Touching from a Distance Page 11
Perhaps I wasn’t giving Ian the attention he required at home. Who knows? But adoration from the press doesn’t seem to have been enough for him. The reviews increasingly began to dwell on Ian’s distinctive dance. To me it was just part of the act and I saw my role as looking after the actor at home. I tried to provide a steady background life for him to depend on – a shelter. I was hardly likely to be impressed by his manic jerking on stage when I spent my life concentrating on eradicating the possibility of any seizures at home. Had the act become reality, or reality become the act? I endeavoured to treat him as a ‘normal’ person, as one should an epileptic, but he had difficulty in switching from his stage life to his home life. I could have looked after him for all time. I had been there when he was a schoolboy and yet he treated me as he might one of the sycophants who infiltrated the cushion of his friendships within the band.
Ian all but stopped talking to me and in desperation I turned to my health visitor. She was very sympathetic and arranged an appointment for me to see Ian’s specialist at the hospital. Ian made it obvious he didn’t want me to go and it might have been a more fruitful meeting had I gone in secret. As it was, Ian came with me. We sat in the surgery – me with Natalie asleep on my knee and Ian pouting, with his arms folded like a difficult teenager. The doctor was no help at all. I explained Ian’s change in personality and all he could do was assure me that it was perfectly normal under the circumstances. I was left without a hint about how to cope with the situation and a feeling that there was something I wasn’t being told. Whether the meeting would have been different without Ian’s stolid presence, I do not know.
Bernard Sumner had also noticed that Ian’s moods had become even more erratic: ‘He had a manic personality … in his performance. If he didn’t get what he wanted he could raise hell, but in a funny way sometimes.’ My parents were dismayed at the opposition I was facing in trying to find out more about Ian’s problems. My father was determined to get some answers for me and made an appointment with a doctor at our local practice. We felt that although medical matters are supposed to be confidential between patient and doctor, we were at least entitled to an explanation of Ian’s prognosis. My father found the GP to be evasive, rude and unhelpful. He came away from the surgery insisting that the doctor himself was mad. This was not too far from the truth – within weeks the uncooperative man shot himself. Ian reacted very squeamishly to the news, despite the fact that he barely knew him.
For one evening at the end of July, Manchester’s Mayflower Club was renamed the Funhouse to present the ‘Stuff the Superstars Special’. The morning before this gig, Dave McCullough made the journey to Strawberry Studios in Stockport to interview Joy Division for Sounds. One pompous band member was quoted as saying: ‘We don’t want to give people straight answers. We’d rather they question things for themselves.’ The interview had started off well, with Dave McCullough gleaning information about Unknown Pleasures from Ian, but he was unable even to find out the names of the other band members, let alone delve deeper into Joy Division’s music. Despite the fact that he walked away with the impression that Joy Division were devoid of intellect, he still awarded them two pages of undeserved publicity.
In August 1979 they played the Prince of Wales Conference Centre at the YMCA, Tottenham Court Road. That Thursday night, Joy Division played alongside Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and Essential Logic. Essential Logic missed out rather as apart from having to take the stage after Joy Division, they went on so late that many fans were already on their way home. Adrian Thrills in the NME enthused about each individual Joy Division member in turn and finished saying: ‘They have the spirit and the feeling.’ There was no doubt about it – Ian was famous. He had achieved what he always wanted; already he was public property. I was sick of other people making observations about Ian’s personality. There was nothing left of him for me, the husband and father ceased to exist and any plans he made were made with Rob.
In August Ian made another appearance on the front cover of NME, this time with Bernard Sumner. Ian was minus the raincoat and cigarette, looking surprisingly relaxed, but Bernard’s face was turned from the camera, his tight clothing and undersized tie making him look more schoolboyish than ever.
