00:01Fifteen years ago this week, Ian Curtis, the lead singer and songwriter of cult Manchester band Joy Division, committed suicide.
00:07Even in an industry reared on the rock myth of live fast, die young, his sudden death on the brink
00:13of international success was considered a tragic waste of a unique talent.
00:17Until recently, little was known about Ian Curtis, whose dark lyrics echoed an equally dark temperament.
00:23Now, a new book, Touching from a Distance, by his widow Deborah Curtis, paints a portrait of an anguished figure
00:29tormented by deep depression.
00:31Its publication has renewed interest in Ian Curtis's life and in Joy Division, whose back catalogue is being reissued next
00:38month.
00:39The Late Show's Mark Cooper talked to Deborah Curtis to discover more about the man behind the myth.
00:46Shortly after Joy Division's lead singer, Ian Curtis, killed himself in May 1980, the single Love Will Tear Us Apart
00:53finally took the band into the top 20.
00:55This wasn't merely a reaction to Curtis's death, but confirmation that the group had been on the verge of stardom.
01:01In career terms, Ian Curtis had everything to live for, so why did he take his own life?
01:14He always said he didn't want to live. He wanted to be dead by the time, you know, before he
01:19was 25.
01:21And he always said that, and I would say, well, you know, surely when you get to that age, you
01:28won't want to die.
01:30And he said, oh, yes, I will.
01:31He did stay with me for a couple of weeks before he died, and I tried talking him out of
01:36his frame of mind.
01:37I tried everything I could.
01:41And he wasn't really having any of it.
01:44And he was such a stubborn guy, you know, he was so single-minded that I just thought,
01:50if he's going to do it, he's going to do it.
01:53And no one in this world is going to be able to stop him.
01:57To some, Ian Curtis's suicide seemed a logical conclusion of the despairing drive of his music.
02:03Joy Division crystallised the mood of existential gloom that became one of British rock's major exports of the 80s.
02:09Turning the energy unleashed by the punk revolution inwards, Joy Division's dark, brooding music raged at the human condition.
02:16Punk was all about bashing away there.
02:19And it really had one statement to make, which was fuck off or boredom or whatever else.
02:24And what Joy Division, what they did was to use that simple form to express more complex emotions.
02:35They're one of the great British groups, one of the unique British rock groups of the last 25 years.
02:41At the time it seemed so new. I mean, there was a melancholy about the music, there was this sort
02:46of architectural sound, this beautiful brooding sound, which could have teetered over into melodrama at any minute, but never seemed
02:55to do it.
02:55I mean, they worked this tightrope all the time. Again, a mark of a great group.
03:07Although Joy Division are always seen as a Manchester band, Ian Curtis came from Macclesfield, a small affluent town 20
03:14miles away.
03:19Curtis grew up in the town's most deprived area, but made it to the prestigious local grammar school.
03:31As a teenager he sought to escape the constraints of small town Macclesfield through the darker edges of rock and
03:37roll.
03:38He liked Iggy Pop, I think, because of the way Iggy Pop used to sort of cut himself on stage.
03:44He liked all that. And Lou Reed was pretty depressing. He liked to listen to people who had maybe suffered
03:55in some way, or pretended to suffer in some way.
04:00In 1976, Ian Curtis travelled to Manchester for a Sex Pistols concert, a defining moment in Manchester's musical history.
04:08The Pistols inspired a generation of young Mancunians to start up punk bands.
04:13Sharing that moment with Curtis were Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook from Salford.
04:18Together they formed a band and began to play the clubs around Manchester.
04:40It was Ian that sat us down, really, and played the Ziggy Pop and Lou Reed and Velvet Underground and
04:46everything.
04:47Me and Barney were complete musical shallons, if you like.
04:51When we realised that we were never going to make a great punk group, we started looking for a new
04:56direction.
04:57And a lot of that direction came from Ian, because, like I say, he was interested in kind of the
05:02more manic side of life and the darker side of life.
05:06I did everything, everything I wanted to.
05:13In the late 70s, Manchester was economically depressed and widely regarded as a cultural backwater.
05:19Interesting things were happening there, however.
05:22On Joy Division's debut album Unknown Pleasures, punk rock collided with northern soul and European dance music,
05:28while Curtis's lyrics and crooning vocals evoked a mood of loss and melancholy that seemed rooted in Manchester's post-industrial
05:35landscape.
05:51Manchester, in the late 1970s, early 80s, was a real grim, sort of industrial wasteland.
05:59You know, there was nothing outside, nothing outside to look at or enjoy, so you weren't inside his house.
06:10His essential subject was the human individual spirit.
06:14He was delving deep within himself.
06:17And occasionally some of the songs sounded quite frighteningly real.
