Unknown Pleasures at 40: The Life, the legend and the legacy of Ian Curtis, Joy Division's lead singer

A wet Thursday in May, and I shelter from the rain in the lee of Macclesfield’s crematorium, evidently looking a bit lost because I am approached by a gravedigger called Karl, who looks me up and down and hazards, “Ian Curtis?”

“We get all sorts here looking for his grave,” says Karl cheerfully as he guides me along the path that wends through the headstones a short way into the cemetery. He points at a small memorial stone set into a kerb on the path. IAN CURTIS, it says simply. 18-5-80. LOVE WILL TEAR US APART.

There is a bunch of drooping red roses, a pot containing little more than twigs, and sprays of pale blue blooms. A painted pebble announces that the Chaos Crew loves Ian. There’s a pair of aviator sunglasses with a plastic cigarette balanced on them. A framed piece of paper bears the lyrics to Joy Division’s 1980 hit, and possibly their best-known song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. Half of the felt-tip lines have run into a psychedelic rainbow in the rain. It looks strange; just like the Anton Corbijn-directed biopic Control, it seems that Ian Curtis’s story should be told in black and white.

Ian Kevin Curtis was born in Old Trafford’s Memorial Hospital in Manchester, though his parents Kevin and Doreen lived in Hurdsfield, a couple of miles away from Macclesfield cemetery. He was born on 15 July 1956. St Swithin’s Day. They say if it rains on St Swithin’s Day it will rain for another 40 days. Standing in front of Ian Curtis’s headstone, I could almost believe it’s been raining here for 40 years.

Curtis’s father was a detective officer in the British Transport Police (then the Transport Commission Police). Curtis lived with his parents and his younger sister Carole, and attended the local Trinity Square Primary School, and then Hurdsfield Junior School.

According to Curtis’s widow Deborah, he inherited his father’s love of writing – Kevin had written several plays, never published or performed – and his “silent moods”. He was, says Deborah, “a performer from a very early age” and “never did anything by halves”. As a child he donned a crash helmet and jumped off a garage, having become obsessed with the idea of being a stuntman. His hero was speedway rider Ivan Mauger, and in his teens, with his childhood friend Tony Nuttall, Curtis saved £10 to buy a BSA Bantam bike to ride in the fields near their homes.

Deborah Curtis published her book on Ian, Touching From A Distance, in 1995. She details his early life, their first meeting (she was a Macclesfield girl as well) and their wedding on 23 August 1975, when she was just 18 and Curtis was 19. The book covers the formation of Joy Division, Curtis’s affair with the Belgian journalist Annik Honore, and his death at the age of 23, on 18 May 1980, on the eve of what should have been Joy Division’s first tour of America.

Joy Division were formed in the white heat of the punk scene in 1976, when Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook went to see the Sex Pistols play at the city’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. Bernard’s mother bought him a guitar, Peter Hook borrowed £35 from his mum to buy a bass. The second time the Pistols played the Free Trade Hall, Curtis was there with Deborah, who recalls it in her book as the first time Curtis met Sumner and Hook.

In his 2012 memoir Unknown Pleasures, Hook recalls: “Maybe we did share a few words that night but he certainly didn’t really register with me then. The first time I remember Ian making an impact was at the Electric Circus, for the third Pistols gig. He had ‘Hate’ written on his jacket in fluorescent orange paint. I liked him straight away.”

Curtis responded to an ad Sumner and Hook posted in the Manchester Virgin Megastore for a singer, and with a drummer, they suddenly had a band. They were initially called Warsaw, after the song “Warszawa” from David Bowie’s album Low, and played several gigs in what was becoming the post-punk scene of Manchester. After going through two drummers the band recruited Stephen Morris, who had attended the same school in Macclesfield as Curtis, and renamed themselves Joy Division in early 1978.

They released an EP called An Ideal for Living, which brought them to the attention of broadcaster, music mogul and Manchester man about town Tony Wilson, who signed them for his record label, Factory. Unknown Pleasures was released on 15 June 1979. And, as they say, history was made.

In May 1977, Curtis and Debbie had moved into their first home together. Number 77 Barton Street, Macclesfield is at the end of the terrace, half of it veering away from the pavement at a curious angle. It’s where they lived for three years, where their daughter Natalie was born, and where Ian Curtis took his life.

Macclesfield is in East Cheshire, a market town with a population of a shade over 50,000. It’s bordered by the sprawling Forest of Macclesfield, established by the Earls of Chester in the 13th century. Macclesfield was built on silk, and during the 1800s there were more than 70 mills, giving rise to the packed terraces for the workers, such as Barton Street.

