May 18, 2020
Forty years ago, Ian Curtis, lead singer, lyricist and co-founder of one of the greatest bands in the history of music, Joy Division, committed suicide by hanging himself in the kitchen of his home at 77 Barton Street in Macclesfield, Cheshire. He was just 23-years-old.
The news gutted me at the time. It still does now. It guts me just like the death of Jeff Buckley guts me, and others who went too, too young. You wonder what might have been. Always, what might have been.
But Ian was determined to die early. Or so it seems. Suffering from epilepsy and depression, allegedly having an affair with Belgian journalist and music promoter, Annik Honoré, in the throws of getting divorced from his wife, Deborah, and losing contact with their baby daughter, Natalie, he had already tried suicide before on April 6, 1980. Factory Records head honcho, Tony Wilson, invited him to stay at his country cottage to recover. He didn't.
Two months and a few days later, early in the morning after seeing Deborah, and only hours before Joy Division were due to meet before flying out on their first US tour, Ian Curtis slipped away. Deborah has said Curtis viewed the tour with extreme trepidation, because of his extreme fear of flying (he had wanted to travel by ship), and a deep concern about how American audiences would react to his epilepsy. He also told her had no desire to live past his early twenties. But a lot of us feel that way at sometime in those tempestuous years. I know I did.
Ironically, Curtis who had always wanted a smash hit didn't live to see the band's next single, the immortal, Love Will Tear Us Apart, become just that. And he didn't experience the impact of the band's final album, Closer, released to global critical acclaim on July 18, 1980. While their debut, Unknown Pleasures, was definitive, Closer is something else again. Closer is up there with Pet Sounds, Hunky Dory, a few others, in that special place, the library of the music gods.
But all of us are, of course, mortal. In those years, I was doing a weekly punk/new wave driven radio show on 6NR in Perth, called Shake Some Action (after the Flamin' Groovies classic), along with Phillip Sylvester, Pat Monaghan, Darrel LeMercier and noted WA music guru, Ray Purvis. Joy Division was a staple. Ray was importing records from England and somehow, if memory serves me correct, had got one of the few copies of the Sordide Sentimental release of Licht Und Blindheit, the first issue of Curtis' great song, Atmosphere, before its official Factory release. There were only 1578 copies pressed. Today, complete with its inserts and ornate cover intact, it sells for $3000 or more, whenever a copy becomes available.
However, being an irreverent bunch of post-teens we used to imitate Curtis' vocals by singing live on air into a plastic bucket. Just because we could. We were in awe of Joy Division.
I don't remember what we did when he died. I do, however, remember Paul Morley's extraordinary story in the UK music paper, New Musical Express (NME). Morley, a close friend and supporter of the band, was called by Wilson almost immediately after he died, told what had happened, and invited to see Curtis' body. It was one of the most utterly depressing, real, and beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read.
So Ian was gone, and we thought Peter Hook (bass), Bernard Sumner (guitar) and Stephen Morris (drums) would be gone too. How do you come back from a suicide? How indeed! We were wrong. They decided to carry on, not as Joy Division – there could never be a Joy Division without Curtis – but as New Order.
On March 6, 1981, New Order returned with Ceremony/In A Lonely Place, written 16 days before Ian's death, with vocals by Sumner. Performed, originally, at Joy Division's last ever concert on May 2, 1980, Ceremony was a stunning farewell and a huge hello. Resplendent, in its gold embossed sleeve we flogged this chiming, thumping, bass-driven gem to death. That version lasted until September 1981 by which time Gillian Gilbert had joined the band on keyboards and second guitar. This is the version found on most New Order compilations. Re-recorded with Gilbert it subtlety distanced itself from the Joy Division sound of the original and hinted at an intangible what might be.
I would need a book to tell what that was. But 39 years later, New Order are still together, and probably the most down-to-earth bunch of gods you could wish to meet. Yes, gods, icons, call them what you will, because what New Order did next was reinvent dance music.
Preceded by the album, Movement (1981), and the subsequent singles, Everything's Gone Green and Temptation, both of which shifted the post-Joy Division sound further away from its rock and punk roots, New Order turned the music world upside down on March 7, 1983, with the release of a 12" record, Blue Monday.
Here is the soundtrack to millions of best-night-out evers. More people have probably spun out, taken substances (illegal and/or legal) and spiralled round a dance floor at 2am in the morning to its 7:29 than nearly any other 1980s song.
Blue Monday, is the sound of Manchester, the sound of the Hacienda nightclub that New Order and Factory opened in 1982; it is the sound of alternative dance music as made by white boys from grim working class backgrounds. And it was grim. They used to nail the tables and chairs down in the clubs and pubs in the worst areas, serve the drinks in plastic cups.
What followed was probably the greatest run of 12" singles ever: Confusion, Thieves Like Us, Murder, The Perfect Kiss, Sub-culture, Shellshock, State of the Nation, Bizarre Love Triangle, True Faith, Touched by the Hand of God, Blue Monday 1988, Fine Time.
When I heard Ceremony for the first time I punched the air, a lot. Alone in my lounge room. When I heard Blue Monday for the first time, I got stoned and played it over and over and over again, dancing like a madman until I couldn't dance anymore. I probably was a little mad then. My world in motion was complicated. Successful metropolitan journalist on the rise, nicknamed the ferret (there wasn't a hole I wouldn't go down in search of a story). It took me to some dark places. Late nights in back alleys. Threats. Stings. Wins. Losses. But truths. And glorious stories of people beating the odds. I think, I, and others, made a small, perhaps microscopic, difference, but a difference nonetheless. Personally, my first marriage collapsed. It was always going to. Work, music, radio, sex, alcohol and drug abuse. That was life. Cliched, maybe. Okay, certainly.
But New Order were always there as eventually I spun – like their heaven sent albums and 12" singles – through the 1980s. They were there when I was told by my doctor in 1985 – was it that year, I think so, around then anyway – that I'd be dead in five years if I didn't quit everything. They were there that night I consumed all the booze and drugs I could find in one last rage, and went cold turkey with a frikking' monumental hangover the next day. They were there on the nights over the next three months when I'd shake, not from the cold; when my eyes watered and wouldn't stop; when my skin crawled. And they were there when I came out the other side.
The other day my wife (who loves them as much as I do) and I spent half of Sunday afternoon, bouncing through the late autumn splendour to their latest live albums, and greatest hits. Their music remains as wondrous a source of spontaneous joy as Joy Division's is a potent reflection and reminder of the darker sides of life's gritty truths. A gut-wrenching post-punk reality show. When there were none. And both have their own beauty.
You want to make me choke up, play me Decades, the final track on Closer – you can hear Ian Curtis saying goodbye ("Here are the young men/ the weight on their shoulders/ Here are the young men, well where have they been?/ We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber/ Pushed to the limit/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 free./Where have they been?"), then Love Will Tear Us Apart, then Atmosphere, then Ceremony, then Blue Monday, then The Perfect Kiss, then Bizarre Love Triangle, then True Faith, and, finally, Crystal.
And if, at the end, you aren't out of breath and spinning in some nightclub of your own making, wracked by emotions you can't even begin to define, then I guess we'll go our own ways.
And, yes, Ian was right. Love will tear us apart, again. But only if we let it.
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