06:23At other times they sounded quite harsh and cruel, and it always felt to me that that cruelty and that
06:28harshness was directed inwards to himself.
06:31I got hold of the original file that he'd had in his bedroom at Victoria Park Flats.
06:38I was shocked to see that the writing was almost as depressing as what he'd written later on.
06:46And that was from when he was 16, talking about how bad the world was.
06:55I mean, that's the sort of thing 16-year-old boys do anyway, I think, but he didn't grow out
07:02of it.
07:03It just got worse.
07:06Although the music press worshipped Curtis's enigmatic persona, and Joy Division were about to have their major breakthrough,
07:13Ian Curtis appeared to be maintaining the most conventional of households, with his wife Debbie and new baby daughter.
07:20We got married when I was 18 and Ian was 19, and it was very normal existence to start with.
07:29I made sure the mortgage was paid and that there was food in the house.
07:34And then, once that was all set up, he could go off and get on with what he probably thought
07:43was being the breadwinner.
07:59While Ian Curtis's domestic life may have seemed normal, his music and stage performances were becoming ever more intense and
08:06unhinged.
08:07He became ill, suffering bouts of depression and eventually developing epilepsy.
08:15I saw a Joy Division show, a short, dramatic show, in a little sweaty club.
08:22At one point in the show, he suddenly went somewhere else.
08:26He started to do this dance, which looked like he was actually having a fit of some sort.
08:32And the music got more and more profound and he went right out on a limb and actually collapsed back
08:38into the drum kit.
08:39And was helped off stage.
08:42And it was suddenly the whole sort of line between the performance and the guy's life was just broken.
08:48I mean, it was just the wrong game for him to be in, really.
08:52Because, I mean, being with a band and the doctor said to him, right, okay, you've got epilepsy, which is
08:56quite a common thing, unfortunately, these days.
08:59You need to take it easy.
09:00Don't get yourself worked up.
09:02Don't drink.
09:02Don't get too tired.
09:04Make sure you have a nice, even diet and make sure, you know, you take everything easy.
09:07And then, what do we do?
09:09We go and tour England for four weeks in the back of a transit van.
09:14Despite Curtis's personal problems, Joy Division finished recording their second album, Closer, in early 1980.
09:20Still regarded as one of the great rock albums of the 80s, it makes for harrowing listening.
09:25The lyrics couple a medieval sense of mortality with an agonised awareness of the trials and the horrors of the
09:3020th century.
09:39I remember one night when we were making Closer, very late, it was about four o'clock in the morning.
09:45He was saying to me that, I was asking him how his lyric writing was going.
09:49He said, it's amazing, he said, it's just coming one after another.
09:55I'm writing really quick.
09:57And I know exactly where the end of the song is and normally I don't do that, I just write
10:01and write.
10:02He said, but I'm writing, it's coming really quick.
10:05He said, erm, he said that I feel, I feel as if I'm, I'm swirling down into a dark void.
10:14I remember he was saying.
10:18And, er, as I'm doing it, I'm throwing out pieces of paper we're writing on.
10:26So, I guess he felt, I got the impression that he felt that some force was taking him somewhere.
10:35By the 17th of May, 1980, Curtis's professional and personal life had spun out of control.
10:40His marriage was collapsing over his infidelity with a Belgian woman.
10:45He had great anxieties over the band's upcoming debut tour of America and his epilepsy was worsening.
10:51The dividing line between his illness and his art had collapsed.
10:54On the morning of the 18th, Ian Curtis hung himself on the kitchen clothes rail at his home in Macclesfield.
11:01He was pacing the room. He was very agitated.
11:05And I, I knew enough about his epilepsy to know that he wasn't going to have an epileptic fit.
11:10So, I felt that he was well enough for me to leave.
11:15He must have stayed up all night listening to records, I think, because one of the records was still going
11:22round on the table.
11:26And I guess he must have decided to write to me about three o'clock in the morning because he,
11:33he said that the birds were singing when he finished the letter.
11:42And, well, he, he must have killed himself in the early hours.
11:50People kind of think that there's a trail that you can follow through the music and come up with a
11:54conclusion why, erm, it ended in such tragedy.
11:58Maybe there is, I don't know, maybe there is.
12:00And that's what the, erm, the residual interest is, you know.
12:06That's why people are still interested.
12:09Because it was, erm, a career with a conclusion, really.
12:16It wasn't the inability to deal with the pressures of fame.
12:20It wasn't an inability to deal with all the drugs you were taking.
12:22It wasn't that.
12:24Those, it was, it was a death based on a, on a, a real and common trauma.
12:30Er, someone suffering dreadfully about a decision in their life about people and the rest of it.
12:35And therefore it was a very personal and very human suicide.
12:57Joy Division's Ian Curtis.
12:59Al to these.
13:00It's anemiaife.
