1995 05 Joy Division Vox

FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE?

Hundreds of stars have over-indulged in order to sustain rock’n’roll's central tenet: Live fast, die young. Far fewer have taken the extreme decision deliberately to end their own lives with a bullet or a rope. Fifteen years after the death by suicide of Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer’s ex-wife has written a book about his life. Why, asks Deborah Curtis, have no lessons been learned?

In September 1979, a Manchester group called Joy Division showcased their latest single, 'Transmission', on BBC2's new-wave show, Something Else. The opening camera shots panned in on the members of the band, finally stopping on the ghost-grey frame of the singer, hunched over the microphone, his pale blue eyes half-closed in concentration. As the song went on, Ian Curtis became more animated, jerking his arms and knocking the microphone stand to the floor. No language just sound, that's all we need know he sung, almost running on the spot in a desperate attempt to get away from whatever it was that was pursuing him. And we could dance! he screamed, looking genuinely terrified, but finally breaking free from his trance-like spell.

In a medium notorious for contrived or plastic performances, Curtis's TV appearance was a revelation, yet it was typical of the mesmeric way that he performed during the final year of his life, frequently getting so fired up by the music or his own personal demons that he would have an epileptic seizure on-stage.

Bono still genuflects at the holy voice of Ian Curtis, describing him as one of the greatest rock performers of all time: his work has touched everyone from Kurt and Courtney to comedian David Baddiel, who used to cover Joy Division songs in his schoolboy punk band, The Odds.

"I remember watching Ian Curtis sing in 1979, and it was fucking terrifying,” says Shane MacGowan. Like a horror movie or something. You were scared to go for a piss in case you missed something. He was clearly disturbed, but he managed to exorcise his demons on-stage."

Curtis finally gave in to his inner demons in the dawn hours of May 18, 1980. He wrapped the rope from his kitchen clothes-line around his neck and hung himself. Now, 15 years later, Curtis's widow Deborah has taken a line from Transmission— "Touching From a distance" —as the title for her book about Ian and Joy Division.

Initially begun six years ago as a form of therapy for her deep-rooted sense of loss and confusion, Deborah gave the book the working title of Exorcise One (a pun on the early Joy Division song 'Exercise One'), interviewed most of the people who were close to Ian and eventually took the decision to have her feelings published.

I think Ian would like the idea of someone perpetuating what he was," she says. "He wanted very much to be remembered."

Tony Wilson, owner of Joy Division's record label Factory, has yet to read Touching From A Distance , but he is delighted that someone has finally written an indepth, personal account.

"I've always said that if we'd had a Danny Sugerman (co-author of the definitive Doors biography No One Here Gets Out Alive) around, a lot more people would have known about Joy Division,” he says. "The Doors sold more albums in 1978 than in 1968 because of Danny's great book, and I was always waiting for one on Joy Division."

Born on July 15, 1956, the young Ian Curtis idolised The Doors singer Jim Morrison, was obsessed with "the romantic image of an early death" and, as a teenager, stubbed cigarettes out on his arms, sniffed dry-cleaning fluid, popped pills and once took enough Largactil to need his stomach pumped. On the day that the 16-year-old Ian met his future wife in their home town, Macclesfield, he was wearing make-up and his younger sister's pink fun-fur jacket. When they stalled dating a few months later, Ian told Deborah that he had "no intention of living beyond his early 20s" and she, wrongly, "assumed it was a phase he would grow out of'.

A big fan of David Bowie and The Velvet Underground, Ian had already decided that he was going to be a great songwriter. Deborah describes him as highly sensitive and deeply romantic, but prone to jealous rages and mood swings. They got engaged in April 1974, and Ian sold his beloved guitar to raise the £17.50 for a sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring.

They were married the following summer and, a year later, their lives were changed forever when they saw the Sex Pistols at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall, which confirmed Ian's belief that it was possible for anyone to be in a band. Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner were also there, and together they formed Warsaw (named after the David Bowie song Warsawa). Warsaw eventually found a permanent drummer in Steve Morris who also lived in Macclesfield, but the band changed their name to Joy Division before releasing an EP called An Ideal For Living in January 1978.

Soon Joy Division were gigging regularly and, on their way back from their first London show, at Islington's Hope And Anchor, on December 27, Ian had his first epileptic fit. The fits continued throughout 1979, a year that saw the birth of his daughter, Natalie, and the release of Joy Division's first album, Unknown Pleasures — a stunning debut that dealt with loss, loneliness, confusion and despair through a series of great songs like 'New Dawn Fades', Insight' and 'She's Lost Control' (where Curtis openly sang about epilepsy).

