Listen to the silence

an extract from a permanently unfinished manuscript entitled “Out there is moving but I’m still in here”.

Paul Morley

London 23/10/97 

And so, here. And so, to make some promises that cannot be kept. And so, to speak. And so, wonder.

I am wondering what to write about Joy Division, or, to be exact, what exactly to write about Joy Division this time. How exact can I be? How exact should I be? I’ve been writing about Joy Division all my adult life; all my writing life; all my life. In many ways (and this is one way) everything I’ve ever written has been about Joy Division. (Let me explain, eventually... if I can... if I should...).

Everything they make me feel - or suggest I feel - is a central metaphor for everything I feel, about me, the world, music, emotion, love, death, time, God, and so on. And so, now I come to think about it, this is how exact I am going to be...

And so, in the ways (count the ways) that pop music opens you up and explains things (and t/fore closes you down and unexplains things, which is so part of the still moving thrill that pop zips and unzips in its own time and space) then shall we say for the sake of this promise that when I was fourteen Marc Bolan with a wave of his magic wand showed me the light and then at another age Joy Division - only my age, the fuckers, what did they know of this world let alone any other(s) - showed me with a dizzying dip of the mind the dark.

And so here are the extremes of pop: the masking of the world of appearances, and the unmasking. 

...The glittering surfaces, and the shattering depths. Marc Bolan stuck stars onto his skin, and that was pretty exciting. Joy Division pierced their skin - put a hole in their being - with their cracked and cracking obsessiveness, and that was pretty exciting as well. Twenty years on, Marc Bolan reminds me of my past. He is, alas, behind me. Joy Division still point me towards my future. In many ways (entertain the ways) they’re still to come.

And so, what. I could say (count the coulds) speaking as a damned virtual rock critic that Joy Division as a rock group are an interesting case, if not the most interesting case. This is speaking historically (whoever does the speaking, metaphorically speaking) and so does go some way (watch the way) towards creating some kind of shape to rock things, some order, but please feel free to remove the traces as soon as they seem to appear. In no time at all, just a sliver of no-time at the no-end of the 70s which in many ways (discount the ways) is as far away as the '50s, the sick boy band eventually named Joy Division after an auntie or something - boy oh boy - made up quite a myth with the help of themselves and a vain desire for purity.

The myth of the group quickly ghost-rolled hip-deep around their music: you thought that you could never see through this spilling myth, and yet somehow (count the somehows) you could see all the way through. To. (the other side). They had only been going a matter of months before the evidence was plain to see and hear; here was a strange out of nowhere out of place out of it rock group who were opaque and transparent, visible and invisible, straightforward and dissident. They changed all the time. They shed all manner of inner and outer skins monthly; some disconcerting musical menstruation saw them change inside a couple of seasons from chubby punk babes to mean rock’n'roll cockroaches implicated in some absurdly grand mission to take over the world, or bits of it.

And so they did it all - all of what they did - with two Ip’s a handful of singles and some shows (shows that showed how fast they were going however steep the corners were. Occasionally they slowed down, but that was only for some blood shedding). Ah, and talking of blood, there was a suicide (count it; you can’t miss it; it’s just round the corner) that manufactured for the group the ultimate end, a sudden stop to what had begun so unsuddenly and so slovenly, and this sheer shiny pointed end at the opposite end to their ragged quite pointless beginning created this great shape (count the shapes), this missile, and we now see and hear how this missile was launched into the light and then within a matter of time it exploded into the dark and so the story of Joy Division had the perfect 20th Century (leg)ending. And so the myth so soon so scandalously was neck high and climbing. And tightening.

And so, speaking to order, The Interesting Case Of Joy Division as a rock group (or as we shall see in this order of things, THE rock group). For a start, they had these values, this stubborn need not to sully their worth. They took very seriously, which suggested that deep down they might be comedians as much as tragedians.

The two Lp’s they made didn’t contain any of their singles, so there was no overfamiliarity to back-pollute the complete and separate works that the albums were. The singles were from different worlds. Joy Division defied commercial conventions with such shrugging care and inattention because they know, really, that in the long run - and perhaps they were in it for the long run, the steep climb - it would pay off. The deliberate distinction they wanted to maintain between their albums (the two energised masterpieces, ‘Closer’ with its soft and hard ‘s’, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ with its spaced out s and s, different but connected, one icy and jumpy, the other thawed and graceful, one out of the womb, the other into the tomb) and their irresistibly overemotional singles was their way of achieving the aloof splendour enjoyed by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Groups far too grand and superior to fret about the grubby worlds of hard sell and instant gratification: their glamour came from their ant commercial perversity, a wonderful mixture of laziness, arrogance and self-confidence. Some anti-social need to preserve integrity, to play on reclusiveness, to back into the limelight. (They were independent: but never ‘indie.’) This was for Joy Division - long term style not short term fashion. From the very beginning, they thought big.

And so their music had to be big too, and rebellious, and they had a lot to go on: in many ways (keep counting) they had as much to go on as any group twenty years later. With Joy Division, you hear a group with a great record collection, who have great discrimination, and whose intention was to absorb and dominate these influences, to equal and surpass. Their music has this betranced European detachment - arted, parted, departed, stop and started separateness, music that oozed out of the great European cities - that they picked up from the likes of Can and Kraftwerk. When they started to get so good, they started to rub noises together, to blend temperatures, to mix rude rock directness with shy nervy avantgarde indirectness. They drifted even as they shifted. They glanced as they flashed. They floated as they attacked.

