What they got was Bernard, Peter and myself doing Joy Division songs with Alan Hempsall from Crispy Ambulance doing the singing. A clearly not 100 per cent Ian came on for three songs. I think Section 25 did some too.
Now this was not what the audience wanted. They were upset and one or two cried deceit. This fire spread and turned to anger, to brawl and, with grim inevitability, to what we call a riot. There was damage to property and there was injury done to people – blood was spilt. No matter how Tony tried to dress it up in the aftermath as something that will go down well in Rock Folklore, like Lou Reed at the Free Trade Hall – remember that? – there was no getting away from two things. One, the entire thing had been a debacle/disaster, a fine example of the ill-conceived notion. Two, it went to show that the paying customer was paying to see Ian first and foremost – the rest of us now the support band and, though we didn’t quite see it that way, I suspect Ian did. He’d let the fans down. More responsibility. Another thing to disturb the balance.
Debbie and Natalie – The Band
Annik – The Band
Epilepsy – The Band
Put it all together and he was trying to balance:
Life – The Band
And now it was him that the crowd wanted, not so much ‘the band’. It had been going that way for a bit, to be honest. It always does. The band was no longer four people equally sharing the weight of expectation. Maybe he felt the responsibility for that side of the equation was now resting on his shoulders.
Six weeks later he hanged himself. No ‘cry for help’ there then. No accident. Part of me still thinks there was a bit of ‘this’ll show the bastards’ crazy petulance in there as well.
Within a week of his death the fables started. Singer found dead in Manchester street, singer dies in heroin overdose. A variety of grisly ends was sensationally reported in the column inches of the local and national press. He was a singer – they got that right (not a genius or poet yet) – and he was dead – also correct. As for the rest, you can’t libel the dead, so go to town.
I remember ranting down the pub about this media fest. ‘I bet some fucker’s going to come and make a film about this – I’m not having anything to do with that shit when it happens . . .’ Well, I got that bit wrong, didn’t I? Sell-out that I am.
* * *
Later, we were near West Park in Macclesfield again, this time at the cemetery on the opposite side of the valley from the museum and its oddities. Rob and Tony had been to the undertakers to say their goodbyes the day before. I couldn’t face it. I was still clinging on to the hope that this would all turn out to be a dream or a mistaken mix-up that would still somehow sort itself out and we would all have a laugh about it.
Ian was cremated less than a mile away from the panda. He was born, raised, educated and died in the town, so why wouldn’t he be? He knew the stuffed bear well, everyone did. A memorial stone was laid in the cemetery. It said, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Which was true.
But why did he do it? That’s the riddle of suicide. Why choose death over life? Why throw it away? The dead feel no guilt – they don’t feel at all, so maybe that’s the attraction. An end to all ills, isn’t that what they say? They leave the guilt for the living. The ones who have to live with the fact. Live with all the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘if only I’d . . .’ that would never leave, not truly. Always there in the dark, waiting to torture again, to lay the finger of blame.
I’ve had my share of black-dog days, weeks, months even, mostly when I was younger, in my teens or early twenties, buying in to that ‘Hope I die before I get old . . .’ and ‘Five Years’ and ‘All the Young Dudes’ and ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’-ness, some sort of doomed glamour that’s nice to wallow in for a bit – a comfy bed. But sooner or later you run out of others to lay the blame on and, in the end, it’s just you on your very lonesome own and a choice that is starkly monochrome: this or that, black or blacker. Look enquiringly at sharp edges and little brown bottles and wonder.
Sometimes the black pit gets so deep there doesn’t seem any way to claw out. To end the numbness. Feel something else.
Then get angry again – get angry with the world. The world can take it.
Suicide is generally a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It is overkill.
Over the years, as Joy Division grew from a reality to a myth and Ian became a legend, the cemetery near West Park became a Père Lachaise of the north-west, a place of pilgrimage. Fans would come and leave notes and cigs and lighters and other precious things as offerings like he was a latter-day saint. (He was a long way from that in reality but death works its magic.) He became a big draw, a reason to visit Macclesfield at last.
Then one day in the early twenty-first century, Ian’s stone was stolen. Some people will stop at nothing. It no longer surprises me. The only surprise is that the police didn’t think of pulling the panda in for questioning, for surely there was motive there. He was ‘one of the largest ever killed’. He used to be the biggest thing in Macclesfield.
* * *
We went to the Factory office on Palatine Road, had a bit of a wake, watched The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle on VHS and said to each other, ‘See you Monday?’
‘Twelve o’clockish?’
‘Yes, why not?’
What else were we going to do? The only thing we knew for sure was what we weren’t going to do, and that was give up.
So I asked myself, what do we do now? Coming up with any sort of plan was a bit difficult, obviously. So it was easier to find a way through by saying what you were not.
Not Joy Division.
Not giving up being a band.
Not replacing Ian.
Not talking about the past.
I think of Joy Division as some sort of deep space rocket that escaped our gravitational pull with Ian’s suicide.
I would think that such a catastrophic mechanical failure would be the end of the mission. That would be that and we could all go on to wherever the rest of our lives might lead. Death gets you like that: everything must stop. For that to happen, the past must stop too, but the recordings we made still remained, pressed on to inky black vinyl.
