2007 11 Joy Division - Record Collector
https://recordcollectormag.com/articles/toran-apart-the-legend-of-joy-division
TORN APART
THE LEGEND OF JOY DIVISION
ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST INFLUENTIAL BANDS IS NOW THE SUBJECT OF A COMPELLING NEW FILM. PAUL LESTER TALKS TO PETER HOOK, STEPHEN MORRIS AND BERNARD SUMNER - AND TO FILM DIRECTOR ANTON CORBIJN
Three decades after they formed and almost 30 years after their post-punk peak, Joy Division still cast a giant shadow over the music scene. There are reissues of their albums on their way, as well as a documentary, a major film called Control, and scores of bands, both British (Editors, Bloc Party) and American (Interpol, The Killers, whose version of JD’s Shadowplay closes the movie) making music under their influence.
The enhanced version of their three monolithic albums (Unknown Pleasures, Closer, the half-live Still), with their brilliant pristine production courtesy the late, great Martin Hannett, have been remastered by the surviving members, and the documentary, simply titled Joy Division and produced by New Order’s US manager Tom Atencio, is on its way.
Then there’s Control. Based in part on Ian Curtis’ widow Deborah’s 1994 biography Touching From A Distance and directed by former NME photographer Anton Corbijn (who took the famous image of the band in a subway passage, with only Curtis facing the camera, and later shot a video for JD’s Atmosphere), it’s been filmed in stark black and white. It tells the story of Joy Division’s emergence from Manchester and rise to prominence as the signal band of their era, and focuses on the drama surrounding their enigmatic lead singer who, aged 23, committed suicide on May 18, 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour, tortured by illness (he’d recently developed epilepsy) and divided feelings for his wife and Belgian lover Annik Honore.
It begins with the teenage, fag-smoking, Iggy/Lou/ Bowie-worshipping Curtis in his parents’ Macclesfield flat, sees his horizons expanded by The Sex Pistols’ legendary performance at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, and captures his decline and fall in forensic detail. Some of the movie’s haunting final scenes include Bernard Sumner attempting to exorcise Curtis’ demons via hypnosis, his suicide attempt in April 1980, and his final night alive, listening to Iggy’s The Idiot and watching Werner Herzog’s Stroszek.
Control is actually the second major motion picture to feature Joy Division/New Order, the first being Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002). And yet, seeing their young lives played out on the big screen hasn’t brought New Order’s Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Peter Hook closer together; in fact, they spent most of August 2007 splitting up in a war of words, despite having written new music for the Control soundtrack, a tantalising glimpse of what might have been: a follow-up to 1980’s Closer.
Despite falling apart as a band, individually they’re not reluctant to discuss their achievements in not one but two of the most important British bands since The Beatles and the Stones. Here, Sumner, Morris and Hook talk at length about Ian Curtis, New Order, Control, and the enduring power and glory of Joy Division’s music, while Anton Corbijn, in a rare face-to-face interview , discusses the film that got a rapturous reception at this year’s Cannes and managed to get an unanimous thumbs-up from New Order themselves.
“They don’t agree about very much, but they all seemed to like this film,” says the director. “So that’s a first.”
PETER HOOK
THE LOW-SLUNG BASS SUPREMO GIVES AN EMOTIONAL INTERVIEW ABOUT HIS LIFE AND TIMES.
Were you pleased with the way you were portrayed in Control?
Well, I recognised myself much more in this than in 24 Hour Party People. As for the other characters, I don’t think one person was completely wrong. It seems to be pretty fair. I mean, Debbie and Annik seem to come out if pretty well [laughs]. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?
Does the film take sides?
Bernard, Stephen and I remember things differently. That has to be taken into account. It’s one story looked at three different ways, with each person making themselves look better.
Is it a poeticised version of events?
No. If anything, it might have made it more ugly. But Anton has handled it very well. I was very impressed with it. I don’t think it’s been treated with kid gloves. It’s not a hatchet job. I don’t think it’s glamorised for effect. I think it’s been very truthfully handled, given that it’s a delicate subject matter.
We you involved every step of the way?
We were, actually. We were involved in looking at the script, telling our stories and stuff right the way through.
Did Anton ever come to you and say, “Hang about, Bernard said something completely different…”?
There were occasions like that. It’s still like that with New Order, which is quite interesting. We’re like negatives of each other. The main things that the film is dealing with are very well known anyway. There might be details I think are wrong but nothing that spoiled my enjoyment of it. If ‘enjoyment’ is the right word: it’s enjoyable in the way that picking at a scab is enjoyable. You know you shouldn’t because it will hurt you more in the end. I didn’t think the film was going to affect me as much as it did, to be honest. It made me realise that the thing is still raw. It isn’t nice to witness. I’m the worst judge of that because I was there. Watching the film brought it all back. The next time I see it will be at the Manchester premiere. That will be weird for a thousand more reasons.
Do Joy Division deserve their reputation for darkness and despair?
I was always at odds with the way people would describe Joy Division. Some people only saw it as dark and miserable. I thought it was fucking great. It used to make me run for joy. Not much makes me want to do that these days…
When the four of us came together, it did become this very dark force that was very powerful. As soon as we stopped playing, we reverted to how we were normally. People always assumed we were very serious, dour types. Those elements only came out when we played together.
