian was into he took deathly seriously. There were no half measures.”

DURING MARCH, 1980 CURTIS PLUNGED himself into the recording of “Love Will Tear Us Apart" at Strawberry Studios. Prior to the sessions, Tony Wilson had lent him some Frank Sinatra records, explaining that the emotion came through spreading a syllable rather than every syllable being a single note. Curtis’ singing on the record has an awesome, eerie, dreamlike quality. Shortly after finishing the song (and B-side “These Days”, used in Basquiat), Joy Division decamped to Britannia Row in London for the recording of their second album and masterpiece, Closer.

“We'd stay up all night," recalls Bernard of the sessions. “Gosh, we'd work some weird hours. I used to sleep in the control room, and at night you got a weirder atmosphere, so we got on a really weird tip.' Sumner enjoyed being in London and the unusually pleasant studio surroundings. Hooky recalls the sessions as a very “intense" time. Peter’s bass playing - always a barometer of the group's mood - had assumed a more mournful quality, best exemplified by the song, “24 Hours". As for Curtis, Deborah has described the singer at this time as being in a kind of “trance state". “I think he was, yeah," agrees Bernard." I think that the lyrics contributed to his state and they sort of fed each other. It was a vicious circle. He was seeing Annik at the time. He seemed a troubled man. More troubled than usual.

“I remember one night during Closer,“ he goes on. “I went out into the rest room, and he’d cut his head open. I said, 'Have you had a fit, Ian?’ He went, 'No. I just banged my head on the stairs. But I do feel weird.' He seemed depressed. He said, 'I feel like there's a big whirlpool and I’m being sucked down into it and there’s nothing I can do.’ And then he said, 'It’s really weird. I’m writing the lyrics really quick. I’m writing them all the way through from beginning to end, and they don't need rewriting or editing. It's really strange, it's like they’re writing themselves.’ I think it was coming to a head. I think he knew that after recording he was gonna have to deal with the situation of his wife and his girlfriend. He had to make a decision and he wasn’t looking forward to it."

Despite the difficult choices facing Curtis, there was some light relief during this period. Shortly after the Closer sessions, somebody - probably roadie Terry Mason - had acquired a pornographic film featuring two buxom German ladies and a couple of lively eels. There was a gasworkers’ strike on, and Terry suggested showing the film as a gesture of solidarity with the picket line. Thus, Joy Division's hallowed rehearsal room was transformed into a sleazy cinema. However, the band had forgotten that Ian had been spending the day with an upmarket journalist from a French magazine. When Ian and the journalist walked into “rehearsals”, the pair were dumbfounded. Bernard recalls the scene with amusement.

“There’s about 15 gasworkers in there and these fuckin’ women and these eels! This journo just went, 'Zees is where you rehearse? You do zees every day?!’ Ian was like [clenches teeth], ‘Fuckin’ hell. What are you fuckin’ doing?!’"

With the journalist appalled, the rest of Joy Division fell about laughing.

IAN HAD HIS MOST SERIOUS SEIZURE AT A GIG with The Stranglers at the Rainbow on April 4,1980. According to Sumner, “he just never stopped dancing.” Even when they’d finished the gig.

“He started spinning round and went flying into the drum kit. He was fitting onstage and we carried him off, still fitting. We carried him off through the backstage liggers, everyone staring, and we literally had to lock him in a room. We didn’t want anyone there. And he just broke down completely. I think he just thought, ‘I can’t carry on doing this.' I think he wanted to give up then. He wanted to leave the band.”

An hour later, Curtis - ever the trooper - was onstage at the Moonlight, in front of Annik, managing five numbers before being carried off. On April 7, Curtis took an overdose of Phenobarbitone. The band assumed it was a cry for help and rallied round, with Ian staying at Bernard’s house for two weeks. Curtis, however, had another shock for the guitarist. “He said, ‘It wasn’t a cry for help. I took the tablets and realised I didn’t have as many as I thought. I remembered that if you don’t take enough it won’t kill you but you’ll get brain damage.' He said that’s what happened. I thought it was bravado, but now I think he'd definitely tried to do it. It was in him to do it."

