- 2 October 1979: Mountford Hall, Liverpool University, opening date of Buzzcocks tour, with Joy Division as support
Pete Shelley: It was in October ’79, and we’d just released our third album, A Different Kind of Tension. We were looking for a support band, and Joy Division were now actually making records, and so I think it was probably Richard Boon’s idea that here’s another band who we know and get on with, let’s take them on a nationwide tour.
I don’t think we really got to see all that much of Joy Division playing at the gigs. Normally, we’d be at the hotel having a huge slap-up meal before we went onstage, and then we’d arrive just as they were finishing, and then afterwards we’d all meet up in the hotel bar, so there was lots of drunken evenings and the bar would stay open.
Richard Boon: Once Buzzcocks had some major-label funding, there we were, stupidly passing on this torch, so we toured with the Slits and Subway Sect, we’d have gigs with the Fall, Gang of Four and Cabaret Voltaire, and here were Joy Division with their impressively received album, needing to promote it. We invited them; it was just like, they were mates. They got paid, they had their own sound guy, but they were very self-sufficient, and of course their crew and the Buzzcocks’ crew got up to stupid roadie mischief, as did members of both groups.
Pete Shelley: And then, of course, as well as the members of Joy Division there was also their support crew, people like Terry, who was always a barrel of laughs. There was a roadie called Twinny, who would collect pounds – now a pound was still a lot in those days – and then he would show you his tattoo. He’d take down his trousers and bend over, and coming out of his backside were two hands which had been tattooed on, so that’s how he’d get his drink money.
Bernard Sumner: The Buzzcocks tour was our first real experience of proper rock’n’roll and roadies and all that. I remember one of the Buzzcocks’ roadies playing an awful trick on me and giving me a big lump of draw, and then about four o’clock in the morning said, ‘There you are, eat that.’ I was young and naive and I thought my head had fallen off, didn’t know where I was. And I know we were young and naive, but it was an adventure for us really and it didn’t feel like work, it just felt like fun. So as long as it was fun, we’d do it.
I don’t think I was actually married then, I was just cohabiting. It was difficult when we had jobs. I worked in the animation place, Ian worked in a disability rehabilitation centre, Steve worked for his dad, Hooky worked at the dock office in Salford. We finished our jobs at five thirty at night and we’d have a gig in London at nine o’clock, so we had to bomb down to London or finish early, do the gig in London and then drive back and go straight to work the next day.
When we became fully professional we chucked in our jobs and went on the dole, which was quite daunting, but it gave us the freedom to just concentrate on the group. It was daunting because my job was pretty good, and it was quite a big step, having rent to pay and what have you, but it worked out.
Peter Hook: We weren’t earning any money and it was becoming a real problem, and in between that the Buzzcocks tour emerged and it gave us our chance to go full-time. But the problem was that for all of us, really it meant a cut in wages, because I think we were only on £11 or £13 a week. Barney was actually on a really good wage with what he was doing at Cosgrove Hall; the rest of us were quite normal. I was on about £23 a week or something, so it meant taking a cut.
I’d moved out from home as well because my mother wouldn’t allow it, to be honest. She was embarrassed that I was going to go off and work with a group. I actually lied to the bank manager and got a loan before I left to buy my house, which I bought with Iris, my girlfriend. So it was quite a stressful time for me because I was leaving work, me mam was going to kill me, and then all of a sudden I ended up in this house. We’d no money. I was on £13 a week, and we had no carpets, no chairs, no bed, nothing. I think we had two deckchairs that somebody gave us, and so it was great.
Kevin Cummins: When it was booked, Richard Boon thought he was giving Joy Division a break, but by the time that tour came round, everybody was going to see Joy Division rather than Buzzcocks. A lot of people left at the interval. I think the opening night was at Liverpool University. I shot that for the NME. Even then, the NME wanted it to be a Buzzcocks review rather than a Joy Division review. Paul and I argued in vain that nobody was interested in Buzzcocks by then, and the people who were going wanted to see Joy Division.
- 4 October 1979: Newcastle City Hall
Jon Wozencroft: Joy Division didn’t play that much up in the north-east. I think they played one gig at Middlesbrough Rock Garden, which was a bit of a misnomer because it was anything but like a rock garden: it was a very, very difficult venue to get to underneath a flyover, and quite a violent and alienating place. So everyone was waiting for them to play in Newcastle.
The anticipation by that time was fever-pitch. I’m sure at least half of the audience were there for Joy Division. What is quite extraordinary is that they were playing every night of the week at that point: before Newcastle they’d been to Liverpool, Leeds, then after Newcastle they were going up to Glasgow, to Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen – it was an extraordinarily hectic schedule. Newcastle City Hall’s a big space. To jump from the Factory to a place like City Hall must have been quite scary for them.