The interesting thing in the film is how the band develops: they actually get better as the film progresses. I thought that was a subtle triumph, because the band don’t sound as good at the start of the film as they do at the end. Anton cleverly captures that transition.
What was stranger: seeing yourself portrayed as a person or a performer?
Because of all the shit that’s been going on with New Order, the strangest thing was going back to a happier time. We had all these hopes and dreams when we started out. Thirty years later, we’re bickering like an unhappily married old couple.
But the ultimate weirdness of it is at the end. That was very powerful and very upsetting. Everybody stood up and clapped. And I’m thinking, “This is my life. Sit down, you dickheads.” I’m sitting there with my head in my hands, crying. That was a mindblowing experience.
Did you watch it with the others or on your own?
I saw it once on my own when it was unfinished, then once when we were together in Cannes. We were together but apart. Barney wasn’t talking to me then. He knew then that I wanted to split the band up but he didn’t want to talk about it and he didn’t want to talk to me.
You’d think the film coming out would bring you closer.
It’s come at a bad time for the film. You can’t pick these things, can you? It’s odd because neither Barney nor Steve said anything to me in Cannes. It was like I was the lunatic to say what I said.
Is it truer to the spirit of Joy Division that you are having this fractious phase?
(laughs) I don’t know, really, but it makes for great press. If you’re gonna go, go with a bang, not a whimper.
How do you think Control compares to other rock biopics?
I think the only one it compares to is Backbeat. The Doors was more like 24 Hour Party People to me.
How did Anton approach Ian’s final hours?
That was very difficult. The police described it as a text-book case: suicide brought on by depression, well-documented by his cries for help. Unfortunately, we were all too young to understand. But that part of the film is chilling. Towards the end, it felt like someone had ripped out my heart and was stamping on it. When Atmosphere came on, I thought I was going to throw up, to be honest.
Were there moments in the film when you wished you could have stepped in to save Ian?
No, my life feels like a film anyway. Sometimes I wish I could step out of it. It’s like Die Hard.
How did you get on with Anton?
I fell out with him when he started telling us how the music should sound. After 30 years of living with the death of Ian Curtis, if I didn’t know how the music should be, then I would never fucking know. We had an altercation because I don’t need anyone to tell me how to write music to go with the death of Ian. Because I have to live with the fact of his death every moment of my life.
We did make up. I love Anton. It’s just there were times when he was in full-on director mode and maybe didn’t appreciate just how much of our hearts and souls are invested in this.
We wrote the incidental music as Joy Division: the three of us. Unfortunately, our relationship was falling apart at the time. Steve and I wrote our bits together. Bernard did his bits separately.
The music is great. Anton accused us of making it too beautiful. He didn’t want the music to detract from the film. It’s great Joy Division music. God knows if that music will ever be released because we’re fighting so much at the moment.
Is it like a follow-up to Closer?
I saw it as our only chance as New Order to go back and be Joy Division, only without Bernard singing and having to worry about lyrics; just putting our heart and soul into the music, which is what we did in Joy Division. You can hear the difference between New Order and Joy Division quite plainly. I was so much looking forward to working on that. Unfortunately, it coincided with us being at each other’s throats. But it showed that the three of us can still make beautiful music together, which makes the present-day scenario all the sadder really.
If Ian hadn’t committed suicide, could Anton have made the film?
Another question is: would success have changed Joy Division? We’ll never know, because we were still struggling when Ian died. We weren’t earning any money, we weren’t selling many records. So Joy Division never knew success. For all I know, success could have saved Ian. It might have given him the lift he needed. But everything happened after he died. If he’d got through it, I think he would have ended up like a cross between Bob Geldof and Bono with a little bit of him from The Doors thrown in.
The greatest regret of my life is that we went mega after Joy Division and Ian wasn’t around to experience it. Because I think he would have made a wonderful rock star. You think about people like Sting, Robbie Williams and Bono… Ian would have blown those fuckers away.
Joy Division cast a longer shadow now than they did in 1980.
And I’m fucking delighted about that. No band seems able to usurp Joy Division. It’s really weird. You look at bands like Editors and Interpol. They come close but they just can’t seem to do it. U2, bless ‘em, have tried again and again to get close to what Joy Division were doing. But they can’t, can they? We can’t even get close as New Order.
Are Joy Division the missing link between The Beatles and Nirvana?
Put it this way: when I listen to Nirvana, I hear the Ceremony bassline on quite a few of those songs. So I’d have to say yes.
What are your final feelings about Control?
The way I judge a film is on how many people go for a piss when it’s on. When I saw it, only two people nipped out. One of them was Bernard. He’s got a weak bladder. He’s like a 75-year-old woman.
To my knowledge, Deborah [Curtis] has not been to see it. Natalie [Curtis, Ian’s daughter, 13 months old at the time of his death] has, and it must be weird for her. Because the thing I feel most guilty about is that she lost her father. I’d give anything to bring that back; much more so than anything to do with the music.
