Ian Curtis Remembered: “Ian was actually loads of fun.”

Picture: Rob Verhorst/Redferns

Behind their intense music and austere image, Joy Division remain a dark riddle wrapped inside the enigma of Ian Curtis and his tragic early death. On the anniversary of Curtis’ death in 1980, MOJO unravels the story of a frontman increasingly torn apart by love, epilepsy and duty, and the powerful effect of his harrowing illness on the group’s second album Closer, completed just days before Curtis’s tragic suicide on the eve of a much anticipated first US tour.

On October 1979, Joy Division climbed into Steve Morris’s Olympic blue Ford Cortina and headed off on their first major UK tour. For the next six weeks they would be supporting the Buzzcocks at 2,500-seater venues across the country. Befitting a group on a small Manchester independent label, money was tight. Up north, they drove home after the gigs, feasting on the backstage booty of butties and crisps.

The damp autumn weather and lack of luxuries resulted in numerous muttered complaints. Yet, despite their austere public image, life on the road with Joy Division was never dull. In fact, it was pure Spinal Tap, with perhaps a dash of Coronation Street.

“We were like kids in a sweetshop,” grins Steve Morris. “They gave you a free crate of pale ale! It was our first encounter with The Rider.”

There were lots of hi-jinks. In Cardiff, the hotel bar shut at 2am, so the roadies prised off the metal grilles and handed out free beer, the night ending in a huge drunken cushion fight between main act and support. In Guildford, Joy Division surpassed themselves by removing the strip-lights from the gents’ toilets and smearing the taps and light switches with excrement.

During a mid-tour break, the group played a one-night stand at an arts complex in Brussels. After the gig – a significant landmark in the story for darker reasons – Ian Curtis got drunk and pissed into a free-standing metal ashtray.

The group were, by some accounts, a randy bunch. “There was suddenly this fantastic copping potential,” explains Morris. “I was somewhat young and naïve in that respect. It was like, ‘Steve, can I borrow the keys to the car?’ Why? ‘I need to get some badges.’ Why do you need badges? ‘Look, just give me the fuckin’ keys, you twat!’”

“Ian Curtis was actually loads of fun,” stressed Tony Wilson, Factory Records boss and music biz legend. “They all were. Their major pastime was japing – it was a central part of their lives.”

But you can hardly blame the outside world for buying into the noir Joy Division myth. Live footage from that time doesn’t exactly suggest four working-class, Northern lads out for a laugh. On-stage, they are intense, stern, apocalyptic. Ian Curtis, lost in his own world, marches back and forth like a demented Wehrmacht sentry, rhythmically clutching at imaginary ghosts. Peer closer, and his eyes are glazed and haunted. It’s as if he’s seeing something we can’t. Maybe he was. On that tour, he was suffering on-stage epileptic seizures virtually every night.

But talk about Ian as some kind of mystic and you will get very short shrift from his friends and former bandmates. Again and again they will stress “he was just a normal bloke” – married, a child, a mortgage, a dog, lived in an ordinary terraced house, loved music. Some of those closest to him will admit there were occasional glimpses of a mysterious, secretive, unknowable Ian, someone who, as Peter Hook explains, “was trying hard to hide part of his personality”.

But that didn’t mean that his sudden death in May 1980 made any more sense.

When Ian Curtis hanged himself at home in Macclesfield, Cheshire, he assured himself immortality. He was the second high-profile casualty of the punk era, following Sid Vicious’s overdose a year earlier. But the two couldn’t have been more different. Sid was a troubled rock’n’roll icon who fell victim to his own myth. Ian Curtis – beneath his unassuming Northern front – was a gifted poet and original thinker, clearly battling a debilitating illness and the stresses of a messy personal life.

Within weeks of his death, Love Will Tear Us Apart, one of Joy Division’s last recordings, reached Number 13 in the chart. Its sorrowful melody and haunting lyrics, seemingly about his disintegrating marriage, brought the group, somewhat late for Curtis, their first mainstream recognition. Ian was instantly transformed into an archetype: a dark visionary, who knew his life was fated to be a short one. On close inspection, some of Joy Division’s lyrics appeared to foretell of his tragic end. When he wrote about death, on tracks like Dead Souls, Shadowplay and New Dawn Fades, it was as if he was so close to it he could already feel what it was like and was presenting his own suicide as his final artistic statement.