There was this sarcastic alternative American thing about them that they nicked in their bedrooms from The Doors, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground - the way they used guitars as an abuse, melodies as a sign of bitter-sweet intelligence, beat to beat up beat, the way hate was as great a subject as love, the secrecy of thought as sexy a subject as sex. These surly, sacrificial Americans revealed to them the edgy. Then there was even this deadpan sensation seeking camp outsider thing snatched out of the studded back pocket of the smart aplombish Eno, Roxy Music and Bowie. The sleek bleak and S&M bruised Roxy of ‘For your pleasure', the colder, fishier, tenser Bowie of ‘The man who sold the world’ and ‘low’, the allusive Las Vagueness playfulness of Eno the singer/songwriter. In the wet dead north west such delectable subversive stuff was the surreal thing: there was a way out over the grey walls and the sharp and hostile things of everyday.

And so all these distant decadent musicians banked up in the lives of the four impressionable young men shared this thing about “not belonging" and not wanting to belong and they had this flamboyant and tenacious urge to tell the truth about the world about them through magnificent and liberating lies.

And so as if the world could be a better place and... why not. And so at just the right time in this order of things came punk rock (turning private emergencies into public urgency) named after somebodies uncle or something (still counting), and that fitted in just right with all that other stuff. The Sex Pistols, vomited out of the mouths of The Stooges, harassed the group that would be Joy Division into action, and they adapted to and pretty soon transcended this frenzied coincidence of The Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and The Doors, (and you never know, Peter Hamill, Nick Drake and Black Sabbath. And you never know, more JG Ballard, Mary Shelley and Albert Camus. And you never know more than Franz Kafka and Dostoevski). And so there was more to help this transcendence, this disorderly magic. There was the Manchester damp and the shadows and omens called into dread being by the hills and moors that lurked at the edges of their vision. It wasn’t soft, where they lived. It was stained green and unpleasant. It seemed to be at the edge of the edge of the world. You had to dream your way out of such a tranquillised, inert stretch of land/mind scape. You had to use your imagination to believe that there was anything else but nothing else. In these slow suburbs, your mind would ache for release. And so would your body.

There was sexual frustration battering the air from all directions. There was godless depthless nightclub music desperately seducing these serious young men with remorseless promises per minute: the adventure of art and the chaos of the mind versus the mindless temptations of the rhythms of the moment, and eventually as New Order the remains of Joy Division would somehow solve this absurd dichotomy without compromise, introducing northern lights to northern darks. And so anyway, circus minded glam pop, with all its bump and grind, something of the comedy meat of this stuff (count the stuffing) made into the JD pot, into this wilderness of the familiar and the freshly compelling, this atmosphere of futuristic cataclysm. So they happened.

And so rage lurked beneath the taut surfaces of their worlds.

And so they thought.

And so they had the daring of the timid.

And so they knew what they were doing.

And so they did.

And so things happened to them.

And so there was tension and a release of tension.

And so all hell let loose.

And they didn’t know what they were doing.

And so it came from somewhere and nowhere and they didn't like to think about it too much just in case it stopped coming.

And so they just let it happen.

And so they blanketed the sky with orange sheets that turned to a diaphanous white chiffon before sweeping upward into instant oblivion.

And so time and time again reality burnt through to the surface of this wicked and deep adventure.

(And so what about their record company, Factory, not so much a record company, more a state of mind, or a state, with mind, who pushed them and pulled them. And so who encouraged them. And helped them. And hindered them. And indulged them. In some ways, they drove Joy Division, and in some ways, Joy Division were very driven. Sometimes, Joy Division drove Factory. They drove each other up the wall. Together they erratically defied the banal rock gravity of following certain rules of presentation and promotion. Since when has a record company - not so much a record company, more an existential minder - been a combination of villain, pantomime dame, benefactor, wicked step-mother, clown, lover and butler? Factory and Joy Division are the perverse proof of that old chocolate pudding of a saying that there is no business like show business. And of that old banana split of a saying that there are more quests than panthers).

(And so, also, they had a manager, Rob Gretton, who loved them, like a child, like a brother, like a friend, like a fan, and who watched over them with such belief and commitment. He followed them to the ends of the earth and then, funnily enough, beyond).

And so all of this bled fed wed and headed dead or alive into the drastic mind and body of Joy Division (who were outgrowing their mind and body and packing more time into the time they had than they had time for) and all of this, all these coincidences and transmissions and transitions and (r)apt moments and exotic settings and mild distortions, it all added up, and put them into this unique position where they were both the last ever great rock group (after The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, MC5, The Doors, Television, The Sex Pistols) and the first ever great rock band (before The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead) ... they were some twisted turning point some tunnel of light and dark and love and hate that you must journey through from one era to the next if you are to make any new sense ... Joy Division summoned up in a rocket shell in their time and place all the great rock - surface and substance, pose and power - that there ever was and ever will be.

And so somehow (and what are the odds of this happening) they drew into themselves all the greatness of rock's past and rock’s future and received all this interference and information from fact and fantasy, absence and presence, that transformed their music into an epic of timelessness. Say what you want, time never seems to corrupt the music of Joy Division: the actions, sensations, images, movement all seems to fit into the next moment, the noises and agitation, the courage and diligence, always seems to be happening for the first time. Their music so feverishly conjures up insecurity, malign gods, moral chaos, human lostness, caged energy, loss, shifting meaning and danger that it could never slip back into some cosy version of itself. It could never be stripped of its harrowing power because its crystallisation of moody form and seething content is so classic and universal.

And so where was I?