Not that Control makes me re-evaluate my whole life. It makes me realise that that part of my life was very special for a lot of people. It helps to remember that when I’m going through a lot of shit in my life like I am now. When I feel like I’ve achieved nothing. The break-up of a relationship is always difficult, especially a 30-year one. When I look at the film, it makes me realise that Joy Division changed the world. That’s fantastic.
Who would direct the next one, the New Order years?
Quentin Tarantino. Let’s have a blood-bath!
STEPHEN MORRIS
THE HUMAN DRUM MACHINE SORTS THE MYTHS FROM THE FACTS BEHIND THE HUMAN TRAGEDY.
What did you think of Control?
I liked it. Some people might be expecting it to be about Joy Division but it isn’t. It’s Ian’s story, and the rest of the band provide the light relief.
It’s weird to see yourself portrayed in a film. It works, even though you accept that there’s going to be some artistic licence involved – one example being that I don’t remember going on tour with a kit-bag! But all the key facts are there.
How did they get the details of your character right?
It was easy doing me because I don’t say very much.
How about the scenes featuring you, Hooky and Bernard? Were they based on hearsay or facts?
One of them is based on a real-life taped interview. The rest they must have made up as they went along (laughs). But it’s more about Ian.
Did you expect it to be artier and more pretentious?
Yeah, based on what Anton had done before. But those were videos, not feature films. I think he’s done a good job. It just amuses me that it looks like Macclesfield has only got one street! Some of it is filmed in Nottingham but the scenes outside Ian’s house are Macclesfield. That was his actual house. My auntie was complaining because she couldn’t get to the doctors with all the cameras!
It looks like it could be the 60s. Just recently I’ve been digging out loads of old photographs, and it did look a bit like that. You see photos of the 70s and they might as well have been taken during the war.
Because Control is in black and white, you miss all the strange colours of the times, like the tangerine cars, all the stuff that Life On Mars does so well. Originally there was going to be one sequence where you see Ian’s eyes in colour. But that didn’t work out.
Is it a poeticised version of events or a gritty, realistic version?
Perhaps a bit of both. If it had been too grittily realistic you’d have ended up with one of those ‘by ‘eck, there’s trouble at mill’ films. It might have got too like Cathy Come Home. I think it gets the balance right.
How does it feel to see your early life mythologised?
That’s what made me dive into the old photographs, because I was asking myself, ‘Did it really look like that?’ It [the era captured in Control] looked more dated than I thought it was going to.
How does it compare to 24 Hour Party People?
That was more like a romp, and there was a lot of stuff that just wasn’t true, or they were exaggerations. It was a bit like Carry On Factory Records. This is more factualised.
Still, it’s amazing enough to have one film made about us while most of the principal characters are still alive. To have two films is quite bizarre.
How does Control measure up against, say, Oliver Stone’s The Doors?
I thought The Doors was terrible. And I would have hated the thought of Control involving actors miming to a backing track. When I heard they were going to be playing the music themselves, I knew it could go either way: really good or really crap. But they really do pull it off.
Do you remember Ian being like the character portrayed in Control?
Everyone’s got their own Ian, their own memories of him. In the film, he’s somebody’s version. At the end of the day, it’s an actor pretending to be someone. There’s definitely bits of Ian on screen that I recognise.
The epilepsy scene in the car happened pretty much like that. If anything, Ian was more obnoxious in reality. It built up to a right old argument over my sleeping bag. “You’ve had it for 10 minutes – I want it!” He was being really arsey, kicking me in the back. (sadly) Then we realised something was terribly wrong.
Do you think the film glories in the darkness and the suicide, or is it pretty plain-speaking?
I think it’s pretty plain. There were a few versions of the script and some of the early ones started with the end right at the beginning, then told it all backwards. I quite liked that because it got the death out of the way. But the way they’ve done it now works as well.
Finally the post-punk generation has its own movie…
Yeah, maybe it’ll be Frankie Goes To Hollywood next! Or Nirvana. But it’s horrible to think that someone has to die before they make a film about you. Nirvana are probably the leading contenders for a biopic, although that’s a term I abhor.
What was it like watching Control with the others?
I saw it with Bernard and Hooky in Cannes. You’d think that the film might have brought us together again. But it was overshadowed by the zoo that is Cannes. It’s constant flash-bulbs, which is not what we’re about. There was a Control party on the beach where they showed the live footage from [Joy Division video] Here Are The Young Men over and over. If we went back in a time machine and Joy Division tried to get into a party like that, they’d have been told to fuck off.
Is there a danger of becoming mainstream? Do you prefer the idea of Joy Division as the world’s biggest underground band?
Yeah. It’s not a bad epitaph to have. But it’s not just us. It’s the way that music itself has gone. I remember music being very personal. You’d come home with the LP and it would be yours. Now you can walk into Boots to buy a toothbrush and Iggy Pop is playing through the speakers. Music has become like the air; it’s lost a lot of mystique. And you don’t get that emotional attachment you used to get with a 12” slab of vinyl with downloads.