His bandmates probably chuckle at such portentous analysis. But there is at least one person in this story who believes that Ian may have been secretly and knowingly living out the existence of a doomed prophet: his wife, Deborah. “He used to fantasise about taking his own life, that romantic idea of dying young,” she explains. “All the people he admired were ones who weren’t around anymore. That’s what he wanted – to be like them.”

It’s Christmas Eve 2004, and MOJO is discussing Joy Division’s enduring appeal with Tony Wilson (who will pass away aged 57 just three years later). In 2004, the group seem to be hipper than ever. They’re becoming to a new generation what The Velvet Underground were to theirs: a deliciously dark, cultish pleasure. Tune into MTV2 and it’s awash with nervy young men who’ve clearly absorbed the group’s emotional, icy magic: Interpol, Kasabian, The Rakes, Snow Patrol, The Futureheads, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club…

Then there’s the film. In January 2004, it was announced that an independent US production company is finally to bring Touching From A Distance, Deborah Curtis’s book about her life with Ian, to the big screen.

Tony Wilson is calling from his mobile. He’s in Salford, walking his dog, William – the pooch in New Order’s Blue Monday ’95 video. He is reassuringly as you’d expect. “Joy Division are immensely important,” he pants. “Bernard Sumner is… Hang on… William! Get off the road! Sorry about this… look you can’t shit there, you silly dog… William!!”

He rings off; he rings back. “Bernard Sumner is annoyingly clever,” he booms. “He once made the point that punk rock was vital because it rescued music from the crap and made it real again. But punk only had a limited vocabulary – it could only express simple things like ‘Fuck you!’ or ‘I’m bored’. Bernard said that sooner or later, someone was going to take the energy and inspiration from punk and make it express more complex emotions. And that’s what Joy Division did. Instead of saying ‘Fuck off’, they said: ‘I’m fucked.’ In doing so they invented post-punk and regenerated a great art form – rock’n’roll.”

Steve Morris still lives near Macclesfield, the Cheshire market town which used to spin silk for the world’s finest wardrobes. We’re sitting in the barn-cum-recording studio of his farm, where some of New Order’s forthcoming album, Waiting For The Sirens’ Call, was recorded. Pinned on the wall are instructions for making the group’s tea: Hooky “no milk”, Bernard “filtered water”, etc. In the corner is a full-size replica Dalek and piles of equipment, including some old Joy Division stuff – Bernard’s dusty Vox stack and Steve’s drum kit, stolen from outside New York’s Iroquois hotel in 1980 and later recovered during an FBI raid on a mafia warehouse.

Joy Division came together a few months after Curtis befriended Sumner and Hook at an early punk gig – no one can agree which one. Bernard and Peter were mates from Salford, the area of Manchester infamous for its cramped terrace houses and smelly textile factories. They’d been teenage skinheads and Mods, hanging out at North Salford Youth Club, listening to rock and soul. Hooky liked reading Richard Allen’s ’70s youth cult novels; Bernard was gifted at drawing but couldn’t afford to go to art school.

“Ian just seemed like one of us,” recalls Hook. “He had an Army & Navy flak jacket with ‘Hate’ written on the back. That was quite good. He was quiet and polite. Dead nice, really. He had a mate at college who painted doors on the floorboards. That’s Macclesfield for you! Then Steve joined. Did coming from Macclesfield make them outsiders? In a way. It was green hills and open spaces. They were both fuckin’ mad.”

Joy Division’s unusual sound developed during 1977 and 1978 at T.J. Davidson’s, a drab, ugly textile warehouse converted to a rehearsal space. Now demolished, it was situated on Little Peter Street, behind Deansgate Station on the fringes of Manchester city centre. In winter, it was so cold the group used to start fires with scavenged wood to keep themselves warm. The group – initially called Warsaw – practised for three hours every Saturday afternoon. All of them had day jobs.

Their originality stemmed from a punk naïveté. “None of us could play a note,” explains Bernard Sumner. “So instead we decided to use our brains and intelligence to do something original. We learned to play within our limits. What we did was simple and powerful.”

“There was none of this ‘four bars of that’ malarkey,” grins Morris. “It was like, ‘Play that riff twice and then do another riff.’ We had no musical language at all. None of us knew what a bar was. We used to argue about it, ‘Hang on, that’s your idea of a bar, not mine.’”

