by Peter Hook
This was to be the band’s penultimate gig. There Ian met up with Annik, and that night the pair stayed at a hotel in Rusholme. The following day they visited Rob Gretton, who by coincidence Debbie phoned during their visit. On Monday Annik returned to London and Ian went home to Macclesfield, but at this point both Ian and Debbie’s parents became involved and on Tuesday 22 April there was apparently a showdown involving all concerned – as well as Rob and Lesley Gretton – at the Curtis home in Macclesfield. The same day, Debbie phoned Annik at the Belgian embassy and by her own admission ‘screamed’ at her that she planned to divorce Ian and would be naming Annik as co-respondent. Though advised to hang on by her parents in order to win a larger divorce settlement when Joy Division were a bigger band Debbie chose not to. ‘It was difficult initiating the divorce,’ she writes in Touching from a Distance, ‘but once I had made the decision it felt wonderful. It seemed as though a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.’
For her part, Annik has said that the call forced her to confront the fact that Ian was married – something she had downplayed. ‘I realized I was hurting somebody,’ she said.
Meanwhile Ian went to stay with Rob and Lesley Gretton, then with Bernard, while the band – despite taking a break from playing live – busied themselves with rehearsals and preparations for the upcoming US tour. Now at new rehearsal rooms, Pinky’s in Broughton, they wrote two new songs, the first since the Closer sessions: ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’.
‘We were so excited about going to America’
Ian saw Annik for the final time on Friday 25 April, at a Factory night held at the Scala cinema in London’s King’s Cross – where Joy Division had been due to play but pulled out. The following day Annik was scheduled to leave the UK for an Egyptian holiday; by the time she returned, Ian should have been leaving for America with Joy Division.
They left the venue in the early hours then returned to her flat so she could finish packing. Then in the morning went to catch their respective trains, bidding farewell at the station. She never saw him again.
Meanwhile the band pressed ahead with plans to film a video to accompany the single release of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
We’d worked him nearly to death in March. Then we’d done quite a bit of working him to death in early April.
Ian had responded by trying to kill himself.
We’d paid him back with a debilitating riot and then at last – at long bloody last – we pulled some gigs. Every gig, in fact, that we could pull. We did it because of Ian, because he needed a rest.
But sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t the gigging break that did him in in the end. At least when we were playing we were away, our minds were distracted. With the gigs cancelled and us staying close to home, Ian also ended up staying so much closer to the source of all his domestic problems.
Not that we were aware of all these troubles, the depths of his problems, at the time, mind you. It’s only recently, since the explosion of interest in Joy Division, you might say, and while I’ve been researching the book, that I’ve really started to get a clear picture of the kind of shit Ian was going through and the very short timescale involved.
At the time he kept it mainly to himself. As far as we were concerned he was dead excited about going to America, really looking forward to it. Yet you read about him telling people that he didn’t want to go. According to Genesis P-Orridge, Ian said he’d ‘rather die’ than go on tour – and maybe he did say that, but not to us he didn’t: no way. With us Ian was bang into the idea and maybe if he’d been spent more time with us, and less at home, and less talking to the likes of Genesis, then he’d have been buoyed up by it all. I think he’d have gone to America, where, looking at it, the schedule wouldn’t have been exhausting, and I think he would have loved it.
I’m not saying his problems would have gone away, of course. Just that they wouldn’t have been crowding in on him quite so much. I really think that if he’d made it to America he’d have lived.
Or maybe I’m just talking out my arse again. Barney always said that it was his medication that made him suicidal, and that could have happened anywhere – Macclesfield or New York.
Anyway, what else could we do but stop? Ian was exhausted, his illness getting worse. He had to rest. Even though, in a funny kind of way, he did the exact opposite: he was drifting between staying at his mum and dad’s and with Barney; he had Debbie and everyone on his case; he went to London to say goodbye to Annik, so was probably upset about all that. Then, a couple of days later, we were recording the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ video, and that seemed to take forever.
We’d arranged to film it in T. J. Davidson’s, even though we weren’t really using it any more. Looking for more basic comforts we’d ended up in Pinky’s near Broughton Baths (quite near North Salford Youth Club, actually, the second youth club I ever went to, with Barney; I got chased away from the first, South Salford) but it wasn’t big enough to make the video.
Now, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that we hated the whole idea of a video where you mimed or acted to the track. In fact we were never into it, all through New Order. God, you feel like such an idiot miming. So what we decided to do was hire a PA and a mixing desk, play ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and record while we filmed, so the video would be a live performance of the song.
We set up for the filming with a long runway so the cameras could come in and out on a track, like a mini-railway. Then off we went and did a few run-throughs, trying to get the sound right. But we couldn’t, because there wasn’t a separate room in which to mix the sound. It was confused with the racket that we were getting off the instruments and through the amps. It didn’t really work, and the tape we ended up with, the soundtrack to the video, sounded pretty rushed and bad, to be honest. Nor could we overdub any backing vocals – or anything else, for that matter.