Someone once said that Joy Division were the last band that mattered, the last band with whom something was the matter…
Whereas for most bands today, it’s become a career option. For us, it wasn’t just about feeling angst and wanting to get that out. But it wasn’t about being a successful band either. We didn’t have a bloody clue what we were doing. It was what we wanted to do. It’s less an expression of yourself nowadays and more somebody’s expression of what you ought to be.
What did JD change?
It was an amalgam of Joy Division, Factory, the Peter Saville sleeves – the whole package. Factory changed the way record companies worked. We changed a lot of things just by being bloody-minded and Factory let us be that way. It worked against us in that we did come across as dark and mysterious individuals. Then, when people got to meet you in person, they’d get a little bit upset. The fact that we would play practical jokes on all and sundry didn’t help.
Could the film have been made if Ian hadn’t taken his life?
I think the only way Ian could have survived would have been for the band to have stopped. If we’d all walked away from it and said, “OK, sort yourself out.” If that had have happened, this movie would never have been made, definitely not.
To what extent were his problems to do with women?
Women were definitely involved. That was one of the reasons he started the band, that primal instinct. But I can’t emphasise enough that Joy Division was the product of all four of us, along with Martin Hannett, who made the records sound the way they did. We didn’t understand what he was doing. We wanted to sound the way we did live, but the records didn’t. To hear them recently was a bit of a shock – when we came to re-master them, we realised that we couldn’t impose modern production values on them. You end up making it worse, not better.
Unknown Pleasures and Closer still sound fantastic today.
What was it like recording new Joy Division music for the soundtrack?
It wasn’t like we stepped into our old selves. You can’t really do that. You can’t re-wind 30 years of your life and be the person you were then, because you’re not. With the soundtrack, it was looking at what Anton wanted. It might be Joy Division-esque. But we weren’t trying to be Joy Division again. There are only three little pieces in it and they are quite slight: the hypnotism scene, the leaving-hospital scene, and the final scene.
Can we rule out a third JD album?
I don’t think that’s going to happen (laughs). After Ian died, we turned the whole thing on its head when we did New Order and it was a case of, “We’re not Joy Division anymore.” We could have got another singer in and done some of the old stuff. We preferred to draw a line under it. We had Ceremony and In A Lonely Place left over as the last two Joy Division songs. We took those as a gift and went on from there to the extent that we got the reputation for being shirty in interviews. Well, the only reason we got shirty was all we heard was, ‘Why did Ian kill himself?’ So we stopped doing interviews. We went in the opposite direction and started doing disco music, the antithesis of what Joy Division would have done. But in retrospect, it wasn’t so very different from what could have happened.
When we got back together in 1998, we asked ourselves, ‘Why the hell don’t we play Joy Division songs anymore? If anyone’s going to play them, then surely we should.’ It really took us that long before we were able to come full circle. Once we started playing them, it was interesting because we realised that the way we approached songs was very different in New Order. With Joy Division it was just doing what we did, feeding off each other, rather than making sense musically. In New Order it was unchangeable because it was like a bloody robot!
With New Order, we started from scratch. Ian was such a large part of how we sounded. We couldn’t replace what he did. It wouldn’t have been right if someone had pretended to be him in the group. So we had to be a completely different group. By the time of [1983’s] Power Corruption & Lies, we were working with drum-machines and synths, which became the propelling force.
I wouldn’t see it as a rebirth. You only get one shot at being born.
How did you find the transition from Joy Division to New Order?
Very difficult. After all, one of our mates had died in a very strange way. This sounds awful, but it was only after Ian died that we sat down and listened to the lyrics. You’d find yourself thinking, “Oh my god, I missed this one.” Because my take on it was that I’d look at Ian’s lyrics and think how clever he was being, putting himself in the position of someone else. I never believed he was writing about himself. Looking back, how could I have been so bleedin’ stupid? Of course he was writing about himself! But I didn’t go in and grab him and ask, ‘What’s up?’ You’re wasting your life wondering what you could have done. I didn’t ask him those questions and I have to live with that. Watching the film, there were moments when I wished I could have stepped into the film. Unfortunately, you can’t.
Which are you most proud of: Joy Division or New Order?
When I look back, I don’t see two different groups anymore; it’s all of a oneness. In the early days of New Order, I would compartmentalise it and almost slam the door on Joy Division. If you’d asked me then, I’d have said “this is a completely different group”. With the benefit of hindsight, I’d say that this is a group that something happened to, and we came out the other side.
Going to America might have changed everything…
God knows what that might have been like. That’s one of the weirdest things I could never understand, because Ian wanted to go to America as much as the rest of us. We were like kiddies in a sweetshop. It was all the more shocking that he should have done it then. Ian was like, “Great, see you at the airport.” But it never got that far.
Would Joy Division have become U2?
I hope not. But I knew we were having an impact. Since then, we’ve had Live Aid and all the rest of it. Music is now the window dressing, not the engine.
What’s the future of New Order?
I don’t know really. The thing about New Order is that we’ve always thrived on not having a plan and having no idea what we’re doing next. We’ll see.