Joy Division came on that night quite early because they were a support band, and normally what would happen is that people have had a good two or three hours in the bar. Joy Division were on at ten to eight or something crazy like that, and they came across rather nervous. They were quite tight in the middle, but the other thing that’s obviously very distracting for them, and especially for Ian, would be that all the Buzzcocks gear would be there and they’d have to work within what the main band had configured for their set. There wasn’t much room for movement.
They seemed a bit tired, which is obvious if you consider what their schedule was at that point. They hurried through their set, but they played ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ at the end, which was like, ‘Uh?’ There was quite a strange mixture between the Unknown Pleasures aspect of it and the tracks that weren’t properly digestible because they hadn’t been in the public domain – ‘Colony’, for example, or ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. There was a feeling of ‘That was a bit quick, wasn’t it?’ – like going in a flash – but after Joy Division had finished playing at least a third of the audience just left.
- 16 October 1979: Plan K, Brussels
Annik Honoré: Frédéric Flamand was the director of Plan K and he was really into the avant-garde. He was a choreographer. He had this idea that Brussels was the perfect centre to have a cosmopolitan venue where all arts could happen – music, dance, cinema, video. They had used the place to rehearse as a dancing troupe, and by that time already Tuxedo Moon was using the place for rehearsals. He knew a lot about literature and a lot about dance, but nothing about music, and certainly not rock music.
He knew of Michel Duval, and Michel was writing in the En Attendant fanzine. Michel knew that everything was happening in London, and I was already living there then, so he said, ‘Well, you have to go and find a group,’ and we all agreed that Joy Division would suit the mood for the type of evenings that Frédéric had in mind. I was living in London, and it was a time when it was so easy to meet the groups, just to go backstage and talk with them, and if you were a foreigner, you would just go and ask, ‘Would you be interested to go abroad to Brussels?’ It wasn’t very far.
I had seen Joy Division. They played the Nashville Rooms in July. They sounded like no one else, very, very powerful onstage. They sounded really good because the sound was deep and big, and Ian on the stage was fascinating. He sang and he danced in a unique way. At the same time, they looked a bit provincial, nothing like London fashion, but they looked very smart with the nice shirts and trousers. They really impressed me: everybody who was at the Nashville Rooms was thrilled, and there was something exciting going on, something different.
We got there early to make sure we had a ticket, and the room was absolutely packed. Because I was writing a few articles for En Attendant, it was easy to go and see who was at the mixing desk. Rob was there, and I went to ask him to do a small interview and have an article for a Belgian magazine, which was funny for him: something foreign, but Belgium – I’m not sure he knew exactly where it was. That’s how I got to know them.
They appeared as four very simple lads, very easy-going, nothing sophisticated, but the music was very, very strong. It was hard to believe that these four guys, making jokes and really young, could have such a deep, heavy sound. When Ian was onstage he was coming out of himself, he was a different person. He was kind of possessed by some very strong power, and he looked like he was in another world. At the same time, he looked very strong and very fragile, very vulnerable. At the time, I didn’t know he was sick or anything. I think he was very brave to sing and dance like he was doing.
The way he talked with me, he was very much of a gentleman. He was very soft and nice. We stayed up all night talking: he had a lot to say and he didn’t seem shy at all then. There was something. The chemistry was there. We both agreed on David Bowie and on Iggy and the Velvet Underground, so that night we listened to Low. The books, I think we mentioned Kafka. It went on and on all night, our discussion, and then we came to talk about personal things: more about his life, his married life, his child and the family, and he asked me about my family. I was surprised that he was so young and he was the only one to be married, so it was obviously not so easy for him to go on tour.
When Joy Division realised that they could go with Cabaret Voltaire and that it would be a special evening, with William Burroughs doing a lecture, and dance and films being shown, they agreed immediately to come and perform. Ian was a fan of Burroughs. I think we mentioned it in the conversation; everybody knew who William Burroughs was and everybody was interested. I had read one book, The Wild Boys, and Ian had read more because it’s not so easy to understand when you’re not perfectly bilingual. He was thrilled to meet the man in the flesh.
Richard Kirk: We always seemed to be in Manchester, and we did become friends and we ended up playing together on the same bill. Quite frequently, in fact. Initially, Joy Division would open for us because they weren’t at a certain time as well known as Cabaret Voltaire, but obviously that situation changed once they’d got Unknown Pleasures out there and they became a lot more popular. They had a bit more of a commercial edge, so they could potentially reach a bigger audience, even though it was along the same lines: it was very dark and almost monochrome in its feel.