Joy Division are, in this order of things, the centre of the (rock) universe. They even ended up being as dug up and compiled and re-compiled and re-mastered as Hendrix - and so here we are finding ever more ways to extend the brief moment (ousness), to spin it out, to hold on, searching for clues in the out-takes and the bootlegs for how this might have happened, knowing all along that it's mystery, and within that it’s accidental, and within that it’s futile, and within that it’s over.

And so there was a death in the family. And rock and roll, the very real greedy myth of it, the sly shifting life of it, loves early death and gaudy sacrifice. The rock and roll myth, the sensation of it, loves death as the lions loved Christians. Death in rock and roll chronically cosmically represents rocks vain mad mock mocking danger. As if there is such a thing after all. It makes it all worthwhile, all the effort and frenzy, all the lust and collapse. All the fucking fantasy. True, tried outsiders - pretenders and contenders can find a place to live, and die, inside rock and roll. At the extremes of desire, death proves rock and roll, certifies its acts of rebellion. And death proved Joy Division, it set them up. Death rams home into amplified eternity the essential black glamour rock and roll aspires to, instantly, brutally creates the kind of immortality that all entertainers even the frail, unformed and boyishly, conscientiously alienated Ian Curtis - desperately crave.

And so Ian Curtis, dead name, dead stop, dead mysterious, dead success, dead all the same, dead at the moment, a close relation of the unknown, as withdrawn as it gets. And so how romantic can you get. And so how accidental is life and death. And so, fatalism. And so Joy Division, dead cool, as made up as history, as mad as rock and roll history, had seriousness thrust upon them overnight - that’s overnight, that’s serious, that’s boys becoming men, that’s their music coming true, the fictions becoming facts, overnight, seriously. And so Joy Division, who’d perhaps played at being out of this world, were hurled out of this world. And so overnight. And so they played at taking themselves seriously. And then, in the middle of one martyring night, it worked for them. Seriousness. Who could deny it? This was some meaning. And so Joy Division, as lovely as a dream in stone, just as their record sleeves always cried and whispered, had it all going for them as rock and roll myths. A great short fast fractured life rendered psychedelic by a messy midnight death. And so their seriousness was left hanging in space. And so that is something. Else.

And so what might have been was viciously disturbed.

And so all along they were glorying in their fate.

Oh, and so, the death of producer Martin Hannett - more mischievous myth, more (disjointed) history, more incidental insubordination, more violence, more degenerate heroism and indecipherable cowardice, all in all adding to the serious components of Joy Division as big deal rock and roll illusion inside their very own infinitely variable endlessly interpreted mystery melodrama. They were bigger than they seemed, bigger than they seem, on the quiet as big as they come. Their myth is noisy and quiet, dazzling and hidden, static and dynamic ... and so is their music.

And so, seriously, Joy Division, after their overnight stop, neither exist or do not exist.

And so, as specimens, as living things, as boys, as innovators, as brats, as fuckers, as thinkers, as feelers, as dreamers, as ghosts, as petulant bleeders, as occultists, as neurotics, as heroes, as narcissists, as dead things, as commodity, as history, as future, as ageless punks, as sceptics, as forever young, as practical jokers, as auto-didactics, as deceivers, as a touch inflated, as vapours, as liars, as chaos, as pleasure, as strangers, as egos, as northerners, as Englanders, as Europeans, as futurists, as the inspired, as the inspirers, as metaphysicians, as sentimentalists, as next door neighbours, as sell outs, as swines, as artists, as borrowers, as lenders, as drinkers, as addicts, as cults, as confessors, as back catalogue, as weirdos, as adulterers, as fathers, as sons, as images, as details, as nutters, as musicians, as Joy Division, as survivors, as far as it goes we can say that they’re like group zero. Out of the group, all that they are and sound like and did and had done to them, you could find traces of all the great ‘non/not belonging’ rock music that there has been and will be. Their myth is the myth of rock, they’re a compression of all the obscure and commercial, wild and inexplicable dynamics that makes - made - rock such a force in our face and in our lives.

They are the end, the beginning and the middle all at once. And so they never belonged. They never got bogged down. They never repeated themselves. They were always in the process of discovering themselves, in the process of thinking, in the process of processing their influences.

They had it easy in the sense that for them it was all over after three years - and the rest was history - and they never reached the point where they might get assimilated or jaded, but then again (and again) they had it hard in the other sense that there was something about them that knew they had an awful lot to do in such a short time. You can hear in their music that they knew some kind of crash was coming: the end of the century or just the end of their dawning noise.

And so that was an order.

And so far so good. 

And so selfish.

(And so when one is doing rock criticism one gets to the point where one would just like to emit an inarticulate sound).

And so I could place Joy Division in that order.

And so I could not.

And so I could write - with intention - about Joy Division’s central role in it all, the it all of rock et al, and yet how they are also so off-centre: but then to be so central to the story they have to be off centre as well, because the central beauty of pure rock is that it is off-centre.

If they were just central they would not be central: that would be too banal for words. They must be off centre to be central, to be properly obvious and mysterious, to be (in the skipped beat of a missing moment) enigmatic.

And so they are.

And so good.

And so moving on from the centre where we have placed them off-centre in the history of (rock) things, the myth still rises, and obscures, and provokes.

And so I was just thinking.