The band - very worried but thinking Curtis just needed help - got the singer a psychiatrist, and he spent the day in a mental hospital. There was talk of a year’s hiatus, but an American tour was booked for the next month and four years' work was just corning to fruition. That evening, April 8, the band were booked to perform in Bury. “He wasn't well enough,” rues Sumner. ‘He was really ill. We shouldn’t have dragged him out of hospital."

After two songs, Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio took over from Ian. Fuelled by the antics of some local skinheads, the audience rioted. “Loads of people got injured,” says Sumner. “And Ian was like, ’Oh, no, it’s all my fault.’ He was twice as bad then. He was in tears.”

A week after the Bury gig, Ian was blacking out at Derby Ajanta. He moved in with his parents as Deborah filed for divorce.

"The relationship with Debbie, there were loads of mistakes,” comments Hook. "She dragged him back to his roots. He didn’t want to go back to Macclesfield. But everyone makes those mistakes.”

ON MAY 2, 1980, JOY DIVISION APPEARED AT Birmingham University in what was to be their final concert. During the gig, the band debuted a new song, “Ceremony", but Ian had to be helped offstage during the encore of “Digital”, the first song they’d ever recorded for Factory Records.

Was the circle finally complete? Bernard Sumner recalls - only half jokingly - that manager Rob Gretton dispensed with the cheap tape recorder they normally used to record gigs and hired a 16-track. “He must have known something was gonna explode.”

Following the gig, the band laboured over another new song, the last they’d write with Ian. Among Curtis’ lyrics for the serenely powerful “In A Lonely Place” are the words “Hangman looks round as he waits/Cord stretches tight, then it breaks."

“Ian came into rehearsals for one or two days,” recalls Sumner. “And he just sang these words. I don’t think they were properly considered, finished lyrics. I think they were just off the top of his head." 

The band taped it, and the performance with Ian makes a ghostly appearance in the forthcoming Heart And Soul boxed set.

After rehearsals, Hook dropped the singer off at his parents’ in New Moston and the band made excited plans for their highly anticipated trip to the States. 

“We were screaming with delight in the car cos we were going to America,” recalls Hooky. “I went, ‘See you on Sunday.’ He said, ’See you on Sunday. Yeah!” 

That was the last Peter Hook saw of Ian Curtis.

ON THE EVENING OF MAY 18, IAN RETURNED TO the house he’d shared with Deborah on Barton Street to watch a subtitled film, not wanting to bore his father at home. Sumner - again only half jokingly - describes Barton Street as “a really weird place. An odd, vibeless street. Cold feeling in the house. Barton Street would make anybody want to commit fucking suicide!" Ian sat up all night. He watched Herzog’s Stroszek, about a German artist who goes to America, becomes lost in the frightening New World, has to choose between two women and commits suicide. Ian played Iggy Pop’s bleak The Idiot, drained a bottle of whisky and wrote a long, loving, rambling letter to his wife. By the time he’d finished it, the sun had come up. He then went into the kitchen and quietly hanged himself. It was the final act of a brilliant but desperate man. Curtis’ suicide validated his lyrics and ensured he could never be questioned about them.

In death, Curtis had ensured the immortality and legendary status his band's music would have brought to him in life. Soon afterwards, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Closer slayed the critics and conquered the charts.

“I’ve thought about Ian’s death countless times ' says Bernard Sumner now. “It could have been his epilepsy, that he didn't want to go on with it. It could have been that he couldn't face his relationships

crumbling. It could be that the tablets he was on for the epilepsy affected his mood so much and they really did. He'd be crying one minute, laughing the next. Those tablets really did affect his personality. It could be the fact, reading Debbie's book, that he was a suicidal personality. We don’t know. I tend to think it was a combination of those things corning together at the same time. ”

For Peter Hook, it was a terrible and avoidable shock. 'In many ways, it was so obvious.' he says. “These days, at least, they’d say. Right, you're going in hospital and you’re not coming out until you’re right.’ Then it was, ’Here’s a few pills, son. Try and cope with the bloody group.’ We lost him, and it was a mistake. It could have been stopped.” 