Tony Wilson describes Warsaw, who regularly played Manchester’s punk venues – Electric Circus, Rafters – as a “fucking cacophony with a great singer”. Famously, Hook played melodic riffs high up on the neck of his bass because his equipment was so poor it was the only way he could hear himself. Their music was edgy and intense. In From Joy Division To New Order, Mick Middles posits the theory that the group may have unwittingly been funnelling the vibrations of T.J. Davidson’s grim, industrial past.

Sumner and Hook take the psycho-architectural link even further.

“My background was working class,” says Bernard. “I lived in Alfred Road with my mother and my grandparents. It was a Coronation Street-style house. My niece and aunties lived in the same road. There was a chemical factory at the end of the street, which backed onto the River Irwell. It stank. When I was 11 we were moved into a tower block. We thought it was great. It had a bathroom and an airing cupboard. But it was also the breaking up of that community. I thought everyone in the street would move into the same tower block, but they didn’t.”

Hook: “Where Bernard and I lived it was dark, it was the ’50s and ’60s, there was still smog, rows and rows of terraced houses. It was black and claustrophobic.”

“There was something subconscious in my mind,” adds Bernard. “The displacement and sense of loss I had… Then my stepfather died. I was quite angry. Up until I was moved to a tower block, everything was really good. Afterwards it wasn’t. I think that may have affected the music in some way.”

“Joy Division were from the north side of Manchester,” the group’s producer, Martin Hannett, explained to Martin Aston in an unpublished interview from 1989. “It’s a science fiction city. Not like the south side at all. It’s all industrial archaeology, chemical plants, warehouses, canals, railways, roads that don’t take any notice of the areas they traverse. The incidence of serious diseases in north Manchester is 50 per cent higher than anywhere else in the country. Grim, eh?”

In April 1978, Ian Curtis handed Tony Wilson a note at a local battle-of-the-bands contest, the itinerant Stiff/Chiswick Challenge, informing him he was a “fucking cunt” for not booking the band on his Granada TV show, So It Goes. Within a year the group had recorded an album, Unknown Pleasures, for Wilson’s new independent label, Factory Records (no advances, no contracts). It was only when Martin Hannett – who based its sound on The Doors’ Strange Days – played them a test pressing that they properly heard what Curtis was singing about.

The lyrical content was blacker even than their music: death, religion, love, war. There were references to “the blood of Christ”, a girl’s uncontrollable seizures, childhood rooms filled with “bloodsport and pain”. His poetry was chilling, polished and original. Just as the group never analysed their music, no one ever asked Curtis to explain the words he sang in his rich, powerful tenor. It wasn’t as if Joy Division were consciously trying to preserve their own mystery. “Ian’s words sounded great,” says Hook. “That’s all that was important at the time.”

It’s a wet, drizzly night in December and Macclesfield isn’t in the mood to give up its secrets. MOJO is trying to find the “monstrous” grey council block behind the town station where Ian Curtis lived as a teenager. After 40 minutes trudging around the perimeter of Victoria Park, I give up. It later transpires that Park View flats were demolished 18 months ago.

Deborah, Ian’s widow – who now uses her maiden name Woodruff – has fond memories of them. “I remember Ian standing on the balcony, wearing his sister’s pink fluffy jacket and eyeliner,” she smiles. “He was tall and imposing, over six foot, a little bit frightening. This was 1973. Did he ever attract trouble? No. He could give people the stare.”

We are sitting in a pub, the Station Hotel, opposite the railway station, looking out on Macclesfield’s old industrial centre, warehouses and textile factories now converted to posh flats and heritage museums. When it was first published 10 years ago, Deborah’s memoir, Touching From A Distance, gave the first intimate and detailed picture of the singer’s life. It was an intensely moving book (and soon to be turned into the film Control).

Ian Curtis was 16 when Deborah first met him. A bright grammar school boy who’d passed seven O-Levels, he was also a pharmaceutical adventurer (solvents, Valium, barbiturates) and music nut (Lou Reed, Bowie, MC5, Iggy). His interest in drugs got him expelled from school – where Steve Morris was in the year below. Ian’s father worked as a detective in the Transport Police: it’s from him that Ian apparently inherited his love for literature and “silent moods”. Though living at 11 Park View when they began courting, Curtis had spent his early life in Hurdsfield, on the outskirts of Macclesfield.

