Touching From a Distance

Ian Curtis’s original lyrics for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

With love to Natalie

Frontispiece, Ian Curtis’s original lyrics for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

All uncredited photographs © Deborah Curtis.

A big thank you to all the people I interviewed: Iris Bates, Ernest Beard, Derek Brandwood, Kelvin Briggs, Oliver Cleaver, Steve Doggart, Franck Essner, Peter Hook, Michael Kelly, Terry Mason, Paul Morley, Stephen Morris, Tony Nuttall, Patrick O’Connor, Lindsay Reade, Peter Reid, Richard Searling, Bernard Sumner, Sue Sumner, John Talbot, Anthony Wilson and Helen Atkinson Wood.

Special thanks to Peter Bossley for his guidance and encouragement, without which I would still be grinding my teeth in my sleep!

Kisses to Wesley.

Ian Curtis was a singer and lyric
writer of rare, mediumistic power: his songs and performances for Joy Division conveyed desperate, raging emotions behind a dour, Mancunian façade. There were four in Joy Division – Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – but Ian was their eyes and ears: it was he who propelled them into uncharted territory – songs like ‘Dead Souls’ which, cold as the grave, has the infinity of a Gustave Doré hell.

It’s easy to forget, now that Manchester is an international music city, just how isolated Joy Division were. At a time when the main venue of communication was the weekly music press, Joy Division shunned interviews: they survived and prospered through concerts, badges, seven-inch singles and word of mouth. During their last six months, the modern youth media began: style magazines like
The
Face
and
i-D,
access programmes like
Something
Else,
which Joy Division hi-jacked with a manic performance of ‘She’s Lost Control’.

Joy Division were not punk but they were directly inspired by its energy. Like punk, they used pop music as the means to dive into the collective unconscious, only this was not Dickensian London, but De Quincey’s Manchester: an environment systematically degraded by industrial revolution, confined by lowering moors, with oblivion as the only escape. Manchester is a closed city, Cancerian like Ian Curtis: he remains the city’s greatest song poet, capturing its space and its claustrophobia in a contemporary Gothick.

Manchester is also a big soul town: you breathe in black American dance music with the damp and pollution. Asked to write a song based on N. F. Porter’s Northern Soul classic, ‘Keep On Keeping On’, Joy Division took the orginal’s compulsive riff and blasted off into
another dimension: ‘Trying to find a way, trying to find a way – to get out!’ Despite the dark lyric, traces of the original’s hard-bitten joy and optimism come through, like a guide track erased in the finished master.

I was living in Manchester then, a Londoner transplanted to the North West; Joy Division helped me orient myself in the city. I saw this new environment through their eyes – ‘Down the dark street, the houses look the same’ – and felt it through the powerful atmosphere they generated on records and in concert. Their first album,
Unknown
Pleasures,
released in June 1979, defined not only a city but a moment of social change: according to writer Chris Bohn, they ‘recorded the corrosive effect on the individual of a time squeezed between the collapse into impotence of traditional Labour humanism and the impending cynical victory of Conservatism’.

Live, Joy Division rocked, very hard, but that was not all. Ian Curtis could give performances so intense that you’d have to leave the hall. Most performers hold something back when they’re in front of an audience: what is called stagecraft or mannerism is, in fact, necessary
psychic
self-protection. Flanked by his anxious, protective cohorts – Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook – Ian Curtis got up, looked around and surrendered himself to his visions. This was not done in the controlled environment of a concert hall or studio, but in tiny, ill-equipped clubs which could at any moment explode into violence.

When you’re young, death often isn’t part of your world. When Ian Curtis committed suicide in May 1980, it was the first time that many of us had had to encounter death: the result was a shock so profound that it has become an unresolved trauma, a rupture in Manchester’s social history which has persisted through the city’s worldwide promotion as Madchester, and through the continuing success of New Order, the group formed by Joy Division’s remaining trio. As Curtis himself sang on ‘Komakino’: ‘Shadow at the side of the road/Always reminds me of you.’

Deborah Curtis was the last person to see her husband alive: at the most basic level, her memoir is the exorcism of the loss, guilt and confusion that followed
his act of violence in their Macclesfield
home. It tells us also about what has been much rumoured but never known: the emotional life of this most private of men. Much of the information in this book is printed here for the first time – an act of revelation that shows how deep the need is to break the bonds of Mancunian taciturnity.

It also tells us something that is ever present but rarely discussed: the role of women in the male, often macho, world of rock. Deborah Curtis is the wife who supported her husband, but who got left behind. There’s a chilling scene where, heavily pregnant, Deborah goes to a Joy Division concert, only to be frozen out by an associate because she is not glamorous enough, because, in her own words, ‘how, can we have a rock star with a six-months-pregnant wife standing by the stage?’ And so, the cruelties begin.

There is another question which this book raises, as chilling as it is unanswerable. Deborah Curtis writes about the reality behind the persona, the fact that Ian Curtis had a condition – epilepsy – which was worsened by the exigencies of performance. Indeed, his mesmeric stage style – the flailing arms, glossy stare and frantic, spasmodic dancing – mirrored the epileptic fits that he had at home, that struck a chill into his intimates. Did people admire Ian Curtis for the very things that were destroying him?