The more you try to shine a light on the myth, the more shrouded in darkness it becomes. “There is a punch line nobody knows about,' says Peter Hook, darkly. 'I’ll tell you one day, when you’re no longer writing about Joy Division. I’ll tell you one day ... the thing that made him go over the edge.“

IN THE MEANTIME, THE MUSIC IS STILL HERE. 

“I listen to Joy Division now and it’s hugely atmospheric and powerful," says Peter Hook. 'There was a lot of me trying to break away from my life, and Bernard from his. When we were together in the group, we were very, very serious. Cos we were serious about breaking out. Ian was most serious of all. 

“It’s interesting to me that people still play that music to each other. Students, young kids, it’s got a power that seems to open people's lives up. Ian left a legacy that lasts to this day. All right, he couldn't do it himself, but he left music that still gives hope to loads of people."

Bernard Sumner has his own perspective on the music and meaning of Joy Division, and, in particular, Ian Curtis.

“The one thing that I would say about Ian Curtis is that his ambition wasn’t - as many singers' ambition is today - to get on Top Of the Pops and be famous. That wasn't it. He had something to express. It wasn't a show. It wasn't an act. He wasn't seeking attention. Ian Curtis was the real thing. 

“And that's the only real thing I know for sure about him."

Heart And Soul is released by London on December 8

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SIDEBARS

THE PRODUCER

Martin Hannett, conjuror of atmospheres to Joy Division and New Order

‘As soon as you step into the north side of Manchester, you're in a very science-fiction, industrial landscape. I was struck years ago by a room full of air compressors at the Ferranti factory which was banging out this four-in-the-bar, industrial bass drum rhythm. I just stood in the centre of the room for hours.’
(Radio One, September 1979)

‘It's all about drum sounds. If the bass drum isn't there, than if you try to dance to it you'll fall over.’ (Piccadilly Radio, 1982)

Martin Hannett died in 1991

THE ENGINEER

Chris Nagle engineered Unknown Pleasures, “Transmission" and “Atmosphere" with Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios

‘MARTIN could be very awkward in the studio. He had various methods to keep the band out of the way, to keep the creative process his own. Sometimes he'd go to sleep under the desk to create a state of panic.

Then he'd just impose his will on people and they'd go back into the studio really wound up. He was clean-ish at this point, drug-wise. His “plan", as he used to call it, was a “sonic hologram". It was something he was developing, layering sounds and reverbs. When Unknown Pleasures came out, people commented that the drums and bass were really loud, which at the time was a different style, especially for a “rock" band. Martin was always contrary.

Unknown Pleasures was recorded very live in five days. Strawberry was tiny but it was perfect. Like that lift noise on "Insight". Martin just said, “Stick a mic on the shaft and wind the tape back a bit, hit record." And he said to Ian, “Get in the lift, go down, come back up and that'll do it." And it did. We used to record everything, cos mistakes often turned into these little tricks. There's a bit on there where we've got him lighting a match, and Martin just went, “Keep it". One "I Remember Nothing", you’ve got Rob Gretton smashing cups where the bins used to be. Ian had a ritual when it came to the vocals. He'd listen to the whole tune once, in silence, then go back in and do the take. Another odd thing was that Ian had sheets with his lyrics on but he always recorded with the lights off. The words were well in his head.'

Chris Nagle is currently recording with Manchester band Gabrielle's Wish

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THE MUSICIAN

Vini Reilly's Durutti Column played with Joy Division several times. Their 1982 album, LC, features ‘The Missing Boy', about Ian Curtis

"I WAS first mesmerised by Ian when I saw Warsaw and even then I thought he was a more charismatic frontman than Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop. Later, we got to the point where we were talking about more than the weather and he was just a special bloke. An amazing guy. Not to dismiss the rest of the band, but he fascinated me. Obviously, I was very, very upset when Ian died. It was awful, beyond the hype. There’s lots of things that have been said about Ian's death, such as Tony saying it was the best thing that ever happened to him. The journalist [Nick Kent] later admitted he made that up, cos it makes good copy, but that never gets printed.