That same week Joy Division were booked to play at Eric’s in Liverpool. As Liverpool is my birthplace, I was looking forward to going back immensely. I took great pleasure in driving there myself, found my own way to the club and Ian had remembered to put me on the guest list. He didn’t often forget, but I was always shy about asking to get into a venue for nothing. When I went into the dressing room to look for Ian, two of the lads were in there talking to a couple of young female fans. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the day after the gig Ian asked me not to go any more unless I had the other girls with me, as it wasn’t fair if I went without them. It was gradually made plain to us that wives and girlfriends were no longer welcome. It had been OK for us to boost the numbers in the audience in the early days and we had become used to sitting on the amplifiers to stop them being stolen. It was taken for granted that we would wash and iron clothes, pack cases and make excuses to employers, but now it seemed we were bad for the image. Rob Gretton shouldered the blame, but to be fair all the boys had tongues in their heads. If they had disagreed with the ‘no women’ policy, they could have spoken up. I was very disappointed – the whole scenario was reminiscent of when I was pregnant. Too big for my jeans, I had been panicked into borrowing a dress from my mother. That evening as Tony gave me the once over and then looked away without greeting or comment, I felt for the first time that my presence might be unwelcome or even unsuitable.
Only Steve Morris continued to take his girlfriend wherever he went. He didn’t voice any objections, but just ignored what the others said. In some ways, from the point of view of managing a band, it made sense to keep their respective women away. It strengthened the relationship between the band members and allowed them to concentrate on the task in hand. If Ian was going to play the tortured soul on stage, it would be easier without the watchful eye of the woman who washed his underpants.
However, this policy helped create a rift between us. We never spoke about the easier access to drugs once the band got off the ground, but Ian knew how I felt about them. I had seen his depressive moods, knew about his earlier overdose and was aware of his apparent schoolboy death-wish. On top of all this was the questionable wisdom of mixing other substances with his prescribed drugs. When I did go to gigs, there was often a sudden silence when I walked into the dressing room. Joints were hurriedly handed back to Tony in the pretence of Ian never having touched them, and the rest of the entourage didn’t comprehend my dislike of them. It never occurred to me to tell them about Ian’s past – with hindsight I realize that I cherished the fact that I had known him longer too much to share it.
The Leigh Festival at the end of August 1979 was a collaboration between Zoo and Factory. It should have been a festival to remember and at the very least the first of many. I was wary of what I had been told about turning up at gigs without the other girls, so I made sure I collected Sue Sumner from her flat before driving on to the festival. It was a bright, warm day and I was disappointed because it hadn’t occurred to me to take Natalie along. I mentioned this to Ian, but he was so busy discussing the size of a particularly large turd in one of the toilet tents that he didn’t seem to hear me.
Thanks to James Anderton and a profound lack of publicity, the town of Leigh was closed for the day and the police presence almost outnumbered the festival-goers. After a fruitless journey into Leigh for a bite to eat, we were confronted by a road block. A short, fat thug in jeans motioned to me to stop the car and after showing me what could have been a bus pass (I wasn’t allowed to read what it said), we were made to get out. While two policemen and one policewoman searched us and the Morris Traveller, the fat stupid one made jibes about the car, perhaps trying to provoke some reaction. Ian told me that someone else from
Factory was in fact carrying the dope, but of course his car was not stopped. Ian and Bernard took it all in their stride.
The name Joy Division always provided a talking point for the press. Rather than make up an obscure reason for the choice, the lads remained silent. I was surprised that none of them, especially Ian, had some clever answer up his sleeve, but the lads were tired of explaining themselves. As Dave McCullough found out when he interviewed them for Sounds just before the ‘Stuff the Superstars’ gig, their attitude was one of players beginning a game in which the rules had been set out, but only the band were privy to them. Eventually they stopped giving interviews because the press tended to focus mainly on Ian and he felt he should resist that. Joy Division were in danger of being seen as a backing band when in fact the four of them made a cohesive and dynamic force.
