Touching from a Distance Read online

  The police asked me to formally identify the body, but eventually my father was allowed to do it instead. I regret that very much. I sat in the car and waited – still too shocked to cry, but able to notice that, yes, like the old cliché, the sun was still shining and the breeze was still blowing. It was a beautiful day. The green leaves above Barton Street buffeted against a blue, blue sky. For the last time Ian and I were driven in opposite directions. I was to hear later at the inquest that Kevin Wood and another young man from the street had tried to cut Ian down before the police arrived. This had been a harrowing experience – there wasn’t a sharp knife in the house.

  Pat O’Connor was by then head porter at Macclesfield District and General Hospital. When he was called in to book in the latest corpse he was shocked to see his old friend Ian Curtis. It was his job to escort Ian’s body and the police down to the morgue. A few days later my parents and I returned to the house to collect a few clothes and toys. My father dismantled the clothes rack and chopped it into tiny pieces. I noticed the record player was switched on and, lifting the lid, I saw The Idiot still turning. While I was there, it struck me that Ian had brought none of his usual medication which had been essential to his well-being. I did find a Dictaphone which the band had given Ian to hum his melodies into. There was only the tape that was in it – it was blank.

  *

  It was some time before I was allowed to go to the police station to read the letter which Ian had left for me. I was handed the original and despite the private nature of the letter, my mother was handed a typed transcript to read. I was a little surprised at this, but didn’t feel as uncomfortable as she did.

  Rob Gretton rang me before the funeral to ask when he could arrange for Annik to visit the Chapel of Rest to see Ian’s body. I was upset, but we did come to an arrangement and Tony Wilson took it upon himself to make sure Annik didn’t appear at the funeral and cause a scene. Even after his death we were jostling for possession, importance, affection – call it what you will. Rumour has it that Annik was already wending her way back up north before she knew of Ian’s death.

  ‘That’s what I heard, that was part of the reason why … I gathered that that was part of the reason why he thought this was the only way out. He didn’t know how to handle it.’

  Lindsay Reade

  Annik stayed with Tony Wilson and Lindsay Reade for a week, sleeping in the same room where Ian had slept. She sat on their floor, crying and playing Joy Division records for twenty hours of every day she was there. Annik showed Lindsay a letter that Ian had written to her. It began ‘Dear Annik, It was really painful hanging there’. Presumably he meant on the other end of the telephone.

  They took Annik with their floral tributes to the Chapel of Rest before the funeral. Tony’s car was a Peugeot estate and had always been known to Lindsay, ironically, as ‘the hearse’. Once in the Chapel of Rest, they were able to see the marks on Ian’s neck. Alan Erasmus leaned forward and moved Ian’s clothing to cover the marks before his parents came to view the body. Tony’s words to Ian’s corpse were, ‘You daft bugger!’ He said to me later, ‘I’ve always felt a friendly annoyance that he fucked off.’

  Tony Wilson also took Paul Morley to the Chapel of Rest, but Paul declined to go in. He felt his relationship with Ian had not been close enough to be able to view his body. The event also must have dredged up overwhelming emotions as his own father had committed suicide. Tony Wilson’s main reason for inviting Paul Morley was Tony’s intention that Paul write ‘the book’, but he was affronted and turned down the offer.

  Factory Records held their own wake for Ian and spent it smoking dope and watching the film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.

  Ian was cremated on 23 May 1980. I remember the rawness in his mother’s voice and the blank, staring faces of the remaining band members. I felt the shame of failure and the bitterness of seeing them all there, sharing my grief when it was too late. Only the family and our friend Kelvin Briggs were invited back to my parents’ house. Kelvin took care of me that day, just as he had taken care of Ian on our wedding day. After a couple of whiskies my nerve cracked. As I began to laugh with embarrassing hysteria, I looked up at Kelvin’s face to see the tears rolling silently down his cheeks.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WRITTEN THERE FOR ALL

  The inquest was scheduled for Friday 13 June in Macclesfield. The delay was caused by the hospital being slow in getting together various pieces of information. There were a couple of journalists, Ian’s parents, the remaining band members except for Bernard, two police officers, my family and myself. I had already met with the coroner and explained the various self-inflicted weals on Ian’s body, but was surprised to be questioned on the amount of whisky in the house at the time of Ian’s death. I held up my fingers to reveal less than half an inch. My father had the indignity of having to stand up and say he didn’t know Ian particularly well. Anyone who had known them both would be well aware that they had only myself in common. Pete Hook remembers my father saying that Ian was ‘on another plane’:

  ‘He wasn’t on any plane. He should have been on a bleeding plane, the bastard. It’s just really sad. I still feel angry to this day; because the whole thing that he wanted, the whole thing that he groomed you for, was success.’

  Peter Hook

  I felt Rob Gretton expected some kind of concrete conclusion from the inquest; that we would be shown the light and suddenly understand why Ian had done what he did. However, the cause of death was recorded as: ‘a. Asphyxia b. Ligature around the neck. The deceased killed himself.’ As we left the court room, Peter Hook squeezed my arm and said he was sorry. This was one of the few expressions of sympathy shown to me by Ian’s music-business friends and meant a great deal.

