- 2 April 1980: the Moonlight Club, London
- 3 April 1980: the Moonlight Club, London
- 4 April 1980: the Rainbow Theatre, London
- 4 April 1980: the Moonlight Club, London
Paul Morley: You’d see them at the Rainbow, and then at the same time you could see them at the Moonlight on the same day. It was moving incredibly fast, it all seemed to be accelerating incredibly fast.
Bernard Sumner: Ian then started having fits onstage. One gig, we were supporting the Stranglers at the Rainbow. I remember we were doing the ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. He always used to dance onstage, but we finished the track and he was still dancing. He just spun round and round till he crashed into the drums, and then ended up on the stage having a fit, and by this time he’ d had quite a few.
So we carried him off, and then there were people in the corridors: ‘What’s going on? Oh, it’s that guy that has the fits.’ And we put him in the dressing room, and he went, ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ We left him for a bit to give him a bit of space, and then when we opened the door he was just in tears, and we didn’t know what to do. He was our mate, we wanted to help him, but we just didn’t have a solution to that particular problem. It was really sad.
Stephen Morris: We did stupid things, like the Stranglers’ benefit gig while we were doing three nights at the Moonlight. He had a fit after the Stranglers gig and then carried on to the Moonlight. ‘Can we not just …’ – but we never even thought, and he honestly never said, ‘Oh, I’m not up to it.’ He wouldn’t have said that. He was just, ‘No, I’m fine, I’m fine, yeah.’ That was the beginning of the end, because he couldn’t do without being in a band, and he couldn’t pretend. Because of that, he would be drained.
Terry Mason: The Good Friday gig with the Stranglers, Ian had a major seizure there. We then rushed across town over to the Moonlight Club to do this Factory night. No one in that building really came to see any of the support acts; they were there to see Joy Division, they were there to see Ian. He’s had one seizure at the Rainbow, but still – his commitment. We went over to the Moonlight, and Ian just crumpled onstage. At that point there should have been really large alarm bells going, but no one seemed to hear any. The world had got out of control.
The film that was one of Ian’s favourites at the time was Eraserhead, David Lynch, and it’s a very strange, disturbing film. The hero of the movie stares at a radiator, which opens up and there’s this girl with rather big cheeks who’s dancing, doing a little act inside the radiator, and there’s stuff falling from the ceiling – the film’s in black and white, so we don’t know what the stuff is. And that was like Ian: he was there in his little show, and like the woman in the radiator, he’d lost control of what his show was about in the end.
Tony Wilson: Ian’s performance was always electric, but it would suddenly get even more electric. You wouldn’t see Ian about to go off, but you would see Bernard and Hooky and Stephen begin to look at each other onstage, and I began to recognise it from that. One of the most profound performances was after they’d supported the bloody Stranglers at the Rainbow and then come across to do Factory by Moonlight, which was some crazy idea that we’d had – which I should apologise for because it did set Ian off.
Lindsay Reade: The more the gigging got intense, the more the fits were taking place. But this may have a parallel with his private life as well, because the two things were amplifying together in terms of stress. The stress of performing, of being on the road: the demands on his time were getting much bigger with each month or week. Plus his private life was disintegrating because he’d got the stress of having a baby, plus the fact that his marriage was in pieces and he loved another woman. He was an honourable guy, he didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings and he wanted to do the best for everybody, so you’ve got two things literally tearing him apart.
I actually think he couldn’t go on with it. He must have felt he couldn’t go on with it. It was going to reach a point, and it did that Easter. He’d had the worst fit ever onstage, in front of more people than had ever witnessed anything like that, and he must have privately thought, ‘This can’t go on.’ That was at the Rainbow. That must have been really humiliating, for all those people to see that. People think it’s glamorous – rock star falling into drum kit, wow – but he wouldn’t have felt like that. He would have felt really ashamed, and not in control.
Bernard Sumner: After that, he had serious doubts about his future. Eventually, he decided he wanted to leave the band. Quite understandably. Who wants that to happen to them onstage? We came to an agreement. He wanted to leave the band, he wanted to buy a corner shop down in Portsmouth, he wanted to go off and write a book. We didn’t want him to because we’d put so much work into it, but we understood his predicament. The agreement was that he wouldn’t do any gigs for a year, that we’d just write.
But around this time he would agree to anything you told him. Ian was very open to suggestion at this time. He’d made up his mind to leave the band. He was going to do something completely different, and we said, ‘No, don’t do that. We’ll just record, take the pressure off.’ And without any change of expression, he’d say, ‘Yeah, okay.’ If we’d have told him to go and cut three of his fingers off, I think he would have done it. He was so suggestible. He really wanted one of us to come up and tell him what to do, and that would have been his way out.