Tve lost a few friends but there have been reasons why they’ve died, such as lifestyle. But, with Ian, I always felt he didn’t go out at the right time. It was nobody’s fault, just that at that point epilepsy was treated with barbiturates. Nobody knew what else to do. The barbs change people’s personality. You lose sense of reality. That’s what happened and he got further and further out, and so far out he couldn’t get back. But the real Ian was a beautiful guy. Funny, normal, and like lots of great people he had no idea that what he was doing was great.

‘Untimely death is a difficult one to deal with. So many people were hurt by it but he had no choice. There was no solution. I spent two hours on the phone with him after he’d attempted suicide with the overdose. I spoke to him about everything and I knew I had no answer. I wouldn’t bullshit him and he wouldn’t have accepted bullshit. It was his own nightmare. It was a collision of circumstances, but the biggest factor of all was that he was given barbiturates. The epilepsy was getting worse - would have continued to get worse - and he’d suffered enough. People should respect his decision because he was in the best position to decide what to do.

‘I still miss him and the world misses him. Everyone says New Order made it cos there was this big cult thing with Ian, but, had Ian lived, they would have been 10 times as big. He was the greatest lyricist and frontman. He was just astonishing. If we do have a planet left in a thousand years time, his stuff will still be looked at and will have stood the test of time. There isn’t much music and certainly not many lyrics that you can say that about. But he is the one that didn’t make it.

‘He is the missing boy.’

There was a boy, I almost knew him/A glance exchanged made me feel good/Leaving some signs, now a legend/ Watched with obsession, some accidental beautyI Trying to capture as the light begins to fail/The dream is better... but the end is always the same ’

(Excerpts from ‘The Missing Boy’)

Vini Reilly is preparing his next album and winning the battle with his own long-term physical and mental problems

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THE RECORD COMPANY

Factory boss Tony Wilson

‘I THINK Joy Division would have made it without Factory because there is an inevitability about talent and they were geniuses. But it would have been different, undoubtedly.

'Bob Dylan put The Beatles and Woody Guthrie together. Elvis Presley put country and western and rhythm and blues together.

‘I knew Joy Division were one of the greatest bands in history but I never understood what they did. Then about five years ago Barney was on Radio One and he explained it. Rock music had got very pompous and horrible and punk stripped it down back to the basics again and was fantastic. But what was expressed in punk was “Fuck you." Sooner or later someone was going to use the instrumentation of punk and that simplicity to express something more complex. That was precisely what Joy Division did. They used punk to orchestrate more complex emotions. Punk said “Fuck you." Joy Division basically said “I’m fucked."

‘If you listen to “Shadowplay", there are moments where the lyrics show that there’s a whole other area to be achieved. That was what they did and they were the number one band. Just like it was the Pistols, then The Clash; it was Joy Division, then U2. And that’s how they moved history forward.’

Tony Wilson is working with what are apparently the next in the Joy Division/ New Order /Happy Mondays lineage of great Factory bands, The Space Monkeys

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THE JOURNALIST

Jon Savage moved to Manchester in 1979 and wrote about Joy Division on several occasions. Two years ago, he assisted with Deborah Curtis’ book

'I CAME across Joy Division in 1977 at the last night of the Electric Circus. They were Warsaw then. They weren’t very good but there was an urgency that I found fascinating and compelling. By the time I moved up, Joy Division were the hot, hot, hot local band. I saw Manchester through their eyes in that the music instantly clicked with me. My song was “Autosuggestion” - very long, dreamlike, spacey, quite psychedelic in a threatening way. And that was what Manchester was like.

'I was more shocked about Ian’s death than when John Lennon died, it affected everybody very badly. Groups like A Certain Ratio and Section 25, who were coming up in Joy Division’s slipstream and were actually very good, suddenly had a real problem. ‘For me, Joy Division piss over every group today. I mean, you put up Joy Division against Primal Scream and you just laugh. There wasn’t any of that pandering to markets and looking over your shoulder crap that bands do now. They were wonderfully self-contained. They didn’t “hang out” and make arseholes of themselves. And they rock, they make you wanna move.