Even so, we were very happy with it as it happened. It was raw, dirty and arty. We liked that: it was us all over, of course. As usual it never really occurred to us that anybody else might have a problem with it. If they did, well, that was their problem. Trouble was, hardly anybody we sent it to would play it. It got shown a little, but not nearly as much as we’d hoped, so it had seemed a bit of a waste of time.
Ah, but then we heard that it had gone down well in Australia, and of course we thought, Good on the Aussies. They’ve got good taste, they have. They know art when they hear it. And thus began an affection for our like-minded brethren down under.
It wasn’t until years and years later that we visited Australia – as New Order, of course – and discovered the truth. Somebody at the Australian record company had simply laid the actual record over the film, and it wasn’t even properly synchronized. It looked well dodgy, actually – well, we thought so. But this became the version that ended up being the ‘official’ (for want of a better word) version. Now of course it’s perfect, capturing us at our youngest and freshest with a great soundtrack.
I suppose you could say it was yet another of those slightly questionable self-defeating decisions, to do the video that way: like insisting on performing ‘Blue Monday’ live on Top of the Pops (which they’re not set up for) and seeing it go ten places down the charts as a result. But we didn’t care, not really. Our ultimate aim was just to be ourselves, to do things the way we wanted them doing, and we’d insist out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Rob was always in our corner. Tony was always in our corner. You might call them mistakes but at least they were mistakes made on our own terms. Mistakes that then became legends.
A few days later we played Birmingham. We didn’t know it then, of course, but it would be our last-ever gig as Joy Division.
It was a good one, too. We later released it on the album Still. Ian had a bit of a wobble during ‘Decades’ but was fine for ‘Digital’. Even so, it was one of those gigs – like all of them were around then – where you were looking at Ian wondering if, or when, it was going to happen, and that
was because it was now happening at every show. With hindsight you can look back and say he probably wasn’t going to be right at any gig, whether in America or outer space. Even so, the idea of cancelling or rescheduling America never came up.
We were so excited about going, so wound up about it and desperate to do it. Ian, the fan of the Doors and Lou Reed and Iggy Pop and Burroughs, especially. I don’t care what Genesis P-Orridge says, he was looking forward to going. I mean, we had so much going for us then. The word was getting out that we were a great group to see live. We had ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ up our sleeve. We were on the way up.
That’s what always gets me about what he did. Sometimes you can see just why he did it, and it makes a kind of sense.
Other times, it just makes no fucking sense at all.
‘I never said goodbye’
Ian killed himself in the early hours of Sunday morning. The last time I saw him was on the Friday night, when I gave him a lift back to his mum and dad’s in Moston, just past where my house on Minton Street was. You drove to the top of the road and his mum and dad lived in Failsworth, literally a quarter of a mile from my house. So, yes, I drove him home that Friday night and he was cock-a-hoop, full of it. We’d had a great practice and I was dropping him off. We were laughing and joking and every now and then one of us would go, ‘I can’t believe we’re fucking going to America!’ We were screaming in the car, jumping up and down on the seats, properly shouting, whooping, hollering: ‘Yeah! America!’
No ‘rather die’ about it.
This was on the Friday night. We were due to leave after the weekend. If the silly bugger hadn’t killed himself we would have been on a plane to America on Monday. If he’d known all along that he planned to kill himself, as some say he did, was he just putting it on, all that excitement? Was he that good an actor?
Barney spoke to him on Saturday. There was a phone at his mum and dad’s, whereas he didn’t have a phone at home, so you were able to phone him there but not in Macclesfield. Barney rang to see if he wanted to come out but Ian said no, because he was going to go to Debbie’s, and of course that’s what he did. He went up to Debbie’s. They had an argument and she went to work.
And he went and hung himself.
Before he was supposed to leave for America, Ian had been staying with his parents and seemed well, according to his mother, Doreen. On Saturday morning he received a letter regarding his divorce and told his mother he wanted to go to Macclesfield to see Natalie, to say goodbye. Doreen and Kevin, Ian’s father, gave him a lift to Piccadilly Station, and the last they saw of him he was waving to them from the station approach. Natalie was staying with Deborah’s mother, but Debbie saw Ian at the house on Barton Street on Saturday afternoon before she went to work behind the bar at a wedding reception, promising to return after work to see him. She did, finding that he’d been drinking spirits and coffee, having watched the Werner Herzog film Stroszek, and they continued discussions about the future of their relationship. Ian told her that he had spoken to Annik earlier; he also asked Debbie to drop the divorce. As he became more and more worked up, Debbie began to worry that he might have a seizure and offered to spend the night. She then drove back to her parents to tell them she intended to stay. However, when she returned to Barton Street, Ian seemed to have calmed down.
He asked her to leave and to give him her assurance that she wouldn’t return to the house before ten the next morning, when he was due to leave for Manchester. After she left, he listened to The Idiot by Iggy Pop on repeat, drank more coffee and spirits, then wrote a long letter to Deborah, in which he said that he wished he was dead but made no mention of any intention to kill himself.
At about eleven thirty the next morning Deborah returned to the house to find Ian dead, kneeling on the kitchen floor with a rope around his neck, the other end tied to the kitchen clothes rack attached to the ceiling. A neighbour cut him down.
