Ian Curtis and Joy Division remain unique. Not least because their music depicts emotions, sadness and terror in a way that pop music has rarely been able to depict. Also because Ian Curtis held nothing back to reveal his inner feelings, both live and on the band’s two albums. In fact, he seemed to be singing directly to the audience. In a way that’s unusually personal for a pop album.
Robert Smith of The Cure, no stranger to profundity himself, put it this way: “I remember hearing ‘Closer’ for the first time and thinking, ‘I can’t imagine ever doing something as powerful as this. I thought I’d have to kill myself to make a convincing record'”.
Of deep grey
To understand why Joy Division sounded the way they did, it’s important to consider the time and context in which the band members grew up and lived. The British Empire and class structures crumbled, unemployment and inflation plunged the country into an ever-greater crisis. Britain was in an economic decline, with huge cuts in public spending, political polarization and endless strikes. Not to mention the added danger of IRA bombs. The optimism of the “Swinging Sixties” had finally evaporated.
This was particularly true of the north of England in general and Manchester in particular. A city that had played an important role in the industrial revolution. It symbolized a region that had been in a state of perpetual agony since the decline of almost all local industries (from coal to cloth weaving). Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner recalled a Manchester full of factories where “nothing that was pretty” existed. According to him, they grew up in a place “When you didn’t have much of a chance of really getting ahead in the world”.
The Children of Manchester
In Joy Division’s music one could hear the scenes of Manchester in the 1970s. In fact, the first album was “Unknown Pleasures” “the album that most perfectly evoked the spirit of 1979”according to journalist Mick Middles.
Many faces
Ultimately, the esthete obsessed with death and rock and movie stars who died young. Who read about human suffering in Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hesse and Ballard. Your wife Debbie from Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince” read that “No secret is as great as misery”. According to Peter Hook “there were just too many Ians that we couldn’t handle. The perfect friend or partner for Ian would have combined all of those things, but if that person existed, they weren’t in our circles, so he had to be a chameleon. When I think about it, I bet even Ian didn’t know who the ‘real’ Ian was.”
The image of Ian Curtis
Much of the myth and mystique surrounding Joy Division and Ian Curtis tends to convey a more one-dimensional sense of anguish and gloom. Perhaps because the band gave few interviews and the album cover designs contain little information about them. Additionally, the images and footage released by Joy Division were almost entirely in black and white. Including the biopic “Control” based on the book “Touching From a Distance” by Ian’s wife Debbie Curtis. The film was created by Anton Corbijn, who had a decisive influence on the mythical look of Joy-Division with his black-and-white photos for the weekly music magazine NME at the end of the 1970s. With its 2007 release, Curtis has finally become a historical figure.
According to Kevin Cummins, another key photographer for Joy Divisions, Ian Curtis was an entertaining fellow, “but he has this picture of a depressed, withdrawn, dark, romantic hero because I’ve only posted photos where Ian looks depressed.”
Clear signs
But however much Ian maintained an inscrutable facade and enjoyed hanging out with those around him, looking back shows clear signs that things weren’t going well for him. His epilepsy, diagnosed in December 1978, became an ever-increasing burden as seizures grew more severe and frequent, both on and off stage. The medications he took for prevention were accompanied by numerous unpleasant side effects.
Ian Curti’s lyrics have always portrayed images of human cruelty and coldness, pressure, crisis, failure and loss of control. However, as his marriage and health spiraled downwards and he felt the pressure of fronting an increasingly popular band, they took on unprecedented proportions. So he sang lines like “Existence, well what does it matter”, “It’s creeping up slowly, that last fatal hour”, “I’ve lost the will to want more” and “Look beyond the day at hand, there’s nothing there at all”. Journalist Paul Morley referred to the album “Closer” as “a series of blatant suicide notes to a number of people in Ian’s immediate vicinity”.
“Joy Division in itself is such a big responsibility”
But did Ian Curtis want to die a romantic death, modeled after David Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”? Was it the drugs that made him end his own life, as his wife and some friends believed? Or was it all the soul searching, the illness and having to make a life choice between his wife and the affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré?