Number 77 faces the back of a property owned by Dorothy Bentley Smith. She is a local historian, and has written widely on Macclesfield’s silk legacy. For many years, she and her husband ran their home as a bed-and-breakfast business. They moved there from Burnley the same year that Curtis and Deborah moved into Barton Street; Dorothy had always had her eye on number 77 as a potential short-term let that would be an adjunct to the bed and breakfast, and she would often talk with Debbie about making an offer should they ever decide to move.

Standing at Dorothy’s back gate, she points to the window opposite and tells me, “That used to be a blue room, and there was a red telephone on the windowsill. I always remember it. It had a red bulb, to match the telephone. When I used to come out this way I would often see Ian on the telephone, and he’d always wave at me.”

Ian used to take his dog for a walk every day, and Dorothy leads me through the rain on his route, turning off Barton Street and crossing Park Lane, over to a large park. We emerge to the side and re-cross Park Road to what used to be the labour exchange, now flats, where Ian worked. On the wall is a slate-grey plaque bearing the design from the sleeve of Unknown Pleasures.

So here, on Barton Street, was the hub of Joy Division. “I never really saw much of the band,” says Dorothy. “Debbie and Ian just seemed like a normal couple. One day she said to me, ‘Stop up late, Ian’s going to be on the telly’. So we stayed up and the band was on for about two minutes.” Dorothy thinks about Ian for a moment, and says, “He was a nice lad, very young in thought, I would say. Perhaps a little immature. He was a young lad that had never really grown up.”

On Sunday, 18 May 1980, Dorothy was bringing her daughter back from Sunday school along Barton Street when she saw an ambulance parked outside number 77. Ian had been diagnosed with epilepsy after his first real attack in late December 1978, but Dorothy thought it might have been for Debbie, who had been under the weather. When she learned what had happened, says Dorothy, she “went cold”.

On that weekend in May, Curtis and Debbie were all but living apart, due to his affair with Annik. She was staying at her mother’s with their daughter Natalie. Joy Division were due to fly out on Monday to America. It was widely regarded that this was the band’s big break. Curtis had signalled his desire to talk with his wife, but it didn’t go well and he told her not to come around to the house until he’d gone back to Manchester to prepare for the flight to the US. Around midday on Sunday Debbie drove to Barton Street, expecting that Ian would be gone.

She writes: “The curtains were closed. I could see the light bulb shining through the unlined fabric. Thinking Ian might still be asleep, I left Natalie in the car.” Debbie entered the house and for a moment didn’t see Ian, distracted by the letter he had left for her on the table. Then from the corner of her eye she saw him, kneeling in the kitchen, head bowed.

Ian Curtis, at the age of 23, on the brink of international stardom, had hanged himself from the clothes rack.

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Deborah Curtis calls Ian taking his own life his “the final act in his plot of self-destruction”. She says he had talked about suicide since his early teens, and adds that if everyone who had known Curtis had sat around a table and compared notes, they would have realised, piecemeal, that he was suffering severe mental health problems.

In his memoir, Peter Hook talks of feeling guilty that, “like everybody 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”.

After Curtis’s death, Joy Division reformed as New Order, with Gillian Gilbert on keyboards and Bernard Sumner on vocals. These days, Peter Hook tours with his band The Light, performing Joy Division and New Order tracks. I meet him a few miles north of Macclesfield, in Alderley Edge, and tell him that I’ve been to Ian’s grave.

“Tiny, innit?” he says. He goes every year on 18 May, the date of Ian’s death. “I’ve been saying for nearly 40 years there should be more in Macclesfield to honour Ian Curtis. There should be a bloody statue up of him.”

The question of if and how Macclesfield should honour Ian Curtis is where the whole story takes something of a bizarre turn. After Ian’s death, when Deborah wanted to move out of Barton Street for good, Dorothy Bentley Smith made good on her previous discussions and paid the full asking price for number 77 straight away. She owned the house from 1980 to 1994, selling it after her husband suffered a debilitating stroke, eventually passing away in 1997.

The house has become something of a focal point for Joy Division fans. Dorothy says there was quite a big time gap between Curtis’s death and people starting to come to look at the house, but eventually there were whole minibuses navigating the narrow Barton Street, disgorging fans on the Joy Division trail.

In 2007 the movie Control was released, based on Deborah’s book and starring Sam Riley as Curtis. Dorothy’s house was used as a base by the production team and Samantha Morton, who played Debbie, was sequestered in her largest room between takes.