“From what I can tell it was a fairly idyllic childhood,” says Deborah. “Wandering around fields, building dams in brooks, chasing pigs. It always puzzled me why he was so obsessed with writing about cityscapes. Maybe he felt guilty that he wasn’t trapped in one. Ian was angry,” adds Deborah. “But I was never sure why.”

Deborah found Ian charismatic and attractive. He was highly creative and original, and kept box files full of poems, lyrics and stories. He often stayed up late writing. He was desperate to make it as a rock star. Deborah recalls that he was smitten with tragic figures like James Dean and Jim Morrison; he also, she says, entertained romantic fantasies of his own early death.

He read Hesse, Sartre, Ballard, Dostoevsky, sought out cult films by Herzog and Fassbinder and, like most youths of his generation, was fascinated with Nazi Germany and military history. (Hence ‘Joy Division’, the corps of Jewish women forced to pleasure SS officers in the concentration camps.) Later, when Joy Division was taking off, Ian privately corresponded with Genesis P Orridge from Throbbing Gristle, punk’s foremost avant-garde thinker and outré performer.

“He was really clever,” she explains. “He could have done something very cerebral. He was a fantastic writer and had plans for various works. It’s a loss in that way. His lyrics are fantastic – imagine if he wrote a novel…”

Intelligent though he undoubtedly was, the man Deborah describes in her book isn’t always likeable; nor is he standard-issue rock’n’roll material. His politics were to the right. In 1975, he voted Conservative and insisted Deborah did the same. Though caring and tender, he could also be insecure, possessive and controlling. According to Deborah, she agreed to their marriage in 1975 under duress: Curtis made vague threats that he might do something to himself if she turned him down.

At their engagement party Ian violently threw his Bloody Mary over his fiancée, believing she was flirting with an uncle. Later that evening, she saw Curtis dance for the first time – the awkward, weaving shimmy the world now knows so well. She didn’t think it unusual at the time.

Once married, Deborah often found it hard to talk to her husband about his poetry and deeper thoughts. “He didn’t communicate very well,” she sighs. “You never knew what his agenda was.”

He got a job in a Manchester record store and was an early convert to punk. When he met Sumner and Hook he had the means to channel his literary ambitions and rock star dreams into something real.

Throughout 1978 and ’79, when the group was taking off, he worked hard to keep his domestic and band life together. He took his new job, at the Manpower Services Commission, seriously. He and Deborah were so strapped for cash he even cleaned the group’s rehearsal room for a few extra quid. When Tony Wilson co-opted Joy Division to glue together the sandpaper sleeves for Durutti Column’s Return Of The… LP, the rest of the group paid Ian to do theirs for them. Meanwhile, they sat and watched a porn film.

In social situations Ian was witty and good company. He was also capable of being provocative, especially after a few drinks. In her book, Deborah mentions being upset when she heard that Ian had entertained the band with an offensive story about a Pakistani family defecating into sheets of newspaper and hurling the parcels into a neighbour’s garden.

There was, it seemed, a disturbing and unfathomable side to Curtis. It was only seen occasionally, but it was, says Morris, like “someone had flicked a switch”. His first encounter with “alter-Ian” came not long after he joined the group, and they all went to see The Stranglers at the Electric Circus. “We couldn’t get in, so we went to the pub,” Morris explains. “The Stranglers’ drummer, Jet Black, was in there smoking a pipe. So Ian said, ‘Look, I’ll go over and sort us out.’ He was drunk [and] the next thing was like, Where’s Ian gone? Then I saw him necking with some bird I’d never seen before in me life! It was like, What?! I said, Do you know her? He said, ‘No.’ So Ian is wearing a black star on his lapel and goes up to [journalist] Paul Morley, who says, ‘That’s a fascist symbol’, and Ian says, ‘No, it’s not, Paul, it’s anarchy, FUCKING ANARCHY!’ Then Ian said, ‘Shall we go into the ladies bogs?’ And I was like, Ladies’ bogs? Erm, why would we want to? It was frightening. He did like to carry on with the ladies.”

“Ian did have a bit of Jekyll and Hyde thing,” agrees Sumner. “I remember he tried kicking in the door of the dressing room at [the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge] gig, when Paul Morley and Kevin Cummins were taking ages to come on-stage. He [once] got so wound up arguing with Rob Gretton he ran around shouting with a bucket on his head. I thought it funny more than anything else.”

