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Joy Division: Band on the Wall, Manchester
Mick Middles, Sounds, 16 September 1978

IT WAS during the unforgettable summer of '77 that I had my first encounter with Joy Division (then named Warsaw). Through a steamy Electric Circus Sunday night haze I watched the entire set under the impression that they were The Perfects. I remember thinking how limited the band's music was, even in comparison with the rest of the scene.

It was the beginning of the end for my personal New Wave, the sudden realisation that there must be more to music than the three chord bash. At the end of the set I approached a friend and uttered the embarrassing words, "I thought The Perfects were really dreadful."

"Perfects?" He said in a stunned voice. "They're Warsaw and they come from Manchester." He continued as if to imply that the fact that they were a local band gave them some sort of instant approval.

And his attitude on that distant night has been reflected more recently by a large number of Mancunians who feel that the city's new bands, in particular Joy Division, have been ignored and forgotten by the media.

So, I entered the Band on the Wall with a feeling of guilt at having not seen Joy Division since the closing night of the Electric Circus.

They started with 'Exercise One' which immediately showed that the band have improved immensely over the past year. It was a deep and doomy song with a killer bass line.

The band careered through the set, gradually lifting the crowd from being just mildly interested to being pretty boisterous. The finest song of the night was 'Ice Age', a catchy, bouncy and vicious number and a complete winner.

Still, although Joy Division are a fine, action-packed band, they still seem to me to be somewhat limited and fairly samey. They still tend to lock themselves inside this Nazi-history chic, a subject that has been exploited beyond tolerance over the past couple of years. But all in all a very interesting band with a bass guitarist who could eat Jean Jacques for breakfast. See them.

Joy Division
Mick Middles, Sounds, 18 November 1978

THROB,THROB, THROB, THROB. "Hey Miss, a bottle of Newcastle please, what? Oh, a bottle of Pils then." THROB, THROB, THROB, THROB.

The small under-age boy is becoming frustrated. All around him drinks and money are changing hands. Louder, deeper voices continually overwhelm his feeble pleadings. Even when he finds a chance to speak out on his own the throbbing of the music succeeds in drowning his words.

Forty feet behind him a group are onstage. The bass player has his back to the audience, he is swaying from side to side with the doomy rhythm. The lead guitarist stands dead still at the back of the stage, next to him two drumsticks hammer into the shivering drum-kit. At the front of the stage the lead vocalist stands with his right hand waving about in epileptic fashion. He is screaming infectious vocals. 'Seen the real atrocities buried in the sand, stockpiled safety for a few, while we stand holding hands.'

The name of the band is Joy Division. A doomy Mancunian fourpiece who emerged in early '77 under the name of Warsaw. It is Friday night/Saturday morning inside Manchester's energetic Russell Club, the crowd are politely non-commital. They seem mainly concerned with the traditional Friday night pastime of becoming outrageously drunk and are not taking much interest in the band. The band themselves are well below par and cannot reach the high standard that is their usual boast. Three weeks ago they achieved the impossible when they received a standing ovation from the normally ulta-passive Band On The Wall audience. Tonight, the finish is anti-climactic. They began in fine form but the set slowly tapered off to a mediocre finish. I stagger out of the club greedily clutching my free copy of the band's 12-inch single and, in true Springsteen style, I speed off into the night, maaan.

THE NEXT morning arrives too soon. I crawl out of bed with a dull throbbing at the back of my head and intent on self mutilation I reach for the record deck. Joy Division's e.p. is cruelly slapped on. I flinch as the static clicks in the speakers and await my fate. The music begins, dark and loud, almost early Black Sabbath. The lyrics cut through my head.

'I was there in the backstage, when the first light came around, I grew up like a changeling to win the first time around, I can see all the weakness, I can pick all the faults But I concede all the faith tests just stick in your throats.'

I've never, in all my record collecting life, known a record that is produced as loud as this. The second track is loud but experimental. Hard to compare it to anybody but perhaps Wire. It is magnificent in every way and I couldn't be more sincere. The e.p. is called 'An Ideal For Living' and is available NOW on Anonymous Records in twelve-inch form. It was out earlier in the year as a seven-inch but the record's power was missing. This is, as they say, the real thing.

THIRTY HOURS later I walk nervously into the room marked 'Rehearsal Room Number Six' and mentally study the lads who are huddled in the far corner. They are Joy Division plus manager Rob Gretton. I am trying to assemble a decent set of questions in my head. The room is freezing and the atmosphere is equally icy. I sit on the filthy floor and gather the band's names. They are: Ian Curtis – vocals, Bernard Albrecht – guitar, Pete Hooks (Hookey) – bass, and Steve Morris (who looks like John Maher) – drums.

After some five minutes of non-communication we decide to move to the pub, where the ice is broken. Only Pete Hooks seems unconcerned to the point of total disinterest. He curls up in the chair next to mine and verges on the unconscious. I try to ignore him and begin the strange interview.

On the record label it says "songs by Joy Division". Do you write collectively? Who comes up with the ideas?

Ian Curtis: "It varies a lot, musically anyway."

Bernard: "We usually start with a drum riff and then add bass and guitar on top of that. Ian supplies the lyrics."

Ian: "Yeah, I've got a little book full of lyrics and I just fit something in. I have a lot of lyrics in reserve so I'll use them when the right tune comes along. The lines are usually made up of all sorts of odd bits. 'Leaders Of Men' for example, some of the lines are two or three years old."

What are the lyrics about?

Ian: "I don't write about anything in paticular, I write very subconsciously".

Steve Morris: "If they were about anything specific they would become dated."

Ian: "Yeah, I leave it open to interpretation."

Are they trying to hide something, I think to myself as I drop the all time-clanger. When everyone thinks of Joy Division they automatically think of this Nazi thing. Perhaps it's because of your previous name (Warsaw). What have you to say about that?

Bernard: "WE picked Warsaw simply because it is a very nothing sort of name. We didn't wish to be called 'the' somebody.

Rob Gretton: "Back to this Nazi thing. It's good if people can jump to conclusions. I think that people can be very naive sometimes."

Bernard: "People tend to take a radical viewpoint on everything, whereas if they would just think for a change, they would see that it was absolutely nothing."

Rob: "You wrote in your review that "Joy Division still persist in this Nazi history chic". What does that mean?

It's a feeling that circulates around your audience plus the way you look onstage. (Incidentally, does Ian Curtis shout "Have you all forgotten Rudolph Hess" at the start of the Joy Division track on the Electric Circus album?

Rob: "They may look dark and mysterious onstage, but why do people connect that with the Nazis."

Ian: "Everyone calls us Nazis."

No, I didn't say that you were Nazis. I said that you seemed to be interested in Nazi history.

'They Walked In Lines' (Ian Curtis'78): 'All dressed up in uniforms so fine, they drank and killed to pass the time. Wearing the shame of all their crime, With measured steps they walked in lines.'

Bernard: "Everyone says that, but compared to Jimmy Pursey, who was an out and out racist.."

Why?

Bernard: "Well you don't think so, that proves my point. Nobody can remember the beginning of Sham 69 and the things he said then. Now he tries to disconnect himself from his past. Still his lyrics are great." (General laughter).

Have you played in London at all?

Rob: "No, never. It's been a conscious thing really, we want to wait for a while until we have more things on record. Actually, there could well be something in the near future, but I can't go into that.

Would it be fair to suggest that you are as near to Heavy Metal as you are to New Wave?

Rob: "I really couldn't say, but we are the only band in Manchester who have not turned towards pop. Would you agree?"

What about The Fall?

Rob: "Oh, yeah I forgot them."

Ian: "Do you like The Fall?"

Yeah, my favourite band in fact.

Rob: "Really, I dunno about them. They are like us in one respect because they don't pamper the audience. I don't see why you should pamper the audience".

THE INTERVIEW ends. I exchange 'see yous' with them and leave the pub. I am happy, I even stop to pat the dog that is guarding the pub's entrance before I cross the road. I am happy because Joy Division are one of the leading bands in the current renaissance of Mancunian activity. Manchester may have died during the last summer but right at this moment it is preparing for the second assault.

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures
Jon Savage, Melody Maker, 21 July 1979

"To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man." Where will it end?

THE POINT IS SO OBVIOUS. It’s been made time and time again. So often that it’s a truism, if not a cliché. Cry wolf, yet again. At the time of writing, our very own mode of (Western, advanced, techno-) capitalism is slipping down the slope to its terminal phase; critical mass. Things fall apart. The cracks get wider: more paper is used, with increasing ingenuity, to cover them. Madness implodes, as people are slowly crushed, or, perhaps worse, help in crushing others. The abyss beckons: nevertheless, a febrile momentum keeps the train on the tracks. The question that lies behind the analysis (should, of course, you agree) is: What action can anyone take?

One particular and vigorous product of capitalism’s excess has been pop music, not so much because of the form’s intrinsic merit (if any) but because, for many – bar football – it’s the only arena going in this country, at least. So vigorous because so much has to be channelled into so small a space: rebellion, creation, dance, sex energy. And this space, small as it is, is a market ruled by commerce, and excess of money. It’s as much as anyone can do, it seems, to accept the process and carefully construct their theatre for performance and sale in halls in the flesh, in rooms and on radios (if you’re very lucky) in the plastic. The limits imposed (especially as far as effective action goes) by this iron cycle of creation to consumption are as hard to break as they are suffocating.

"Trying to find a clue/trying to find a way/trying to get out…" Unknown Pleasures is a brave bulletin, a danceable dream; brilliantly, a record of place. Of one particular city: Manchester. Your reviewer might very well be biased (after all, he lives there), but it is contended that Unknown Pleasures, in defining reaction and adjustment to place so accurately, makes the specific general, the particular a paradigm.

"To the centre of the city in the night waiting for you..." Joy Division’s spatial, circular themes and Martin Hannett’s shiny, waking-dream production gloss are one perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places, endless sodium lights and hidden semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites — the endless detritus of the 19th century — seen gaping like rotten teeth from an orange bus. Hulme seen from the fifth floor on a threatening, rainy day... This is not, specifically, to glamorize: it could be anywhere. Manchester, as a (if not the) city of the Industrial Revolution, happens only to be a more obvious example of decay and malaise.

That Joy Division’s vision is so accurate is a matter of accident as much as of design: Unknown Pleasures, which together with recent gigs captures the group at some kind of peak, is a more precise, mature version of the confused anger and dark premonitions to be found (in their incarnation as Warsaw) on the skimpy Electric circus blue thing, the inchoate Ideal for Living EP, and their unreleased LP from last year. As rarely happens, the timing is just right.

The song titles read an opaque manifesto: ‘Disorder’, ‘Day of the Lords’, ’Candidate’, Insight’, ‘New Dawn Fades’ — to recite the first, aptly named "Outside’. Loosely, they restate outsider themes (from Celine on in): the pre-occupations and reactions of individuals caught in a trap they dimly perceive — anger, paranoia, alienation, feelings of thwarted power, and so on. Hardly pretty, but compulsive.

