I think that when we stop doing that, I think, well, that will be time to pack it in. Credit: Mikey ( CC 2.0) Don’t walk away in silenceīut did Curtis wish to die a romantic death, along the lines of one of his favorite artists David Bowie’s Rock’Roll Suicide? Was it the medication that made him end his own life, as his wife and several friends believed? Or was it all the soul searching, the illness, and having to make a life-choice between his wife and girlfriend?Ĭurtis himself perhaps alluded to one reason when he told Radio Blackburn in 1980 that ‘basically, we want to play and enjoy what we like playing. Photo of flyer taken at Piccadilly Metrolink Station, Manchester, England, United Kingdom on 12 August 1979.
Mancunian journalist Paul Morley, who has written extensively on Joy Division, even describes Joy Division’s final album Closer as ‘a series of blatant suicide notes to a number of people in Ian’s immediate vicinity.’ He was singing lines such as ‘ Existence, well what does it matter’, ‘ It’s creeping up slowly, that last fatal hour’, ‘ I’ve lost the will to want more’, ‘ Watching the reel as it comes to a close’, ‘ Look beyond the day at hand, there’s nothing there at all’, and ‘ Hangman looks round as he waits, cord stretches tight then it breaks’, the latter from what was probably the last song the band ever wrote, ‘In a Lonely Place’. But they were becoming increasingly depressing as his marriage and health deteriorated and he felt the pressure of bearing his soul as a lead-singer of an increasingly popular band. Ian’s lyrics had always portrayed images of human cruelty and coldness, pressure, crises, failure and the loss of control.
And the medicine he had to take for the fits had lots of unpleasant side effects. His epilepsy, which he had been diagnosed with in December 1978, was getting worse as fits were becoming stronger and more frequent, both on-stage and off. He had already tried to commit suicide once. This is echoed by Ian’s mother, who has emphasized that her son’s life wasn’t tragic and by Peter Hook, who describer Ian as a people pleaser and ‘one of the lads, as far as we were concerned.’ Look beyond the day at handīut however much Ian kept a straight face and could be fun to be with, in retrospect there were many signs that he was not well. Including the otherwise excellent film Control, based on Ian’s wife Debbie Curtis’s book, Touching from a distance.Īccording to Joy Division’s main photographer, Kevin Cummins, Ian was fun to be with, ‘but has this image of a depressed reclusive gloomy romantic hero because I only released photographs of Ian looking depressed.’
Perhaps because the band did few interviews, because the cover-art contains little information about the band, or because the pictures and footage that were published and released of them were almost exclusively black-and-white. The perfect friend or partner for Ian would have combined all those things, but if that person exists they were nowhere near our social scene, so he had to be a chameleon … Thinking about it, I bet even Ian didn’t know who the “real” Ian was.’ The myth and the manĪ lot of the myth and mystique surrounding Joy Division in general, and Ian Curtis in particular, tends to portray a rather more one-dimensional sense of torment and gloom. Who read about human suffering in Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hesse and Ballard, read to his wife Debbie about how ‘there is no mystery so great as misery’ from Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, and talked about poetry and literature with his girlfriend Annik, who he met after a concert in August 1979.Īccording to Peter Hook, ‘there were just too many Ian’s to cope with.
The aesthete who had an obsession with death and rock and film stars who had died young. The lad who partook in all manner of laddish pranks with band and friends, such as fighting, drinking, ‘chasing groupies and pissing in ashtrays and looking at turds in toilets’, as Joy Division bassist Peter Hook remembers.