By this time, Deborah says that Ian had "built up a wall against any communication"—a wall that was built even higher when it became clear that the band's wives and girlfriends were no longer welcome at gigs (only Steve Morris ignored the new "no women" policy by continuing to take his girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on tour).

"That policy still operates today," says Peter Hook. "Personally, I don't agree with it now; it’s ridiculous. Looking back, we were just like any other bunch of 23-year-old louts. Give them a load of free beer and what do you expect?"

That October, when Joy Division played Plan K in Brussels, Ian Curtis met and fell in love with a woman called Annik Honore. In her book, Deborah is gracious about the other woman in her husband's life, only slipping when she refers to her as "the Belgian boiler"— a description that, according to Tony Wilson, was coined by Joy Division’s manager Rob Gretton when he shouted out in a Parisian club: "Hey up, Ian, where's your Belgian boiler?" and Curtis replied, through clenched teeth: "She’s right behind you, Rob."

Deborah says: "Annik was totally different from me. One of my friends said to me: Well, she is very glamorous, which upset me at the time, but I suppose she was. She was outspoken and I think the roles were completely reversed—whereas I was like Ian's accessory, she made him her accessory. I suppose I became his mother, just looking after him and packing his sandwiches and his suitcase, and it was like he had two different people."

Deborah eventually confronted Ian about his affair but, despite his promise to end it, he continued to take Annik on the road and shared a flat with her while the band recorded their second album, Closer, in London in March 1980. Annik told Tony Wilson she was worried about the mea culpa nature of some of Ian's lyrics. I remember Annik saying, very strongly: I'm worried about Ian,'" says Wilson. "There's some line where he’s saying that it's all his fault. She was absolutely right, but we didn't realise it.”

On his return from London, on April 7, Ian wrote a suicide note and took an overdose of Phenobarbitone. Deborah called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped. "We thought his first suicide attempt was a cry for help,' says Tony Wilson, "but none of us actually thought he really wanted to kill himself.'

Despite intentions to cut down the band's workload, Joy Division played three more shows that April; one developed into a riot because Curtis was too ill to appear. "The more work we did, the more likely we'd be to carry Ian off-stage," says Peter Hook. "We used to have endless fights with lighting guys, trying to stop them from flashing the lights because, as soon as the lights flashed, he'd go into a fit; the more tired he was the worse it would be."

At the end of April, Deborah filed for divorce, but Ian seemed in good spirits, playing Joy Division's final UK show at Birmingham University on May 2 and looking forward to their first American tour. "Ian was like a chameleon," says Deborah. "He'd be depressed one minute and a grinning school-boy the next."

The rest of Joy Division saw Ian for the last time on Friday May 16, when they dropped him off at his parents' house in Macclesfield. "We were all laughing and joking in the car about going to America on the Sunday," says Hook.

The next day, Ian went to his and Deborah's house at 77, Barton Street, ostensibly to watch Werner Herzog's Stroscek, a film about a German musician who travels to America, feels alienated and commits suicide. He played Iggy Pop's The Idiot through the night, wrote a letter to Deborah in the same large capital letters that he used to write his lyrics, and hung himself. Deborah describes discovering his body the following noon in the book.

"I took a step towards him, about to speak. His head was bowed, his hands resting on the washing machine. I stared at him, he was so still. Then the rope—I hadn't noticed the rope. I ran through to the sitting room and picked up the telephone. No, supposing I was wrong? Another false alarm I ran back to the kitchen and looked at his face; a long string of saliva hung from his mouth. Yes, he really had done it."

Wilson has described Curtis's suicide as "altruistic", intended to help both Annik and Deborah. "It was altruistic to a degree," Wilson says now. "The altruism is that you are causing a nightmare for three people and you can save them all the nightmare by committing suicide. But he should have fucking stuck around. Hooky's line was the best: 'In 24 hours, he would have arrived in America, fucked his way across it and had the time of his life.'"

"It's very easy to look back and think about what we should have done," reasons Hook. "There were a lot of factors involved. I mean, if he hadn't watched that film, he might still be with us now."

