Joy Division Singer Ian Curtis Remembered On The 40th Anniversary Of His Death

A few months into 1980, the British post-punk group Joy Division were ready to take the next steps in their promising career. Led by their compelling lead singer Ian Curtis, the emerging quartet from Manchester were gaining momentum with an acclaimed debut album in Unknown Pleasures; their live shows were must-see draws; and they had gotten exposure on television and favorable reviews in the music press. Now Joy Division were set to embark on their first-ever U.S. tour and release a new record, Closer, that saw them expanding on their sonic palette. But that all came to a tragic halt when Curtis – who struggled with personal and health issues – committed suicide at the age of 23 on May 18, 1980.

“A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth—he was definitely that,” former Joy Division bassist Peter Hook remembered Curtis in his 2012 memoir, also titled Unknown Pleasures. “But he could also be one of the lads—he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned…At the time I just thought he was a great guy. And he was a great front man.”

Following Curtis’ death, the surviving members of Joy Division – Hook, guitarist Bernard Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris – carried on together as the hugely successful group New Order. Meanwhile, the legacy of Joy Division has been immortalized through album reissues, books, documentaries and a dramatized movie. In the present, New Order has performed Joy Division material at their shows, as well as Hook with his own band the Light (A limited-edition clear vinyl version of Closer to mark the album’s 40th anniversary is scheduled for reissue on July 17).

“It’s a story that’s not going away,” says the veteran British writer Jon Savage, who has extensively covered the band from their beginnings in the late 1970s; his 2019 book, This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else, is an oral biography on Joy Division that will be reissued in paperback this fall. “I thought they were fantastic. They were getting big. They were like the hottest underground group in the U.K. at the start of 1980. And that was part of the appeal, because Ian died right at the crest of a wave for them. So in a way Joy Division are always becoming, just about to be really successful. It’s frozen at that moment.”

Inspired by a performance by the Sex Pistols in Manchester in 1976, Joy Division formed (their previous band moniker was Warsaw) and later signed to the indie label Factory Records, co-founded by TV journalist Tony Wilson. Compared to their contemporaries, the group forged a distinctive kind of sound—one that was punk-influenced but also moody and darker, and informed by the band members’ upbringing and surroundings in post-World War II Manchester. In a short period of time leading up to 1980, Joy Division’s recorded output – highlighted by their classic debut, 1979’s Unknown Pleasures – was quite prolific, while their reputation as a live band grew. Yet Curtis was suffering from epileptic fits beginning in December 1978 that would remain with him for the rest of his life and affect the group’s live performances.

“They worked incredibly hard. They basically recorded three albums’ worth of material in under a year,” says Savage. “That’s the work ethic and that’s also excitement: you’re a young person, you’re in a band that’s happening. But if you look closely, the concerts start to get more and more scrappy, Ian starts to have more fits. The last probably great show they did could’ve probably been the University of London Union in early February [1980]. Certainly after February, things start to get sketchy.”

Around March of that year, Joy Division were working on their second album Closer with producer Martin Hannett at London’s Britannia Row Studios. The sound of the album was a progression from Unknown Pleasures with a pronounced emphasis on electronics that would be further explored by New Order —as indicated on the group’s very danceable “Isolation,” accompanied by other notable songs such as “Heart and Soul,” “Twenty Four Hours” and “Decades.”

“It’s just incredible,” Savage says now of Closer, which was released two months after Curtis’ death. ““Isolation” is basically synthpop. That would’ve been the direction that they would’ve gone. “Isolation” is a great synthpop tune with devastating lyrics. Certainly the second side goes off into these immense dirges, they’re fantastic. It was better recorded, they were getting more involved into synthesizers. It’s an extraordinary record. People didn’t know really that Ian had switched from projecting himself into a situation into actually writing about his own life. Nobody realized that. That’s understandable. But at the time everything was happening so quickly.”

In hindsight, it’s easy to assume what Curtis was about to do based on the lyrics from the Closer album—a doom-laden work that captured the singer’s sense of despair and disillusionment. “People judge Joy Division retrospectively from Ian’s death backward,” Savage says. “In fact, at the time, nobody knew that he was going to do this. Everybody thinks of Joy Division as dark and gloomy, and of course there was a side of that—particularly in the later work when Ian was really depressed certainly in 1980. This is why I called the book This Searing Light, because I wanted to make it clear to people that there was a lot of light in Joy Division. There was a lot of white light and a lot of excitement.”