Again, these themes have been stated so often as to be cliches: what gives Joy Division their edge is the consistency of their vision — translated into crude musical terms, the taut danceability of their faster songs, and the dreamlike spell of their slower explorations. Both rely on the tense, careful counterpoint of bass (Peter Hook), drums (Stephen Morris) and guitar (Bernard Sumner): Ian Curtis’s expressive, confused vocals croon deeply over recurring musical patterns which themselves mock any idea of escape.

Live, Curtis appears possessed by demons, dancing spastically and with lightning speed, unwinding and winding as the rigid metal music folds and unfolds over him. Recording, as ever, demands a different context: Hannett imposes a colder, more controlled hysteria together with an ebb and flow — songs merge in and out with one another in a brittle, metallic atmosphere.

The album begins unequivocally with ‘Disorder’: "I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand"; the track races briskly, with ominous organ swirls — at the end, Curtis intones "Feeling feeling feeling" in the exact tones of someone who’s not sure he has any left.

Two slower songs follow, both based on massively accented drumming and rumbling bass — in their slow, relentless sucking tension, they pursue confusion to a dreamlike state: ‘Day of the Lords’ is built around a wrenching chorus of ‘Where will it end?’, while the even sparser ‘Candidate’ fleshes out the bare rhythm section with chance guitar ambience. In a story of failed connection and obscure madness, Curtis intones "I tried to get to you", ending with the pertinent:

It’s just second nature It’s what we’ve been shown We’re living by your rules That’s all that we’ve known.

The album’s two aces are ‘Insight’ and ‘She’s Lost Control’: here, finally, Gary Glitter meets the Velvet Underground. Both rely on rock-hard echoed drumming and bass recorded well up to take the melody — the guitar provides textural icing and thrust over the top.

Insight’ leads out of ‘Candidate’ with a suitable hesitation: whirring Leslie ambience leads to a door slamming, then a slow bass/drum fade into the song. The attractive, bouncing melody belies the lyrics: "But I don’t care any more/I’ve lost the will to want more". At the end Curtis croons, his voice treated, ghostly: "I’m not afraid any more" to drown in a flurry of electronic noise from the synthesized snare.

‘She’s Lost Control’, remixed to emphasize guitar and percussion, is a possible hit single: it’s certainly the obvious track for radio play. Deep and dark vocals ride over an irresistible, circular backing that threatens to break loose but never does; the tension ends in a crescendo of synthesized noise.

On the ‘Inside’, three faster tracks follow — mutated heavy pop, all built around punishing rhythms and riffs it’d be tempting to call metal, except control is everywhere. ‘Shadowplay’ is a metallic travelogue — the city at night — with Curtis fleeing internal demons; the following couple, ‘Wilderness’ and ‘Interzone’, wind the mesh even tighter.

‘Wilderness’ externalizes things into Lovecraftian fantasy, all echoed drumming and sickening guitar slides, while ‘Interzone’ moves through a clipped, perfect introduction to guitar shrills and ‘Murder Mystery’ mumbles:

Down the dark street the houses look the same Trying to find a way trying to find a clue Trying to get out!

Both sides, finally, end with tracks — ‘New Dawn Fades’ and ‘Remember Nothing’ — so slow and atmospheric that alienation becomes a waking dream upon which nothing impinges: ‘Me in my own world … ‘

Leaving the twentieth century is difficult; most people prefer to go back and nostalgize, Oh boy. Joy Division at least set a course in the present with contrails for the future — perhaps you can’t ask for much more. Indeed, Unknown Pleasures may very well be one of the best, white, English, debut LPs of the year.

Problems remain: in recording place so accurately, Joy Division are vulnerable to any success the album may bring — once the delicate relationship with environment is altered or tampered with, they may never produce anything as good again. And, ultimately, in their desperation and confusion about decay, there’s somewhere a premise that what has decayed is more valuable than what is to follow. The strengths of the album, however, belie this.

Perhaps, it’s time we all stand facing the future. How soon will it end?

Joy Division: Northern Gloom: 2 Southern Stomp: 1
Chris Bohn, Melody Maker, 16 February 1980

Joy Division: University of London Union

AH, THE HORROR, the horror... where's Colonel Kurtz? Somehow the demented Brando figure is there, spiritually leading the new dance. Like him, today's purveyors have witnessed the failure of wanton destruction, as epitomized by punk, and in turn have retreated inwardly.

But whereas he translated his thoughts into some nightmare paradise of his own creation, recent bands' introspections manifest themselves in tight, uneasy rhythms, simultaneously despondent and obsessively exhilarating. Coming too late to lose themselves in furiously simple thrashes, they've composed out of that same frustration something more complex, but equally immediate.

Joy division are masters of this gothic gloom, and they're getting even better at it. Since they played London last November with the Buzzcocks, they've added new songs, more vigorous than their predecessors. Less colourful now, they're getting closer to the despair that's been the core of their work thus far, and they're honing in on it by twisting purplish plots round slower rhythms, bringing the bass even further to the fore and allowing Ian Curtis's knotted-brow singing greater expression.

In other hands their songs would collapse disastrously, but Curtis's controlled balladeering makes lines like "I remember/When we were young" (from ‘Insight’) one of the saddest statements in pop, which is after all, the province of the young, and that sung to the sweetest, most melancholic tune, too.

Perversely, they didn't play the great last single, ‘Transmission’, but the next, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, was tantalizingly aired; featuring synthesizer more heavily to lightening effect, it breaks away from the claustrophobia into clearer surrounds. Optimism on the way? Whatever, I'm prepared to wait.

Joy Division: From Safety To Where?
Jon Savage, Melody Maker, 14 June 1980

ABOUT MIDDAY on Sunday, May 18, Ian Curtis was found dead by his wife in the kitchen of his house in Macclesfield. Although the exact cause and circumstances are unclear – the inquest is to be held this Friday – the manner was peculiarly final – hanging.

His death occurred at about 5am on Sunday morning, at a time when he was under a great deal of emotional stress from outside sources.

His funeral was held on Friday, May 23. Since then fantastic stories have flown on the wings of rumour, as the rock'n'roll vampires have begun to erect the steel wall of myth: a Viciousburger that died for his art.

Rock'n'roll culture is dead necrophiliac, it's the death wish that lies in youth and in the original dream amplified. Death is romantic, exquisitely sad; it provides an easy package, an easy full-stop. So it is with Ian Curtis; Joy Division had built up a reputation based on the communication of a particular mood; rooted in place (Manchester), yet wider; alienated, nostalgia, displacement of belief, yet searching for an answer at a time when common systems have disappeared and little is left. This reputation was enhanced by stinging, monolithic live performances and more muted, fragile recordings.

Death provides a crystallization: Ian Curtis' artistic life can now be interpreted as a struggle that failed, for reasons that are as personal and obscure as his death. Now, no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous. Now you can file under all-purpose romantic myth, ripe for packaging and consumption.

To write much further would give unnecessary place to an act that was private, public though it's effects may be. Ian Curtis and his myth have now become public property in that what he expressed affected many people who knew him little (like myself) or those who knew him not at all.

To mythologise and canonise him as a romantic pessimist who died for his art is to have a corpse in your mouth. It's also to miss the point and give credence to a myth that is out of date (Chatterton in the early 18th century) and damaging in these bad times.

I was very affected by Ian Curtis' death; I'm not now. Life must go on, as the morbidity of speculation and myth-making is unhealthy. By all means consume the myth if it fulfils a need, but reflect on it: people do die for all sorts of things and rock'n'roll is no significantly sillier than anything else. But Curtis didn't ultimately, die for either art or rock'n'roll, nor it's romantic pessimism, ultimately enough. Our cancerous culture atrophies through the very real lack of a will to live: to idolise death is to reinforce that.

As for Ian Curtis, he's passed through to the next stage.

Joy Division: Someone Take These Dreams Away
Jon Savage, Mojo, July 1994

HERE ARE THE young men, a weight on their shoulders Here are the young men, well where have they been? We knocked on the doors of hell's darker chambers Pushed to the limits, we dragged ourselves in Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying We saw ourselves now as we never had seen Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration The sorrows we suffered and never were freed Where have they been? Where have they been?

AUGUST 27, 1979: Joy Division are headlining a ridiculous festival in a field outside Leigh, half-way between Liverpool and Manchester. The leading independent labels of both cities — Zoo and Factory — are meeting to showcase their talent: A Certain Ratio, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes. To the local police, this is tantamount to an alien invasion: they've closed down the town and are searching everyone on entry for drugs. One of my carload is already in custody.

In the twilight, Joy Division start their journey. What you get is this: at the back, a lanky drummer who pounds out rhythms at one intricate yet simple. At climactic moments, Stephen Morris attacks a syndrome of those "pou pou" noses that you're starting to hear on disco records like 'Ring My Bell'. On the left, a slight person with the face of a debauched choirboy and the clothes of a polite young man — Bernard Dicken as he is then called — hunches over a guitar which is issuing rhythmic, often distorted blocks of noise. The sound scythes through the air.

On the right is the bearded bass player with his dyed blond thatch, engineer boots and double-breasted jacket: bent at the knees, he swings his instrument round like an offensive weapon. Peter Hook's bass lines are prominent in the mix: Joy Division use them to carry the melody as so much else is texture. In the centre stands the singer: very pale, sometimes sweaty, tall, dressed in different shades of grey. He has the severe haircut of a Roman emperor.

At the beginning, Ian Curtis is still, singing as if with infinite patience. Then, as the group hit the instrumental break, it's as through a switch has been flipped: the stillness suddenly cracks into violent movement. The running joke is that he does the "dead fly" dance — the leg and arm spasm of a dying insect — but he is more controlled than that. As the limbs start flying in that semicircular, hypnotic curve you can't take your eyes off him for a moment.

Then you realize: he’s trying to get out of his skin, out of all this, forever and he's trying harder than anyone you've ever seen. This is extraordinary. Most performers keep a reserve while they're onstage; only giving a part of themselves away. Ian Curtis is holding nothing back: with the musicians behind him every inch of the way, he's jumping off the cliff.

Near the end of the set comes a new song, 'Dead Souls', which begins as a rollercoaster of soaring guitar and lurching bass lines. After a couple of minutes Curtis starts to sing: "Someone take these dreams away." He's seeing visions, of figures from the past, of mocking voices — a terrible beauty. By the time that the song reaches its coda, he's shrieking, "They keep calling me, keep on calling me, they keep calling me", and the hairs on our necks stand up. This is it, no way round it: Ian Curtis is raising the dead.