Outside the group, Ian and Deborah enjoyed a fairly ordinary domestic life. At weekends, they would take country walks with their dog. In April 1979, the Curtises became a trio when a daughter, Natalie, was born. His existence was, in many respects, the paradigm of normality. I put it to Hooky that Curtis – and Joy Division – weren’t very rock’n’roll in comparison with The Clash and Sex Pistols, who lived in squats, stole their food from street markets, and led a bohemian, art school life. He bristles. “Ian was a working-class bloke who had to go out and earn a living,” he says. “We all were. All those other bands you mention were middle-class and had money. We had nothing, it was totally derelict where we came from in Manchester. Ian had responsibilities, he struggled hard to feed his family, even though he’d rather have played music all day.

“I think that makes him more rock’n’roll. Don’t you?”

 In October 1979, with a new single, Transmission, out, the group set out on tour with the Buzzcocks. By now, Unknown Pleasures, was a permanent fixture on the indie album chart. In Sounds, Jon Savage proclaimed it to be “one of the best, white, English debut LPs of the year”.

The Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle remembers the group as “very reserved. I don’t know if we frightened them off because we were pissed-up and full of drugs. We had a different verve and spark. It was rock’n’roll. They seemed reticent and timid.” Many claim that Joy Division’s deeply emotional, sheet-metal roar blew the ’Cocks off the stage. (Diggle, not surprisingly, dismisses such talk: “Another Factory myth. Most of the audience were still in the bar when they played. We were louder, heavier… No, quite impossible.”)

On October 16 the group journeyed on their own to Brussels Raffinerie du Plan K, an old sugar refinery converted into an arts centre. The evening culminated in a reading by beat legends Williams Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their collaboration The Third Mind. “To be honest, we all liked that kind of stuff, but we didn’t go on about it,” says Morris. “We didn’t go around in black or wearing sunglasses inside. But occasionally Ian would reveal that part of himself. I remember he went smooching over to Burroughs. We were like, ‘Great, we’ve got a crate of double-dead-strong beer, can we get another?’ He was off getting his book signed.”

Later, a drunken Ian reverted to type and pissed into the aforementioned metal ashtray. When a member of staff remonstrated with him, he sarcastically addressed her in slow, loud English, casting her in the role of stu-pid for-eign-er.

The constant touring and exhilaration of being the music press’s bright new promise was beginning to adversely affect Ian’s health. At the end of the previous year, in December 1978, he had suffered his first epileptic seizure, following Joy Division’s first ever London gig, at the Hope & Anchor in Islington. He had been prescribed medication, but the attacks were becoming ever more frequent, more violent. On a couple of occasions, Diggle recalls that the Buzzcocks were asked to extend their set, so fans wouldn’t interfere with ambulance crews trying to reach Ian backstage. The seizures usually occurred either on-stage or directly after performances.

Soon, however, there would be another stress that would send Ian’s epilepsy spiralling out of control. The last night of the tour, at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, Steve Diggle was chatting at the bar when Ian approached him. “We were talking generally about it being a good tour, how everything had gone really well, etc,” he recalls. “Then Curtis said, ‘I’ve got this problem. I met this girl in Europe and I’m married with a kid.’ He said it in a very sensitive and troubled way. That sort of thing was happening to a lot of people around us at that time. The temptations of the road. I just said, Don’t worry, mate. You’ll get over it! Other blokes would have laughed about it, but Curtis didn’t. It seemed to be a real problem. I didn’t realise how much of a problem.”

When Joy Division sped off down Ian’s street to start their European tour on January 10, 1980, Curtis looked directly ahead and didn’t wave goodbye to Deborah. Annik Honoré, the girl he’d met at Plan K in Brussels, would be secretly accompanying him throughout the tour. None of the other band members had a wife or girlfriend in tow. Annik worked at the Belgian Embassy in London. She was, by all accounts, “glamorous and exotic”.

On the road, the usual pranks and japes prevailed. “In Cologne, I did the stupidest thing that I’ve ever done,” says Morris. “We quite liked speed at the time. We sent someone to get some, and he came back and said, ‘I’ve got you this.’ It was like this red star.”

“It was called a Belgrade Star,” clarifies Peter Hook. “Steve swallowed it. This guy was like, ‘On no! Dat is five hits of acid!’ He took the lot in one go. Steve was out of his mind for two days. We were staying in a loft space, 12 feet up. Twinny, our roadie, thought it would be amusing to take the ladder away for the night.”