Are Joy Divison/New Order the most important band between The Beatles…
…and whoever is important tomorrow? It’s not for me to say. I just happened to be in a band whose music I loved. When you’re doing it, there’s no intent in terms of being historically important. It’s nice if someone thinks we were the link between The Beatles and whoever. I can only see it as a time of my life which has now been documented in two films.
BERNARD SUMNER
JD/NO’S UNOFFICIAL MUSICAL DIRECTOR ON THE REAL MOTIVES FOR IAN CURTIS’ SUICIDE.
What did you make of Control?
I like it; it’s incredibly accurate.
Some people were expecting it to be artier, more avant-garde…
But it’s not really an avant-garde story. It was important the story came first, before any kind of self-expression from Anton. Ian is the central character, not Anton. I think people want the story. I really like the look of it. That’s pretty much how it was, really. Maybe the bands’ characters have been suppressed a little. We were more youthfully idiotic than that. But we had a serious side and that’s captured very accurately. The guy who plays Ian has done an absolutely amazing job. One thing is that Ian had a very explosive side to him that only comes out once in the film. His way of dealing with problems was to explode. But human beings are complicated creatures. It’s impossible to capture every single facet of someone’s personality in a film.
It must be weird to see someone alive after 27 years…
Yeah. It was very strange seeing it in Cannes, watching loads of other people watching yourself.
The actors learned to play the songs very quickly.
When we wrote those first songs, we’d only been playing our instruments for eight months. By the very nature of that, our parts were very simple. We’d sit around in this rehearsal room, a big disused factory with smashed windows and rubbish piled up at one end. We had the cheapest tape-recorder you could buy. And we’d play away. Ian would always be picking out the good bits: ‘That’s good; that works.’ And I’d say, ‘OK, let’s add that bit to this bit, it should be a good tune.’ So Ian would spot the riffs and I’d do the arrangements.
The film looks as though it’s set in the ‘60s…
That’s because it’s set in Macclesfield! It’s always been a decade behind.
Joy Division’s is a modern, sleek Euro-techno sound, and yet it’s made among the cobbled streets and terraced houses of old, bleak northern England…
Steve had quite an eclectic record collection. He liked his Krautrock, bands like Neu! He’d worked in a record shop and filched quite a few things from there. Our sound was a product of the music we listened to.
It must be weird seeing your late adolescence mythologised on the silver screen.
I’ve got quite a clear memory of myself back then. The question for me is how four young guys made music that was so heavy. We’d listen to things like Iggy’s The Idiot in rehearsal and we knew we couldn’t make music like that because we weren’t proficient enough. We stamped our personalities on the music of Joy Division and it sounded heavy. But we weren’t really heavy people. I suppose I’d had quite a tough life up to that point. I’d had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age. Maybe that gave me a bleak outlook on the world.
You say “heavy”, but in many ways the film is quite light given that it’s a Joy Division movie made by Anton Corbijn. It has moments of levity and humour.
I think he [Anton] let the music do that, let it speak for itself. You don’t want to make something that is so heavy you have to switch it off after 10 minutes. It’s an accessible film. That way you get across to more people.
Looking back, we were the opposite of heavy as people. We were flippant and playful. We liked a good laugh. But when we got in the rehearsal room, that’s the music that came out of us.
There was an unspoken feeling that we couldn’t talk about our music. There was this flow of creativity and it shouldn’t be looked at too closely and analysed. Don’t question it. Don’t even observe it. Definitely don’t try to understand it. It was all done by instinct. There was no formula or process. In rehearsals, the more we didn’t talk about it and the more we didn’t look at it, the easier the music came. It came very much from the sub-conscious mind.
That was one of the reasons we didn’t like doing interviews. Because journalists would ask us how we wrote and where we got the sound from. We were genuinely unable to answer those questions. If we began to answer them, it would stifle our creativity.
How much attention did you pay to Ian’s lyrics?
When Ian died, I did go through his lyrics and I did find myself thinking ‘Oh god’. You look at it through a different filter because of what happened. But we never really listened to his lyrics, to be honest. At least we never sat there and analysed his words. It’s a bit like reading your friend’s letters, I suppose.
Were you consulted about the hypnotism scene in the film?
Yeah. I wasn’t sure I wanted it in. But the way Anton treated it made it acceptable. In rehearsals, when we got bored, I’d sometimes muck about with hypnotism. I found that Ian could be hypnotised very easily. One time I did hypnotic regression on him. He had these visions of past experiences. When I brought him round, he had no recollection. I wasn’t freaked out when it worked on Ian because I’d done it so many times before. He was very susceptible. I’d heard that you could unlock problems in people. In a way, it was a last-ditch attempt to unlock whatever was causing Ian’s problems.
He stayed at my house for 10 days to two weeks [in early 1980]. We’d stay up at night talking. One night I asked him about the hypnotism I did on him at rehearsals. He couldn’t remember. So I said we should do it again, and I’d record it. So we did and he had exactly the same experiences he’d had at rehearsals. It was an attempt to get to his problem.
But it wasn’t about Deborah or Annik. We didn’t get involved with that. How could we tell him which girl to go with? That would be unfair on both of them.