‘Joy Division had an edge. You never knew what they were gonna do. And Ian would launch himself into the void in every performance. They were casting spells.’

Jon Savage has written a number of books on punk and rock and is currently putting together a retrospective album of music by the dlsco/electro pioneer, Giorgio Moroder

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THE ALBUMS

UNKNOWN PLEASURES 

(June 1979) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

THE beginning of Curtis and Co's voyage - “To the centre of the city where all roads meet waiting for you” (“Shadowplay”) - is a key lyric in that it articulates the feel and atmosphere of Unknown Pleasures: late-night urban sprawl, sodium lights, cars flashing by, walking in hope and fear towards an unseen future.

Overnight, the album changed the sound and style of rock. Although rooted in punk, Unknown Pleasures was a negative, inverse image of that style. The bass and drums took the lead, the minimal, clipped guitar rejected rock'n'roll shapes and posturing in favour of those most un-rock’n'roll traits -honesty and humanity.

Unknown Pleasures has a physicality, a torque, that even the most hi-powered dance music can’t touch. Nothing sounded like this before, and nothing has since.

CLOSER (June 1980) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

IMPLAUSIBLY enough, the superior follow-up. Although Unknown Pleasures featured synthesisers, Closer embraced them to create the most emotional music ever recorded. The band’s physical sound - exemplified by the pulverising “Colony” - had gained an angularity, a starkness, while something like “Isolation” hinted at the electro-bounce to come. Lyrically, Ian Curtis asserted his uniqueness as a writer, one whose chosen metier just happened to be rock.

Closer remains untouchable, partly because of the circumstances of its recording, but also because Joy Division were working without the constraints of most modern bands. This is not music aimed at Radio One or MTV but at somewhere deeper within the soul.

Nevertheless, on its initial release it sold 120,000 copies. Side two - “Heart And Soul”, “24 Hours”, “The Eternal” and “Decades" - is true modem classical music. It describes a landscape that is twilit, icebound and threatening, yet unavoidably compelling.

STILL (September 1981) ★ ★ ★ ★

RELEASED in 1981 and designed originally to beat the bootleggers, Still is a flawed but compelling collection of outtakes, leftovers and bona fide JD classics (“Dead Souls”, “The Sound Of Music”). It also features the entire last gig at Birmingham.

SUBSTANCE (July 1987) ★ ★ ★ ★

ANOTHER compilation, this time emphasising Joy Division’s underrated and - sadly - unfulfilled potential as a singles group. Includes stunning, rarely heard tracks such as “Autosuggestion” and “From Safety To Where" - psychic hi-fi from Fast Product’s Earcom 2 Various Artists mini-LP.

HEART AND SOUL

The new Joy Division box set in full

Compiled by the surviving members of the original band and Jon Savage, author of the punk history, England's Dreaming, Heart And Soul is the definitive Joy Division compilation and includes many previously unreleased tracks. The first two CDs feature the outtakes and single releases that were more randomly brought together on the Still and Substance compilations and present them alongside the Unknown Pleasures and Closer albums. The third CD has further outtakes, demos, radio sessions and previously unheard rehearsal recordings. The fourth CD features previously unreleased live material, including 11 tracks recorded in Manchester, shortly after the release of Unknown Pleasures. The tracks recorded in Bournemouth are from one of the final concerts of the October - November, 1979, UK tour on which Joy Division supported The Buzzcocks.

‘They were recorded in this place called Graveyard, ironically enough, with Martin Hannett," Peter Hook recently told Melody Maker about the recently rediscovered tapes of Ian Curtis singing “Ceremony" and “In A Lonely Place”.

‘We’d forgotten about the whole thing. When I moved house, I was looking through cassettes, I put the last one in, a real old, crappy tape, and it had Ian singing “In A Lonely Place" and “Ceremony”.’