Morris: “I spent the rest of the tour tripping. I kept shouting, I’m going to chop off your head with an axe!”

Having Ian’s mistress travelling with them inevitably caused tensions. “I liked her,” says Hook. “But she was very bossy and domineering. The funny one was staying in a brothel. I can’t remember where. Speakers under the bed. You hired it by the half hour. After the gig we were in the van outside, waiting to go in. Annik said, ‘Hang on, ziz is a knock-ink shop!’ Yeah, so what? She said, ‘I am not staying in an ’ouse of ill-repute.’ So we said, Look, you’re shagging a married bloke, so what the fuck are you talking about, you silly cow!”

Outwardly, Curtis didn’t seem fazed by what was clearly an awkward situation. However, once the tour had finished and he was back home with a suspicious Deborah in Macclesfield, there was a sign that he was deeply troubled. One night, he drunkenly sought out a Bible. Having studied religion at school, he knew just where to look. He gouged out chapter two of The Revelation Of St John The Divine. It concerned the wanton Jezebel: “Behold, I will cast… them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation.”

Later, it transpired that same night he’d cut himself up, too. Unbeknown to anyone, Ian’s life was entering its final phase.

Between March 18 and 30, 1980, Joy Division worked on a second LP. As with Unknown Pleasures, the producer was Martin Hannett. As ‘Martin Zero’, Hannett had recorded the Buzzcocks’ pioneering Spiral Scratch EP, and it was this thick-set and dishevelled figure who had transformed Joy Division’s raw, edgy live sound into the glassy, stately, controlled force on Unknown Pleasures.

The sessions took place at Pink Floyd’s studio, Britannia Row, in Islington. Meanwhile, the group were billeted in a pair of adjoining flats in a modern residential block off Marylebone Road. New to London, each afternoon they’d go sight-seeing. Britannia Row had several superb ambient ‘live’ rooms. Hannett – a casual heroin user who regarded himself as an artiste – chose the location because, according to Steve Morris, he “liked to record in places that had a history of success”.

“Martin’s method was to turn everything upside down,” says Hook. “He talked to you like a mad professor. He’d say, ‘Make it softer but harder. Wider but not too wide.’ Jesus, it’s a only a fucking bass line, Martin! He had his head in the clouds. But he managed to bring a bit of the heavens down to earth. He managed to capture something special.”

“If Hooky has been able to communicate to me what exactly it was that he wanted, instead of saying it wasn’t what he wanted, it would have been easier,” said Hannett in 1989.

Steve Morris: “I thought Martin was great. The analogy was the Tom Baker Dr Who. It was a double act between him and Chris Nagle, his assistant. If we tried to interject, it was like, ‘Hmm, musicians…’ It was quite us-and-them. You sometimes felt you were on the outside of it all. The way you pushed the buttons on the console was all part of the recording magic, apparently. Right on, Martin!”

Sumner: “Martin had a vision, but it was difficult to see. He could hear things in the music that no one else could. Whether it was because he was stoned, I don’t know. We used to say, Tell him to turn up the ARP [synthesizer], and Hooky would say, ‘Martin, can you turn up the ARP?’ And he’d shout, ‘What?! What are you fucking talking about, you fucking cunt?!’ He’d get really angry. But it was 50/50, we got our way half the time.”

Closer, as the album would be titled, was carefully constructed from numerous performances and overdubs. Each drum was recorded separately. The music clearly foreshadows the beautiful, wintry, electronic dance music of New Order. Hannett insisted they used synthesizers and electronically triggered drum beats with which he’d become fascinated. (“Listen to The Eternal,” rails Morris, “there’s actually a beat missing because the equipment didn’t fucking work!’)

Ian’s voice was growing richer and more expressive – thanks, Tony Wilson believes, to a conversation he and Curtis had recently had about Frank Sinatra’s tone and phrasing. The most startling aspect of the record, however, was Ian’s lyrics. With hindsight, Closer clearly reveals his troubled inner life and anxieties about his physical deteroriation. Atrocity Exhibition, though ostensibly about the Nazi extermination camps, seems also to relate to his own experiences on-stage – an epileptic freakshow. Heart And Soul ruminates on the struggle between right and wrong and ultimately expresses an indifference to living. Love Will Tear Us Apart – taped at this session (but not on the album) – speaks of two lovers, reluctantly and painfully journeying on different paths.