"I was into, I suppose nowadays you'd call it slacking, but in those days I called it being a lazy twat." says Bernard Sumner today. "I couldn't believe that I was now a professional musician: my whole ambition was to do something that I enjoyed, but not actually work hard at it. Just let the ether flow through me — ha! — and I'd be this medium for this music from the spirits that came through me. I'd just lie there and the music would come through my fingers, because I'd imagined that's what art was.

'It's difficult to speak for everyone, but one of the funny things was that we never talked about the music: we had an understanding which we never felt the need to vocalize. I felt that there was otherworldliness to the music, that we were plucking out of the air. We felt that talking about the music would stop that inspiration. In the same way, we never talked about Ian's lyrics or Ian's performance. I felt that if I thought about what he did, then it would stop. I thought, If something great is happening, don't look at the sun, don't look at the sun."

Shadow that stood by the side of the road Always reminds me of you.

JUST OVER 14 years ago, in the early hours of 18th May 1980, Ian Curtis died by his own hand. It came as a total shock. The group were due to go to America a day later. With a single, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and the album Closer ready for release, Joy Division were poised for a breakthrough. As Chris Bohn wrote later, "the suicide didn't so much bring [their] journey to the heart of darkness, to an abrupt halt as ... freeze it for all eternity at the brink of discovery."

Manchester is a closed city, Cancerian like Ian Curtis. The main participants didn't openly mourn, but carried on under a different name, New Order, into the group we have known and loved during the 1980s. The label that Joy Division had helped to build, Factory Records, became the model of non-metropolitan success. Everything culminated in the summer of 1990, the last summer of love, when Happy Mondays broke through the New Order finally went to number one with the World Cup theme, 'World in Motion'. Grey and black had turned into Day-glo, darkness into light.

Yet Joy Division have remained a powerful presence, or indeed, absence. They have been recently cited by writers as diverse as Kurt Cobain, Coutney Love, Donna Tartt and Dennis Cooper, who entitled his second novel Closer. They also inspired the comic artist James O'Barr, who saturated the three parts of his novel The Crow with Joy Division lyrics, character names and an open dedication to Ian Curtis, "who showed me the indescribable beauty in absolute ugliness". It was during the filming of this dark story that Bruce Lee's son, Brandon, was killed by an accidental shot.

I began regularly visiting Manchester again after 1990, and experienced Curtis's absence as a powerful event that I hadn't yet come to terms with. As things turned sour for both Factory and New Order, it was hard not to feel that his death remained unresolved for the main participants. It seemed like a good time to tell his story. I contacted Curtis's group, manager, label owner and wife — Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson, Deborah Curtis — and they all, except Gretton who hardly ever does, agreed to speak.

In her forthcoming biography, Touching from a Distance, Deborah Curtis writes about the reality behind the performance, the fact that Ian's mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that she has to cope with at home. As she says now, "people admired him for the things that were destroying him". Ian Curtis's death was a personal tragedy with wider implications. Couldn't it have been prevented? Was what we thought to be artistic exorcism sheer, unrelenting autobiography? Where did such darkness come from and why did we so willingly enter it?

A change of scene, with no regrets A chance to watch, admire the distance Still occupying — though you forget Different colours, different shades Over each mistakes were made I took the blame Directionless, so plain to see A loaded gun won't set you free So you say.

JOY DIVISION began, as did so much else, on 4th June 1976. Invited by the fledging Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols played their first northern date, in a tiny hall above Manchester's Free Trade Hall. In a super-8 film shot that day, Johnny Rotten twists around the small stage in an already stylized ritual of aggression and withdrawal. "It was dead exciting and dead heavy, real laddish," says Peter Hook. "Something was happening and the music was secondary."

"I went with Hooky and Terry Mason, our roadie," Says Bernard Sumner. "He'd read somewhere about the Sex Pistols having a fight onstage and he dragged us down to see them. I didn't think they were good: I though they were bad, that's why I liked it. I thought they destroyed the myth of being a pop star, of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship.

"I first met Ian at the Electric Circus. It might have been the Anarchy tour, or the Clash. Ian was with another lad called Ian, and they both had donkey jackets: Ian had ‘HATE’ written on the back of his but I remember liking him. He seemed pretty nice, but we didn’t talk to him that much. About a month later when we decided to try to find a singer — because Hooky and I had formed a group — we put an ad in Virgin Records. Ian rang up and I said, ‘Right, OK.’ We didn't even audition him.

"Ian brought a direction. He was into the extremities of life. He wanted to make extreme music: he wanted to be totally extreme on stage, no half measures. Ian's influence seemed to be madness and insanity. He said that a member of his family had worked in a mental home and she used to tell him things about the people there: people with 20 nipples or two heads, and it made a big impression on him. Part of the time when Joy Division were forming, he worked in a rehabilitation centre for people with physical and mental difficulties, trying to find work. He was very affected by them."

Ian Curtis was born on 15th July 1956, the elder son: his father worked in the Transport Police. During his teens, his parents moved from Hurdsfield on the outskirts of Macclesfield to the huge 1960s blocks of Victoria Park, near the station. Although only just beyond the furthest Manchester suburb, Macclesfield is an older, small town, where the looming Pennines offer both an escape and a witchy emptiness: "It's actually quite nice, the hills around," says Sumner. "But if you drive round there on a winter night, and I've done it, you won't see a soul on the street."

According to Deborah Curtis, who met him when he was 16, Ian had a normal bohemian adolescence. Like many teens growing up in the early 1970s, he was fired by David Bowie, who placed in pop culture a whole set of self-destructive references both musical and literary: Jacques Brel, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, William Burroughs. At the time, this seemed like little more than the standard teenage dramatization of misery: after leaving the King's School, Curtis went to work every day and, in August 1975, got married. It seemed as though he was settling down.

With hindsight, it's now clear that things went deeper. When he was 14, Ian would, like many teens do today, raid the medicine cabinets of anyone they visited, and try out the combination of drugs as a leisure option. In the summer of 1972, there was an ambiguous overdose with his friend Oliver Cheaver, where both boys had their stomachs pumped: overdose or suicide attempt? "I think he wanted to kill Jim Morrison," says Deborah Curtis. "Someone who'd got famous and died. Being in a band was very important: he was very single-minded about it. He'd always said that he didn't want to live into his twenties, after 25."

"Everyone says Joy Division's music is gloomy and heavy," says Bernard Sumner. "I often get asked why this is so. The only answer I can give is my answer, why it was heavy for me. I can only guess why it was heavy for Ian, but for me it was because the whole neighbourhood that I'd grown up in was completely decimated in the mid-1960s. I was born and raised in Lower Broughton in Salford: the River Irwell was about 100 yards away and it stank. At the end of our street was a huge chemical factory: where I used to live is just oil drums filled with chemicals.

'There was a huge sense of community where we lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid: we could stay up late and play in the street, and 12 o'clock at night there would be old ladies outside the houses, talking to each other. I guess what happened in the 1960s was that someone at the council decided that it wasn't very healthy, and something had to go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved over the river into a tower block. At the time I thought it was fantastic; now of course I realize it was an absolute disaster.

"I'd had a number of other breaks in my life. So when people say about the darkness in Joy Division's music, by the age of 22, I'd had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to life, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realized then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there's this void. For me Joy Division was about the death of my community and my childhood. It was absolutely irretrievable.

"When I left school and got a job, real life came as a terrible shock. My first job was at Salford Town Hall sticking down envelopes, sending rates out. I was chained in this horrible office: every day, every week, every year, with may be three weeks' holiday a year. The horror enveloped me. So the music of Joy Division was about the death of optimism, of youth. Just before Joy Division was a time of total upheaval for me: it came very early."

The group took shape. Sumner claims they were always known as Joy Division. Peter Hook disagrees, and for the first few months they were more generally known as Warsaw — after Bowie's 'Warszawa'. "We had so much aggro then," says Peter Hook. "Most of the musicians in Manchester then were very middle-class, very educated: like Howard Devoto. Barney and I were essentially working-class oiks. Ian came somewhere in the middle, but primarily we had a different attitude. We felt like outsides: it was very vicious and backbiting."

Warsaw dithered with drummer until another Macclesfield native, Stephen Morris, joined in summer 1977. "Ian was a year or two above me in the King's School," he says. "He remembered me because I got kicked out with a couple of friends for drinking cough medicine, and the older boys were advised to go round checking the pupils' pupils." The group played the Electric Circus and recorded a four-song EP, Ideal for Living, which showed them moving away from thrash to a more measured, heavier sound. "We were just having fun," says Sumner; "learning where to put your fingers on the guitar and what sort of amplifiers to use."

By the time the record was finally released, they were known as Joy Division — a name taken from the book that inspired the EP's final cut, 'No Love Lost': Ks-Tzetnik 135633's House of Dolls, a pulp nightmare diary of Nazi terror. The sleeve featured drawings taken from World War II: a drummer boy, a Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto. "Ian had always been interested in Germany," says Deborah Curtis. "At our wedding we sang a hymn to the tune of the German national anthem. We went to see Cabaret a dozen times."

"For me it was about World War II," says Bernard Sumner, "because I was brought up by my grandparents. They told me about the war, about all the sacrifices people had made so that we could be free: we had a room upstairs with gas masks and sand bags and English flags, tin helmets. The war left a big impression on me, and the sleeve was that impression. It wasn't pro-Nazi; quite the contrary, I thought, fashionable or unfashionable, what went on in the war shouldn't be forgotten, so that it didn't happen again."

It would help to put this period into some kind of perspective. Punk was primarily libertarian, anarchist even, but there was a persistent right-wing trace that cam from its opposition to the power politics of the day — the end of consensus socialism. In both English and American avant-garde rock — whether it was the Ramones or Throbbing Gristle — it had become important to say the unsayable, to examine the right-wing, to try to come to terms with the darker side of the human psyche. This is not a wise thing to do in pop culture, which is notorious for flattening our complexities.

Ian Curtis was a bundle of paradoxes: he was a Tory, yet he liked the writing of bohemian authors like J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs. At the same time as he wrote haunted lyrics and gave mesmeric performances, he was a great practical joker. He could be both a charismatic leader and highly suggestible: he hated confrontation and could be all things to all men. Even the people closest to him will disagree: according to Peter Hook, "Ian was interested in the occult." Sumner says he wasn't.

During 1978, Joy Division left their naivety behind, they started to get good. In January, they played the infamous Bowie/Roxy disco, Pips. "That was the first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage," says Stephen Morris. "I couldn't believe it: the transformation to this frantic windmill." Their appearance at the chaotic Stiff Test/Chiswick Challenge battle of the bands in April brought them to the attention of their future manager, Wynthenshawe native Rob Gretton, and their most persistent propagandist, Tony Wilson.

