2007 08 12 Joy Division, The Observer

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/aug/12/popandrock.joydivision

Closer to the birth of a music legend

Ian Curtis, the tragic lead singer of Manchester post-punk pioneers Joy Division, comes alive again in a stylish new biopic. Here, the acclaimed photographer who captured the band's brief blaze of glory tells how he helped fashion their bleak image

Kevin Cummins

Anton Corbijn's film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, Control, which premieres in Edinburgh on Friday, is set in a Manchester that is high-gloss, highly saturated, monochromatic. This is pure fiction. The 1970s reality of Manchester is of a bleak post-industrial Victorian city. Large, decaying warehouses were yet to become idiosyncratic hotels and urban living spaces. Mainly they were filthy, dilapidated and abandoned.

In his celebrated English Journey of 1934, JB Priestley described the light in Manchester as being 'a turgid sooty gloom that was neither day nor night'. Furthermore, Manchester's weather was '...a popular joke, combining rain, sleet and fog'. Priestley could easily have been describing the late 1970s. For it was under these conditions that I took my first photographs of Joy Division.

It's been well documented that the Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall during Manchester's hot summer of 1976 were the catalyst for virtually every music fan in the city to form a band. I was one of the few who had no interest in performing. I'd just finished my photography degree and my only ambition had been to work for the NME or The Observer. I sat waiting for them to call.

Consequently I was in Manchester with my Nikon while everyone around me was learning his or her first three chords. Later I was going to gigs every night, shooting bands obsessively and sending the photographs to Neil Spencer at the NME. Finally he introduced me to a wannabe writer, Paul Morley, and we were relentless in the promotion of our city via the pages of 'The World's Biggest Selling Rock Weekly'.

Joy Division was one of many groups that formed in the wake of the Pistols' visit. They toyed with Stiff Kittens as a band name, then changed it to Warsaw in time for their first live appearance in May 1977, finally settling on Joy Division in January 1978. I've long since convinced myself that we met on one of those legendary nights watching the Pistols. We may have done. It's 31 years ago. Was I there? Was anyone there? We had to be; otherwise our stories make no sense.

I know I was there at The Electric Circus on 29 May 1977 to see Stiff Kittens/Warsaw in their first gig, opening for Buzzcocks. I've got the photographs. Rather I had them. Somehow that single strip of six frames has long since disappeared. Upon arrival Ian told everyone their name was Warsaw. They had the insouciance of young men unable to believe they were actually on stage. To distance themselves from the punk audience, two of the band sported unseemly moustaches. Sounds writer Ian Wood asked me if the guitarist was a public schoolboy. It wasn't a great debut performance. We had no idea we were watching a band that would touch our lives for 30 years (and counting).

When I was shooting for the NME in this, my first year out of college, I had very little money. I had to pay for my own film and processing (£10 per roll) and hope that the NME would use more than one shot in order to make a profit. (£6.50 was the repro rate at that time). Consequently I was very parsimonious with film. I rarely wasted a shot. A typical Joy Division session would rarely run to more than one roll, and even then I'd try to save a few frames to shoot something for another client.

Ian & Co were learning how to pose as a band. I was learning how to shoot bands. We had our own agenda. It wouldn't be politic to release shots of Ian smiling, so on the rare occasion I captured a hint of a smile I cursed my bad luck at wasting a frame. Often, as Ian stood in front of my camera looking contemplative, the other band members, bassist Peter Hook 'Hooky', drummer Stephen Morris and guitarist Bernard Sumner, would stand behind him pulling faces. Occasionally Ian would yawn. These images only exist in my mind. I could never commit them to film. I couldn't afford to. Would my pictures tell a different story if I'd had the luxury of being able to shoot endless frames digitally?

Shots of the band in colour are rare. I only have six frames - shot on the end of a live roll of photos of Buzzcocks. It was pointless shooting the band in colour. I'd be wasting money. Publications that were prepared to feature the band only published in black and white. Peter Hook told me that even he thinks of Joy Division as a black and white band.

My major sessions with them are shot against snow (white) and TJ Davidson's rehearsal room walls (black). Other photographers would try to capture a similar bleakness, but I suppose my advantage was in living in the city. I didn't have to travel from London and hope the weather would be suitable on the one day I was commissioned. I could just turn up whenever I could afford to put film in my camera.