I got into William Burroughs in the mid-seventies, when the NME was quite counter-cultural. You would read about things like Burroughs in magazines like NME because obviously they never taught it on the English Lit curriculum at school. When I first found out about Burroughs, I’d already been doing cut-ups, because I’d been very interested in the Dadaist movement. I remember reading about Tristan Tzara, who used to make poetry by putting a load of words into a paper bag and then pulling them out at random and making a poem.
Then finding out about Burroughs, it was like all the bits of the jigsaw now fitted into place. You can see the appeal to a teenager, where it’s just full of filthy language and pornographic imagery and basically anti-Establishment. That’s what it said to me. I always thought the job of an artist was to challenge the status quo, and then when you read it in print, you read what Burroughs was saying and his understanding of how things work on this planet politically and in terms of things being controlled – you’ve hit pay dirt there.
It was Brion Gysin who first started to use cut-ups. He said that writing was fifty years behind painting, and I thought the idea of applying that to music might make it jump forward in the way that Burroughs had done with words. To do it with sounds and noises is what Cabaret Voltaire started to do originally. We were aware of that approach through knowledge of the Dada movement, but it came into focus with reading The Naked Lunch and The Electronic Revolution.
We went over to Brussels to do a gig at this converted sugar refinery called Plan K, to launch this arts venue. We’d been approached by people there to go and play alongside Joy Division, but the big attraction was that they actually had William Burroughs as part of this event, and Brion Gysin as well. There were various readings given by Burroughs and Gysin, and they were also showing some of the films that Antony Balch made, like Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups.
There were four floors to this venue: the ground floor was where the bands would play, the concert space, and then on the other floors there was performance art and one room where they just showed movies, and that was the first time we’d actually seen the Burroughs movies. They were also showing Performance, which is one of my all-time favourite films. It just seemed too perfect, a dream engagement.
Stephen Morris: Ian had met Annik then, and she suggested that we play this place in Brussels called Plan K. We got there and we were in the YMCA, or the Brussels equivalent. Apparently, the YMCA in Belgium operates on a two-tier system: there’s the lodge for uncouth youths downstairs, and upstairs was a sort of sauna and a television. ‘That’s the singer’s room, the singer and Cabaret Voltaire are in there, you lot are in here, and yeah, that’s your bed over there, Steve’ – and it didn’t actually have any springs, you went through it.
Peter Hook: I was driving, you see, so I was sober and I remember it all. Plan K was the first time we’d been abroad, which was really exciting. We had loads of problems with Terry. He couldn’t seem to get the van above 40 miles an hour, so I ended up driving the van because we were going to be late, we were going to miss the ferry. Terry was a real miserable bastard then. I think he’d finally given up all chance of being in the group and realised he was only going to be a roadie or a tour manager, so it made him really miserable, and Twinny was revelling in it.
Terry Mason: When we went over to Brussels for the first gig outside the UK, again we thought it’s a major milestone. You’re leaving home turf for the first time. We were playing a gig at a sugar refinery. William Burroughs was on the bill, and Cabaret Voltaire. We thought, ‘Right, we’re big-time Charlies.’ We got sent to this hostel to stay in. It was very central for Brussels, but all of a sudden we get shown this room that’s got six beds in it. There was six single beds in one room. I don’t think it had a window to the outside world, but it had a window into the corridor.
Stephen Morris: One of my abiding memories of schmoozing Ian was at the Plan K. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were promoting The Third Mind, which had just come out. I always remember Ian going up to Burroughs or Gysin, ‘Excuse me, do you have any of those books in English?’ He got the bum’s rush off William Burroughs, but he had a go.
Peter Hook: Ian decided he was going to get a free book off William Burroughs because he’d read all Burroughs’s books and bought them. Bernard and I were most amused. Burroughs was reading first and then he was doing the signing, and Ian went over, and me and Bernard were pissing ourselves behind the pillar. I can’t remember what he said, we weren’t near enough, and all we heard was Burroughs: ‘Oh, fuck off, kid.’ We didn’t stop laughing for hours. Ian was so embarrassed.
Richard Kirk: The thing I remember most vividly is in one of the upper floors of Plan K there was myself and the other two members of Cabaret Voltaire, Ian and William Burroughs sat round a table drinking. I remember Ian asking Burroughs what he thought about suicide, and I’m 100 per cent certain Ian was talking about the American band Suicide, and William thought he meant the act of suicide, so it all got a bit confusing. I was that in awe of someone like Burroughs, I didn’t really know what to say to him, but I was just happy to be sat there around a table with him.