And so their music could form a soundtrack for Godard or Bergman or Fassbinder or Wenders or (...) Herzog. It could worm through the words of Sterling or Gibson, and it could buzz around the up-sense and down-data of Ballard or Burroughs. And it could be called cyberpunk or cyber-phunk, perhaps their one true location is lost in cyberspace, they’re scattered, vastly out there, intimately in here, and they’re as hyperreal as the next hyperreal thing and imagine how hyperreal that is, and girl oh girl are they ever so hypersensitive. There was something (the way they got the human spirit dancing on the end of pins and needles, the way they didn’t smile much in public, the way they could evoke derangement with such cool clarity, the way they wore their second hand clothes, the way there was something cruel lurking behind the beauty) about them that was ancient and, so, gothic (1548 and all that). They were postmodern (postmodern as something atmospheric, something bored and fanatical, a volatile mix of this, that and the approximate other, fraught with an eerie, brittle significance) from the moment - if not the moment before, but let’s not get too date specific at a time like this - they facelessly if not namelessly produced ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and said that they were waiting for some guy to come and take them by the hand and there were these gulping black noises and squirming off white sub-noises going on way out beyond their realish rock that sounded like they were giving birth or operating on themselves and yes Joy Division’s music could form a soundtrack for Lynch but not Tarantino oh no that’s the point. Joy Division never had any intention of wanting to cut The Universe down to size.

They love - and hate but with respect - the size of The Universe. The size of the Universe is everything. And so the size is in the details. And one of the great things (count the things) about Joy Division is their appreciation of size and their attention to detail.

And so I suppose. And so believe me it was as if, whether they intended this or not, they were trying to warn us about dangers to avoid.

And so according to Joy Division whether they knew it or not nothing is neutral nothing is impotent in the universe an atom may ruin all an atom may ransom all.

And so you wake up frightened with the feeling of having overslept. And so they made us think of another separate world that maniacs and exiles invent when the normal everyday world seems impossible. And so the mood shifts again.

And so then there were the writings of Ian Curtis, who was underground by the time he was 23, and he wrote these overloaded and penetrating autobiographical fragments, these notes and notices from the above ground underground, these tensing of the senses, that seem to come from the life of someone who lived so much more than twenty years and a bit. Something was concentrating his mind dramatically. It was like he suspected it - the all embracing it, the it of all its - was coming to end one way or another sooner rather than later. Even without having all that I’ve mentioned - their off centred centrality, their essence-ness, their zero, matrix, symbolic status - Ian Curtis’s impressions and depressions would have lifted Joy Division into greatness. He sang from the knife edge with a kind of suave sordid middle of the road disconnectedness. He sang suffering with an almost tender listlessness. He put this awkward but handsome spin on despair. He crooned anguish. He delivered sullen commotion. He expressed his restlessness and soul-sickness with a damaged insouciance. Even when he was charged, and brutal, he seemed resigned. He sang his sharply apprehensive songs in the spirit of:

I’ll get this off my chest and then get my chest off me.

This music that rocked - that could go the distance, from here to there and beyond - hung inside a sense of sadness and waste and emptiness. And so, more and more, a mental and physical exhaustion, as if Curtis was transferring himself into the very body of the music, slipping over the line from where the music was for him to where he was for the music. The music was taking him away. Taking him over. Needing the drama of his life. And so more drama. And so more. And so the sin always rises.

And so Ian lived his (rock and roll) life intensely to such depths. And so the love and alarm of ‘Love will tear us apart’. And so you can tell exactly - around an unknown centre - when his life started to end. (And, somewhere else, when it started to begin. You can even hear when he started to believe in death. It’s right there in the way his voice forms and reforms).

And so there was Ian Curtis leading the band who were all playing their instruments as if they were leading. Three lead instruments - the glass and capering Sumner guitars, the cold and anxious Morris drums, the iron and lurid Hook bass - plus spare and marooned noises off and noises in that acted as if they had an (ectoplasmic) ego all of their own and were leading ... plus Ian with his tragic voice and his antic dancing and his leading the group and us into ...

...his space.

A space that hung around the music like a tarnished halo, a space that seemed to fill the music out from within, a space that kept itself buttoned up even as it spilled the beans and lost its marbles.

The space in Joy Division’s music has always been intriguing. Somehow (one more time) the group could leave such emptiness in the middle - and at the edges of their music - without weakening it. In fact, it added to the strength, the resonance. Perhaps it came out of the space they were all leaving around themselves - even as they came together to make this music they kept themselves to themselves, they stayed trapped inside their own splendid isolation, stuck inside their own young minds. They all played and sung inside their own worlds. Privacy X 4 - and beyond.

And so their music is, sure enough, about isolation, and the difficulties of keeping in touch with other human beings as we create for safety’s sake a reality around us that works for us as much as it can. It’s about the mind - as far as my mind is concerned - and the tricks that it plays on itself, it’s about the way (one way) the mind can find all sorts of ways (link the ways) to prize apart illusion and reality and then cobble them back together and then start all over again and so on.

And so to the songs, again and again because they just do not wear out whatever you take from them, wherever you take them. Somewhere in there, amidst other more secretive and even more catastrophic narratives, you can just make out Ian’s battle for self-preservation, a battle that he was winning and then he was losing. These songs were lifted beyond themselves by being somehow - as far as it can go, if this isn’t too far fetched - set inside the enclosed, abstract and echoing space of a mind which enveloped the songs from all sides like a prison. This is some illusion. And so some reality. Ian’s mind somehow - how this is so is on the tip of my tongue - held the songs in volatile place. And so I suppose, this time, that I’m saying with the music, we can see inside his mind. And we see him just beginning to think ideas he only has so much time to formulate, ideas and thoughts that are about, with such boyish bravado, everything and then nothing.

And so he re-enters the shadows of his living night, the overnight that strangled his everything and then nothing. And so ideas, forgotten, abandoned, miscarried.

And so Ian Curtis. He gave Joy Division their life and their death. He gave Joy Division his life and his death.