That’s quite pretentious, but more pretentious would be ‘You can kill the man, but you can’t kill his work.’ Which would make a tagline for something slouching out of Hollywood on a particularly off day.
So the space rocket Joy Division was off on its own, voyaging through the dark and lonely night, and we left it mostly to its own devices.
True, to tidy up – well, I thought we were tidying up – the end of Joy Division, we put a recording of our final gig at Birmingham and all the out-takes that we could find on a third LP, Still. We went in to Britannia Row for a couple of days to fix up a couple of things, musically. That, I thought, should be it. Close that door for there is no more to be had. No more extra tracks hidden away somewhere. No best-ofs, no special editions of Closer with extra tracks. For me at that time, Still was a full stop. There was no more, and there never would be.
Finito.
Surely?
I spent the next few months going through the usual range of emotions – depression, anger, denial, resentment. Anger mostly. At one point, in a fit of petulance I started smashing up the furniture in my cupboard bedroom. Now I really was treating the place like a hotel – very rock and roll.
I got the old life-goes-on speech from my dad. You know, the one that begins, ‘I’m very sorry about your friend, but . . .’ I suspect he thought I’d be after my old job back in the none-too-distant future.
I told him to fuck off and went out on a drunken bender. The things we do.
I felt devastated. Yes, I felt sorry for what Ian must have been through, and I felt deeply sorry for what his family were still going through, but I felt sorry for me too. If I wasn’t careful, I would end up wallowing and that wouldn’t help anyone. Bands rarely survive the loss of their lead singer – that was something that I was reminded of on several
occasions by Rob and Tony. But I’d spent all my time getting into a band. The thought never crossed my mind that it might one day come to an end.
Certainly not like this.
I listened to Suicide’s second album and their single ‘Dream Baby Dream’, and went back to reading a lot of psycho-mystic books about conspiracies, anything to do with the occult, communicating with the dead, Colin Wilson’s outsider stuff, Tarot cards, I Ching – the usual guff. This sounds like I was going through the seeking-enlightenment stage of rock stardom, which is a terrifying thought. Perhaps I was. If so, I never found it. But at the same time I began to get very interested in computers and how they might help the drummer. This would soon become an obsession with technology.
Everyone likes a doomed rock star and when it came out in June ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, a fittingly doom-sounding title, was what I believe they call a posthumous hit.
The video was scheduled to be on Top of the Pops and everything. But owing to a BBC technicians’ strike, that particular edition of TOTP never got screened. Yet more evidence of our apparent curse and more fuel to the doom rep.
In fact, the video – our one and only attempt at a pop promo – was in itself a fiasco. We had filmed it back in April and had insisted that it should be a live recording of us playing the song in T. J.’s, our old rehearsal room. Owing to a disagreement with our regular PA company, the gear didn’t turn up, so we had to rummage round Manchester to get a PA rig at short notice.
Then, of course, Ian took his exit from the world and shortly thereafter we realised that the vocals on the video were pretty badly recorded. In fact, the whole thing was. So Martin was co-opted into repairing this – a pretty difficult job even with today’s digital equipment. Martin did his best, but it was not a great success. The overall effect was a bit like watching a badly dubbed spaghetti Western. I began to suspect that in a previous life I, or at least one of us, must have done some truly evil deeds. To compensate we developed an enhanced version of northern gallows humour. (We would take the piss out of ourselves and our situation by incorporating death into some of our future titles – ‘Death Rattle’, ‘Little Dead’. The assumption that ‘ICB’ stood for ‘Ian Curtis Burial’, though, wasn’t one I considered at the time; it stands for ‘Int@@@@@ Co******* Ba9990112’, obviously.)
Closer came out on 18 July 1980, two months after Ian’s death, and was ‘hotly anticipated’ by the music press. It received great reviews. Well, I was told they were great reviews. I could not make head nor tail of the ones I read. They seemed to be talking about a completely different band. They read like a eulogy for the most part and spoke with great reverence about something that to me was tragic, yes, but now just a fact of life. Something I had to live with.
The photograph we had picked for the sleeve seemed either like an eerie prophecy or some bad taste, cash-in joke. It’d been a good idea at the time but, after Ian died, became yet another of those awful coincidences. Who in their right mind would put a tomb on the front of an album by a band whose singer had just died?
Talk about unlucky curses.
I was getting used to them and numbly thought, Oh fuck it, who cares? There was nothing we could do except laugh bleakly. I did my best to avoid looking at the front cover, as if it would go away.
The way the press talked about Ian turned him into someone I didn’t recognise. As time went on, I began to feel less and less sure that I had actually known him at all.
In the forty years that have passed since then, a mythology of Joy Division has only grown. A mythology fuelled by books, films and bands that have taken the music as a starting point for their own lives. I listen, watch and read them and with each passing year feel as though it all happened to someone else. The story becomes more and more dream-like. Less and less real. As though something has been altered over time, taken over and, a bit like a Burroughs cut-up, rearranged for dramatic effect. Leaving me curiously confused.