The film helped me see things from Debbie’s perspective. She always seemed bitter and angry about the band. The film shows why she felt like that. After Ian’s death, she was completely isolated; she had no one to turn to. All those years she was left alone. As a band, we had a very difficult political course to navigate between Debbie and Annik. We had to keep a distance. The film really helped me to understand their point of view, to have some idea of the experience through their eyes.
Does Control conclude that Joy Division’s music was ultimately “about” Ian’s problems with women?
I don’t think it’s saying that Joy Division’s music was about that. It was more a case that we made this music and the singer had these problems. A lot of the music was written before he met Annik. He wasn’t torn between two women in the early stages of the band. Maybe it just means that Ian’s problems were insurmountable. Not only did he have this hideous relationship problem, he also had this illness that occurred at the same time. He developed epilepsy at 22 and it wasn’t a mild form. It was really, really bad and it occurred frequently. Then he had this explosive personality…
People often ask me why Ian killed himself. There were many things. Apart from anything else, the epilepsy must have cast a shadow over his future, particularly his future with the band. With the relationships, that was another giant shadow. He was extremely guilty about his daughter Natalie because his relationship with Debbie was deteriorating. I remember him telling me he couldn’t pick Natalie up in case he had a fit and dropped her. That really disturbed him. He couldn’t drive a car. At that age, 22 or 23, no matter how mature you feel, that’s a bloody lot to cope with.
Then he was in a gigging band. Before he died, we’d just spent four years becoming Joy Division. We bought our instruments, wrote the songs and went out playing them. It revolutionised all our lives because we were small-town boys: Steve and Ian came from Macclesfield which is a small town; me and Hooky were from Salford which is a small town in a cultural way. We’d spent two years playing dives and dumps everywhere. Every gig was a tremendous education for us and we were finding our feet. After four years we were on the cusp of becoming really big. We were about to go to America. People fly to New York every day now to do a bit of shopping. In those days it was a big thing. For us to go from playing small clubs in West Yorkshire or Lancashire to playing the east coast of America was a huge thing. We were all so excited about it. But, for Ian, there was the thought of going over there and having fits in front of people during a gig. We didn’t have flashing lights but sometimes a particular drum beat would do something to him. He’d go off in a trance for a bit, then he’d lose it and have a fit. We’d have to stop the show and carry him off to the dressing-room where he’d cry his eyes out because this appalling thing had just happened to him. The drugs he was on just seemed to compound the situation. They made him very, very sad. One minute he’d be laughing, the next he’d be crying. He was on very heavy barbiturates, but they didn’t stop his fits. They just seemed to be yet another problem for him. I don’t think there was a solution to Ian’s problem in those days.
Did you have a hunch he wouldn’t make that flight to America?
No, I thought he was going to make it. If Ian hadn’t have been ill, I’m sure Joy Division would have been huge. But had we got that big, Ian wouldn’t have been able to cope. I think he would have reached a point where it would have been, “I can’t do this any more, guys.” Before he died, there’d be times when he felt he’d have to leave the band. He had a friend in Bournemouth and he was going to open a bookshop. What happened is that we decided to have a three- or four-month break to see if Ian wanted to carry on. And he decided he did want that.
Like Cobain, was there a part of him that didn’t want to be a famous rock star?
That’s an interesting question. I’ve often asked myself that about him. After all those years of trying, he was now getting what he professed to want. It transmuted from a dream into a reality. Maybe he wanted the dream but not the reality. I think there’s a definite possibility of that, yeah.
Like Jim Morrison et al, was Ian fated to die young? Was it all horribly inevitable?
There’s an element of truth in that. Ian knew at some point in his life that he was going to commit suicide. He kept that really well from us because we were very surprised when he tried it the first time: six weeks before he died, he took a drugs overdose.
The first sign of trouble was when he came into rehearsals one day. He said he’d woken up on the floor with knife marks all over his chest and arms. Fuck knows what that’s about. Then came the drugs overdose, probably barbiturates with half a bottle of whiskey. But he bottled out of that and called an ambulance. He told me the reason he called the ambulance was that he’d read if you don’t take enough pills you could end up with brain damage.
When Rob [Gretton, manager] called me to say that Ian had committed suicide, I heard it as, “Ian’s tried again.” But how can we judge him? Because we haven’t had his life experiences. It’s impossible for us to look at his life from the point of view that he looked at it from.
Maybe if his problems had occurred when he was older, he wouldn’t have committed suicide. I don’t know if he had any attitude towards suicide before we met him, or whether he’d ever fantasised about it before. It was certainly a subject that never came up. Not with me anyway. I don’t know if he ever talked about it with Debbie.
How do you think Anton handled that part of the film, the final scene?
Really well. There’s nothing sensationalist in it. Everyone knows what happened to Ian. The film is just saying, “This is what happened.” That’s all you need to know, really. Because it’s important to preserve Ian’s dignity.
How do you think Ian emerges from Control? Is he now up there in the pantheon of late, great rock stars like Morrison and Hendrix?