He gave them their specialness. He actually risked his neck. And so what was the fucking point of that. (The point: not the point). He was under-crisis and he passed this sense of crisis - real and imagined - right into the bloody unstable mood of the music. He was fighting mad, and you can feel that in the turbulence of the music. He was frightened, and the music is frightening. He was in love. And so he was lonely. That he and his friends - who were just as lonely in their own ways - could turn these thoughts and confusions so magically into sounds - gentle, pure, heartbreaking and lacerating sounds - is but a hint of the alchemical extravagance of this strangely intelligent, ridiculously burdened, youthfully defiant, glooming and blooming, magnificently doomed, old style, avant-garde, anonymous and famous rock and roll group.

And so?

What.

Exactly.

And so if I may be so bold at such an exact time as to say the following; Joy Division locate us in the gently smoldering nowhere solid hell* of communal remembering, of mutual awareness, never exact, never erased.

And so, mind you, there t. 

* The word hell stems from the Germanic root meaning ‘concealed’ and originally, like Hades or Sheol, had less to with punishment than simple bleak survival in a vague netherworld.

Another end, another day, another doldrum, another beginning, another way of seeing things where there is nothing and everything to see. And so, on. 

The event on stage is more than a spectacle.

The intense spotlight beam isolates the silhouette, fixes it in space and annuls time. Blinded and dumbstruck for a moment, the illuminated singer no longer discerns the limits of the room around him. An echo in the heart of the chance silence strengthens the overwhelming impression of a subterranean quest. Echoes of grottoes and cold cathedrals, echoes of the infinite cosmos.

Categories of anguish tend to merge together: the oppression of depths and the closed evoke dread of the void, the corridors of the kingdom of the dead resound in the far depths of ourselves like the idea of the infinite.

This spectacle is a ritual, one infinitely despairing of solitude.

A shudder... Those few seconds, free from vibrations, are an eternity. In them, they condense the depth of interior reflections, funeral exploration of dark labyrinths, from which only the unique and irredeemable end is certain. Would the music be only punctuation and accentuation, the frame more or less hewn from an absolute silence, secretly sought after?

The blinding spotlight is a setting sun. The horizontal light of dusk, which strikes the eyes without the head having to look up. It is the hour of unmeasured shadows announcing the return of darkness. Intermediary time zone and moment of mixed emotions. Exaltation and depression can be born from these fires and shadows - the mental ambiguity in echo with that of the privileged moment.

Every being anguished by its own existence experiences an irresistable attraction for those end of the day contemplations. Can it itself foresee what its feeling will be?

Weary of life and desiring the Night... or on the contrary, sparking off internally at the sight of the last flarings?

Two extreme examples, amongst others, to show the nodal character of that moment when all subjective experiences are summed up, when all of each day’s conflicts are replayed.

CLEMENS BRENTANO, the German romanticist, wrote this intuitive sentence: “...Impressively, the night veils the immense porch of dusk, and every human heart knows who has won, who has lost”.

The opposition of clarity to darkness as a reflection of the battle between reason and the delirious, but equally a point where the two empires cloud over reciprocally, as in a kind of reconciliation. Mad and secret hope of the distressed being ... Hope that the symbolic ritual, cosmic and everyday, will induce by its exemplarity, the synthesis of that which, in its own mind, is separated. Perhaps if the Star at that precise moment suspended its fall. But coexistence never establishes itself, it is usually melancholy and despondency which accompanies the setting. Destiny of those who desire the half-light, who refuse to choose between analysis and delirium. Hesitant people from intermediary zones, from the uncertainty, from shadows andalmost horizontal lights, from half-open doors and broken windows.

Others opt for the darkness. They will call up the abstract, will desire the rise of secret forces, of dream, of phantasms and of the unconscious ... but with some restrictions, in truth even a certain intellectual dishonesty.

HEINREICH VON KLEIST, that other great Romanticist, states that “in the organic world, in so far as the conscious reflection becomes darker or weaker, grace advances more radiant and triumphant..."; it is no less true of it that he hesitates to annihilate all conscience in himself. He seeks only in fact the awakened dream, a kind of somnambulism where the observer, though in retreat, would remain vigilant. The unconscious is here a super-conscience, a reservoir of occult knowledge in which the awakened part desires to drink deep. As MARCEL BRION notes in his work the Romantic Germany, the question is one of “sleep and active dreams”. One enters the night in order to explore it and the twilight is its threshold. Interior darkness, darkness of the terrestrial depths, the romantic symbolism passes with ease and intuition from one world to the other. The nocturnal sky blends with the subter-ranean world of hells. The texts of that time testify to that... Thus that magnificent letter from Caroline Von GUNDERODE to Bettina BRENTANO (Clemens Brentano’s sister): “You don’t yet understand that these paths lead right to the bottom of the spirit’s mine; but the day will come when they appear to you as such, for man walks often through deserted ways; the more he has the desire to advance, the more solitude becomes terrifying, and the more the desert spreads onwards. But when you realise how far you have descended into the well of thought and when you find there below a new dawn, when you re-emerge joyous, when you speak from your subterranean world, then you will be consoled; for the world will never be with you”.

Most paradoxically, it is the light that she seeks in the blackness of the inner worlds, a new dawn (that twilight of the morning) with an essential different quality - the revelation of herself.