Martin Hannett: “I’d rather still have Ian alive but it was just perfect. It was a document. He was crumbling. But it all came together in a magical way. There’s just a lot of pain in there as well as pleasure. Ian wasn’t taking his medication because he felt like it made him numb. He had to be looked after very closely all the time, because epileptics get prescribed fistfuls of phenobarbitone. These turned him off, it slowed him down. On the few occasions that we couldn’t look after him, we’d find him in a mess, because he’d had a fit. Sound-wise, I invented all these little tricks to do with generating sound images, like a holographic principle. Light and shade. Trying to make it independent of what you’d then listen to it on.”

Meanwhile, the japery continued. Ian was living with Annik in the bedroom of one of their Marylebone apartments. “It was trying to be a model of domestic bliss,” recalls Steve. “(Belgian accent) ‘Ian, are you do-ink your i-ron-ing?’ It was like, ‘Tell her to fuck off!’

“One day we found this kebab shop,” he continues. “It was like, Great! We said to Ian, ‘Come on, let’s go in!’, and Annik looked daggers at him. He said, ‘No, Annik’s a vegetarian.’ And she said, ‘And zo are you, Ian!’ So he’s like, ‘I don’t like kebabs.’ And we’re like, You what?! You don’t like kebabs?!… OK, have a salad, then. I’ll have a doner kebab – actually, I’ll fucking well have his.”

The group wound up the couple by folding their sheets into an “apple-pie” bed that you couldn’t get into and removing all their furniture bar the “i-ron-ing board”.

“It was a bit tense,” says Sumner. “Partly because of Annik’s presence. Rob and Hooky took the piss out of Ian. I thought it was a bit out of order, actually. But Ian was being a different person in front of Annik. You don’t fart in front of a new girlfriend, do you? So I think everyone had had enough of it. But… I don’t want to open old wounds.”

The last few months of Ian Curtis’s life is harrowing stuff. The most significant developments were his affair with Annik and worsening epilepsy. During the Buzzcocks tour, Ian had been suffering seizures virtually every night: they’d become almost a perverted validation of Joy Division’s Sturm und Drang. During the early months of 1980, the fits became more violent. At home with Deborah, he couldn’t fall asleep until he’d had an attack. The stress of his complicated private life clearly wasn’t helping. Nor was the primitive treatment for his epilepsy. The carbamazepine and phenobarbital prescribed to control his seizures resulted in unpredictable mood swings, “like a drunk, but without the high”, according to one leading epilepsy specialist. Ian was becoming extremely ill.

In April, Joy Division supported The Stranglers at the Rainbow. Curtis, lost in his dance/trance, had an epileptic seizure on-stage. Later that night, the band drove across London to headline a Factory Records show at the small Moonlight Club in West Hampstead. Ian had another fit while performing. Afterwards, he sat at the side of the stage, a complete wreck.

Ian stayed in London with Annik. On Easter Monday, he finally returned home to Deborah. That night he attempted to take his own life, with an overdose of phenobarbitone. He was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped. When Ian was discharged, Tony Wilson suggested he should stay at Wilson’s cottage in Glossop.

With hindsight, Joy Division should have taken a break. Despite the group’s reservations, Ian agreed to honour a gig the very next evening at Derby Hall, Bury. Knowing he was unwell, Rob Gretton arranged for Ian to perform just a handful of songs, then hand over to A Certain Ratio’s Simon Topping. The audience was outraged. The gig ended in a huge brawl. Ian was devastated. Wilson found him upstairs in tears.

“We were young, and the band was taking off,” says Hook. “We’d worked so hard to get that far. We didn’t know to deal with Ian’s illness. Imagine four 22-years-olds from Manchester – it was like, Hi, Ian. ‘Hi. Look, I’m really ill.’ Right. (Pause) You up for a pint then? It wasn’t like, OK, let’s sit down and talk about it. But let me make it clear, we did look after him. But the thing was he didn’t do much to help himself. He was fighting it.”

Steve Morris: “If we were more caring we could have dealt with it better. But we were like, He’ll be all right! He had to go to bed early, not get drunk, lead a regular lifestyle. No flashing lights! Don’t flash the lights! We were actually quite careful about that. But that was the antithesis of what he was. He wasn’t the kind of person who went to bed early. It was a head-fuck. Being in a band wasn’t conducive to making a recovery.”