"Every band in Manchester played that night," he remembers. "I sit down and then this kid in a raincoat comes and sit next to me an goes, ‘You’re a fucking cunt: why don't you put us on television?’ That was Ian Curtis. At the very end of the night, Joy Division went on and after about 20 seconds, I thought, this is it. Most bands are onstage because they want to be rock stars. Some bands are onstage because they have to be, there's something trying to get out of them: that was blatantly obvious with Joy Division."

During the spring of 1978, the group recorded an 11-track album for RCA under the auspices of Northern Soul DJ Richard Searling, but they were moving so quickly that it was obsolete almost as soon as it was recorded. "There was suddenly a marked difference in the songs," says Peter Hook. "We were doing a soundcheck at the Mayflower, in May, and we played ‘Transmission’: people had been moving around, and they all stopped and listened. I was thinking, What's the matter with that lot? That's when I realized that was our first great song."

Everything was coming together. Rob Gretton took over the group's management: his first act was to commission a sequence of designs from Better Badges — this was the era of the badge as underground communication. Tony Wilson put them on So It Goes, a Granada TV programme (their performance of 'Shadowplay' was overlaid with negative footage from a World in Action documentary about the CIA), and had them as headliners when the new Factory club opened in Hulme. After the group had sweated out their contract with RCA, they went in to the studios with Martin Hannett to record what would become The Factory Sample.

"I'd seen them in Salford Tech," Martin Hannett told me in 1989. "They were really good. It was very big room, they were badly equipped and they were still working this space, making sure they got into the corners. When I did the arrangements for recording, they were just reinforcing the basic ideas. They were a gift to a producer, because they didn't have a clue. They didn't argue. The Factory Sample was the first thing I did with them: I think I'd had the new AMS delay line for about two weeks. It was called digital; it was heaven sent."

"Joy Division had a formula, but it was never premeditated," says Bernard Sumner. "It came out naturally: I’m more rhythm and chords, and Hooky was melody. He used to play high lead bass because I liked my guitar to sound distorted, and the amplifier I had would only work when it was at full volume. When Hooky played low, he couldn't hear himself. Steve has his own style which is different to other drummers. To me, a drummer in the bad is the clock, but Steve wouldn't be the clock, because he's passive: he would follow the rhythm of the band, which gave us our own edge. Live, we were driven by watching Ian dance; we were playing to him visually."

"Ian used to spot the riffs," says Peter Hook. "We'd jam; he'd stop us and say, ‘That was good, play it again.’ We didn't have a tape recorder then: imagine! He spotted ‘Twenty Four Hours’, ‘Insight’, ‘She's Lost Control’ — all of them. If it hadn't been for his ear, we might have played it that once and then never played it again. You didn't even know you'd played it that once and then never played it again. You didn't even know you'd played it, half the time. It's unconscious, but he was conscious."

"Ian was a writer," says Bernard Sumner. "He would always have a file box with him, full of lyrics. He'd sit at home and just write all the time, instead of watching telly. He'd stay up: I don't know this, I'm just surmising, because he'd come in with reams and reams of lyrics. He never wrote any music but he was a great orchestrator. I'd arrange the songs and we all wrote the music, but Ian would give us the direction. He was very passionate at those moments: if we were writing a song, he'd say, ‘Let's make it more manic!’"

While The Factory Sample slowly sold out its 5,000 copies, Joy Division proceeded apace — in traditional industry terms. In late December 1978, they played their first London date, at the Hope and Anchor. The next month they recorded their first, four-song session for John Peel. In March they did four demos for Martin Rushent, preparatory to their signing: to Rushent's company, Genetic, a subsidiary of the WEA-owned Radar Records. It never happened.

"The more we went into it, the more we realized that it was going to be very difficult to work with these people," says Peter Hook. "Genetic were offering us a lot of money, like £40,000, which was flattering, but so far out of our comprehension that it didn't matter. Rob just decided that the toing and froing with Tony was (a) more interesting and (b) more frustrating but ultimately more rewarding. He decided it was better to work with someone you could just walk down and get hold of. Factory, for all its failings, if you had a beef, you could just walk in there and yell."

The group were busy recording with Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. When they'd finished Unknown Pleasures, they took it to Factory. There was no contract, but, as Peter Hook says, "We had a sheet of paper saying that the masters would revert to us after six months if either of us decided not to work with each other. That was it. It was amazing that the agreement lasted so well."

This way Joy Division's first breakthrough: "Unknown Pleasures was our first outing into the real world," says Bernard Sumner. "I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand," Ian Curtis sings on the opening 'Disorder', and the following nine tracks are a definitive Northern Gothic statement: guilt-ridden, romantic, claustrophobic. On 'Interzone' the group take a Northern Soul riff, N. F. Porter's 'Keep On Keepin' On', but blast off to another place entirely: "Trying to find a way/Trying to find a way/To get out."

The standout song was 'She's Lost Control', a live favourite with its Stooges guitar and swooping bass line, quickly covered by gay disco diva Grace Jones. "It was about a girl who used to come into the centre where Ian worked to try to find work," says Bernard Sumner. "She had epilepsy and lost more and more time through it, and then one day she just didn't come in any more. He assumed that she'd found a job, but found out later that she'd had a fit and died."

I'd just moved to Manchester that spring, and Unknown Pleasures helped me orient around the city. I reviewed it for Melody Maker in typically overheated style:

Joy Division's spatial circular themes and Martin Hannett's shiny, waking dream production gloss are one perfect reflection of Manchester’s dark spaces and empty places: endless sodium lights and semis seen from a speeding car, vacant industrial sites — the endless detritus of the 19th century — seen gaping like teeth from an orange bus ...

Unknown Pleasures is one of the strongest debuts ever, defining not only a city but a time. Martin Hannett: "Ian Curtis was one of those channels for the Gestalt: the only one I bumped into during that period. A lightning conductor." As Biba Kopf wrote last year, "no other writer so accurately recorded the corrosive effect on the individual of a time squeezed between the collapse into impotence of trad Labour humanism and the impending cynical victory of Conservatism."

The group hated the record. "We'd played the album live," says Bernard Sumner. "The music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars. The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we'd drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin had coloured it in for us. We resented it, but Rob loved it, Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the public loved it: we were just the stupid musicians who wrote it! We swallowed our pride and went with it."

Existence, well what does it matter I exist on the best terms I can The past is now part of my future The present is well out of hand.

There were problems. "Ian was primarily a fun guy, a good laugh," says Bernard Sumner. "But in a weird way. he wasn't a straight person. Let me start with his moments of intensity, which was when he got frustrated. I remember him having this argument with Rob Gretton at our rehearsal room, T.J.Davidson's. He got so frustrated that he picked up the garbage bucket, stuck it over his head and started running up and down the room, screaming at Rob, and he was just completely mad. He had an explosive personality, but most of the time he was cool. He really was.

"His performance was a manifestation of this frenzy. He was Ian, Mister Polite, Mister Nice, and then suddenly, onstage, about the third song, you'd notice he'd gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart, ripping up the floorboards and throwing them at the audience. Then by the end of the set he'd be completely and utterly manic. Then you'd come offstage and he'd be covered in blood. But no one would talk about it, because that was our way we didn't think he knew why he got himself worked up that way.

"One day we were doing a gig at the Hope and Anchor in London. I was really ill with flu, and they had to come and drag me out of bed. Every time Steve hit the cymbals the whole room turned upside-down: literally, in my head, my eyes turned upside-down. It was horrible. There were only about 20 people there. We were driving back home in Steve's car: I was really ill, shivering, covered in a sleeping bag. Ian just grabbed the sleeping bag and pulled in off. He's been moaning about the gig, the audience, the sound: he was in a really negative mood.

"So I grab the sleeping bag back, and he grabbed it back again and covered himself with it, and started growling like a dog. It was scary. He suddenly starts lashing out, punching the windscreen, and then he just went into a full overblown red-stage fit, in the car. We pulled over on to the hard shoulder, dragged him out of the car, held him down. Then we did about a hundred miles an hour to the nearest hospital, somewhere near Luton. We were in this horrible casualty ward and the doctor said, ‘You've had a fit; you'd better go and see a doctor when you get back.’"

This attack, which occurred in the early hours of 29th December 1978, marked the full onset of Ian Curtis's epilepsy. Throughout the whole of a demanding period for the group, Curtis was receiving medical treatment for what was becoming a serious condition. "With Ian it was the full-blown grand mal," says Stephen Morris. "They put him on heavy tranquilizers; the doctor told him the only way he could minimize the risk was by leading a normal regular life, which by that time wasn’t something he wanted to do. He liked to jump around onstage, and to get pissed: it was one of the reasons he got into the band in the first place."

The pressures were building up at home, as Deborah Curtis explains: "With Joy Division it all came together for him. I told myself at first that it was all part of the act, but it was all wrong. There wasn't an Ian at home and an Ian in the world, it became like that all the time. The trouble started when my pregnancy began to show: he had that first fit. It sounds awful, but he liked to have the attention. One of the things he liked about me was that I did stand behind him, 100 per cent, whatever he did. When I got pregnant, everybody made a fuss of me, and I think he was a bit jealous."

Natalie Curtis was born on 16th April 1979. Just over a month later, Ian had the most serious in a sequence of grand mal attacks, which involved hospitalization. His solution to the pressure at home was, according to his wife, withdrawal, but there was no escape from the momentum of Joy Division's success. "With being so young, you think of yourself as being invulnerable," says Peter Hook. "We were being driven by this thing called Joy Division, and basically you just did your damnedest to keep it going."

Unknown Pleasures broke new ground in several ways. In staying with Factory, the group showed that a non-metropolitan, independent label sector was viable. There was Peter Savile's brilliant, baffling sleeve design. Despite releasing a powerful record full of raging emotions, Joy Division refused to open themselves up any further in print: after a couple of mistakes, they did no interviews. "Rob thought the music was such a beautiful notion that he didn't want us daft bastards fucking it up for anyone," says peter Hook.

Joy Division were on a roll, constantly writing new songs, some of which are collected on Substance and Still: 'Something Must Break', 'Sound of Music' and a trio of classics — 'These Days’, ‘Dead Souls’, the Spectorian ‘Atmosphere’. "That was the best track that Martin ever mixed," says Sumner. "I thought that was beautiful." In October, they began a 24-date UK tour supporting Buzzcocks, which enabled them to give up their day jobs. In a break from the tour, Joy Division played their first concert abroad, at the opening of a new arts centre, Plan K in Brussels. It was there that Ian Curtis met Annick Honore and fell in love. "Ian wasn't having a very good time with Deborah," says Peter Hook. "They were married before the group came in, and they had had a reasonably normal life. The sad thing about your girlfriends is that you leave them behind. You move on and you're subject to temptations."