In January 1979 the NME, for want of something happening in London, decided to wrap Manchester up with a feature about three bands; the Passage, Spherical Objects and Joy Division. Morley decided that Spherical Objects would be the fulcrum of the piece. He 'just knew' they were going to be massive. We spent a day each with the Passage and with Spherical Objects and finally arranged to meet Joy Division on 6 January 1979. It had been snowing all week. I was concerned that the snow would date the photos, so I almost cancelled the session. We decided to do it anyway - but to try some indoor shots too. I had no idea then that this snow on the bleak city landscapes would be the defining visual moment for the band.

We spent all day shooting photographs, punctuated by visits to various pubs in order to shelter from the bitter cold. We got to know each other well that day. Paul would use the pub breaks to conduct his interview. We were both amazed at how serious they were about their art. Most bands we'd met until then were just enjoying the ride. Joy Division knew they'd be famous one day.

Prior to the release of their first album, Joy Division weren't particularly popular, even in their own city. Many people thought they were arrogant. Aloof. They didn't seem to care whether people liked them or not. They were the antithesis of the Fall, the biggest cult band in Manchester. The Fall were approachable. They were always out, watching other bands, drinking, speeding...

However with the release of Unknown Pleasures in June 1979, Joy Division blew all the opposition away. Martin Hannett's production on that record captured the monochrome austerity of city and the band - a sound they hadn't realised until it was drawn out by Hannett.

In the late 1970s, Manchester, which Engels called 'a grim place to live', was still suffering from the after-effects of the Second World War. The heavy bombing, along with an ill-conceived 1960s regeneration programme, conspired to make Manchester redolent of an eastern European city. Revisiting my photographs, I see the bleakness of a city slowly dying. A single image taken from a bridge in Hulme of Princess Parkway, the major road into Manchester, features no cars. Unthinkable now. But this is the reality of the afternoon of Saturday 6 January 1979.

Anton Corbijn is famed as a rock photographer. He and I are contemporaries, both of us working for the NME in its heyday. Control is Corbijn's first feature film - he's made pop videos in the past. For me, seeing the film was akin to watching a series of still photographs, punctuated by occasional concert footage. This gig footage - with actors playing live onstage - are the parts of the film that really worked for me. So authentic is the sound that at one stage I thought it was a Joy Division recording with Sam Riley (who plays Ian Curtis) singing over the track. But the film lacked humour. It would appear that Corbijn has bought into the mythology surrounding the band, too: the crypto-fascist young men in their grey overcoats from the grim north of England. Nothing could be further from the truth.

After my initial photo-session for the NME, I spent a lot of time with Joy Division - socially and professionally, both in rehearsal and on tour. They were typical of most young lads in their late teens/early twenties. We were a similar age. Talk was mainly about music (Iggy and the Stooges, Velvet Underground, Bowie, Lou Reed), girls, books, football (with Ian - the others weren't bothered. Ian and I supported Manchester City). They weren't really the serious young men of Ian's dark lyrics. Bernard would say that he didn't really understand what Ian was writing about. It was just another layer to their sound.

In the movie, many of the major players are portrayed as maladroit caricatures. Rob Gretton (the band's manager) is depicted as a foul-mouthed buffoon; the reality was that Rob was one of the gentlest, most loyal men you could hope to meet. And the impersonation of Factory records boss Tony Wilson - who died aged 57 on Friday (see panel below) - by Craig Parkinson owes more to Steve Coogan's version of Wilson in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People than any observation of the man himself.

Control trades on the current vogue for false nostalgia. Nostalgia for a period not lived. It's understandable that Joy Division's popularity and mythology has grown since Ian's tragic suicide aged 23 in 1980. Most of today's fans never saw the band live. This movie provides a welcome chance to see them, albeit in 'tribute band' form, but for me, late 1970s Manchester will never be better captured than in Ian's wife Deborah's memoir, Touching from a Distance, and the discomfiting songs on Unknown Pleasures.

Tony Wilson 1950-2007

I knew Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and cultural impresario, for almost all his life; we were at Salford's De La Salle Grammar School together. He was the brightest pupil, a bit of a trainspotter really. He was always going to do something big.

When Joy Division came along Tony was just as excited as me and the band, despite being that bit older. He was like a kid when it came to music. He believed in bands when no-one else did, and was prepared to spend his own money making things happen. He was the catalyst for everything that happened on the Manchester music scene from the 1970s.

Tony didn't mind anyone lampooning him. But it's a shame that lots of people thought he was Steve Coogan's caricature in 24 Hour Party People. In fact, he was very kind, very generous, and very, very smart. KC

Control has its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on Friday, and goes on general release on 5 October. 

Juvenes: The Joy Division Photographs of Kevin Cummins will be published by To Hell With Publishing in October (limited edition of 200 copies; tohellwithpublishing.com)