Martin X. Ruffian, review in NMX fanzine
I spent the interval ligging backstage and giving away copies of ‘NMX’ No. 7. I forgot that this was the issue in which I called Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s singer, a ‘right prat’ or words to that effect but he took it quite well considering, and even promised to put me on that Sunday’s guest list for the Buzzcocks/Joy Division gig at the Top Rank. I’m still not convinced that they’re brilliant enough to justify all the good press they’ve had – I can think of unknown groups I rate higher – but there’s no denying they are very good.
The music varies from punky fast and simple to doomy slow and weird, always emotional and compelling, though not half as depressing as has been made out. I was compelled but entertained as well. Cabaret Voltaire are Ian Curtis’ favourite group, or were on the night, and Joy Division are a bit like Cabaret Voltaire without the synthesizers and drum machine. Experience this for yourself. The Phlegms went wild about it and they were called back for several encores.
Stephen Morris: We did the gig and then we experienced Duvels beer, and, ‘Oh, it’s quite nice this, isn’t it? Let’s get a case of this,’ and everything from walking offstage is tinged with some sort of hallucinogenic flashbacks because we had about twenty of them. We went back to the quarters quite merry, and then we didn’t realise that not only is it shared, it’s like a submarine: if you’re not in your bed, somebody else is in your bed, and there were other people sleeping in our bleeding room.
Peter Hook: Twinny stole forty-eight Duvels. When we came to do the gear, we were loading out through the bar in Plan K, which was quite funny because it was such an arty do. Everyone was so arty, wandering round – ‘Oh God, Joy Division, they’re so wonderfully sublime, darling,’ in French or Belgian, as they do – and I said, ‘Fucking get the gear loaded, you drunken bastard.’ Twinny got up onstage, showed his arse for two quid, showed his tattoos to the audience, oh my God, everyone else was pissed. I was driving with Terry, so I was sober, so I said, ‘Get the fucking gear out, will you?’
I said, ‘Is the gear in the van?’ Twinny said, ‘Yeah, gear’s in the van, yeah.’ So I said, ‘I’ll just check.’ And I opened the thing up, and it was full of beer. He’d robbed the bar, left the gear outside and fucking filled the van up with beer. I was going, ‘You daft bastard,’ and the barman came out with about five bouncers – we had to put all the beer back in.
Terry had a face like a slapped arse. We had a load of drinks from the dressing room, and I had a bottle of tomato juice, and he was sat there with a face like that, and I thought, ‘I’ll show this cunt.’ So anyway, I dived out of the car, went round with the tomato juice and put it over the windscreen of the van just to annoy him. It’s amazing, the things you did. And I remember this great face, he just sat there and put the windscreen wipers on, and it was flicking tomato juice all over the street, and I thought, ‘Oh, man, you miserable twat.’
So we get back to the hostel, and then Barney picked Twinny’s bed up and upended it, so Twinny fell out of bed, and then Twinny went over and picked Barney’s bed up, so he fell out of bed, but he fell and banged his head on the radiator. So he went fucking mad and tipped Twinny up again, so Twinny got a bottle of orange juice and poured it in Barney’s bed, and then Ian came down. It was just all going off. It was like proper kids abroad for the first time. Fucking madness, it was, it was great, and then Ian was caught pissing in the ashtray.
Terry Mason: Ian needed to pee, and he peed in this flip-top litter bin, sort of waist high, and one of the people managing the hostel is looking through the internal window at Ian peeing and he comes rushing through. English wasn’t his first language, and he was screaming at Ian; the rest of us are just falling over for him getting caught. Ian’s there: ‘You tell me what to do, and I will do it,’ moving into that English that English people say when they’re talking to foreigners – you say everything louder and slowly. And he said, ‘Do you want me to move this?’
So we were still a bunch of lads having fun. By the time we got to Brussels we’re already on the Buzzcocks tour. We were still a bunch of daft lads going about the country doing stupid stuff. We had great toys, we had flight cases – you’d put someone in a flight case and push them down a few steps. You know, anyone thinking of joining a band, do it. Touring is good, don’t believe what people say.
- 27/28 October 1979: Manchester Apollo
Peter Hook: The strangest thing about after the Buzzcocks tour was that you were playing the same music you were playing before the Buzzcocks tour to nobody, and then all of a sudden there was thousands of the buggers. One minute there’s nobody there, the next minute there’s thousands, and you’re playing the same music. It was quite odd, but we did start getting busier and busier.
Richard Boon: During that tour they improved. This was an opportunity for them to play much more regularly than they had before, and they had to put up with the whole daily grind of show last night, get up, travel, soundcheck, show again, and they got more disciplined as a result, it started to work. They were actually working as a band. I’m sure that they’d probably all taken leave from the dole office or their day job to do it. I think it gave them an instinct for more professionalism.