By now, Ian was putting more of an emotional distance between us. He did bring a couple of books home about Nazi Germany, but in the main he was reading Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse and J. G. Ballard. Photomontages of the Nazi Period was a book of anti-Nazi posters by John Heartfield, which graphically documented the spread of Hitler’s ideals. Crash by J. G. Ballard combined sex with the suffering of car accident victims. It struck me that all lan’s spare time was spent reading and thinking about human suffering. I knew he was looking for inspiration for his songs, yet the whole thing was culminating in an unhealthy obsession with mental and physical pain. When I tried to talk to him, I was given the same treatment as the press – a stony face and no words. The one person he did talk to about it was Bernard.
‘Where I lived there were shelters; there was a bomb shelter in our back yard. There were underground shelters at the end of our street where we used to play. All the films on TV when we were kids were about the war. So when you grew up and understood what had gone on, you were naturally pretty interested in it … It was unfashionable to talk about it … you had to drop the subject … but I didn’t think it should have been dropped and I think that was where our interest came from … It had been a decade before we were born – not that long ago.’
Bernard Sumner
Bernard also remembers that Ian liked to consider Nietzsche’s theory that there exists a race which is reincarnated periodically and they were the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans and the Nazis. However, I think Ian’s obsession with the Nazi uniform had more to do with his interest in style and history. Since his infant-school days he had loved to draw soldiers from different periods – up until this point, the appeal always lay in the uniform, never warfare itself.
I also had a childhood full of wartime reminiscences. The air-raid shelters, the prefabricated houses, the holes where the iron railings used to be at the front of my grandmother’s house, were there for everyone to see. I was accustomed to talking about the Second World War with my family. There was never any need for sensationalism; there was sensation enough in the facts. For me the past was a little a too close. My great grandfather was Jewish and I preferred to look at the newspaper cutting of my six great uncles who served during the war, buy my poppy and watch the Remembrance Day service every year. In the past, the only war Ian and I had discussed had been the one in Northern Ireland. He did not speak of politics, but of the romance of his ancestors being bayoneted by Black and Tans. I had no wish to reincarnate the horrors in my own mind. Ian had moved on to a higher plane by this time. If I didn’t understand this sudden interest in Nazism, then he wasn’t going to explain it. Band policy seemed to be interfering with our relationship. Ian regarded me with disdain, perhaps trying to ignore the fact that I had seen both sides of his personality. Much worse than his previous ambivalence towards me, I began to see in his attitude the same disdain he had shown for other members of his family.
As the pressure of playing and travelling built up through July and August, Ian’s fits became more frequent and I found it increasingly difficult to communicate with him beyond finding out what kind of sandwiches he wanted. Although his doctor at the hospital changed Ian’s tablets when it seemed necessary, and was apparently constantly expressing his concern about Ian’s lifestyle, I found myself shut out of Ian’s problems. His resentment towards me seemed to be building. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought he held me responsible for his condition. I knew nothing of the mental side effects of his therapy and even if I did, I would not have expected such an adverse effect on Ian’s personality. As far as I was aware, his medication was being monitored and any imperfections would eventually be ironed out.
Ian’s Aunty Nell and Uncle Ray came over from Tenerife for a month’s holiday. Knowing how close Ian had been to Nell in his childhood, I decided that if anyone would be able to help me it was her. Ian’s family still seemed unaware that anything was wrong and, frustratingly for me, he behaved perfectly normally at his parents’ house. I took deep breaths and braced myself to bring the subject up, but was so afraid of their disbelief that I kept silent. There was never an opportunity to speak to Nell alone. On the day she left I cried. I had seen her as my last hope and was angry with my own lack of resolve.
CHAPTER NINE
THESE DAYS
The end of August 1979 was make or break time for Joy Division. They were lucky enough to be offered the chance to be support band on the Buzzcocks tour, so it was ‘give up the day job’ time. Ian had no qualms about this as it was what he had been waiting for. His relative contentment is borne out by the fact that he had only one grand mal attack during September, compared with the great number in August, when he was effectively going without sleep. I sighed with relief as this change in lifestyle should have helped Ian’s affliction. The other members of the band took good care of him. Their time was spent surreptitiously watching him for signs of an impending fit and they were always there to help him recover or take him to hospital if he was particularly poorly.