"Annick loved him and understood him," says Tony Wilson. This triangle dominated the last months of Ian Curtis's life. "I knew something was desperately wrong," says Deborah; "but I didn't think it could be that. He was so possessive with me, that it didn't occur to me that be might go the other way." The affair resumed during Joy Division's short January 1980 European tour. On his return to the house that he shared with Deborah in Macclesfield, Ian Curtis collapsed after drinking a bottle of Pernod and cutting his wrists.

This is the crisis I knew had to come Destroying the balance I'd kept Doubting, unsettling and turning around Wondering what will come next.

AT ONLY 23, Curtis was facing one of the most difficult life situations of all: falling in love with another woman while he had a child. "I've been through it as well," says Peter Hook. "You do get very confused, and it's easy to lose your head, especially where kids are concerned." In March, the group spent two weeks in London's Britannia Row Studios, recording what would become their second LP, Closer. Ian stayed with Annick in London, while Deborah had finally found out what was going on.

"Factory was like a family," says Deborah. "They’d exclude anyone who wasn't what they were looking for. I remember when I was expecting Natalie, standing at the door of the Factory, Tony looked me up and down. It was obvious what he was thinking: how can we have a rock star with a sex months pregnant wife standing by the stage? It wasn't quite the thing. Then this glamorous Belgian turned up: she was attractive and free. I don't blame Ian: most people need a partner and if you exclude that partner you have to find somebody else. It's only natural. He needed someone to look after him."

It's easy to see now that Ian Curtis's torment went into the songs: those that didn't refer to his emotional dilemma were taken from the darker sources of literature – 'Colony' from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 'Atrocity Exhibition' from J.G. Ballard. The latter also drew on a real-life experience Curtis had had.

"There was this mongol kid who grew up near Ian," says Sumner. 'He could never come out of the house: his whole universe was the house to the garden wall. Many years later Ian moved back to Macclesfield and by chance he saw this kid. Ian had grown up from five to 22, but the kid looked the same. His universe was still the house and the garden.'

Ian might have been, as Tony Wilson says, "trancelike" during the sessions but the group remember them with pleasure. "Hooky and I always felt that Martin Hannett did his best stuff when he did it quick," says Sumner. "We recorded a lot of it by direct injection, straight into the board, but we wanted some real life ambience on it, so Martin put some big speakers in the Britannia Row games room. We pumped most of the album out through the speakers and recorded them, to make it sound live."

"When we heard the lyrics, we knew they were very, very good," says Peter Hook. "They were very open, weren't they? He was telling us a lot about himself, his fears and his doubts, but you were too young and caught up with the excitement: it was like a snowball going downhill. It's a great shame because you should have been able to just hear it and say, ‘Ian can we have a chat with you? What's the matter?’ But when you're young, you don't notice things."

"The mood he was in when he wrote that stuff is a very big question," says Tony Wilson. "It's almost as if writing that album contributed to his state: he immersed himself in it, rather than just expressing it.' In many ways, Closer stands as the definitive Joy Division album, not the least because the sheer pleasure of the music – which looks forward to New Order's electro – buoys up the often bleak lyrics and vocals. It was also the group's most successful record — reaching number six, UK in summer 1980 — by which time it had been over taken by events.

Through childlike ways, rebellion and crime To reach this point and retreat back again The broken hearts, all the wheels that have turned The memory's scarred and the vision is blurred Just passing through till we reach the next stage But just to where, well, it's all been arranged Just passing through but the break must be made Should we move on or stay safely away?

"It ended up with Ian having fits onstage," says Bernard Sumner. "In early April we did two gigs in one night: supporting the Stranglers at the Rainbow, then the Moonlight Club. At the first gig he started dancing, but he didn't stop at the end of the song. We were trying to stop the song, and he was dancing faster and faster, went into a spin, span into the drums and knocked the kit over. We realized he was having a fit and we had to carry him offstage. By the time we got him to the dressing room he'd come out of it, and he just broke down in tears. He was so ashamed. We didn't know what to say, or what to do."

Peter Hook: "For him to get up there, suffering from epilepsy, perform like that, be exposed, must have been absolutely awful. I think we were to blame for railroading him into doing it. He was in a no-win situation: he didn't want to let us down, he didn't want to let himself down, and yet it was making him ill. It's our own weakness, we make ourselves ill. But to have the brains to realize that if you carry on doing it, one day you're not going to wake up. That takes a lot of guts."

Three days after the Rainbow concert, on 7th April, Ian attempted suicide with an overdose of phenobarbitone. The next night, he was expected onstage, at Derby Hall, Bury. "It was a complete disaster," says Bernard Sumner. "We had to pull Ian out of psychiatric hospital. He came to the gig, couldn't go on, and Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio went on instead. The crowd freaked, and a full-scale riot went on. A lot of people got bottled. Ian saw this and of course thought it was all his fault. He just broke down again.

"He was in hospital for another four days. His wife already knew what was going on. He needed to get out, so he stayed at my house for two weeks. During that time I tried to drum into him what a stupid thing it was to take an overdose. We came to an agreement: He wanted to leave the band, he wanted to buy a corner shop in Portsmouth or somewhere, he wanted to go off and write a book. We didn't want him to, but we understood his predicament. The agreement was that he wouldn't do any gigs for a year, that we'd just write.

"But around this time, he'd agreed to anything you told him. His reaction to a problem has been rage: he was like a human blowtorch and he'd burn you out of his way. Now his other solution was someone would come along and play God, tell him what to do. You can't do that with a person's life. We were loath to advise Ian, because whatever we'd have said, he'd have done it. I remain convinced to this day that if someone is going to commit suicide, they're going to do it, no matter what anybody says to them. Ian was going to do it."

During April, Deborah Curtis instituted divorce proceedings. Ian stayed with Bernard and Tony Wilson, finally ending up with his parents. He continued with his hospital and therapeutic visits. It was business as usual for Joy Division — some concerts were cancelled, but the group was busy shooting a video for the forthcoming single, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and preparing for their first visit to the US on 19th May.

"The way they described Ian dying was so far from the way I perceived it that it's not worth getting annoyed about," Rob Gretton says in Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis. "There was no great depression, no hint at all. The week before, we went and bought all these new clothes; he was really happy. A lot of his problems were personal: we could advise him, but we couldn't do anything about it. I wasn't worried as a manager, I was worried as a friend."

"I don't think Ian was worried about the American Tour," says Bernard Sumner. "I would have been extremely worried. If we'd agreed that we were going to keep the band together, but we weren't going to do gigs any more, how come a month later we were going on an American tour? It wasn't right. People start getting all the wrong priorities once your start becoming successful. They don't know when to leave you alone and give you a rest. You need more than one kind of sleep in this profession."

To the other members of the group there was no indication of what was to come. "If he was depressed, he kept it from us," says Peter Hook. "On the Friday I drove him home to his parents and we were in the car, laughing away: ‘Yessss! We're going to America on Monday!’ Screaming with excitement, so happy. I think he was mood-swinging because of the drugs. When he got out of the car and I went home, I could barely contain myself. I was so excited."

"The Friday night we went out with this lad I used to work with called Paul Dawson," says Bernard Sumner. "He called himself the Amazing Noswad. He was a psycho: we took him out to observe him. I know it sounds horrible, but we were fascinated by this lad. I was supposed to see Ian the next night, but he rang up and told me he was going to see Debbie. He said he'd meet me the next day, as we were going over to Blackpool to water-ski. He never turned up."

On the Saturday, Ian Curtis returned to the Barton Street house he shared with his wife. When Deborah returned from work late in the evening, they had a discussion about the divorce. Deborah returned to her parents; Ian insisted she should. "I'd had enough," she say now. "I was working so hard and my mum was looking after Natalie. I could have stayed with him that night, but he made it clear he didn't want me there. I was dead on my feet. I could have woken up the next morning and he'd have done it while I was asleep. I think he'd decided, and he was just trying to pick his moment."

Ian had been watching Werner Herzog's Stroszeck, the plot of which concerns a German musician who travels to America, is swamped by the alien culture and commits suicide. After Deborah left, it was the early morning of Sunday the eighteenth. Curtis played Iggy Pop's The Idiot incessantly. After writing a note to Deborah, he went into the kitchen, put the rope from an overhead clothes rack around his neck, and jumped. Deborah found him the next midday, by which time any attempt at resuscitation was too late.

Hangman looks around as he waits Cord stretches tight then it breaks Someday we will die in your dreams How I wish we were here with you now.

"I was the first of the group to be told," says Peter Hook. "I was just about to sit down and have my dinner and the phone rang: ‘I'm Sgt so and so, and I'm sorry to inform you that Ian Curtis committed suicide last night.’ I went back in, sat down and had my dinner. I didn't say anything for about an hour. Shock. It was such a huge thing to cope with. I don't think you ever really come to terms with it."

"I went water-skiing anyway," says Bernard Sumner. "I came back to my friend's house and the phone rang. It was Rob. He said, ‘I've got a bit of bad news for you. Ian's committed suicide’. ‘You mean he's tried to kill himself?’ ‘No, he's done it.’ And it was like the cymbals at the Hope and Anchor: the whole room just turned upside-down. I put the phone down, went and washed my face with cold water. Then I got back on the phone and took it like a man.

"It was a breakdown of his relationship, accentuated by the amount of barbiturates he was taking to subdue his epilepsy. Barbiturates make you so you're laughing one minute, crying the next. He'd had a physical breakdown, a relationship breakdown, which caused an emotional breakdown. I came to terms with it straight away, because I could put my reason on why I thought he'd done it. Now I accept these things: if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. Also I don't really believe it ends there."

"I went to great lengths to push everything to the back of my mind at first," says Deborah Curtis. "I threw things away, mementos I wish I'd kept now: I thought it would help. How can you be angry with someone who's dead? They aren't there, you can’t shake them. You’re totally impotent: it's horrible. I felt angry with him because he had the last word. Seeing articles that dismissed his death as ‘Oh, he had marital problems’ really annoyed me. He didn't commit suicide because he had marital problems. He had marital problems because he wanted to commit suicide.

"I think Ian invented scenarios that would come true. Annick could have been anybody: he needed to find a justification for doing what he was doing. It was something he talked about from when we met, but as we got older, and it got nearer the time, and more I had the feeling that he hadn't forgotten about it. But he wouldn't talk about it: when I tried to once, he actually walked out of the house. I think he enjoyed being unhappy, that he wallowed in it. When we were kids, lots of people were miserable; they grew out of it. I thought Ian would."

"We all knew quite early that we wanted to carry on," says Peter Hook. "The first meeting we all had, which was the Sunday night, we agreed that. We didn't sit there crying. We didn't cry at his funeral. It came out an anger at the start. We were absolutely devastated: not only had we lost someone we considered our friend, we'd lost the group. Our life basically. He isn't someone I will every forget. In my studio at home, I sit writing between two massive pictures of Ian. He's always there, always will be."