In terms of presentation, it was guitar, singer, bass, drums at the back – very classic. As the gigs got more regular, Hooky started to loosen up and he would get a bit more lively, but in terms of holding the audience’s attention and delivering a performance, Ian carried a particular live performance burden, which was something that he’d obviously wanted but I’m not sure he was happy with. I think the initial forced mannerism of his recorded vocals fed into how he was onstage, and he initially thought, ‘This is how I either want to be presented or want to be seen.’
But then he would lose himself in that – that being some kind of euphoria, which was probably private. I think his internal emotions weren’t presented to the audience, there was no heart-rending thing. A lot of the audience may have thought so, but I don’t. He’d achieved some kind of ambition and was enjoying it, but once there’s a commercial envelope broken, people want more and more from you. He just wanted something from himself initially.
It was all very good-natured, and I filmed one of those gigs. There were two independent video facilities in Manchester in the late seventies: there was Granada Television, and there was the Manchester Film and Video Workshop, which was the tail end of some post-hippie community project that boiled down to being Bob Jones, who had a video camera. I think Rob Gretton said, ‘The band would like to see what they look like onstage.’ It’s very important for bands to see what they look like onstage: Are they throwing the right shapes, are they making the right moves?
So Bob and I filmed them in the Manchester Apollo from a box, and constantly argued about focus-pulling and where to move the camera. There was some number which for me was fantastic, where Ian went right out into the wings and did his dancing. I wanted to keep the camera on the microphone, knowing that after a few bars he’d be back, and Bob was like, ‘No, he’s over there.’ And I won: I kept the camera on the microphone, the music builds and then suddenly he’s in. I just knew he’d be over there, but the song was building and building, so the tension is on the microphone.
Paul Morley: On the Buzzcocks tour they played the Manchester Apollo, and they seemed to belong but they also seemed a bit adrift. They seemed to belong on a big stage and in big circumstances, so to speak, but they seemed a little adrift too, like it wasn’t quite their time yet. It always seemed better to see them in a smaller space, when the energy became … well, literally psychedelic at times because of the way everything was moving.
I was talking to them recently about that self-consciousness they must have had very quickly, that they’d done something that was special, and how that infected and impacted upon them. The naivety and the underdog thing had been removed quite quickly, because suddenly they were being heralded and hailed, not just by the locals but by the biggies. There were other people now taking it very seriously, and obviously they must have had a sense within the unit that they’d done something special.
That could have ruined them in a way, it could have given them a kind of London hubris. It could have really spoiled them, but each member of the group had their own ambition. Ian’s ambition obviously was the one that ultimately created the great catastrophe, but I think the others had their own ambition within that, even if it was just to be the greatest bass player on the planet or to make a really great guitar sound. All of that was important technically and was still going on, and supported Ian’s wider ambition.
I got the feeling that each instrument was not dealt with in a way that a normal group would use, so it wasn’t so much a lead guitar, it was almost a side guitar and a lead bass, and the drums were almost used in a jazz way, funnily enough, where they weren’t really just a banal pulse but were jittery and edgy, and Stephen’s eccentricity, his own nerdiness, was coming through, in a way. Live and on record, it was different, but both were unorthodox in terms of the way the dynamics were used.
Sometimes you got the feeling they were in completely different spaces and almost weren’t hearing each other, and other times you got the feeling they were completely connected. Then the voice was interesting, because for a while there was the Jim Morrison thing, and then there was Ian finding his own place. Then, towards the end, the disconcerting crooning started to happen, so as his lyrics got more and more desolate and desperate and deranged, the voice got suaver, which was also part of the distraction that we all fell for at the time.
Jon Wozencroft: Once Joy Division really found their seam, they almost always started with ‘Dead Souls’. That track has a very, very progressive, intense build-up; it’s nearly three minutes before the vocal comes in. This gives Ian a chance both to calibrate – to position himself to start to read the atmosphere, to feel how the band behind him are locking in with each other on that particular evening – and to decide how far he wants to travel. Once he was able to position or balance himself to go out of his body, he would use performance as a way of projecting himself, channelling.
I saw it with my own eyes and ears. There were some very powerful things happening, but there’s also an interesting feature in that there was no real light show in Joy Division performances; everything was quite stark, quite monumental. Just by that physical necessity, because of his epilepsy, which I didn’t know about at the time, Ian would be the point of focus, so he could take that aspect of himself as a point of focus and amplify it and project it, so that there was this incredible movement going on that you can’t quantify. It was very ritualistic.
Terry Mason: The Buzzcocks tour was the traditional UK twenty-five-, thirty-day tour, playing places that were two and a half thousand capacity and the like. A lot of people say it was exhausting. It’s what bands did, you know; it’s not like you were doing a thirty-state tour of America in five weeks. The distances are not that big: you’re going from Sheffield to Birmingham. We were the support band, so the band could get to a venue early, but there was nothing for them to do until Buzzcocks had finished their soundcheck.
