Jim Murray looks back at the troubled Joy Division front man’s life.
In the early hours of May 18 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first tour of America, their enigmatic front man Ian Curtis listened to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, and watched Werner Herzog’s film Stroszek on television at his home in Macclesfield, near Manchester. After consuming part of a bottle of whiskey, he composed a suicide note to his estranged wife as the sun began to rise, noting that the birds were chirping and ‘he couldn’t go on anymore.’ As dawn broke, Curtis hanged himself in the kitchen.
Thirty years later, his legend is fuelled by a rock n’ roll mythology that equals that of one of his many fans, Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, and symbolises our obsession with the figure of the tortured musician dying tragically young.
Ian Curtis is as big an icon of contemporary culture as those he idolised as a teenager – Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Joy Division, the band he fronted for barely four years are a musical touchstone to almost any band that makes the first few faltering, transitional steps from garage to stage. Not only is the irony poignant; the four angry young men from Manchester, their music and their carefully maintained image conflate to give them the status in contemporary culture as alienation writ large.
Inspired by the seeing the Sex Pistols in 1977, Joy Division formed in Manchester. Curtis joined the band after answering an ad placed in Virgin Records by Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. Stephen Morris, who had been a few years below Curtis in high school, would later complete the line up.
After a short period as a run of the mill, snotty punk band known as Warsaw, they had changed their name to Joy Division, a term taken from the novel House of Dolls, by Ka-Tzetnik 135633. Joy Division was the wing of a Nazi concentration camp where female inmates were kept as prostitutes for the pleasure of German officers. By the time of their first release, the An Ideal For Living EP, which featured an image of a Hitler Youth drummer boy on the cover, they were denying accusations of flirting with fascist imagery.
Ian Curtis grew up in Macclesfield on the edge of the grim metropolis of Manchester. He was somewhat of a loner who idolised literary, music and film heroes such as James Dean, Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison, and increasingly identified with the vision of the tortured artist as he progressed through his teenage years, while also harbouring a desire to be famous. After leaving school without any qualifications he drifted from job to job, eventually finding some satisfaction in a job as a civil servant, working with the unemployed and then the mentally ill.
Curtis married his teenage sweetheart, Deborah, at the age of 19, and several years later she gave birth to their daughter Natalie. Cutis rapidly began to take enviable strides with his lyric writing, moving from misogynist, clumsily rhymed lyrics on initial demos to ones which began to plumb the depths of human emotions.
Joy Division eventually signed to the legendary Factory Records, and began recording their first album, Unknown Pleasures, with the mad genius of producer Martin Hannett at the helm. Hannett pushed the band to experiment with recording techniques, while also using cutting edge equipment to drive the band beyond basic garage punk into developing their unique sound. The recording was filled with guitar delay, driving melodic bass lines and synthesized drums producing an album soaked in a metallic sheen, evoking the grimy factories and waste ground of urban decay in Manchester at the time.
Curtis’ lyrics document a world of despair and loneliness – perhaps his and that of others. One of the more harrowing tracks from the album, She’s Lost Control, documented the fate of a mentally ill woman he’d been assisting in his work, who one day no longer turned up. He later learned that she had died. She screamed out kicking on her side and said/I’ve lost control again/And seized up on the floor, I thought she’d die/I’ve lost control again.
The release of the single Transmission announced the band to a wider audience, a foreboding bass line pulsating through guitars that evoked chainsaws cutting through metal and anchored by frantic 16/16 time drumming. Curtis’ strangled vocals evoked alienation, stagnation and ennui. We could go on as though nothing was wrong/hide from these days to remain all alone/staying in the same place staring at the tide/touching from a distance further all the time.
As Joy Division’s reputation grew and the band were able to give up their day jobs, the apparent pressures of a fledgling glimpse of celebrity and fame began taking their toll on Curtis. He had an unhappy home life, exacerbated by the pressures of becoming a father at a young age and growing dissatisfaction with his marriage.
In her candid biography of Curtis, Touching From A Distance, his wife Deborah Curtis suggests a misogynist, aggressive and violent husband; capable of deep unresolved anger and frustration, yet also random acts of love and kindness. She asserts that ‘what he wanted most in the world was for people to be happy’, often giving records and other treasured possessions away.
It challenges the legend of Curtis as the lone, tortured soul, who became increasingly obsessed with self-doubt, channelling his angst and pain in to lyrics. Moreover, his band mates have constantly denied ever being aware of any depression in his character, with Bernard Sumner lamenting in 2005; ‘We never studied his lyrics until after he died, because before that they seemed perfectly normal. Ian was just another jolly chap like the rest of us.’
However, despite the apparent lack of concern from his colleagues as to his state of mind, Curtis was clearly developing serious problems. After several episodes on-stage or post performance, Curtis was diagnosed with epilepsy – often provoked or exacerbated by stage strobe lighting. It was also in this period that Curtis embarked on an affair with a Belgian woman, Annik Honoré.
In a frenetic period of touring and recording in late 1979, he worked fervently on the lyrics for what would become Closer, their final studio album, distilling his troubled family life through a sieve of despair, agony and self-loathing.
The song titles, ranging from opener Atrocity Exhibition, the gothic percussion of Isolation, and the doom laden, funereal march of(The) Eternal, indicate a mind weighed down by far more than Curtis’ 23 years.
It was the last recording Joy Division and Ian Curtis made, and now recognised as a classic. Ian Curtis’ legend grew throughout the 1980s, particularly in the light of the success of New Order, which the remaining members formed after his death. Their infectious mix of dance and rock is just as influential, including releasing the unequalled Blue Monday, the biggest selling 12” of all time.
Over the course of the last thirty years Joy Division has become a touchstone for many bands, influencing and inspiring groups as diverse as Interpol, Radiohead, U2, Bloc Party and the Arcade Fire.
There is an obvious tendency to search for clues in Curtis’ lyrics to find an explanation for his death, but they can only serve as some indication of his state of mind. One of the last songs he ever wrote, In A Lonely Place, which would be released by New Order as one of their first singles is eerily foreboding. Hangman looks round as he waits/cord stretches tight then it breaks /someday we will die in your dreams/how I wish you were here with me now.
Ian Curtis’ ashes reside in Macclesfield Cemetery, where appropriately, the plaque above the niche is inscribed with the epitaph he wrote for himself – and title of the anthem to doomed love Joy Division would achieve mainstream success with when it was released only weeks after his death – Love Will Tear Us Apart.