A number of other Joy Division songs that were recorded between 1979 and 1980 didn’t end up on Closer—especially the bittersweet yet accessible single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” which posthumously became the band’s hit and now-signature song. “From the word ‘go,’ it was seen as a single and probable hit,” says Savage. “It started with them wanting to make a fast danceable song. They needed them because they had all these dirges (laughs). I see that song as a crossover point in Ian’s writing, in that it’s not him projecting himself into the outside world like Unknown Pleasures. It’s a song about a decaying relationship…and it probably is autobiographical. It’s the start of Ian being autobiographical in his writing, which continued to considerable some extent during Closer.”

In addition to his physical health, Curtis’ personal issues were further compounded by his troubled marriage with his wife Deborah and a romantic affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honore. In April, the singer made his first suicide attempt by overdosing on phenobarbitone. Despite Curtis’ condition, the band shortly afterwards performed at the Derby Hall in Bury that led to a riot. “You got a group with a very strong momentum and these things take a life of their own,” Savage explains. “[Band manager] Rob Gretton was a very determined person and they had an ethic that you didn’t call gigs. Of course it was a mistake, but I think it was a mistake that was easily made. In retrospect it was awful. But don’t forget, you’re talking about 40 years ago when people didn’t know about epilepsy. Also, the treatment of mental health was in a primitive state. So you’re not talking about a very sympathetic atmosphere. [Of the show in Bury,] Ian was probably suggestible and said, ‘Okay I’ll come down,’ instead of saying, ‘This is bloody ridiculous.’ You had him coming on [stage] for two numbers, it all goes horribly wrong and there’s a huge fight.”

Still, Joy Division were excited about their impending visit of America starting on May 19 for their first tour in that territory; Savage believes they would have found success in the States had they made it out there. “Everybody was prepped for it. They were good and they were very exciting live. They were just on the cusp of that next wave, which is the video era, the synthpop era. They were coming out of post punk, they were their own thing. They were guitar-based moving towards becoming more synthesizer-based and into disco rhythms and also technology. That’s the other thing about Joy Division: they were technological. They were futuristic.”

The day before the band were set to fly out to the States, Curtis hung himself at his home; his body was later discovered by his wife. “I slid to the floor in shock,” Sumner later recalled of hearing the news at the time in his 2014 book Chapter and Verse. “I didn’t speak, didn’t want to say a word to anyone.” Hook wrote in his memoir: “I felt guilty…Guilty that, like everyone else, I went along with Ian when he said he was all right; that I was so wrapped up 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.”

“Ian’s death was a shattering event for all concerned, particularly the group and the people at Factory,” says Savage.”It was shattering to me in that I can’t remember anything about that period. I honestly have no memory of it. So the book in a way was a disguised autobiography. By the end of the book, I finally understood why Ian had done it. So that was solving a 40-year-old puzzle. I’m sure nobody will ever know why [he did it]. I think it was all too much. The most important factor—which we tend not to talk about because it’s not a glamorous story—was his illness….and all the other pressures on top. I finally understood, and he was only 23.”

It is hard to imagine Ian Curtis as 64 years old now had he lived—he and Joy Division will always stay young in those black-and-white photos; the archival footage from their TV appearances; and, of course, the music that influenced generations of musicians, including U2, Moby and the Killers. “They didn’t stay together and turn sh-t,” Savage says of the group’s legacy. “I’m not saying that New Order turned sh-t, and a lot of the interest is because New Order has been so good for such a long time. Also I think in Joy Division, there’s a time traveling aspect. You listen to Ian’s lyrics and he talks about traveling through time and space. Joy Division was a very interesting group in relation to time, the past and the future. On a deeper level, the obvious stuff is Ian’s death and the romantic image of that, which is factually not correct but understandable. It’s the fact that they are frozen in time at that moment when they were about to crest the wave. They will always be becoming.”

If you are having suicidal thoughts and need help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.