Well, I think the concept of a rock star is fundamentally flawed. Because someone picks up a guitar or a microphone, it doesn’t make them any better than anyone else. I see Ian’s story as one first and foremost about a man, and secondly as a singer in a group.
When we first started to talk to Anton about the film, we felt it should work as a biography of a man and that you wouldn’t have to be into the music of Joy Division to get some fulfilment from the film.
I can see through pop stars and rock stars. They’re just people to me; I don’t see them as demi-gods. I thought punk buried that notion for good. I thought we’d gotten rid of that worshipping syndrome.
Control is the story of a man’s life. And by the way, he was also a songwriter and singer in a band called Joy Division. He had a troubled life. He failed to deal with that troubled life. This is how he failed.
We all live and die by our decisions. If there’s one moral message that comes out of the film maybe it’s that you have to make the right decisions in life. Some of those decisions are crucial and they should be thought about long and hard.
Even in this high-tech modern world where we’re removed from life by technology, we still live or die by our decisions. There are times when you have to come into contact with the greater realism of things, no matter how many cars or widescreen TVs you’ve got. Maybe some personalities are better encoded to deal with problems than others. Some people selfdestruct. I just can’t understand how anyone would deal with a problem by destroying themselves. Suicide is a terrible act of violence. Literally, it’s murdering oneself. It’s almost inconceivable to me. Then again, I’m not in the position that Ian was in. So I shouldn’t judge, really.
Of course, the tragic thing about suicide is that you’re not only killing yourself, you’re seriously hurting people around you.
In your early 20s, there’s quite often a lot of emotional turmoil. All your hormones are still flying about. You over-react to stuff. You’re in love every five minutes. I’ve got this theory that if you can get through your early-20s, then you can get through your life, no problem.
Has the film helped you to understand what happened?
It’s helped me see it all from other people’s points of view. Including Ian’s. It’s like if you write something down, it becomes a part of this world. Ian’s death has always been up there in the ether. It’s always existed in my thoughts. But when you see it on the screen, it becomes a part of this world. I think that’s important. And it’s important that Ian’s not forgotten. Also, the film illustrates the music of Joy Division really well. I think it’s great from that point of view. Maybe it will help our music live longer.
Are Joy Division/New Order the missing link between The Beatles and Nirvana?
I think so, yeah. But really I think we were a strange anomaly that came out of the north and south of Manchester. No matter how much people try to dissect it, it was just music that we wrote and performed and recorded. It just happens to have had some profound resonance with people. When we wrote it we had no idea it would have that effect. Seeing other people play that music in the film made me realise how great it was, and is.
ANTON CORBIJN
THE DUTCH DIRECTOR WHO GAVE THE POST-PUNK ERA ITS LOOK TALKS ABOUT CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF CURTIS IN HIS “THREE-SIDED LOVE STORY”.
Are you pleased with the way the film turned out?
Very pleased. Of course, I can see my mistakes when I watch it, little things. But it came out a lot better than I expected. I was lucky to work with those actors. I’ve always told stories in my photographs and videos. That’s not new to me. What’s new for me is directing actors.
How close was Sam Riley to the Curtis that you remember?
As close as it’s possible to get; really uncanny. It must have been weird for Debbie. She came to the set a few times; by the end she was calling him Ian. To find someone who is unknown, and for him to turn out better than any known actor could have been in that role, was unbelievable.
Sure, we looked at some better-known actors. Jude Law was one of the names mentioned early on. But not by me.
Why did you decide to make an Ian Curtis film and not a Joy Division one?
Because I was interested in the story of Ian Curtis. Joy Division are covered by the story, but I wasn’t interested in making a rock movie.
In creating Ian for the screen, I had my own memories of him and the memories of those who knew him – Debbie, Annik, the New Order guys… Tony Wilson was a co-producer on the film so we had a lot of advice from him, too. People were interviewed. There was a lot of research, although not much footage of Ian. In the pre-digital age, not so much filming took place.
Was it always going to be black-and-white?
Yes, although initially I thought I was going to use a little colour in the middle of the film. But it didn’t work. I found that my memories of Joy Division were all black and white. The photos of them, the album covers… they dressed in shades of black and white. It seemed the correct way to show the period.
Were you ever tempted to make Control as abstract and impressionistic as your video for Atmosphere?
No. It’s a very human story; very simple, very linear. I wanted it to be emotional. With a story like this, it’s not unlike taking a photograph. And you have to get it right. I didn’t want to hide behind effects. The script itself was not linear, but I made it linear because I thought it was more dramatic that way.
Did you have people saying, “It didn’t happen like that…”?
New Order, you mean? They didn’t come to the set. They were invited but I don’t think they could face that. I met them to talk about the script before shooting.
Of course, there are risks when too many people get involved. But I was left to my own devices. I had no hidden agenda. I wanted to be completely honest about everything. I didn’t want to favour either Debbie or Annik.
I didn’t realise the extent to which Ian’s troubles stemmed from his relationships.
On the face of it, yeah. But being torn between two women would not normally be a recipe for suicide. It was the epilepsy that really unravelled him. The drugs he had to take for that had incredible side-effects. Combined with alcohol, that gave him such heavy mood swings. Between those mood swings, the demon was enormous. But if two women love you, that doesn’t mean you’re going to kill yourself. It comes from somewhere else.