"Our first album as New Order, Movement, was really horrible to make," says Stephen Morris. "We said we had to carry on, but it was a real struggle. I couldn't listen to Movement for ages: making it was hard because Martin took Ian's death harder than we did. He took it really badly. I don't think you notice the day you get over a death like that: I had a dream about Ian just before we made Republic: telling us not to be cruel, which I thought was really odd."

"Ian made it all more serious," says Tony Wilson. "It made it something that wasn't just a business, a game that was played. Bizarrely enough, several deaths followed: their US agent Ruth Polski, Dave Rowbotham of the first Durutti Column, Bernard Pierre Wolff, who shot the Closer sleeve. Outside of Ian's personal family, the worst affected was Martin Hannett: he was an inspirational producer and a remarkable man. When Martin died, I was terribly upset."

"Suddenly we didn't have any eyes," says Bernard Sumner. "We had everything else, but we couldn't see where we were going. I was really depressed after Ian died, very unhappy and disillusioned. I felt that I didn't have any future. I was listening to Lou Reed, ‘Street Hassle’, really down music. I started smoking draw, and found that electronic music sounded great. Mark Reeder, a friend from Berlin, sent me over records like ‘E=MC2’ by Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer, early Italian disco. I discovered a new quality in music, which was to pep you up. Suddenly, this was the new direction.

"With Joy Division, I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of thin air, we were never, any of us, interested in the money it might make. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to, and stirred our emotions. We weren't interested in a career or any of that. We never planned one single day. I don't think we were messing with things we shouldn't have done, because our reasons were honourable."

Joy Division: Permanent
Mark Cooper, Mojo, August 1995

WHEN JOY DIVISION'S UNKNOWN PLEASURES was released in June, 1979, it sounded like it came from another planet. Of course, it's easy now to historicise Joy Division, to see how they fused punk rock and Northern Soul into a new kind of dance-rock and how they discovered that existential angst could be new territory for rock'n'roll. These discoveries helped the likes of The Cure, Depeche Mode and even U2 become the international success stories of the following decade.

Equally, it's now easier to argue that Joy Division's brooding soundscapes embodied the incoming cruelties of Thatcherism. Jon Savage's suggestive sleevenotes pinpoint even broader strains in their extraordinarily powerful blend of the brutal and the tender: "It was Joy Division's fate to enact the disappearance of their communities, the psychic poison of dispossessed Britain, the raging emotions that had been repressed by wartime's stiff upper lip." Savage is probably right but the key word in that meditation is undoubtedly the verb "to enact". After all, Joy Division weren't an idea so much as the dark storm cloud itself. Like Elvis Presley, they were immensely conscious artists who couldn't explain what they did.

Apart from the Ideal For Living EP the band had recorded as Warsaw, a couple of tracks on the Factory Sample EPs and less than a handful of London shows, Joy Division had scarcely ventured outside Manchester in the summer of 1979. They weren't part of the Manchester scene and they hardly knew Echo & The Bunnymen, the Teardrops or even Simple Minds, all of whom dabbled in darkness and had a similarly romantic attitude to the Sex Pistols coupled with a latent pop sensibility.

Unknown Pleasures had a new and terrible beauty that scared the fuck out of people when it was first released, and immediately ensured that Joy Division would be both admired and revered. There were no photos of the band on the cover, minimal information inside or outside and yet the music, the words and the feeling seemed immediately both truthful and intimate.

Songs like 'Disorder' and 'New Dawn Fades' were apocalyptic, messages sent back from a psychic crisis, but their true power was that they felt like feeling won from torment, something more real than the boredom, lethargy or indifference that had succeeded punk. They sounded like they came from somewhere else, but the more you listened, the more they sounded like they came from somewhere deep inside. Joy Division had taken the rage that the Pistols had hurled outwards at society and turned it inwards.

Listening to Joy Division now would have become little more than nostalgia if, like The Clash or The Jam, they had merely summed up an era. Of course they did that too, but because they were also the first metaphysical rock group and, as their songs were largely a matter of life and death, most of them still cut to the quick. Although the music's urgency hasn't lessened, it's easier now to be detached and appreciate how they were the sum of their parts – to revel in Hooky's melodic basslines, Morris's goose-stepping drum patterns, Bernard's synths' ability to update King Crimson's mellotron or the way his guitar echoes Curtis's mood. Yet ultimately it was Curtis who aspired to something classical, something eternal, and it's because of him that they transcend their own time and continue to sound so frighteningly real.

Curtis's debts to the crooning melancholia of Bowie, Iggy and even Jim Morrison seem more obvious now, but it is the unremitting intensity of his vision that has endured undimmed. Again and again, he portrays himself as a kind of gladiator, setting out to battle for some sense of honour or purpose in what he describes in Closer's 'Heart & Soul' as "An abyss that laughs at creation". No-one could have survived such an unrelenting inslaught (if there isn't such a word, there should be!) and, with pat hindsight, it seems inevitable that he should have found himself wanting.

Permanent brings all this flooding back but, to tell the truth, it's a frustrating collection because it's less interested in Curtis's extraordinary inward journey than in Joy Division, the hard-driving band with their roots in punk's rage. 'Novelty', 'The Only Mistake' and 'Something Must Break' are all well enough but none of them match the material that was shaped into the two studio albums. Ultimately it's impossible not to miss key songs like 'New Dawn Fades' or 'Decades' or to want to return again to those two wonderfully complete statements. Permanent is a handy enough primer but, although it's convenient to have the singles in one place, it's Unknown Pleasures and Closer that remain irreplaceable.

Ian Curtis
Mick Middles,Linsday Reade, Torn Apart: The Life of Ian Curtis (Omnibus Press), 2006

The authors of this new biography are uniquely qualified to reveal the extraordinary events surrounding the life and death of Ian Curtis.

Manchester-based Mick Middles was the first journalist to interview Joy Division for the music press and formed a close association with the band. Lindsay Reade was a co-founder of Factory Records along with her then-husband Tony Wilson. Together they have revisited the legend of Ian Curtis and produced the first full-length account of this troubled man's life, work and relationships in the midst of the unique explosion of pop energy that hit Manchester in the late Seventies.

Somewhat controversially, their book benefits from the co-operation of Annik Honoré, the Belgian girl with whom Ian formed a close relationship during the last eight months of his life, and the book features extracts from their correspondence together.

In this extract we pick up a troubled Joy Division in April, 1980, six weeks before Ian would take his own life.



"I actually meant it you know. Everyone thinks it was a cry for help but it wasn't a cry for help." – Ian

UNABLE TO RETURN to Manchester to rest following the recording of their second album, Joy Division remained in London to fulfil their various obligations, the first of which was the three night stint at the Moonlight Club. 'Factory by Moonlight' might have sounded like a romantic proposition but, as is often the case, the fantasy and the reality were poles apart. A showcase for struggling Factory acts was all very well but Joy Division's revered status as darlings of the music press meant that in reality the success of the three nights rested fairly and squarely on their shoulders. Rob Gretton, now a partner in Factory Records, no doubt felt compelled to offer the services of his band to help raise the profile of the company in the relatively uncharted territory of the capital.

It is less easy to understand the reasoning behind Joy Division's appearance at the Rainbow Theatre on Good Friday, April 4, supporting The Stranglers, especially since this conflicted with the Friday night finale at the Moonlight, thus necessitating a race across town to fulfil both engagements. Certainly, an appearance at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, a venue that held almost 3,000, carried some cachet, as did appearing with a 'name' act like The Stranglers. The show was originally promoted as one in a series of nine that were sponsored by Levi Strauss, the jeans manufacturer, to celebrate the venue's 50th birthday. Other nights would see performances by heavy metallers Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Whitesnake and soul stirrers the Average White Band, hardly appropriate company for the cutting edge disturbance of Joy Division.

The Stranglers had already committed themselves to playing two of the nine evenings when their singer/guitarist Hugh Cornwell was sent to Pentonville Prison for two months after losing an appeal against a conviction for drug possession. As such the gig changed shape and became a benefit gig in support of Cornwell, with a variety of singers waiting in the wings to take his place on lead vocals. They included Toyah Wilcox, Hazel O'Connor, Billy Idol, Phil Daniels, Nicky Tesco, Ian Dury, Richard Jobson, Peter Hammill, Robert Smith, Robert Fripp and many more. The Rainbow was sold out that night.

"Groups were turning up just to do it," says Larry Cassidy of Section 25. "They didn't have all that much time to play. We were supposed to go on and Rob came up to me and said JD had another gig on the other side of London and if they do the spot before The Stranglers they wouldn't be able to make it so did we want to do it? So I said yes. They went on before us."

Because most of their gear was at The Moonlight, Joy Division performed with a minimum of equipment on stage which was far from ideal for a venue as big as the Rainbow. Far more worrying was that Rob's request to the lighting technicians that they refrain from using strobes wasn't heeded.

Many of Joy Division's London based friends made it to the Rainbow to witness a fractured set of varying intensity. It was undeniably more captivating than the recent Moonlight shows, beginning with a ferocious 'Dead Souls', followed by 'Wilderness', 'Shadowplay' and 'Decades'. By all accounts, including reviews in the music press, Ian's dancing appeared less rhythmic than usual, less effective perhaps; jagged, trance-like and unsettling. At the conclusion of 'She's Lost Control', the whole spectacle suddenly darkened: Ian was clearly having a fit as he staggered backwards into Steve Morris's drum kit.

"Some pillock turned the fucking strobe light on," says Larry Cassidy. "Rob always used to make sure that the lighting guy knew not to turn the strobe lights on because it sets off epileptic fits. This guy turned them on and not long after Ian ended up in the fucking drum kit. So he gets carted off stage – up all the corridors at the back to the dressing room and that was the fucking end of that. And then we had to go on."

Joy Division remained locked in the dressing room until Ian's seizure passed. Then they drove across town to West Hampstead for the final show at the Moonlight. "Ian was not in great shape but he believed that the show must go on," says Terry [Mason, Joy Division's tour manager].

Back at the Moonlight Tony Wilson was unaware that Ian had had a fit at the Rainbow. "I wasn't there," he says. "I was at the Moonlight. I remember them arriving. He seemed all right. He was fine."

So Joy Division took the stage for the second time that night, only for disaster to happen a second time. It was about two thirds of the way through the Moonlight set – 25 minutes in – when Ian's dancing started to lose its rhythmic sense and change into something else entirely. With the band flashing nervous glances at each other, with Terry hovering by the side, the theatre that was a Joy Division performance turned into something verging on the grotesque. Ian was engulfed by another fit and the show collapsed to a halt. Some members of the audience believed it was all part of the act, but those aware of the situation knew all too well that this was the most violent attack that Ian Curtis had ever suffered.