I applaud Deborah Curtis’s courage in writing this book, and believe that it will help to heal this fifteen-year-old wound. It may also help us to understand the nature of the obsession that continues to stalk rock culture: the romantic notion of the tortured artist, too fast to live, too young to die. This is the myth that begins with Thomas Chatterton and still carries on, through Rudolf Valentino, James Dean, Sid Vicious, Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain.
Touching
from
a
Distance
shows the human cost of that myth.

Jon Savage
1995

It was small and wrapped from head to toe in dirty rags, swaddled like a new-born baby. It was suspended from the telegraph pole and fluttered in the breeze before sailing gently down. Like an autumn leaf, it landed softly in the brook and its streamlined shape was taken quickly on the surface of the water, disappearing into the distance. I squeezed my whole body to scream but on waking all I could hear were my own muffled sobs.

My small daughter cuddled closer and tried to comfort me: ‘Don’t cry Mummy. Don’t cry.’

My own mother opened the door and in the bar of light she was able to see which one of us was crying.

On Friday 20 November 1992 Rebecca Boulton rang me from Rob Gretton’s office and left a grave-voiced message on my answerphone. I shed tears when I heard that Factory Communications was going into receivership. To me, Ian Curtis
was
Factory, his company, his dream. They were tears of sorrow and relief.

Receivers Leonard Curtis and Partners held a meeting for unsecured creditors at noon on Monday 22 February 1993. The outcome was as expected: unsecured creditors would receive nothing. The directors of the company were Christopher Smith, Alan Erasmus and Anthony Wilson. Anthony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, Peter Saville and Rob Gretton were shareholders. None of them attended the meeting.

As Ian’s beneficiary I was asked to go to London to sign my part in a contract with London Records. After months of negotiating, Rob Gretton had the unenviable task of persuading New Order and myself to sign on the dotted line with him as manager once more. I caused him some consternation by saying I needed to read and understand the thing first, though I didn’t cause as much anxiety as Bernard Sumner, who initially refused to get out of bed!

On 23 December 1992, twenty years to the day since Ian first asked me out, I boarded the train at Macclesfield. There was Rob, as bear-like as ever, waving me down to first class. As I sat, he explained that first class was a must if he wanted to smoke in peace. I felt in my bag for my asthma medication and tried to relax. The conversation was stilted to begin with. We had exchanged bitter words in the past, but Rob does not appear to hold grudges. He explained that he was not even sure if Bernard would turn up. I realized that my own reluctance to abandon my other responsibilities and jump on a train to
London two days before Christmas was but a small hiccup. Rob had already declined to be interviewed for my book and I was not prepared to push him. Though he has remained a friend, we keep a respectful distance, preferring not to discuss Ian. Yet he speaks freely of the problems he has had with New Order. There are tales of petty jealousy, time-wasting arguments and discontentment. But he’s not complaining, he’s smiling. This stress-beleaguered, slow-talking man has enjoyed it!

When we arrived at Polygram, Bernard was already there. He had flown down ahead of us and was in Roger Ames’s office ‘having words’. Eventually we trooped into the room where the contract was being combed through by solicitors Iain Adam, James Harman and John Kennedy. Bernard sat next to me because he and I were the nonsmokers. Little good this did him – the others puffed away as if their lives depended upon it. When it became clear that the contract wasn’t ready, we adjourned to the pub with Marcus Russell, Electronic’s manager, and Tracy Bennett, Roger Ames’s successor. If I had given someone else power of attorney, I would have been spared the trip but, understandably, I was not prepared to do this. Peter Hook was supposedly mid-air between Los Angeles and London while someone else signed temporarily for him. Steve Morris and Gillian Gilbert were extracted from a bar in the Seychelles for last-minute telephone negotiations. And listening to Bernard in the pub, I thought there was no way that he was going to sign.

By the time we did sign, you could have cut up the smoke in the office along with the atmosphere and given everyone a piece to take home. If I ever thought that signing a contract with a major record company would be exciting, I was mistaken. There was no real euphoria from any of the parties concerned and I couldn’t help feeling as if I had been kept behind for detention. I stood in the frosty air
outside while Rob politely tried to locate Roger Ames to say goodbye and thank him, but Roger was nowhere to be seen. There were bomb scares all over London and little time to spare before the last train back to Manchester. At Euston Station we were evacuated for yet another alert. Then the train was diverted and was so late that British Rail felt obliged to offer us a stiff drink.

When Ian and his friends were young they all talked about how they were going to move to London. Most of them did. Tony Nuttall teaches graphic design, Oliver Cleaver is a high-powered advertising executive and Helen Atkinson Wood is a successful actress. Ironically, one way or another Ian had ‘gone to London’ too. After hugging Rob, I stepped off the train at Macclesfield. It was very late and extremely cold. For a moment I felt lonely, as if I had left someone or something behind – the widow again. And while sometimes I can’t help looking over my shoulder and remembering when we were young, in my heart I know that forward is the only real direction. The signing with London Records released me from my past; I finally felt justified in completing my tale and allowing Ian to rest.