0 lamps of luminous fires

In your splendours the hollow grottoes

Of blind and dark feeling

Through advantageous favours

Give both light and warmth

To the cherished object of their heart

St JEAN DE LACROIX

The dark night of the soul’

Through those who are in misery of seeing themselves without faith, one sees that God does not illuminate them; but for others one sees that there is a God who blinds them PASCAL ‘thoughts’

The light is like a materialisation of the “ungraspable”, the intersection of transcendence and the visual. It is the very symbol of the Spiritual through antinomy to the Material. The light is truth, its domain of clarity is also that of transparence and the aerial. It is opposed to concealment and creeping. It is honesty and deprivation. The light should therefore induce only knowledge, its symbolism should be that of analysis, of description, and of the look ... but there again the worlds mix, the illusions superim-pose one on the other, the end achieved is in contradiction with the appearance conveyed by the invocation. Light and dazzle of sunset. Rays of light similar to shafts, crossing the bodies and destroying them, beams of radiations disintegrating the flesh. The mystic aspires to be only “pure spirit”, to free himself from the corporeal.

“The Ecstasy of St. Teresa" by Bernini (1598-1680): the light is sharp, made from golden metal. The saint, in an ecstatic state close to fainting, has half-closed eyes (the detail is important) ... it is like a voluptuous agony, the prolonging and the translation of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The marble, ghastly pale, sets the body in a specific moment, between flesh and crystal, just before the tangible disappears and the soul flies away. The illumi-nation, in the literal and mystical sense of the term. Extreme pallour of the death desired as the passage to immortality. Coldness of the renouncement of the palpable, anticipation of the infinite, timeless, absolute and fixed. But what is it internally, what is the reality behind the glazed image?

The sunset burns with its last flames. Light/warmth, star energy, echo in the internal fire of emotions, the ecstasy is a fire devouring the being, and seeming to consume it literally. Interior and exterior lose all signification, the body sublimating its substance, becoming gradually transparent, is consumed in harmony with the illumination. The Mystic touched by the light feels he himself becomes immaterial radiation; but that subjective transmutation operates from the interior, at the source of illusions. It finds its origin in the depths of the being, it springs from the secret imperiousness of desires, of which it is only the symbolic resurgence.

It appears then, that the aim of the mystic in his search for the light is not so much as to be dazzled. That dazzling blindness is the triumphal way, although diverted, of a descent to hell. (The eyes which close indicate the withdrawal to the interior of oneself, introspection, self— spelaeology). The difference between the blinding of the black nights and the white blindness of the illumination is minute ... The Mystic abandons the exterior look in order to see better within himself, to be no more than Vision.

His call to the elevation of the soul is a return to the primitive essence; is desire to be freed from pleasures of the flesh only opens the way to an intellectual orgasm embracing the whole body and not the sex alone.

That desire to escape the body and valorize the spirit does not lead to an analytical knowledge but to another more intense and more animal. Mysticism is the universe of illusion par excellence, of the opposition between the said and the experienced. It is not that animal that in us, at the moment, is destroyed, but on the contrary the “I", the spectator and the critic. Chastity and asceticism are not the negation of desire but rather one of the means of transcending pleasure and rendering it avowable. The light is a way to invoke the darkness of the “self. Esoterism was right to state that what is above is like what is below ...to adore God would be only to sanctify the strength that one feels in oneself, a fervent homage to the unconscious, to the interior double that one forebodes as so much more consistent.

Religiousness, beliefs, are only the dregs justifying a dionysiac behaviour. A new exaltation, in some way purified, can be born and developed. Departing from less illusory bases, the atheistic Mysticism will produce new emotions, widening thus the spectre of ecstasy.

Georges BATAILLE, exploring the territories of transgression, as Sade before him, and some others, indicated one of the ways, but it would be boring to limit it to that. Certainly, pornography and intellectual violence permit interesting excesses, but the modern world conceals equally a quantity of experiences of which we don’t yet perceive the whole oneiric and symbolic interest. At the heart of daily punishment and sufferings, in the very wheels of encroaching mediocrity, are found both the keys and the doors to inner worlds. Modern symbolism finds the 

source of its images and its myths in the sufferings of the present ... it reconciles itself with Naturalism by sublimating it. Thus the Factory is not solely alienated. Machines and cadences find in us certain secret correspondences ... The 8 hour shift beyond the destruction it operates daily, brings the organism into a point, anti-natural, where the disordered state is expressed among other things through a kind of waking delirium. The maddest images are then born with ease, the unbridled established without the conscious being able to do anything but register them. How not to effect a parallel with Sufism which utilises giddiness and conjugate fatigue ... and the methods of western mystics centred on abstinence and prayer.

If to ponder at every moment, in a quasi-superstitious way, the hidden significance of daily events is a wide-spread fact (evil?), to consider the modern world in its symbolic expansion is less so.

Society of the Spectacle, modern mythology, generalised Publicity, are capital concepts but nevertheless insufficient to define the nature of our relationships with the universe and society ... we perceive the world, unconsciously, as an omnipresence of signs ... signs without significations, whose sole interest is to evoke, to make us look back into the concealed part of ourselves. The look and subjectivity ... we must reconsider our relationship with the event in the most innocent appearance ... thus is it the spectacle, minute fragment of Spectacular society. 

What happens in the concert is outside the ordinary. Anguish and concentration, between the fire of dazzling spotlight and the moving darkness of the crowd, vaguely disturbing, below the stage.

JOY DIVISION passes beyond simple entertainment to retranscribe musically the worlds of half-light and the intensity of ecstasy. Sometimes disillusioned or nostalgic accents intrude, for the experience is multiform and its complexity cannot be translated in a sole concept. A music at the intersection of luminous and dark worlds, between silence and the cry, a bridge between the past and present mystical symbolism. Key of the rock concerts (doesn’t the word “rock” in itself refer to the subterranean world?) modern rituals of which till now we saw only the entertaining or sociological aspects. 