Paul Morley had travelled across London that night, following the band from Finsbury Park to West Hampstead, and he remembers how the effort needed to make this journey in a short time was somewhat exhausting in itself, even without having to twice perform on stage. "Even for a healthy person it was very unlikely that they would do two shows of such intensity on the same night," he says. "You felt that it couldn't be helping that Ian was driving himself to such a peak of response to his own performance. And the fact it was happening more and more on stage toward the end seemed to suggest it was not the best way to try and treat that condition. It was just accelerating. In hindsight we could say it was accelerating to the suicide but there is a world where it didn't necessarily have to, it could have accelerated into a kind of weird peace where it all calmed down."

Terry Mason believes that the principal reason for doing a series of gigs in London was to try to put aside money to help fund the forthcoming American tour, but he finds it difficult to understand the events of this night. "I was wondering what we were doing there at all," he says. "We didn't have that much to do with The Stranglers that we needed to be at their benefit. The money at the Moonlight was split equally between the bands so it was not of much material benefit. We were just propping up Factory. It wasn't even important. Ian has just done two gigs that meant fuck all to him. It was a massive attack at the Moonlight and, afterwards, Ian looked crushed."

Tony Wilson concedes that this was an unusual night but doesn't feel the band's schedule was unusually stressful, as they were used to working hard. "I think in hindsight that was kind of normal for bands of that era," he says. "For bands in that position, on the way up the ladder, it was quite normal to play three gigs a week. I think the Moonlight period was peculiar. The Moonlight was a wacky idea... I think that was a bit extreme."

Ian and Annik were together for the duration of these London gigs and she left for Belgium on either Saturday April 5 or the day after. Terry thinks that Ian returned to London to stay with her after the Malvern gig on the Saturday but is probably mistaken as Annik certainly purchased her overland ticket to Brussels that day. She still has the receipt, purchased from a travel agency in Buckingham Palace Road and priced £11.70. On it she wrote: "I left Ian Saturday morning, he was still asleep, very tired after the concert at the Rainbow (fit) and the Moonlight Club – after many tears, embraces, kisses, depressions, breakdown till almost daybreak."

Later Annik wrote to Carole: "Obviously he was very tired and depressed after what happened at the Rainbow when he had a fit on stage in front of 3,000 people."

It would have been understandable if Joy Division had pulled out of their commitment to play at Malvern Winter Gardens on Saturday, April 6, the night after the Rainbow/Moonlight debacle. Nevertheless, with Section 25 in dutiful support, they took their place on stage and despite increasing concern over Ian's illness it appears to have been a more relaxed occasion. Indeed, Terry remembers this night as one of the happiest of them all. "It was a lovely sunny day, out in the fresh air, throwing stones and twigs in the streams," he says. "Everyone seemed happy, even Ian. It reminded me of the day of Ian's audition, when we interviewed Ian by taking him to the country. London was 80 miles away and this was a moment of light relief. Things had gone full circle. The gig was timed so that people could catch the last train to get back to London.

"We'd sort of got away from all the London thing that was around us and our little gang was back together, like a bunch of 15 year olds throwing stones in streams. Things like that were what you pick up on more than whether a gig was a classic gig. Thinking back on Malvern it would be quite a restrained gig cos we'd gone from the Moonlight which was tiny and claustrophobic to... this was like, it reminded me of the main hall at the school me, Hooky and Barney went to. A big bank of windows down one side. Basically all the problems of Good Friday had disappeared and it was just us lot again being the knob-heads that we were."

Larry Cassidy also enjoyed the night: "That [Malvern] was good – like the Winter Gardens in Blackpool but a bit more upmarket. It was dead good, the place, the atmosphere, everything. Obviously we knew these were Joy Division gigs but there was no sort of crappy 'we're bigger than you' shit. If you play well and people enjoy it, what more do you want? It was a good gig. Everything was fine."

Everything wasn't fine. The following day, Easter Sunday, April 6, Ian Curtis attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills at his home on Barton Street. He then told Debbie what he had done, and she called an ambulance which took him to hospital to have his stomach pumped. In view of the circumstances, many of those around him assumed it was a cry for help. Somewhat shamefully, Ian telephoned Annik from the hospital.

Annik: "I think the first suicide attempt was somehow an accident. He had probably been drinking again but it was maybe a sign to show, 'Look I don't know which direction to take.' When he called... this is something I will never forget... he called me at work, during the day, from the hospital. He sounded really just like a little boy. He said he'd had an overdose of pills and he was here in the hospital and my heart sank. I said, 'Why did you do that? You must not do things like that.' He said he was lost and it was an accident and he'd never do it again and then he said I should visit and that we must never part because he wants to be with me. After he said all that I said, 'Yes we must get together again and too bad for all the problems.' And he did write to me a few times in April after that suicide attempt.

"It seemed obvious after that... it made things clearer after that first attempt that now he knew which way to go. That's the way it seemed to me. I thought it made things clearer for all of us but obviously not – it was more complicated."

Terry thought the reason Ian didn't go through with the suicide was for practical reasons. "Ian was panicking with regard to the pills because if you get it wrong you don't die, you just destroy your liver or your kidneys," he says. "And you're in pain for the rest of your life. We did know that maybe he'd looked it up somewhere and he knew you had to be careful about it. That you might not die but just wreck your body."

Ian referred to his suicide attempt in a letter to Annik that he wrote on Thursday, April 17, at 10.00pm: IT'S BEEN VERY HARD THESE PAST TWO WEEKS TO COME TO TERMS WITH EVERYTHING AFTER LAST (BUT ONE) SUNDAY NIGHT WHEN ALL BALANCE WAS DESTROYED. JOY DIVISION IN ITSELF IS SUCH A GREAT RESPONSIBILITY NOT ONLY FOR MY OWN HEALTH AND PEACE OF MIND BUT THE FACT THAT ON ME RESTS THE FUTURE OF THE OTHERS AND MORE BESIDE. INDEED THE STRAIN HAD BECOME TOO MUCH. I JUST FELT LIKE RUNNING AWAY FROM EVERYTHING, HIDING IN A CORNER BACKING OUT OF RESPONSIBILITY AND DECISION.

Annik: "I would not blame Ian for committing suicide and I still believe he didn't do it for any of us. It added to the problem perhaps – the fact that it made it a bit complicated but he died mainly because it was an accident, it seems to me, because he was sick, very sick, and because he didn't know how to cope with his illness and the group and the trips and the recording and the concerts – it was all getting too much for him. I don't think he died for love. No. No. It was really a shame he was so sick. And the fact I think that he knew how it would end up at its worst – being an epileptic – frightened him. I remember in one of his letters he said there is no room for the weak and the emotive. And that's how he felt. Very weak. You are looked upon as weak when you show too much of your feelings on your sleeve."

In the same letter Ian seems to be going some way to explain his actions: I WISHED I WAS LIGHT YEARS AWAY OR DIDN'T EXIST AT ALL AND BECAUSE OF THAT FEELING THAT IS EXACTLY HOW I EXISTED – I WAS RUNNING AWAY, I HID, THAT'S WHY I FOUND IT HARD TO EVEN TALK TO YOU, YET YOU WERE THE ONE THING I KNEW I REALLY WANTED, REALLY CARED FOR YET DESPITE THAT BECAUSE OF MY BEHAVIOUR I FELT YOU SLIPPING AWAY EVERY MINUTE AND THIS ONLY MADE ME FEEL WORSE. IT WAS LIKE CLIMBING OUT OF A PIT AND SEEING THE LIGHT AT THE TOP YET EVERY STEP I TOOK UPWARDS I SLID TWO STEPS DOWN. THE MORE I FELT LIKE THAT THE MORE I WANTED TO RUN. EVERYDAY I SPOKE TO YOU I COULD SEE YOU GETTING WORSE. I FELT SO RESPONSIBLE AND SO SICK WITH MYSELF I WANTED TO RETREAT FURTHER IN YET IN TRUTH I FELT LIKE CALLING OUT BUT JUST COULDN'T DO IT, IT WAS LIKE A NIGHTMARE, EVERYTHING GOT OUT OF HAND AND NOW I FEAR THEY WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. I'VE NO RIGHT TO ANYTHING WHATEVER IT IS I WANT OR DESIRE THERE'S NO ROOM FOR THE WEAK OR EMOTIVE.

On Bank Holiday Monday, Tony Wilson, Lindsay Reade, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus drove over to Macclesfield to pick up Debbie Curtis and visit Ian in hospital, listening to the tapes of Closer as they did so.

"It sounded great, better than in the studio in a way, perhaps because it was now a complete album and made more sense as an entire work," says Lindsay. "I thought Ian should have felt extremely pleased with himself creating something like that. But poor Ian was in Macclesfield hospital as we listened to the most stunning achievement of Factory to date."

There was a feeling amongst those in the car that the quality of the music was completely at odds with the problems, domestic and otherwise, of Joy Division's lead singer. It didn't make sense to them that he would want to leave this world.

It was Lindsay's suggestion that after he was released from hospital Ian should stay with her and Tony to ease the pressure of his double life, and Tony agreed. "As I understood it at the time Debbie was threatening divorce unless he gave Annik up," she says.

"Meanwhile he was under another kind of pressure to be with Annik and it seemed there could be no peace in either camp. Perhaps he just needed some space. From the band as well, perhaps. I assumed it was a domestic problem though. I didn't realise how seriously the epilepsy was affecting him and it never occurred to me then that he may have felt he couldn't go on with the stage performances."

At the house on Barton Street the party was greeted by Debbie, looking shaken and pale but still quite strong. Lindsay stayed behind to look after young Natalie [Ian and Debbie's one-year-old daughter] while Debbie and the others went to the hospital. Lindsay gave Debbie a card she'd made to give to Ian on which there was a quote by playwright David Hare next to a hand drawn picture of a cow surrounded by grass, flowers and a hill: "There is no comfort. Our lives dismay us. We have dreams of leaving and it's the same for everyone I know."*

When they arrived at Ian's room, he was sitting up looking slightly embarrassed. "He looked a bit pale," says Alan. "I remember thinking that Rob was being a bit too jovial for the occasion. It seemed a very serious situation – not that we should have been morbid or anything."

Meanwhile, back at the house Lindsay was babysitting Natalie and taking in her surroundings. Debbie was clearly a diligent housewife for it was clean and tidy, a reflection of the environment in which Debbie had been raised. An uneaten, whole, cooked chicken sat on a plate in the kitchen and seemed to Lindsay to symbolise the love that had grown cold in this house. "It was as though that chicken was announcing something bleak," she says. "I took it then to symbolise the doom that was Debbie's rather than Ian's. But I now reference it to the suicide that took place near that same spot."

At the hospital Tony put it to Ian that he should spend a week or so with Lindsay and himself and Ian agreed. It was arranged that he would begin his stay the following day, Tuesday, April 8, after the next scheduled Joy Division show at Bury.