Curtis himself gave a hint when he told Radio Blackburn in 1980: “Basically we want to play and enjoy it. I think when we don’t do this anymore, then it’s time to end it. That will be the end.” According to Debbie Curtis, his only intention was to make one album and one single. He was unhappy with the music business and the pressure of being in Joy Division. As Curtis wrote in a letter to Annik Honoré: “Joy Division in itself is such a big responsibility. Not only for my own health and peace of mind, but also because the future of others rests on me. The burden became indeed too great”.
Ian Curtis is dead
It was soon over. Ian Curtis hanged himself on the night of May 17th, 1980 at his home in Macclesfield, near Manchester. He was 23 years old. The next day he was supposed to fly to the USA for the start of the Joy Division tour. A few weeks earlier, his wife had filed for divorce and Curtis ended his affair with Annik Honoré. His epileptic seizures had increased, as had his use of pills and drugs.
Ian Curtis had had coffee and schnapps, Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot was on the record player. Then the song “Tiny Girls”, which begins with the line: “Well the day begins, you don’t want to live, cause you can’t believe in the one you’re with”. The night before he had seen Werner Herzog’s film “Stroszek”. It’s about a musician who moves to America, is betrayed by his girlfriend and ends up taking his own life.
He left a note on the mantelpiece for Debbie, who soon found her estranged husband. According to neighbor Kevin Wood, Ian Curtis wrote that he wanted to continue living with her when he returned from America. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, many opinions arose about what had happened and why. Peter Hook said Ian Curtis seemed happy to be traveling in the US. Curtis’ friend and colleague Genesis P-Orridge, on the other hand, was certain “that he would rather die than go on this tour”.
According to Curti’s sister, Carole, one of the reasons was that her brother “Could mask his emotions. He never let you know what was really going on. He didn’t want to worry you. In my imagination, I never thought he would live past 30.”
reality and legacy
Joy Division have sold countless albums over the years with no advertising or marketing budgets, thanks to the freedom afforded them by their anarchic and idealistic (some would say flippant and financially unsound) record label Factory Records. In fact, the band’s two albums received excellent reviews from the then-authoritative NME upon their release. “Closer” peaked at number 6 on the UK Albums Chart.
At the same time, for much of Joy Division’s existence, the band members have had day jobs that they had to somehow balance with life in a band. Before recording Closer, they broke those obstacles and lived on around £50 a week. None of them made much money when Ian Curtis was alive. According to in-house designer Peter Saville, who designed Joy Division’s covers, “Ian’s story is one of the last true stories in pop…in a business-dominated pop culture”.
ROLLING STONE author Ralf Niemczyk on Ian Curtis:
During his lifetime, Curtis remained an indie maestro within a small counterculture. His suicide on May 18, 1980 ultimately elevated the depressed singer to a legendary figure in pop culture. The records “Unknown Pleasures” (1979) and the deeply melancholic album “Closer” (1980), which Curtis recorded with his band Joy Division, were initially more well-known in insider circles. In January 1980, only 300 to 350 people came to the rare Germany shows, for example in the Cologne Basement or in the Berlin Kant cinema.
A service of those in the know, consisting of punks, wavers with narrow ties, Bowie fans and England finders. Today, both albums are considered visionary and epochal. Dark-aggressive, coolly performed lyrics. The sound set up by Martin Hannett, which sounded claustrophobic and cold. In addition, Peter Hook’s famous rumbling bass and Stephen Morris’ lonely drums, banished to the roof of the recording studio by producer Hannett.
Even more than through his deep baritone singing and energetic stage performance, the legend Ian Curtis lives on through the ideal embodiment of the profoundly difficult young man. As a poet, songwriter, philosopher of a not at all cheerful everyday life. Even more than thirty years after his death, he has become an eternal character in the wide arsenal of pop culture.
It is idle to speculate whether a later Ian Curtis would have gone the way of Robert Smith, who radiated a not dissimilar aura as a young, still slim and short-haired guitarist of The Cure in the early eighties. Nor will we ever find out whether he would have liked his bandmates’ switch to the electronic follow-up project New Order.
Ian Curtis is buried in Macclesfield. His tombstone bears the inscription chosen by his wife: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – the title of the last Joy Division single. In a note to his wife before his death he wrote: “Reality just a concept based on values and established principles, while the dream goes on forever”.