The mood swings brought on by the drugs, maybe they brought on decisions. Maybe other things contributed – the music he was playing, the film he was watching, the alcohol… everything adds to it. Maybe there was something in him that wanted a finale. He left his wedding ring with his mum that evening. That was weird.
The film he was watching just before he killed himself, Stroszek, is about a man from Berlin who is released from prison and goes to America in the hope of finding a new life in Wisconsin. The next day, Ian was due to go to America with the band. In the film, the guy kills himself. But I wouldn’t want to speculate as to how often Ian had contemplated suicide.
For a man of 23, he seemed quite world-weary. What did you base your portrayal of him on?
I met him two weeks after moving to England. My English was very poor. I don’t think I ever made it to the pidgin level. He was not a boastful guy. He was shy and so was I. So it wasn’t easy for me to communicate. I have more visual memories. I relied on the book [Deborah Curtis’ Touching From A Distance] and other people’s memories.
Could this story have been told had he not killed himself?
It’s far more dramatic this way. Had he not killed himself, everything would have been different.
Does the film debunk or add to the myth of Ian Curtis?
I didn’t set out to make it mythological. I tried to humanise it all. If there is a myth around him, then maybe having a film will add to that. I’m just hoping that the film will open Joy Division’s music to a larger audience, because that music is timeless.
Were they the most significant band of your lifetime?
Well, I moved from Holland to London for Joy Division. I met them 12 days later and did the photograph that became very well-known. They liked the picture and asked me to go to Manchester to do more with them. It’s incredible that I took a few pictures and I’m linked forever with that band. I was just a little boy from a Dutch village.
Did you shape the look of the post-punk era with your images?
Possibly. But that seems like a big claim. The photos I took of Joy Division are an important element in the way that people look and think about the band. They just liked the idea of being photographed with the emphasis not on their faces.
Were there fun moments making this film?
Yes, and some very beautiful moments. The film has a lot of humour in it, but very dark northern humour. The band learnt to play from scratch over two months. It makes you remember that Joy Division’s music was quite simple but also very powerful. Then the lyrics made it very special. But the music itself was not that complex. We’re not talking about Pink Floyd here.
Are Joy Division the missing link between The Beatles and Nirvana?
Well, the time-frame is right. What I will say about them is that they deserved a wider audience. They are truly a seminal band. As for Ian Curtis, I wouldn’t compare him to any other musical figure.
Was he the proto-Bono?
I don’t know. Right from the start, Bono was untameable. And U2 were friends of Joy Division at the time. I can’t answer that.
How did you piece the final scene together?
Certain things were known, such as the record he was playing… That scene is long and it had to tell the truth. I had to indicate how he actually ended his life. I had to piece it together and assume that it was close to what actually happened.
I chose Atmosphere to end the film with because that song is linked to so many memories.
The film starts very positively. It’s only after he marries Debbie… it’s downhill from there. You can see that in the book, how things changed when they got married.
The contrast between the callow youth depicted in the wedding scene and Curtis the quintessential post-punk man is striking…
I think he was caught up in this obsession with becoming someone. He was drawn to mythical rock stars like Jim Morrison. Poetry and music became his focus. Something came over him when he was onstage. That made him enigmatic to watch. He was mesmerising.
What was the reaction to the movie at Cannes like?
Beyond anything I could have hoped for. I went into this naively. It was black and white. I’m a first-time director. The lead actor was unknown – these were the problems I faced trying to sell the idea to investors. But, as it turns out, they are among the film’s strongest elements.
Is it the dark side of 24 Hour Party People?
That was a film about Tony Wilson and Factory Records. This has very little to do with that. 24 Hour Party People is a very funny film and it scratches the surface of a lot of things. This is about one person from that era and it goes deep. The films can easily co-exist. But neither are films about Joy Division.
This film is made in the spirit of our generation. It’s not sentimental or glossy. I think it’s pure. There’s an honesty there, and a strength.
Why “Control”?
I chose the title for the obvious reason of She’s Lost Control. Also, Ian was something of a control freak. But the one element of his life that he couldn’t control was the epilepsy. Also I like one-word titles for albums and films.
Is Control as much about Anton Corbijn as it is about Ian Curtis?
In the look of the movie, for sure. Also, music meant everything to me. It was my world when I was growing up. It was my way of communicating with the outside world. I was quite shy and lonely.
I know the story is very English but the look of it is very European. It’s also very insular. You see very little of the outside world. I didn’t want to show Denis Healy or any of those politicians from the time. I wasn’t interested in the wider political context. My way of telling a story is to get down to the elements that interest me. Although this is a film that is set in the 1970s and ends in 1980, it could have been set in any period because the appeal of the film is far beyond Joy Division. It’s a three-sided love story and a human drama. It’s a tragic story and that’s why I’m so happy with the Killers track at the end: because it lifts it again. Hopefully, it will remind the viewer that a lot of beautiful things came out of Joy Division. That’s not to forget the devastating effect that his suicide had on the people close to him.
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