There was renewed interest in Curtis’s life – and death. In 2015, 77 Barton Street was on the market again, and a Joy Division fan, Zak Davies, mounted a crowdfunding campaign to buy the house with the intention of turning it into a museum. The fundraiser only realised a couple of grand, though, and the house was sold to a private buyer. But then on to the scene came Hadar Goldman.

Goldman is a musician and entrepreneur from Israel. In 2015 he was driving with his wife to a party in Tel Aviv when an item came on the radio about the failed bid to buy the Curtis house. He says: “When I came back home I reached out to the Joy Division Fan Club in order to check out the situation of this fund raising. I was rather shocked that they had managed to raise only couple of thousands of pounds.”

Goldman went into what he calls “crazy mode”, contacting the estate agents in Macclesfield to find out that a sale was already going through. He hired a London lawyer to act on his behalf and “raised the offer to the seller and did some legal stuff and there it was mine.” The house was on the market for £125,000; Goldman reportedly offered £75,000 on top as compensation to the buyer. Goldman had never been to Macclesfield before buying 77 Barton Street, but has been since to look at it, and currently rents it out. But why?

“I’ve been a long time fan of Joy Division since I was 16,” he says. “This music absolutely changed my life. Up until then I had been a classically-trained violinist. And rather successful. The music of Joy Division influenced me in a big way. Mainly on the mental-energy-soul type of influence.

“There was a rather small but very influential scene of underground music in Tel Aviv back at the Eighties. Mind you, there wasn’t any internet back then, nor cheap flights. So our scene in Tel Aviv was behind the times by a few years. I was one of these boys that knew by heart every lyric, had seen every picture, knew all the gig dates, learned all the chords of every song of Joy Division and even Warsaw.”

So inspired by Joy Division was Goldman that he formed a band, Siam, which was “quite successful”. He adds, “Joy Division, and later New Order, were our bible. Amongst other northern UK alternative bands and producers.”

Now he owns the house, he is keen to move forward the plan to turn it into a museum to the life of Ian Curtis. But he admits he’s not been as proactive as he’d like to be so far. “I’m a very busy man, spreading myself in the US and in Europe. I’d like to get some help from the Joy Division fans to help me with the city officials.

“I still want to turn this house into an active museum, meaning, a museum that is relevant and influence young creative artists from all over the world. I must admit that I haven’t put enough time into it. And yes, I’ve come couple of times just to visit the town and looked at the house from without. I love this town.”

Like Peter Hook, Goldman feels that Macclesfield in general, and the authorities, are “rather ambivalent about Ian Curtis”. He muses: “He was a great artist from one hand, but maybe people are rather judgmental about him killing himself, and are frightened that ghoulish goth black magic people are interested in Ian Curtis story, not from the musical angle.

“I think that if we will create a museum that will be a current muse and inspiration for creativity, it will bring everything to the light and with positive momentum. The world knows by now, that only people who think different and act in an interesting manner are the ones to be successful. Macclesfield could definitely enjoy it.”

When Goldman talks of the “city officials”, he these days means Macclesfield Town Council, which was established as the local authority in 2015. Town clerk Pete Turner says he hasn’t yet had any formal approach from Goldman about the museum proposal, but he says that Macclesfield is certainly proud of Ian Curtis.

“The memory and legacy of Ian Curtis is very much a source of great pride in Macclesfield,” says Turner. “He is a focus of conversation and positive memories for many in Macclesfield and the reach of the music he produced remains a constant reminder of his place in this town’s history.” Are there any plans to properly honour Curtis, especially with the 40th anniversary of his death approaching next year? Turner says, “The idea has been broached in the town, but as yet no formal discussion has taken place.”

For now, then, there is just the simple stone inlaid in a kerb in Macclesfield cemetery. Not the original, though; that was stolen in 2008 and never recovered, though Deborah Curtis placed a new one there a few weeks later. It was Deborah who had chosen the wording on the memorial, to the surprise of many. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was released in the June after Curtis’s death, and taken by many to be a frank admission of his infidelity with Annik Honore and the breakdown of his relationship with his wife.

“It seemed to encapsulate all I wanted it to say,” Deborah wrote. “‘Love will tear us apart’ was pretty well how we all felt.” And, in the rain, the felt-tip words of the song lovingly copied out by a fan and framed as a tribute to Ian Curtis continue to run and add an almost unsettling splash of colour to the sad, monochrome story of one of our most tragic and brilliant musical icons.

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