Asked how it felt to unexpectedly hear Curtis’ voice. Hook replied: ‘Very strange - “This will sell lots more copies of the box set." No, seriously, I was very upset and very touched.’

The full track listing for Heart And Soul is:

CD1: UNKNOWN PLEASURES PLUS 

Digital [October 1978] • Glass • Disorder [May 1979] • Day Of The Lords • Candidate • Insight • New Dawn Fades • She’s Lost Control • Shadowplay • Wilderness • Interzone • I Remember Nothing • Ice Age [October 79] • Exercise One [April 79] • Transmission [July 79] • Novelty • The Kill [April 79] • The Only Mistake * Something Must Break [July 79] • Auto Suggestion [April 79] • From Safety To Where

CD2: CLOSER PLUS

She’s Lost Control [12 inch version, March 1980] • Sound Of Music • Atmosphere [October 79} • Dead Souls • Komakino [March 80] • Incubation • Heart And Soul • Twenty Four Hours • The Eternal * • Decades • Atrocity Exhibition • Isolation • Passover • Colony • Means To An End • Love Will Tear Us Apart [A side] • These Days

CD3: STUDIO RARITIES AND UNRELEASED TRACKS 

Warsaw [December 1977) • No Love Lost • Leaders Of Men • Failures • The Drawback * [May 78] • Interzone * [RCA Demo] • Shadowplay * [RCA Demo] • Exercise One * [February 79] • Insight * (Genetic Demo, March 79] • Glass * [Genetic Demo] • Ice Age * [Genetic Demo]  • Transmission * [RCA Demo] • Walked In Line * [April 79]  • These Days [June 79]  • Candidate * • The Only Mistake * • Chance (Atmosphere) * • Dead Souls [July 79] • Something Must Break • Love Will Tears Us Apart [November 79]  • Colony  • As You Said [March 80] • Ceremony * [March 1980] • In A Lonely Place (Detail) *

CD4: LIVE

Dead Souls [July 13, 1979, The Factory] • The Only Mistake  • Insight  • Candidate  • Wilderness • 

She’s Lost Control • Disorder • Interzone  • Atrocity Exhibition • Novelty [RCA Demo]  • Auto Suggestion [August 2, 1979, YMCA] • I Remember Nothing [November 2, 1979, Bournemouth] • Colony • These Days • Incubation [February 29, 1980, Lyceum, London] • The Eternal • Heart And Soul • Isolation

* All tracks previously unreleased

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THE WIDOW

Deborah Curtis published her moving and highly illuminating Touching From A Distance (Faber & Faber, £9.99) in 1995

'I THINK Ian was a split personality. My mother did, too. She didn't want me to marry him. I wish he was here to explain himself. He knew that the band weren't listening to the lyrics and I didn't see them, either, because he put his books away. I don't think he intended people to know what he was up to.

‘In 1980, I thought it would have helped him talking to a psychiatrist. He desperately needed someone to talk to, but he wouldn't stop acting for people. Trying to be what they wanted him to be. I thought a divorce would have taken a weight off his mind but it didn't. He didn't even seem to know what he wanted, and I think he found the idea of a divorce a shaming thing. Like admitting to his parents he’d messed up.

‘He would never have got to America. He was frightened of flying, he was frightened of the way America would react to his illness. But I was distressed by Closer. I was very angry that he'd put all that down on record.

‘ft was an insult, really, that he hadn’t been able to talk to me. But I can listen to the album now... “24 Hours”. It’s so emotional.

‘Ian was a compulsive writer. He should have lived and written a book. He always said he only wanted to release one album and one single.

‘But why stop there? He had such big ideas.’

Deborah Curtis has remarried and lives quietly in Macclesfield together with Natalie, her daughter by Ian

======================================

THE SINGER

'Some people have said [the music] is all about death and destruction. It isn't, really. There's other things... particular feelings. None of the songs are about death and doom. It's such a heavy metal thing, that. Some of the things come out of confusion, because I'm not exactly sure what I want, [although] now I feel more or less settled. I'm doing what I want to do, really.'

Ian Curtis. October. 1979