I was having Sunday lunch with Iris when I heard. I got up from the table to answer the phone. It was the police, detective sergeant somebody, who said, ‘We’re sorry to have to inform you that Ian Curtis took his own life last night. We’re trying to get in touch with Rob Gretton. If you speak to him, could you ask him to ring us, please?’
I said, ‘Right,’ and went numb. (I stayed numb for days, actually, as though my brain was frozen.)
In that state I went and sat back down at the dinner table, picked up my knife and fork and carried on eating. I didn’t say anything to Iris. Just sat back down and continued eating my food, except not really tasting it now, feeling all of a sudden like I was no longer in my own body. As though I was looking down on myself.
After a while Iris said, ‘Who was that on the phone, by the way?’
‘Oh, that,’ I said. ‘That was the police ringing to tell me about Ian.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s killed himself.’
I don’t remember anything then. I don’t remember anything for a long time after that. I mean, I remember that we spent a lot of time together sitting in a pub: me, Barney, Terry and Twinny, just sitting having a drink, playing darts, spending time together, going to see Rob, talking to him, sitting round, trying to make sense of it all. There was no shouting or crying, just a perpetual stunned silence that being together seemed to make bearable. Steve was in Macclesfield, but the rest of us, we kind of huddled together for warmth. Just stayed together because we were all going through exactly the same thing. Gradually the details of Ian’s death began to seep through: the divorce, hanging himself, the whiskey, Iggy Pop. All the stuff that we discovered in dribs and drabs and absorbed with that same sense of numbness.
He was lying in state at the chapel of rest but I didn’t go to see him. Steve and Rob and Tony and all that lot went, but me and Barney were like, ‘No, we don’t want to see his body. We’re going to the pub.’
I really regret that now and always will. We acted like kids in a way, but it seemed okay. It was sort of allowed because it was like the grown-ups were sorting it all out, Tony and Rob and everyone else.
I hired a car for the funeral.
There were loads of people there for the funeral. But the funny thing is I don’t remember much about it. Just that there were loads there, all the bands, the guys from Factory Benelux, but not Annik, obviously, because of Debbie and the family. I remember sitting at the back at the funeral and Ian’s sister screaming really loudly when the curtain closed behind his coffin. But it all seemed surreal; I felt strangely detached. Afterwards we went to the pub down the road: me, Steve, Gillian, Barney, Rob and Terry. Twinny couldn’t face it, so he didn’t go. We sat and had something to eat, had a couple of pints. That was when Rob said, ‘Don’t worry. Joy Division will be really big in ten years’ time.’ He was right, of course. Ten, fifteen – twenty, too. Not that any of us gave a shit at that precise moment in time. We finished the afternoon off watching the Sex Pistols’ film at Factory’s office, a kind of wake. A truly dismal affair.
Afterwards we made arrangements to go back into the practice room on Monday. I remember writing the intro and verse to ‘Dreams Never End’ on my six-string bass in the back bedroom of Minton Street over the weekend. The beginning of our new life as New Order. It was as though a film of Factory records had paused for a moment while Ian was scrubbed out of the picture. Then the film started again and continued as though nothing else was different. In the end it would be years before we would start talking about Joy Division, and Ian, and start to face up to it, to ask ourselves what went wrong. What we could have done differently. How we might have saved him.
Oh, and I remember going to the inquest later, with Rob, and maybe Steve, which was even more surreal because there was bad feeling towards us – towards the band. Like his mum and dad thought we were responsible. I can vividly recall Debbie’s dad giving evidence about Ian, saying, ‘He was on another plane.’ I was thinking, Fuck, I wish it had been that plane to America. They were talking about him as if he we
re a stranger and the inquest found that he’d taken his own life under the influence of alcohol.
Me, I felt guilty. Guilty that I never went to see him when he was lying in state. Guilty that I never said goodbye. Guilty that, like everybody else, I went along with Ian when he said he was all right; that I was so wrapped in my own bit of me, of the band, that I never took the time to listen to his lyrics or him and think, He really needs help.
So, yes, I felt all of that, and still do. I’m sure I’m not the only one. In a way we’re all of us to blame, but none of us are. Years later I remember Dave Pils telling me that when we’d last stayed with them in Walthamstow Ian had left his mac behind, the famous mac he always wore. Dave had grabbed the mac and gone running after the car when we left, but it was too late, we were gone. That was the last time Dave saw Ian.
‘What did you do with the mac?’ I asked.
‘Took it down the charity shop, Hooky,’
I thought, You silly sod. The charity shop? Who would do something like that?
But then even later I was talking to one of our roadies, Corky (Mike Caulfield). He was reminiscing about our old practice place in Cheetham Hill and how it used to have Ian’s scarf hanging on the back of the door. A proper old man’s woolly scarf, it was, brown and grey and black. We’d brought it from the rehearsal room at Pinky’s when we moved.
Corky said, ‘What happened to it, Hooky, that scarf?’
I thought, Oh fuck – because with a sudden jolt I realized I’d taken it to the charity shop. I’d forgotten it was Ian’s scarf and donated it. What an idiot, I thought. Who would do something like that?