Paul Morley: The whole point of Ian is that after a while it seems that he was always on the edge of life. There were obviously moments when you just assumed it was part of the choreography, as anarchic as that choreography had become, and then selfishly you enjoyed it because it was an event, it was a happening, it was a thing, and he’d given it. He was really laying his life on the line for this music, and it elevated everything and there seemed to be a kind of sacrifice.
You felt that he was really entering into what Iggy Pop would do – it seemed to be his equivalent of slashing his chest – really giving you something, giving you a heck of a performance. Selfishly you’d deem it a kind of extreme entertainment. At that time there’d be Public Image, there’d be Throbbing Gristle, there’d be Gang of Four: that tearing apart of clichés suddenly seemed to have ideological fervour and purpose, and Joy Division seemed to be part of that. There was a real reason for this, and it went beyond just fashion and style and music.
Because everything had happened so suddenly through punk. A new band would appear – it would be Siouxsie, it would be the Pistols, it would be the Clash, it would be Wire, it would be constant unbelievable novelty – and I guess you felt that within that you had to keep beating that, sustaining that, otherwise people might lose interest.
- 8 April 1980: Derby Hall, Bury
Stephen Morris: After the first suicide attempt, before that gig in Bury, I remember saying to Rob – cos it was a Saturday and the gig was on a Monday – that we ought to pull it, and Rob got really angry about it. I was really shocked when we did that gig. Also, when he said he wanted to go and live in Holland and do a bookshop, it was us that persuaded him not to. Again, he’d been very pliable. If he’d stuck to what he wanted, he’d probably still be alive today.
Bernard Sumner: Ian had just tried to commit suicide for the first time. He took a drug overdose and he told me afterwards that he’d not gone through with it: he panicked and phoned the ambulance only because he’d heard that if you don’t take enough of them, then it can cause brain damage. I didn’t really believe him, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just a cry for help.’ They put him under the care of a psychiatrist: I think he was actually in hospital. We already had a gig booked. If we booked a gig, it never got cancelled, so we had to do it.
Tony brought Ian down to the gig. He was in no fit state to play, and he should have still been in hospital. We went onstage, and it was Simon Topping and Alan Hempsall, and we had to blag them or bribe them to go up and sing a few songs with us, because we were like, ‘Shit, we shouldn’t be here, but the audience are here. Let’s just go on and play. Ian can sing a couple and then come off, Alan can go on, sing a couple, then Ian can sing a couple.’ But it didn’t go down too well with the audience, because they didn’t know that he’d just come out of hospital.
Peter Hook: Rob didn’t want to pull it, so we decided to get the other singers in, which we thought was quite exciting. I mean, no one really thought about how Ian would feel about that. I can imagine he was decimated really, because if they’d carried on with another bass player, I’d have fucking battered them. I’d have said, ‘No, you don’t, piss off,’ but Ian was so nice that he seemed to let Rob think it was a good idea to let the others play so we could do it, so we went ahead, and it was stupid.
Alan Hempsall: I’d been out for the afternoon and got a phone call, and it was Bernard, and he just said, ‘Oh, Ian’s ill, and we’ve got a gig tonight. We were wondering if you’d like to stand in for him.’ So I was like, ‘Well, sure, yeah, why not? It sounds great to me.’ So I got picked up and driven over to what was the Derby Hall in Bury, and I’d been told Ian was ill, but I turned up to find him there. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a little bit strange.’ He seemed okay, but I said, ‘Well, they’ve asked me up here to sing a little bit, so let’s go for it.’
It was quite unusual, because we had the Minny Pops on the bill with us from Holland and they came on and did a full set. Now this gig had been sold out some way in advance and there were tickets exchanging hands outside for about £5 each, and that was a lot of money at the time. Section 25 were due on next and did four numbers, and then they did ‘Girls Don’t Count’, which was their big single at the time and was our cue to come onstage and join them.
So as ‘Girls Don’t Count’ starts up, Hooky comes onstage with Steve and Bernard to join the three members of Section 25, so at this point we’ve got two bass players, two drummers, a guitarist with a keyboard. Larry, the singer, did the words to ‘Girls Don’t Count’, while me and Simon Topping from A Certain Ratio came on and did some kind of weird backing-vocal thing to it, but then that was their signal. At the end of that, Section 25 walked off with Simon, leaving me and the other three remaining members of Joy Division.