But Ian’s seizures were becoming more and more frequent and they were much larger. At that point, you’ve got Ian in a situation whereby everything that boys join a band to do – the drink, the drugs, the women – all of that is written out of Ian’s script. He’s won the keys to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but all of a sudden he’s told if you taste any chocolate, you will die. Ian’s there and he has to moderate his drink, the only drugs he’s seeing are the collection of barbs that are prescribed to him to control his seizures, and women are out of the question due to the effects of said barbs.
On the Buzzcocks tour we were always conscious. After Ian had the first seizure, we always watched out for him. A lot of the time we’d have to watch for Ian showing the signs that he was having a seizure. Now of course the signs of having a seizure were very much like Ian’s dance style; some of the eye movements he had, he’d sort of built into his stage persona, so to speak. So some of the time you’re thinking, ‘Is he or isn’t he?’ And you’d be ready to go, and he’d just look at you and smile, he’d say, ‘Got you.’
Deborah Curtis: He danced like that before he got epilepsy. I think he was looking for an original energy to express. I told myself at first that it was all part of the act, you know? Part of being in the band, but it was all wrong. There wasn’t an Ian at home and an Ian in the world; it became like that all the time. People admired him for the things that were destroying him. I don’t think people understood that he would still be like that when he came home. It wasn’t just a show.
Richard Boon: I was very upset at one gig where Ian had a fit. Rob said nothing about Ian’s condition, that he was epileptic, and all the road crew who were actually working and paying attention didn’t know what to do, apart from taking him offstage. I was very cross. I said, ‘Rob, you should have told us what the procedures were.’ So that was a bit alarming.
Bernard Sumner: When the illness came, at first we thought, ‘Well, he’s never had it before, so it will go away. It’s just a bit of stress or something.’ We just thought it would be temporary, but it wasn’t, and we thought, ‘Shit, there’s no solution to this. We’ll carry on, but we’ll just have to tone everything down. We won’t have any flashing lights, we’ll try and make sure he gets to bed early, and try and tone it down as much as we can and see how we go on.’
We didn’t know anything about epilepsy neither. I did a little bit because I used to work with a lad that had it, but he had petit mal, where he used to just fall on the floor and go to sleep, but Ian had full fits. I guess we were in a bit of a state of shock. We didn’t really know what to do. We thought, ‘Well, they’ll be able to medicate him to calm it all down,’ but we didn’t really know about the side effects of the drugs. We didn’t know enough about it, and I don’t think medical science at that time knew enough about it neither. We didn’t have a solution.
Stephen Morris: The one that I remember being most shocked by was Eric’s. The dressing room was right at the side of the stage, and Terry caught him and took him off, and you could see him having the fit off the side of the stage. That was the good thing about ‘Interzone’, because Hooky could sing it. If Ian had a fit, we could drag him offstage and do ‘Interzone’.
Peter Hook: Rob had had more fights with the lighting guy cos he’d always start flashing, and that was what would send Ian into a fit. That was his worst one, at Bournemouth: I had to sit on him for an hour and a half holding his tongue in the dressing room. Then he just wouldn’t come round, so I said to Rob, ‘We’re going to have to take him to hospital.’ Everyone was pissed and they’d all fucked off, and it was only me and Rob in the dressing room, so me and Rob had to pick him up and put him in the car and take him to hospital in Bournemouth, and they brought him out of it.
Then it was really funny, because I came back and them lot were in the dressing room having a drink, the bastards. I said, ‘Where’s Twinny?’ They went, ‘Oh, we’ve not seen him. We’ve not seen him since you went.’ I thought, ‘Where the fucking hell is he?’ He’d disappeared. Anyway, I found him in a cupboard at the back of the stage. I went, ‘What are you doing?’ And he went, ‘He’s possessed by the devil, that bastard.’ What a nightmare: the lead singer’s off, he’s off. I was like, ‘Oh fuck, everyone else is pissed.’
Annik Honoré: I witnessed a few of his fits. It was really, really frightening, it was like he was possessed by the devil. He was literally rising from the ground, that’s how I remember it. Ian was mostly embarrassed that he felt like he couldn’t be like everybody else because – it could happen at any time – he couldn’t drive, because he couldn’t be as responsible as the others, and that was really annoying him, that he was being looked after. I wouldn’t say that the others saw him as a sick man, because everybody was young and innocent.
Nobody realised how serious this was. They didn’t treat him any differently, and they should have paid more attention to his disease and made sure that there was not so much light and noise, and not so much late nights and more sleep, but it’s almost impossible in a rock band. I think he felt diminished, and from knowing and having met other epileptic people he knew exactly what could happen and how bad it could get, and that was frightening him. He was also frightened that it would make people frightened of getting to know him better, like myself.