  As far as I know, I was the last person to see or speak to Ian. The affection held for him by everyone who knew him is obvious by the look on their faces when they tell me they still don’t understand why he took his life. His death wasn’t simple by any means. Hanging himself was only the final act in his plot of self-destruction. Unknown to Joy Division and their crew, he had talked about suicide since his early teens. If I ever mentioned his early yearnings to die young after our marriage, my questions would be met with neither denial nor explanation. Enlisting the loyal help of those around him to cover his affair with a Belgian woman served to distance me further from events and ensured a total breakdown in communication. Ian’s stories about how bad our marriage was caused the rest of Joy Division to underestimate grossly the depth of our relationship. Also, maligning my character would have provided Ian with the means to justify his affair to himself and for a short time allay the guilt he would ultimately feel.

  ‘There are different kinds of suicide … I think Ian’s was altruistic. He went through some kind of noble gesture. He was completely tormented by himself. He wasn’t a businessman; he wasn’t someone who could organize it, or arrange it either physically or in his head. I can. I’ve had affairs, I’ve been in love with two people at the same time. It’s tough because I would use the same intellect that I would use to run Factory, or whatever.’

  Tony Wilson

  In retrospect we should have all sat around a table in Ian’s absence and compared notes. I’m sure we would have realized how much he needed help. Annik’s tenacity was astounding – she continued to ring our number long after Ian was dead. The fatal combination of such a lover and a mentor who, on his own admission, could not only justify infidelity but also organize it, compounded lan’s confusion. It would seem that Ian’s earlier view on life after the age of twenty-five never really changed. All he needed was the excuse to follow his idols into immortality and being part of Joy Division gave him the tools to build the heart-rending reasons.

  Ian’s pale blue-green eyes linger on in our daughter and when those familiar long fingers twine themselves unwittingly into those inherited mannerisms, I remember how warm and loved I felt when he and I were sixteen.

  *

&n
bsp; ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ / ‘These Days’ was released in June 1980 amid jokes about Factory’s five-year plan. The powers that be were still unaware that they had been part of Ian’s own plan. While some people worried about the myth Tony Wilson was trying to create, no one realized that Ian had been busy myth-making himself. Ian crooned his way through ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ after Tony Wilson gave him Frank Sinatra’s Forty Great Songs to listen to. When the band were unable to decide which vocal should be used they released both – one on each side of the seven-inch single.

  Understandably, the lyrics were interpreted by the press as being about a love affair gone wrong, but as the last to know that our love affair had ‘gone wrong’, I had taken Ian’s infidelity as being part of his illness. Although I hadn’t heard the lyrical content, Ian did go to great lengths to explain to me the process by which the image on the sleeve was achieved. The words were etched on a sheet of metal which was then weathered with acid before being left out in the elements. Ian told me that the effect would be to make the metal look like a piece of stone. However, I didn’t comprehend that the result would be something resembling a grave stone. His insistence on explaining all this at a time when he could hardly be bothered to look at me makes me think that he was already well ahead with his plans for his demise. I remember being amused by his assumption that I could possibly be interested in a band that I was no longer allowed to see or hear.

  Rob Gretton was stunned when I told him the wording I had chosen for the stone in the crematorium, but there seemed little point in changing it as it seemed to encapsulate all I wanted it to say. ‘Love will tear us apart’ was pretty well how we all felt. The single reached No. 13 in the national chart, but an ongoing union dispute meant that the video was not shown on Top of the Pops.

  The release of Closer brought with it a burst of realization for many of those already close to Ian. His intentions and feelings were all there within the lyrics. While he lived they were equivocal, but with hindsight all was disclosed when it was too late for anything to be done. Such a sensitive composition could not have happened by accident. For me, Closer was Ian’s valediction and Joy Division’s finest work.

  He cajoled us, nurtured us with his promises of success. After showing us what it looked like, he offered us a mere sip before he abandoned us on the precipice.

  ‘Basically, we want to play and enjoy what we like playing. I think when we stop doing that, I think, well, that will be time to pack it in. That will be the end.’

  Ian Curtis, Radio Lancashire interview, 1979

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Short Circuit ‘Live At the Electric Circus’ Virgin (VCL 5003), ten-inch album with a special limited-edition pressing on blue vinyl, recorded live during the so-called last two days at the Electric Circus, released June 1978. Joy Division were still called Warsaw at the time of recording and had one track, ‘At a Later Date’, on the album, as did the Drones, Steel Pulse and the Buzzcocks. The Fall and John Cooper Clarke each had two tracks.

  An Ideal for Living Enigma (PSS139), seven-inch four-track EP, recorded at the Pennine Sound Studio, Oldham, December 1977, but not officially released until June 1978: ‘Warsaw’ / ‘No Love Lost’/‘Leaders of Men’/ ‘Failures’.

  An Ideal for Living Anonymous Records (ANON 1), twelve-inch version, released September 1978.

  A Factory Sample Factory (FAC 2) double EP, recorded at Cargo Studios, Rochdale, 11 October 1978, released January 1979. The Joy Division tracks were ‘Digital’ and ‘Glass’, produced by Martin ‘Zero’ Hannett. Other tracks were by the Durutti Column, John Dowie and Cabaret Voltaire.