A few days later there was a band meeting. Ian said he was leaving: he was going to Holland to open a bookshop. The group said fine. The next day Curtis met Sumner in the street in Manchester. He acted as if the conversation had never happened. The only talk was of rehearsals and gigs. Ian’s life was accelerating towards its grim conclusion. A tour of America was booked for late May. Estranged from Deborah, who wanted a divorce, Ian stayed with Bernard before returning to his parents’ house.

It was around this time that a bizarre and chilling event occurred: Bernard was interested in hypnotism and agreed to put Curtis under. “Ian brought the tapes home for me to listen to,” says Deborah Curtis. “[He] insisted he had regressed to a previous life.”

Todd Eckert, a producer of Control, has heard a cassette of the session. “You’d presume they were messing about, but they weren’t,” he says. “They were really serious. When Ian goes under he becomes this guy living in a hut in France in the 17th century. The intensity with which he tells this story is astonishing. It’s the single most scary thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Why? (Pause) Because Ian is alluding to already being dead.”

Joy Division’s last gig was at Birmingham University on May 2, 1980. During the next two weeks, Ian Curtis didn’t have any serious seizures and seemed quite content. “It was Friday night, we’d been to Manchester, and then Ian said, ‘Drop me off at Amigos’, a Mexican restaurant we used to go to,” recalls Morris. “He was probably meeting some birds! Seriously. It was like, See ya! We’re on our way to America! See ya!”

In Ian’s internal, heavily medicated world, however, things may not have seemed so cheery. On Saturday May 17, Curtis was meant to go water-skiing with Bernard, but didn’t. That evening, he spent the evening at home in Barton Street, Macclesfield. He wanted to watch the Werner Herzog film Stroszek, and didn’t think his parents would appreciate a movie about three low-life Berliners re-locating to the US for a better life. The American Dream turns out to be a bitter lie; Stroszek kills himself.

Deborah returned home from her bar job in the early hours of Sunday. She and Ian argued and Deborah spent the night at her parents’ house. The following morning she returned to find her husband’s lifeless body in their kitchen. He had hanged himself from their floor-to-ceiling clothes rack. Iggy Pop’s The Idiot was still spinning on the turntable.

Steve Morris: “Hooky phoned me on Sunday morning. He said, ‘It’s Ian. He’s only gone and done it.’ I said, Not tried to kill himself again? ‘No, he’s actually done it.’ I thought, It must have been an accident! He’s not clever enough to have killed himself. I felt angry with him. It’s the ultimate cop out.”

Inevitably, the feelings of those closest to him are coloured by their own attitudes towards suicide. Most are baffled by his actions, prompted as they were by his medication and unfathomable, hidden bouts of depression. “I didn’t understand it,” says Sumner. “We had no idea he was going to do it – if we had we wouldn’t have let him out of our sight. But… I’ve seen someone clawing to keep hold of life when they were dying of cancer. To throw something that special away…”

Hook (affectionately): “I thought, You silly bastard.”

Closer was released in July 1980 and reached Number 6. Its clattering, intense, funereal beauty took on extra resonance with Curtis’s death, the words of the single Love Will Tear Us Apart now seeming unbearably poignant. The phrase was chosen for Ian’s memorial stone in Macclesfield Cemetery and Crematorium.

Back in the Station Hotel, Deborah Curtis admits there are still many unanswered questions surrounding Ian’s death. “I know he fantasised about [dying young], but it’s still hard to believe that he actually went through with it. All kinds of things go through your mind: was he just messing about in the kitchen? Was it an accident, did he have a fit?”

I ask her what Ian would have thought of being a MOJO cover star and the subject of a film. “He’d love it!” she laughs. “Really. That’s what he really wanted and dreamt about. I can’t understand that he wanted something so badly that he had to die for it.”

“It doesn’t bother me that Ian’s become a rock martyr,” insists Bernard. “He was so good at what he did, a great performer, great lyricist, great singer. It’s fantastic that he’s remembered. That’s why we now play Joy Division songs.”

“We’ve had a great time,” concludes Hooky. “I just wish Ian had stayed around to enjoy it.”

Special thanks to Matthew Norman at Manchester District Music Archive.