In the weeks after Ian's death, Joy Division's new single 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' reached Number 13 in the UK charts and the critically lauded Closer hit the Top Ten. The rest of the band were shocked and dazed, wondering what to do next. They eventually recruited Morris's girlfriend Gilbert, and formed New Order. "It was like snakes and ladders," says Hook. "We'd got to the top of a ladder, then slid down a snake. But we were determined to climb back up."

Deborah never returned to her marital home. She moved in with her parent and spent long hours sitting in her bedroom with her baby daughter listening to Joy Division. "I'm not sure that any of Ian's songs were specifically about me and him," she says. "He wanted to be unhappy, he wanted to die young and I was just a part of it. You see, even if he did say that he loved me in certain songs or in his suicide note, he didn't say it to me. It's no good saying it when you're dead; you have to say it when you're alive."

Unsurprisingly then, although Deborah chose the words Love Will Tear Us Apart for Ian's memorial stone, when journalists Paul Morley and Adrian Thrills wrote: "The value of Joy Division is the value of love," at the end of his NME obituary, it meant little to her.

"I just thought people had written so much twaddle," she says. "Like that idiot who said: 'This man died for you' [Dave McCullough writing in Sounds]... what really annoyed me was that every time Ian's death was mentioned, it was shrugged off with: 'Oh, he had marital problems,' but there was a lot more to it than that, which is probably why I started writing about it."

These days, Deborah and her second husband, Roger Boden (who she married in 1982), run a recording studio from their Macclesfield home. Natalie Curtis is now 15, the age that Deborah was when she met Ian, and both she and her 11-year-old brother Wesley are avid music fans: he plays guitar and she hopes to be a music journalist. "Natalie's proud of the songs Ian wrote and is aware of how good he was," says Deborah, "but she's perhaps bitter about why he left us."

Ian Curtis might be gone, but Joy Division's music continues, as does the romantic notion of living fast and dying young, most recently embraced by Kurt Cobain, who also made an abortive suicide attempt a few weeks before he shot himself and whose death note echoed fragments of Curtis's.

"Kurt's death had a big impact on me," says Deborah, "partly because we'd got tickets to see Nirvana. When he over-dosed it was so obvious that he wasn't going to be alive for much longer, but it still happened. It's like the guy from the Manic Street Preachers; has he turned up yet? There are so many parallels between him and Ian. He disappeared before going to America, leaving medication behind, and cutting his hair. That's what Ian did—he went crazy, cutting his hair all the time. They all seem to follow a pattern. You'd think somebody would be able to spot them by now."

KNOWN PLEASURES...

“I will never be able to cope with Ian's death, it will affect me forever. He was a really good friend.” Barney Albrecht Sumner

“We said we had to carry on, but it was a real struggle. I don’t think you notice the day you get over a death like that.” Steve Morris

“Ian Curtis was one of the great lead singers in rock’n’roll history.”

Tony Wilson

“Did I see any parallels between Ian’s death and Kurt Cobain’s? No, I saw more of a parallel between the bass lines of ’Ceremony' and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.” Peter Hook

“The stories that I’d heard about Joy Division, I knew that was the band to listen to out of all of them. I’ve always felt there’s that element of gothic in Nirvana.” Kurt Cobain

“When you hear a great song, it touches your life. You fuck to it, you feel blue to it, you feel great to it. It’s like Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’ - that song meant so much to me when I was younger.” Courtney Love

“Coming right after punk, a song like ‘New Dawn Fades’ was amazing. I had pretty limited tastes until Joy Division. After them, my tastes took a weird direction.”

Jim Reid, The Jesus And Mary Chain

“When you heard Joy Division, you were embarrassed, because you couldn’t believe someone was singing such stuff.” Michael Hutchence, INXS

“The voice of Ian Curtis is really naked and desperate. Absolutely timeless.”

Grant Lee Phillips, Grant Lee Buffalo

“Joy Division made music for fucked-up adolescents.”

Tim Burgess, The Charlatans

“We’ve tried to get that Ian Curtis vocal sound. Of course, all the imitators Joy Division spawned were atrocious—with their two-beat snare drum sound and all those people wearing hideous Boy trousers and red slip-on shoes.”

Andy Cairns, Therapy?

“i saw Joy Division before ‘the death’ and I was astonishingly unmoved. As were the audience, I might add. To me, it’s all just... legend.” Morrissey

“Manchester is a closed city, Cancerian like Ian Curtis; he remains the city’s greatest song poet.”

Jon Savage

By Ann Scanlon