He was the James Dean of the ‘blank generation’, the early ’80s desolate people who didn’t want the punk beer can riot: Ian Kevin Curtis of Greater Manchester; that at that time still completely dilapidated central English industrial zone between Mersey and Midlands, which since the decline of pretty much all local industries (from coal to cloth weaving) was in a state of permanent agony.
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 known more to 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, with Peter Hook’s famous rumbling bass and Stephen Morris’ lonely drums banished to the roof of the recording studio by producer Hannett.
The policeman’s son and high school dropout, Curtis first worked in a record store, later first in the Department of Defense, then in the unemployment office. In 1974 he married his girlfriend Debbie Woodruff and they have one daughter, Natalie. Curtis was depressed, he was on valium and drugs. He wrote lyrics, loved music. And finally met Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner in 1976, with whom he founded the band Warzaw – after David Bowie’s dark instrumental of the same name on his album “Low”. Their first EP, “An Ideal For Living”, in a controversial cover design borrowed from the fascist aesthetic, was released in 1978 under the name Joy Division.
At a loss for the no-future zeitgeist
At the latest since the 2007 biopic “Control” by Dutchman 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 seventies, Curtis has finally become a historical figure. A clueless of the no-future zeitgeist, who stylistically replaced the aggravated garage rock of the “Anarchy-In-The-UK” community. Much like James Dean in the 1950s, Curtis’ growing success never really eased his inner conflict and melancholy. His long-suppressed epilepsy (which erupted again and again on Joy Division’s live operations) compounded his despair at the world. It is one of the fateful notes of pop music that Ian Curtis committed suicide when the world’s largest music market was open to the band from Manchester with a US tour that had already been booked.
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 hanged himself on the night of May 17th, 1980 at his home in Macclesfield, near Manchester. 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 Deborah had filed for divorce, and Curtis ended an affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré. His epileptic seizures had increased, as had his use of pills and drugs. 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.
Heard again: “Unknown Pleasures” by Joy Division
“Unknown Pleasures” is not about the present or the future, but about “eternal” themes. Ian Curtis sings of self-loathing, desperation and shame, of the torturous view of a world without possibilities. He was 22 at the time, but his baritone sounded like the voice of a wise, world-weary old man who has seen everything and knows that every hope that seizes you will eventually die out again.
Curtis’ voice and his band’s music—Peter Hook’s singing bass, Bernard Sumner’s splintering guitar, Stephen Morris’ oddly spasmodic stumbling drums—places the album’s genius producer, Martin Hannett, in vast, coldly reverberant spaces , cathedrals of sound, in which the music, the songs and the destinies reflected in them seem even smaller and less important and thus even bigger and more sublime.
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