He knew it’s not much fun to be with a sick person, because it can be very dangerous. I mean, he could die from a fit, from falling on his head or from swallowing his tongue. It was extremely violent.
Bernard Sumner: We played in Bournemouth once. His mate who he’d always gone on about, who was this performance artist who used to chain himself to cars and do all that weird shit, didn’t turn up at the gig, and Ian was really upset about it. Really pissed off. It was on the Buzzcocks tour.
He went real fuckin’ weird after it. We were staying in this shitty boarding house, and the Buzzcocks were staying in this shitty hotel, and we walked along to their hotel for a drink, and coming back along the beach Ian starting walking out towards the sea. It was pitch black, about one in the morning, and he went walking out into the sea, and we had to go and get him. He had a shadow on his personality that was so dark that I don’t think even he could see into it.
Stephen Morris: Ian would say he was all right even when he wasn’t all right. He was his own worst enemy in a number of departments, and that was one of them. He should really have said, ‘I can’t do it,’ but he did. He wanted to do it, we wanted to do it, and it was kind of, ‘Well, it’ll be all right,’ when it was obviously clearly never going to be all right because he was just going to get worse.
The drugs didn’t help, the treatment that he was on, because it was very hit and miss, and they’d give you a load of these psychotropic drugs: ‘They might make you feel a bit ill, but see if they work, then we’ll give you another lot and see what they do.’ So in a way, as soon as you’re diagnosed with epilepsy, it’s automatically bound to get a lot worse once you start taking the pills to make you get better.
Peter Hook: It was always a problem. We just had to look after him. Once he found out he was ill, he was the worst: he just didn’t want to do it, he wanted to be a rock’n’roll superstar. The doctors told him to be quiet and to try and lead a quiet life and not to drink, and he just went berserk. We were always trying to stop him. He did not want to admit that he was ill, without a shadow of a doubt, and what we were doing was really bad for his illness. I think, if anything, Ian felt worse about that, because he felt that he was holding us back.
Probably one of the reasons why he drove himself so hard was because he knew we all wanted it so badly and we were all enjoying it so much. Part of his problem was that he didn’t want to let anybody down. He was a people-pleaser, he wanted everyone to be happy round him, and sometimes he’d say things to people just to make them happy, and worry about the consequences later, which is what I would imagine happened with Debbie quite a lot.
He was a bit of a yes-man, I suppose. He was a nice guy; he’d always agree with you, he was very difficult to have a fight with, Ian. I never had a fight with him, ever. I never fell out with Ian, or Steve for that matter, but Ian used to always fall out with Rob. They really did clash, and it was generally about money, which I think was because Debbie was in his ear.
Deborah Curtis: It was like a family. I heard Iris, Hooky’s girlfriend, saying, ‘They’re a family, we can’t get into it.’ They were close, they’d protect each other. They’ll exclude anyone who isn’t quite what they’re looking for, you know? I remember when I was expecting Natalie and standing at the door of the Factory, and Tony looking me up and down, and it was written all over his face what he was thinking: ‘How can we have a rock star with a six-months-pregnant wife standing by the stage?’ It wasn’t quite the thing.
Lesley Gilbert: To start with, the group were quite happy to have girlfriends and wives there, and then as they started doing more gigs and being away more, certain situations got a bit dodgy. It was very much a lads’ thing, it was a little gang, and girls don’t fit into boys’ gangs, do they? Certainly not then, because it was a while ago. Factory was very male-dominated as well, that was another little gang, so it was all boys together. I think in certain situations they suffered, the girlfriends, being there. The longer that went on, then the more difficult it got for the girlfriends to be there.
And, of course, I had a nine-to-five job, and I know Bernard’s girlfriend did, so we couldn’t be going all over the place anyway. We had jobs to hold down to support them. I mean, I supported Rob for a few years, so I couldn’t be following them around, and also, God, I mean, where’s the fun in that? You’ve got your own things to do. It’s just the way things turned out. I don’t think it was anything like, ‘Right, this is how it’s going to be: girlfriends, wives not allowed.’ It’s just the way things happened.
Stephen Morris: Girlfriends didn’t go to the gigs.
Gillian Gilbert: Only in Manchester. I used to come to some of the others, but it caused ructions. Debbie used to drive Ian to some of the gigs, didn’t she?
Stephen Morris: But Ian had tried to persuade her not to.
Deborah Curtis: Then this glamorous Belgian turned up. She was attractive and she was free, and she had a nice accent. I don’t blame Ian. I think most people need a partner, and if you exclude that partner you have to find somebody else. It’s only natural. He must have been very lonely.