To some extent Joy Division’s future seemed almost rushing to greet them and in the excitement it wasn’t long before Ian began to take advantage. Much to the annoyance of the rest of the band, just as they were hurtling towards fame and fortune, Ian contracted what was known as LSS (Lead Singer Syndrome). This involved disappearing into the distance while the van was being unloaded and, although he was not yet lead singer, Bernard Sumner joined in the fun. Their heads would cautiously peep around the corner to make sure the van was empty before reappearing on the scene. Anton Corbijn’s photograph of the two of them carrying a flight case is indeed unique! Ian’s reluctance to do any donkey work seldom caused problems as Peter Hook and Steve Morris were quite tolerant. Peter took the view that Ian was a lazy bastard and that Bernard just brought out the worst in him.
‘Barney and him used to disappear and swan about like two fucking fairies. I remember going up to Barney one night, getting hold of him (the next band were on stage; he’d fucked off with Sue for a drink somewhere) and saying, “You better go and get your amp off stage.” And he said, “Where is it?” The next fucking band were on and I’d left his amp on stage. I said, “I’m not fucking lifting your amp, you cunt, you can do it your fucking self.” To their credit, it doesn’t really matter, neither of them had much realism. I mean, Barney’s really creative in the way that Ian was and maybe that’s the effect it has on you. I used to be a bit different, a bit more realistic. There’s a very fine line between being artistic and being a dickhead – it’s like love and hate.’
Peter Hook
Futurama ‘79 at the Queen’s Hall, Leeds, was supposed to be a sci-fi music festival, but no one seems to be able to say what made it sci-fi. Joy Division played on the Saturday (the first of the two dates) and were said by Ian Penman to be the real stars of the night. This was no mean feat, considering that seventeen bands played, including the tough competition of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Cabaret Voltaire. Mark Johnson wrote in his book about Joy Division: ‘It was one of the rare occasions that the band’s wives and girlfriends were seen at a Joy Division concert.’ Neither myself, Sue, nor Iri
s were there, so I’m not quite sure to whom he was referring.
As autumn approached they played the Factory for the last time before it closed down for an indefinite period, as the Russell Club’s, licence had expired. It had been ‘our place’ for sixteen months and there was a feeling that we were about to begin the next chapter.
When Ian felt the beginnings of an epileptic fit, he lay down on the office floor and someone was dispatched to fetch me. It was unusual for Ian to have a fit before going on stage. There were too many people buzzing around when he should have been left in peace, but Ian did manage to recover in time for Joy Division’s performance. As if the evening wasn’t memorable enough, there was a fracas between Peter Hook and a member of the audience. Jumping down from the stage, he chased through the crowd and didn’t return to play.
Mountford Hall in Liverpool was the first of the twenty-four dates that Joy Division played supporting the Buzzcocks on their autumn tour. The season began extremely well for Joy Division, who effectively blew the Buzzcocks off the stage on this first night. They earned a rave review from Penny Riley who wrote: ‘It’s music that washes over you, music to surrender to. Only then do you receive the maximum excitement – personal response is vital.’ The Buzzcocks, meanwhile, had to make do with: ‘There shouldn’t have been an encore, but they did one anyway.’ If further reviews are anything to go by, then by the close of the curtain on this gig, the shape that the tour was going to take had already been set.
The theme continued at Leeds University. Des Moines commented that Ian ‘symbolizes Joy Division’, putting the lid on the fact that whether the band as a whole liked it or not, Ian Curtis was the star of the Joy Division show. Idolaters may have loved the music, but Ian’s on-stage orchestration of his own body ensured which direction they were looking towards.