August 27,1979 Joy Division are headlining a ridiculous festival in a field outside Leigh, halfway between Liverpool and Manchester. The leading independent labels of both cities - Zoo and Factory - are meeting to showcase their talent: A Certain Ratio, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Echo & 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 once intricate yet simple. At climatic moments, Stephen Morris attacks a syndrum for those ‘pou pou' noises 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 basslines 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 though 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 spasms 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 realise: he’s trying to get our 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.

(“Ah, the mud of Leigh’’, remembers Tony Wilson. “That was the night of the turd, wasn't it? A very big moment. Bernard told me years later that he and Ian had gone to the bogs and Ian had come out terribly excited, because there was a piece of shit as long as half an arm, and they all went down to have a look at it. It made their day”).

Near the end of the set comes a new song, Dead souls, which begins as a rollercoaster of soaring guitar and lurching basslines. 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 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 vocalise. I felt that there was an 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”.

Just over 1.4 years ago, in the early hours of May 18, 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 and New Order finally went to Number 1 with the World Cup theme,

World in motion. Grey and black had turned into dayglo, 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, Courtney 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 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 had 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?

Joy Division began, as did so much else, on the fourth of June, 1976. Invited by the fledgling Buzzocks, 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 stylised 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 thought 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 me 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 ΉΑΤΕ’ 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 onstage, no half measures. Ian’s influence seemed to be madness and insanity. He said that a mem¬ber 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. Park 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 the fifteenth of 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 '60s blocks of Victoria Park, near the station. Although only just beyond the furthest Manchester suburbs, 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 ’70s, 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 dramatisation 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 be like 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 '60s.

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 ’60s 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 towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantastic: now of course I realise 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 live, where I had my happiest memories, all that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realised 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 maybe 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 outsiders: it was very vicious and back biting".

Warsaw dithered with drummers until another Macclesfield native, Stephen Morris, joined in summer 1977: “Ian was a year or two above me in the King’s School”, he ways; “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, An Ideal For Living’, which showed them moving away from thrash to a more measured, heavier sound. “We were just having fun”, says Sumner; “Leaning 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 know as Joy Division - a name taken from the book that inspired the EP’s final cut, No Love Lost: Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s House Of Dolls, a pulp nightmare diary of Nazi terror. The sleeve featured drawings taken from the Second World War: 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 the Second War”, says Bernard Summer; “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 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 came from its opposition to the power politics of the day - the end of consensus socialism. In both English and American avantgarde 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 out complexities.

Ian Curtis was a bundle of paradoxes; he was a Tory, yet he liked the writing of bohemian authors like JG 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”. Summer says he wasn’t.

During 1978, Joy Division left their naivete 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 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, Wythenshawe native Rob Gretton, and their most persistent propagandiser, Tony Wilson.

“Every band in Manchester played that night", Wilson remembers. “I sit down and then this kid in a raincoat comes and sits next to me and 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 on stage 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 had stopped to listen. I was thinking, what’s the matter with that lot?

That’s when I realised 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 era of the badge as underground communication.

Tony Wilson put them on Granada Reports, a local news show (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 into 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 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 full volume. When Hooky played low, he couldn’t hear himself. Steve had his own style which is different to other drummers. To me, a drummer in the band is 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 once and then never again. You didn’t 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 file box with him, full of lyrics. He’d sit at home a 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 frantic!"

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, Islington. The next month they recorded their first, four-song session for John Peel. In March they did five 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 realised 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 comprehension that it didn’t matter. Rob just decided that toing and fro-ing with Tony was a) more interesting, and b) more frustrating, but c) ultimately more rewarding.

He decided it was better to work with someone you could walk down and get hold of. Factory, for all its failings, if you had a beef, you could walk in and yell”.

The group were busy recording with Martin Hannett at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. When they’d finishe ‘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 the agreement lasted so well.

This was 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, NF 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 bassline, 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 she’d had a fit and died”.

I’d just moved to Manchester the spring, and ‘Unknown Pleasures’ helped me orient around the city. I reviewed it for Melody Maker in typically over-heated 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 in 1993: “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 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 poor stupid musicians who wrote it! We swallowed our pride and went with it".

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, TJ 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 persodality, 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 in, 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.

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 it off. He’d 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 started lashing out, punching the windscreen, and then he just went into a full overblown red state 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 December 29, 1978, marked the full onset of Ian Curtis’s epilepsy. Throughout this 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 tranquillisers: the doctor told him the only way he could minimise 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 as 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 April 16, 1979. Just over a month later, Ian had the most serious in a series of grand mal attacks, which involved hospitalisation. His solution to the pressures at home was, according to his wife, withdrawal, but there was no escape from the momentum of Joy Division’s success: “With being 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 nonmetropolitan, independent label sector was viable. There was Peter Saville’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 it was beautiful”. In October, they began a 24-date UK tour supporting the Buzzcocks, which enabled them to give up their day jobs.

In a break from the tour, Joy Division played their first con-cert 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 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 he 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.

At only 23, Curtis was facing one of the most difficult life situations of all: falling in love with another women 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 six 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 nat-ural. 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 ‘The Heart of Darkness’, ‘Atrocity exhibition’ from JG Ballard’s novel - or his own experience. “‘The eternal’ was about a little mongol kid who grow up near Ian”, says Sumner; “He could never come out of the house: his whole universe was the 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 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 down¬hill. 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 6, UK in summer 1980 - by which time it had been overtaken by events.

“It ended up with Ian having fits onstage”, says Bernard Sumner. “In early April we did two gigs in one night: sup¬porting 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 realised he was having a fit and we had to carry him offstage. By the time we got him to 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 rail—roading 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 was making himself ill. It’s our own weakness, we make ourselves ill. But to have the brains to realise 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 April 7, 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 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 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, we’d just write.