Tony Wilson: I wasn’t aware of Ian’s relationship with Deborah going wrong. I was aware of Ian’s relationship with Annik going right, I suppose, and brutally it never seemed surprising somehow that people move on. I mean, the great surprise in all of our lives was the rock-hard relationship between Rob and Lesley, whereas most of us grow and change, and things change from our teenage sweethearts. So to me as someone who’s grown through several relationships, it was not a surprise that Ian had found this new girlfriend, but I liked Annik and I liked Deborah as well.
Bernard Sumner: At the end of the Buzzcocks tour we heard that they were going to set us up for some jolly japes, so I thought, ‘Well, we’re the experts at that, we’ll get them first.’ So we went to get a big bucket of maggots, and one of the roadies distracted their lighting guy’s attention and we poured the maggots over his lighting desk, and when he came back he was like, ‘What the fucking hell?’
They had all their girlfriends and wives with them, the Buzzcocks, and they all turned up in a minibus. They left one of the windows open, so we bought a load of mice and put live mice in the minibus. So at the end of the night, when they got in the minibus, all the girls started screaming their heads off, they come running out of the minibus. Of course, we were waiting outside in Steve’s Cortina with a load of eggs and just pelted them. It was fun. I think they got us back, though. I seem to recall that Steve had a sunroof on his car, left it open, so they got a huge trifle at the gig and dropped it straight through. See, you didn’t need drugs in those days.
- 9/10 November 1979: Rainbow Theatre, London, Buzzcocks tour ends
Anton Corbijn: I moved to England in October ’79, and I met them within two weeks of moving to London. I went to see them at a show in the Rainbow, in London, and I must have had a magazine in Holland that I worked for, so I could meet Rob Gretton backstage. I suggested a photograph the next day – they were in London – and they said yes. We did it at Lancaster Gate tube station. My idea was unknown pleasures, people walking away on their way to unknown pleasures. In the end, my trip to England was unknown pleasures in my eyes.
James Brown, sabotagetimes.com
Bernard Sumner: There’s a famous photograph taken by Anton Corbijn. I think it was the first time we met Anton, it was his first photo session in the UK, and it was at Lancaster Gate tube station. And on it we’ve all got this really short hair. We were supporting the Buzzcocks. We were sitting round bored in a boarding house in Leeds, somewhere like that. I’d just got a cut, but I had a little bit of hair stuck up at the back and it was annoying me, so I got a pair of scissors and I said to Rob, ‘Can you cut that little bit of hair, it’s annoying me?’ So he cut it, but he cut a big lump out the back of my hair.
Stephen Morris: The problem with Rob’s barbering techniques was the scissors he used – they were massive. Instead of using nice, normal barbering scissors, he used to use massive ones: they were tailor-scissors: big, clunking great rusty brown things. I think he was using the wrong things, but it did result in that rather odd angular style. Bernard Sumner: With me, he cut this little bit off, cut a big chunk out of my hair, so I said, ‘That’s no good, you’ve made a right balls of it,’ so he ended up cutting all me hair short, and then they were like, ‘That looks daft because he’s got dead short hair. You’re gonna have to cut everyone else’s [laughs].’ So it started with Rob cutting that little bit of stuck-up hair off, then he worked his way through the whole group, and that’s why we’ve all got that haircut on that photograph.
Anton Corbijn: So we went to this tunnel, and when they all looked away it wasn’t as strong as when somebody looked back, so I think I have a few pictures of Bernard looking back, and then I asked Ian to look back, and that became the image in the end. When I did that photograph I showed it to a few people, but nobody was interested. People just want to see faces, so that picture wasn’t really published until Ian died, and then suddenly it looked like a prophecy, which of course it wasn’t at all for me.
Almost all the imagery of Joy Division was quasi-documentary – people come and take a few pictures, they walk around or they stand somewhere – but this was with an idea in mind, it was slightly more conceptual. That’s maybe why it lasted so long, but it wasn’t a big shoot, it was just a few minutes, and I remember very much, me being Dutch, I arrived and I want to shake their hands, they’re going to shake my hand. After I’d done the picture, they actually shook my hand. I always remember that very vividly because I of course felt like quite a lonely boy in London.
I came over with my girlfriend, but my English was bad, and you try to build up something in England and it was my first proper shoot. It was just four young guys who were standing there smoking, shaking, like this – ‘Are we okay?’ – underdressed, malnourished. That’s what I always thought of the north of England. It was quite a shock if you came from Holland, where socially everybody was sort of taken care of. You come to England, and there’s extreme poverty and people drinking and smoking and having just a little shirt on and a thin coat and they stand outside in the winter.