The decision to go ahead with the council funded gig at Derby Hall, Bury, was apparently taken by Rob, even though he was aware there was a good chance that Ian wouldn't be able to perform. He was hoping that Ian might be able to make a quick, low-key appearance before handing the vocal duties over to someone else who would close the show. Because of the relative success of the 'Factory by Moonlight' gigs, with the Factory roster providing a disparate blend of artists, Tony thought it would be a good idea for a Factory medley to cover for Ian, and to this end the gig also featured Mini Pops and Section 25. Unfortunately, Bury Derby Hall wasn't like the Moonlight and most, if not all, of the crowd, expected a normal Joy Division gig, with Ian Curtis on vocals throughout, with normal support acts. Touts were loitering with intent outside the venue, selling £3 tickets for £7 and there were plenty of takers.

Staging a Joy Division gig without Ian Curtis was never going to be easy and the band took the precaution of inviting Crispy Ambulance singer Alan Hempsall along as a stand-in, a daunting proposition for anyone. "I received a phone call from Bernard," says Hempsall. "He told me that Ian was ill. That's all I knew. He told me that Ian couldn't do the gig because he was poorly and would I mind stepping in for him. It was one hell of a shock, I can tell you. I had no qualms at all. Immediately I said, 'Yeah, of course.' I was keen as mustard. I was simply thrilled."

Hempsall began diligently learning Joy Division lyrics, including the new song, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', which they had recorded from the John Peel Session, aired in January.

Larry Cassidy recalls the build up to the gig: "We get to Bury – start setting up, come to sound check time, we do that – Ian wasn't there, the band were but he wasn't. They do their sound check and then after that you're in a sort of limbo until you play. Then, I must have asked Rob where Ian was. He said he wasn't very well – he'd had a funny turn and such and such. Then the next minute Alan out of Crispy Ambulance is turning up in the dressing room. It gets to gig time and Ian's still not around and I think it transpired that we got the news he wouldn't be able to come at all. So it was kind of – guys in the dressing room, 'What are we going to do?' They're all out there. We sort of collaborated with Joy Division that the best way out of this would be to kind of mix the sets up. Just use the one kit, so you don't have to change kits or anything. We'd go on and do a bit of us and then slowly turn to JD and Alan would do some vocals – cos he knew the words, being a big fan – and we might be able to smooth it over a bit."

Then Ian arrived. Alan Hempsall: "I didn't know what to expect and I remember being quite surprised to see Ian in the dressing room. But I wasn't about to ask questions. I had gone along to do a job and, as far as I was concerned, that is what I was going to do. So I kind of kept within that professional attitude. As the evening wore on, it became apparent that it was taking a different slant from a normal gig. The Mini Pops went on first and did a full 40-minute set. There was then a short break and Section 25 came on, but only to play for about 20 minutes. At the time, they were Vinnie and Larry, the two brothers... and Paul the guitarist, who was on their first album. They would play for 20 minutes and their last number would be the single, 'Girls Don't Count'. It all seemed fairly straight-forward at this point. When 'Girls Don't Count' started, myself, Hooky, Bernard and Steve all joined them onstage, and Simon Topping from A Certain Ratio. So Larry did the lead vocals while Simon and myself sang the backing vocals, which consisted of the two of us singing 'Girls Don't Count' over and over again. There were two drummers and, as Larry was doing the vocals, he left bass duties to Hooky."

This unlikely assembly went down well, but crowd was still expecting to see Joy Division.

Hempsall: "At the end of that song, Section 25 and Simon left the stage. So that just left me with the three members of Joy Division, a pretty scary moment, to be honest. For me, a Joy Division fan, it seemed positively surreal. Here I was, standing in Ian Curtis's shoes. Well, I knew I couldn't but I was determined to make a decent job of it. We did 'Digital', from The Factory Sample, followed by 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'. I don't think I could have possibly known the greatness of that song at that point. What a strange way to get to know one of the greatest rock songs of all time."

Backstage Ian had indicated that he was willing to perform two of the slower numbers from the new Closer material, 'Decades' and 'The Eternal'. He duly wandered onto the stage, leaving a relieved Hempsall to retreat into the wings. Ian's performance on the two songs, which were unknown to the majority of the audience, was low key, leaving some to question whether Curtis had appeared at all. Even Larry Cassidy admits that he doesn't have a clear memory of Ian singing that night.

When Ian left the stage he was replaced by Cassidy, Simon Topping from A Certain Ratio and Hempsall. They launched into The Velvet Underground's 'Sister Ray', with Larry taking over lead vocals while the other two provided backing. Although there was an element of unrest in the crowd, all seemed well as they departed.

It was a lull before the storm.

Hempsall: "I remember, as we were leaving the stage... there was this great big beautiful crystal chandelier hanging above the stage. It must have been there for donkey's years. At that point, someone threw a bottle which went bang into the middle of the chandelier and the whole thing just seemed to explode. We got completely showered with shards of glass and bits of chandelier. That was the moment it just kicked off. We ran off the stage and locked the door behind us. All I could hear was all these bottles crashing against the door. I didn't know how we were going to get out of there, I really didn't. Twinny [a JD roadie] and Terry Mason were on stage, swinging mike stands around, trying to clock people with them... well, in self defence. They were just trying to keep the kids off the equipment. It was getting really nasty at this point. Twinny got smacked over the back of the head with a bottle or glass which gave him this big gash. This was the point when Hooky, being the good Salford lad that he is, decided that, 'We can take these guys...' He grabbed two empty beer bottles and thrust them in my hands then picked up two more and, 'Come on... let's have 'em.'"

Larry Cassidy: "And they start lobbing bottles over Steve Morris's head. Glass was tippling down and cans, half full of beer. Then it turns into a fucking tirade. Loads of it. So all the musicians fuck off. For some reason I got left behind the curtain. They couldn't see me. They were fucking bottling the empty stage. It was a big thick curtain but I could hear them. The dressing room was just there and they were lobbing stuff at the dressing room door. It subsided a bit and Hooky got really upset about it – being the big, macho man that he is. He wanted to go out into the crowd and start tearing it up. Paul Wiggin held him back. But the funny thing about it that I saw – cos they came out through the door... there's Paul, who was a big, tall guy, looked like Clint Eastwood... he's got Hooky in an arm lock, holding him back. But you know like when two guys have a row in the pub and a friend gets hold of one of them and it's all a bit – it was like that 'Hold me back, where are you?'"

There was no holding back Rob Gretton, as Lindsay Reade observed: "I saw Rob's face completely changing. He had this fierce stone-like look about him, ready for a fight. I had never seen him like that before. He shouted out in disgust, almost like a war cry, as he jumped, without a nanosecond of hesitation, straight into the fray."

Terry Mason started lashing out with a microphone stand at those who had attacked Twinny with the pint pot. "I was a reluctant fighter," he says. "Twinny was having the shit beat out of him after he'd been potted. He'd jumped in to help Rob. Rob had decided to punch someone and it wasn't happening like in cartoons. There was a few more people and Rob was getting a battering, so Twinny went in to save Rob and he got potted again. I thought, 'Oh fuck, I'm really shit at this, don't know anything about fighting but I'm from Salford, I go drinking in the same pubs as Twinny, I could never show my face if I didn't go in.' Someone had to get Twinny out of there."

Alan Hempsall, likewise, didn't regard himself as a fighter. "When Hooky charged out there, he dragged me with him," he recalls. "Well Hooky might be a warrior but I am a bit of a pacifist, really. I have always felt discretion to be the better part of valour but we went out onto the stage to face the audience who had whittled down to the few hardcore trouble makers who were really warming to the notion of a riot by this time. There was a row of bottles in front of them and they just kept picking them up and hurling them onstage. Me and Hooky were covered in glass. Hooky started charging around like a bull in a China shop... literally like that. And there was Tony Wilson hanging onto him, trying to drag him backstage. Tony was screaming, 'Come on Hooky... it's not worth it.' Clearly Tony was correct. It wasn't worth it. We could have got murdered out there. But Hooky being strong was dragging Tony all around the stage. I suppose it was quite comic in retrospect, but it didn't seem very funny at the time. But somehow we all managed to get backstage again, intact and we locked ourselves in again."

Terry believes that those who caused the trouble were "Scally types" who moaned when they said they couldn't get tickets – though he didn't think the gig was a sell out – and, as a result, Rob had put them on his guest list. "A lot of people felt cheated," he adds. "The ones who'd paid, they wanted Ian Curtis singing songs and weren't going to take shit."

When peace was restored Lindsay Reade drove Twinny to hospital, where he received several stitches. The pair whom Terry had attacked with the mike stand were also in casualty, sitting silently waiting to be attended. "There was a bit of an uneasy truce," says Lindsay, "a bit like Christmas day in the trenches. One of these other two lads said to the other that he'd only seen A Certain Ratio the week before and it was seeing their singer out front instead of Ian that made him throw the first bottle (that hit the chandelier)."

"We won on stitches," says Terry, "they needed three between them whereas Twinny only needed two."

More seriously, Ian was deeply upset by the riot. "The whole thing after Bury shook him," says Terry. "I think it was cos he realised that his actions were actually affecting other people. Ian wouldn't have liked that, he wouldn't have seen the glory in a riot when people actually got hurt. Twinny was there with a couple of stitches in his head from being potted. I was still bruised up from getting a battering helping Twinny. So it was involving others – not just Debbie and Annik and that. It was people that really didn't have anything to do with any of his goings on but physically hurt – not just emotionally hurt. That seemed to get to him."

Tony remembers finding Ian with his head in his hands after the gig, blaming himself for the trouble. In an attempt to comfort him, Tony reminded him of the riot at Manchester's Free Trade Hall during Lou Reed's Sally Can't Dance Tour. That had been a fractious affair – with Reed standing ice-cold in dark glasses and then refusing to return for an encore, a stance which was symbolic of an approaching punk attitude. In typical 'myth-maker' style, Wilson reminded Ian how great such gigs are – full-on art events.

Yet however much Ian loved Velvet Underground, it is doubtful that he was much consoled by this. Had Ian Curtis been a different type of rock star, one with the kind of ego more suited to the job, he would no doubt have been gratified that his absence from a gig caused a near riot. But he wasn't and he didn't. He was a gentle soul with genuine humility who really didn't want to hurt anyone. And here he was in a position where he seemed to be hurting everyone close to him – his wife, his daughter, his girlfriend, his group, his friends, and even his fans.

This re-write
Hi, thanks for the heads up that you're re-writing the article. I did investigate the possibility of nominating the article for GA status but after reading the criterion realised it wouldn't pass. The article history section looks in good shape but after this the article needs a lot of work, its not clear if you are going to re-write/delete or look for cites for the information in the style or legacy sections. I'm not sure how much if anything i'll add but if i find any useful cited information i'll add it here instead of the main article space, so you can adapt, move or delete. Cheers Operating 16:26, 31 August 2007 (UTC)