“But around this time, he’d agree to anything he told him. His reaction to a problem had been rage: he was like a human blowtorch and he’d burn you out of his way. Now his other solution was that 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 what we’d have said, he’d have done it. I remain convinced to this day 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 proceed¬ings. Ian stayed with Bernard and Tony Wilson, finally end¬ing 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 were busy shooting a video for the forthcoming single, ‘Love will tear us apart’, and preparing for their first visit to the US on the nineteenth of 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 brought 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 wor¬ried. If we’d agreed that we were going to keep the band together, but we weren’t going to do gigs anymore, how come a month later we were going on an American tour?

It wasn’t right. People start getting all the wrong priorities once you 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 indica¬tion 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 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.

“Fie called himself The Amazing Noswad. He was a psyche: 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. But 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 discus-sion about the divorce. Deborah returned to her parents: Ian insisted she should. “I'd had enough”, she says know;

“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 was just trying to pick his moment".

Ian had been watching Werner Herzog’s Stroscek, 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 the 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 round his neck, and jumped. Deborah found him the next midday, by which time any attempt at resuscitation was too late.

“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 friend’s house and the phone rang. It was Rob. He said I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. Ian’s com-mitted 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 the breakdown of his relationship, accentuated by the amount of barbiturates he was taking to subdue his epilepsy. Barbiturates makes 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, momentoes 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 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, the 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 as 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. It isn’t someone I will ever forget: in my studio at home, I sit writing between two massive pictures of Ian. He’s always there, always will be”.

“Our fist 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 Georgio 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 should not have done, because our reasons were honourable”. 

+++

The title and concept was by Rob Gretton, Peter Hook, Steve Morris, Peter Saville and Bernard Sumner. The CD by CD breakdown was by Nick Stewart and Jon Savage. The track selection was by Jon Savage, with assistance from Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Jon Wozencroft. Tape assembly, editing and remastering was by Andy Robinson, with assistance from Jon Wozencroft and Liam Mullen. The project was coordinated by Rebecca Boulton.

Joy Division have a small but hitherto awkwardly compiled catalogue. The basic idea was to tidy up all the outtakes and single releases randomly collected on Still and Substance and place them with their respective signature albums on the first two CD’s: “Unknown Pleasures Plus" and “Closer Plus”. The third CD would then collect further outtakes, demos, and radio sessions with the early, thrashier Warsaw era material.

It was decided to edit down the unissued/rare material for reasons of space and quality: for instance, only three of the eleven songs recorded for the unreleased RCA album have been included. There is nothing from the group’s first 6/77 demo session. The two Peel Sessions have been edited down to three tracks: the full sessions have been generally available on CD. Walked in line, although previously released, was held over from CD1 for reasons of space. Other tracks - notably Digital from the Genetic demos, and Atrocity exhibition from the 6/79 Piccadilly Radio - have been left off to avoid excessive reduplication. The rehearsals of Ceremony and In a lonely place came from a tape provided by Peter Hook: they are the best available versions.

CD four would then comprise completely unissued live mate-rial: it was decided not to include the 10/77 At a later date (from the 1978 Short Circuit LP), the 4/80 Sister ray, and the 5/80 Birmingham concert issued in full on Still. (Still is available on a separate CD.) Having listened to about thirty soundboard tapes recorded at Joy Division concerts during 1979 and 1980 (almost none exist prior to that date), com¬paratively little is of releasable quality, and the resulting track selection represents the best material available.

The eleven Factory tracks come from a sell-out, home-turf concert shortly after Unknown Pleasures was released to rave reviews. The Hulme Factory had a capacity of about 450 people: these recordings represent Joy Division at their first peak, in a small, intimate space. The YMCA recording of Autosuggestion reflects the group’s dreamier side, as does the Bournemouth I remember nothing which, along with Colony and These days, is taken from one of the final concerts on the 10-11/79 Buzzcocks tour.

Together with the three Bournemouth tracks, the final five songs from a triumphant Lyceum show - just before the end of two months touring in the UK and Europe - show how well Joy Division adapted to bigger halls. Just as the Factory concert took Unknown Pleasures as its base, so do these Lyceum tracks offer alternative readings of songs soon to be recorded for Closer. It might be worth remembering that the time frame of this live CD is only seven and a half months. 

The booklet was edited by Jon Savage and Jon Wozencroft.

It was designed by Peter Saville, Jon Wozencroft and Howard Wakefield at the apartment, and Richard Smith at Area. Abstract photography and video stills by Jon Wozencroft. Digital imaging by Martin Orpen at Idea. Rebecca Boulton supplied all other photographs from the Fractured Music archives courtesy Philippe Carly, Jill Furmanovsky and others unknown. The Paul Morley article is a new, specially commis¬sioned piece. The Jean Pierre Turmel text was published, in this translation by Paul Buck, in the Licht Und Blindheit Sordide Sentimental package (1979). Good evening, we’re Joy Division was first published in Mojo, Issue 8, July 1994. 

The compiler would like to thank: Rebecca Boulton, without whom this would not have happened; Deborah Curtis for supplying the lyrics; Rob Gretton for going into the vault, not just once but several times; Peter Hook, Steven Morris and Bernard Sumner for answering the call of history yet again; Mike Gill; Stuart James; David Lascelles; Andy Robinson; Martin Rushent; Nick Stewart; Jon Wozencroft for helping with the track selection, for the live material editing, etc.

It’s taken a long time but it’s worth it!

Every attempt has been made to contact copyright owners and a standard fee will be paid on request.

Ian Curtis: 15/7/56 - 18/5/80.