Ian has become a serious individual, his life a tragedy. There is some truth in this, of course. There always is some truth in every myth that ever was, that’s why we like them, believe them, buy into them as talismans. But he wasn’t only serious. His life wasn’t just a tragedy.
Joy Division changed my life . . . the songs we wrote together, the records we made in that all too brief span of time. That something we created has resonated with so many people over the years goes so far beyond anything I could ever have hoped to achieve.
Joy Division would turn into such a perfect story. It’s perfect because Joy Division and Ian in particular would never age, would never go on to make all the mistakes that bands make eventually (we’d made all those earlier on anyway). We’d never make that so-so third or fourth album. Ian would never become a ‘celebrity’. His words are there forever. He’ll never let you down.
26
STARTING OVER
I bet you know what’s coming next.
Yes, it’s the bit where we become . . . ‘The band that raised itself from the ashes of Joy Division’ . . . as the overused cliché goes.
The only ashes I can honestly remember were the ones spilling out from the overflowing ashtray of my increasingly clapped-out, nicotine-stained, rotten-egg stinking and possibly haunted car.
I had this eerie feeling that Ian’s spirit was still lingering in the back seat. An earthbound wraith refusing to accept the heavenly tobacconist’s wares. I kept expecting a disembodied arm to reach round and offer me a phantom Marlboro, mostly when driving home alone, exhausted in the wee small hours.
A couple of red warning lights kept flickering on and off, which I took for further signs of possible communication from the other side, rather than the Cortina desperately trying to tell me that it needed urgent mechanical attention. I unwisely ignored its pleas. My mind was on other things, the future being the main one.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, or is that war or curiosity? Never sure about that one. Let’s just say upheaval is the mother of invention then and move on.
A band losing its lead singer or frontman is certainly a fairly big upheaval, but nowhere near as tragic as losing a father or husband.
The three of us wanted to continue making music. There was never any suggestion of giving up and returning to the day job. We all enjoyed making and playing music together too much to consider stopping now. On the other hand, solely playing instrumentals wasn’t a secret ambition of ours.
Carrying on without Ian obviously meant something had to change. To continue as Joy Division Mk2 just felt wrong somehow. But to continue as what exactly? That was the question.
I and the rest of the world used to marvel at the way David Bowie ‘reinvented’ himself on each album and wondered how he managed to do it. How does anyone reinvent themselves?
‘From today I will no longer play the drums, but will only play the sousaphone instead.’
Is that how it works?
Or
‘You will henceforth refer to me only by my new name: Gregor Samsa the human cockroach.’
That all sounded a bit pretentious and contrived, if that’s how you are supposed go about it. I am pretty sure it’s not though.
You constantly change by small degrees, a little at a time. Different things interest you. And as time goes by, changes happen naturally. To stay the same is boring and boredom equals death.
There’s that word again.
But here we were in a situation that required some sort of drastic change, sooner rather than later preferably.
Change is never enjoyable for me – for I love certainty and predictability – but sometimes it can’t be helped. It’s got to happen. If you’re a little bit out of your depth and a tiny bit uncertain, sometimes – behind the fear and trepidation of getting it wrong – subconscious instinct kicks in. What’s the worst that can happen? You fail. So what? And though it might not seem enjoyable at the time, something interesting usually happens, something that in the normal course of events would not have
happened.
Technology, for me, was the catalyst for change. It helped me see the future beyond Joy Division. I began reading more magazines about home computers and homemade synths and sequencers. The articles might as well have had a byline of ‘Written by nerds for nerds’, but I read an article about Dave Simmons (the guy responsible for designing my SDS4) and found out that he was working on producing an entirely electronic drum kit. Now that sounded like something really interesting. That sounded like the future. Finally I would be able to fulfil my Kraftwerk drumming dreams.
But all this was shilly-shallying around. It was avoiding the huge elephant in the band. We had decided to keep the last two songs we had written with Ian as a kind of starter for ten, but there was a sense of awkwardness that plagued the early days of the band that wasn’t Joy Division any longer but kind of was, a bit.
You know what’s coming now, as well, don’t you?
‘What are we going to do about the singing?’
No, not that. Not yet. In the meantime, and more importantly, ‘What the fuck are we going to call ourselves?’
We were back to writing band names on bits of paper and voting. I stuck ‘The Witchdoctors of Zimbabwe’ and ‘The Sunshine Valley Dance Band’ down for a bit of a laugh. Tony liked ‘Stevie and the JDs’, but it was Rob who’d clearly been thinking about this the most. He had a long list in his notebook: ‘Black September’, ‘Mau Mau’, ‘The Immortals’, ‘Man Ray’ . . .
We had a meeting in a pub (of course) and decided that we wanted something neutral-sounding for our new name. Something with no possible Nazi or political connections whatsoever.
Rob had been reading about murderous dictator Pol Pot. ‘How about “Khmer Rouge” then?’ he suggested. ‘That’s pretty neutral.’
‘Fucking hell, Rob. No, it bloody isn’t.’
We argued about that for a while, until, realising it was going nowhere, he said, ‘All right, how about “The New Order of the Kampuchean Front” then?’
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