  The Factory Flick Factory (FAC 9), 8mm film which included ‘No City Fun Music’, a twelve-minute piece by Joy Division based on an article on City Fun magazine by Liz Naylor. It was shown at the Scala Cinema, London, in September 1979.

  Unknown Pleasures Factory (FAC 10), debut album, rcorded at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, April 1979, produced by Martin Hannett, released June 1979: ‘Inside’ had ‘She’s Lost Control’/‘Shadowplay’/ ‘Wilderness’/‘Interzone’/‘I Remember Nothing’; ‘Outside’ had ‘Disorder’/ ‘Day of the Lords’/‘Candidate’/‘Insight’/‘New Dawn Fades’.

  Transmission Factory (FAC 13), seven-inch single, recorded at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, July 1979, produced by Martin Hannett, released October 1979; ‘Transmission’/Novelty’.

  Earcom 2 Fast (FAST 9), twelve-inch EP, recorded during Unknown Pleasures session at Strawberry Studios, Stockport, April 1979, produced by Martin Hannett, given to Edinburgh’s Fast label: ‘Auto-suggestion’/‘From Safety to Where …?’ Included tracks by Thursdays and Basczax.

  Sordide Sentimentale Sordide Sentimentale (SS 33002), ‘Atmosphere’/ ‘Dead Souls’ had been recorded with ‘Transmission’ and the two songs, both produced by Martin Hannett, were later released in March 1980. Pressed as a limited edition of 1,578 on Sordide Sentimentale, it was for sale in France only. The reason for this limited pressing was not apparent from the packaging, but the extravagant three-page sleeve had a text written by Jean-Pierre Turmel, a grim painting by Jean-François Jamoul and a photograph of Joy Division by Anton Corbijn.

  Love Will Tear Us Apart Factory (FAC 23), seven-inch single, recorded at Britannia Row Studios, London, March 1980, produced by Martin Hannett, released June 1980, reached No. 13 in UK chart: ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’/‘These Days’.

  Closer Factory (FAC 25), album, recorded at Britannia Row Studios, London, March 1980, produced by Martin Hannett, released July 1980: ‘Atrocity Exhibition’/‘Isolation’/‘Passover’/‘Colony’/‘A Means to an End’/‘Heart and Soul’/‘Twenty Four Hours’/‘The Eternal’/‘Decades’.

  Komakino/Incubation Factory (FAC 28), free flexidisc which also includes uncredited ‘As You Said’. ‘Komakino’ and ‘Incubation’ were recorded at the same time as Closer and appear on the Britannia Row cassette that Ian took home with him after the session.

  Atmosphere/She’s Lost Control Factory (FACUS 2), twelve-inch single, US release, September 1980 (later to be released in the UK).

  Transmission/Novelty Factory (FAC 13), twelve-inch single, remixed US release, September 1980.

  Ceremony/In a Lonely Place Factory (FAC 33), two songs written by Joy Division but released in January 1981 by New Order.

  Still Factory (FACT 40), double album of studio and live material using tracks from the whole of Joy Division’s career, released August 1981: ‘Exercise One’/‘Ice Age’/‘The Sound of Music’/‘Glass’/‘The Only Mistake’/‘Walked In line’/‘The Kill’/‘Something Must Break’/‘Dead Souls’/‘Sister Ray’/‘Ceremony’/‘Shadowplay’/‘Means to an End’/ ‘Passover’/‘New Dawn Fades’/‘Transmission’/‘Disorder’/‘Isolation’/ ‘Decades’/‘Digital’. Available in standard grey cover or as a deluxe package in a stiff, grey hessian folder with a white ribbon.

  Here Are the Young Men Factory (FACT 37), Joy Division video, released August 1982: ‘Dead Souls’/‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’/‘Shadowplay’/‘Day of the Lords’/‘Digital’/‘Colony’/‘New Dawn Fades’/‘Auto-suggestion’/‘Transmission’/‘The Sound of Music’/‘She’s Lost Control’/ ‘They Walked In Line’/‘I Remember Nothing’.

  Atmosphere Factory (FAC 213), UK release, 1988: ‘Atmosphere’/‘The Only Mistake’/‘The Sound of Music’/‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.

  Substance Factory (FAC 250), Joy Division compilation album, released in July 1988: ‘Warsaw’/‘Leaders of Men’/‘Digital’/‘Auto-suggestion’/ ‘Transmission’/‘She’s Lost Control’/‘Incubation’/‘Dead Souls’/‘Atmosphere’/‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’/‘No Love Lost’/‘Failures’/‘Glass’/ ‘From Safety to Where…?’/‘Novelty’/‘Komakino’/‘These Days’.

  Strange Fruit Strange Fruit Records (SFRMC 111), both the Joy Division Peel Sessions, first transmitted in February and December 1979: ‘Exercise One’/‘Insight’/‘She’s Lost Control’/‘Transmission’/‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’/‘Twenty-Four Hours’/‘Colony’/
‘The Sound of Music’.