We then launch into ‘Digital’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Ian had said in the dressing room before we went on, ‘I’ll come on and do two slow numbers because I feel okay enough just to do a couple of slow ones, and that’ll be it.’ So once I’d done ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, that was my cue to walk off the stage and Ian’s cue to walk on, and I believe it was ‘The Eternal’ and ‘Decades’ – he did those two. And then he walked off, I walked back on with Simon Topping and the rest of Section 25, and we did a cover version of ‘Sister Ray’ by the Velvet Underground.
So there’s a certain amount of confusion by this stage, and the whole thing from Section 25 going on to us coming off had been about forty minutes, but the audience, I think, felt a little bit cheated or certainly didn’t realise what had been going on. There was a big Victorian glass chandelier suspended above the stage and somebody threw a bottle or a glass and it hit the chandelier square on, and as we were walking off we just got covered in shards of broken glass that showered down from the ceiling.
Lindsay Reade: I have very clear memories of standing higher up than the floor and watching this crowd, who were obviously beginning to get more and more uneasy, not to say unhappy. Then I saw the first bottle being thrown, which didn’t particularly worry me because I’d been to the Electric Circus and thought this is par for the course. But then my attention went to Rob Gretton’s face, and he looked really angry, like it was an eruption – Mount Vesuvius. Without a moment’s hesitation he jumped off the stage straight into the crowd and then it just erupted.
Alan Hempsall: Everybody just started throwing things, and we got bundled into the dressing room. Tony and Alan Erasmus were there barring our exit because Hooky fancied a bit of a fight. Nobody else did, of course, but I think Hooky was trying to rouse everybody, going, ‘Come on, there’s enough of us, we can take them.’ But I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, as did most of the other people in the dressing room.
We just got covered in broken glass and there was broken bottles being smashed against the dressing-room door. The roadies, Terry and Twinny, waded in, Rob waded in as well. Twinny got clocked over the back of the head with a pint pot and had to get taken to the local accident and emergency. Lindsay, Tony’s wife at the time, drove him there and he had to have his head stitched up. It all ended in trial and tribulation, and so I think a lesson was learned then: it was like, ‘We won’t do that again in a hurry.’
Peter Hook: The people that caused the trouble at Bury couldn’t get in because they didn’t have any money, but Rob let them in – Mr Philanthropist Gretton. Ian was too ill to do it really; we just decided or he just decided that he’d come on for two numbers, and that was the worst I’d ever seen him then. We did the gig and he just went off, and it turned into a riot. Ian was really upset about it, and I remember catching me then girlfriend at the time pissed, giving Ian a load of shit, and I had to grab hold of her and tell her to fuck off, so it was really bad.
Bernard Sumner: The whole thing just kicked off. It turned into a complete fiasco, a riot. It was horrible, and of course it wasn’t great for Ian because he immediately thought, ‘All this is my fault,’ and burst out in tears, he just took all the blame himself. Really it shouldn’t have been happening in the first place – you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. He just broke down again, went back to hospital. He was in a complete state. We should never have got him out of the hospital, it was a totally fucking idiotic thing to do.
Lindsay Reade: Twinny and I had to sit in casualty, and the instigators of this thing, the other side, were in casualty as well. So it was like the Christmas Day truce, when the cigarettes were shared between the opposing sides. What these two were saying was that they’d had enough: they’d only seen A Certain Ratio last week, and they hadn’t paid good money for a bloody Joy Division gig to have to watch Ratio again – because of course Simon Topping was singing at that point when they chucked the bottle.
The worst thing was that it really upset Ian, but I don’t think any of us realised how upsetting it was to Ian that this happened. My other clear memory of that night is what Ian told me a day or two later. He said he was standing in the wings of the stage watching the band play without him, and he just had this feeling that he was looking down and they were carrying on without him, and that they were going to keep carrying on without him.
- 11 April 1980: the Factory I, Manchester
Deborah Curtis (from Touching from a Distance): When Joy Division played the reopened Factory Club, it was the first time I’d seen Ian since he had gone to live with Tony Wilson. The atmosphere was strained, but Ian did make an effort. All the same, nothing was said about what had happened or how long he intended to stay at Tony’s. It was crowded in the bar and I had hoped for a more intimate meeting, but after a short while it was time for him to join the rest of the band.
When he left I went to talk to the other girls. No one had rung me to see how I was – I suppose because they were embarrassed. Yet now they began to tell me what had happened in London while Closer was being recorded. It was then I found out that while Ian allowed me to worry about money and accommodation, two flats had been booked. The majority had been squashed into one flat, while Ian and Annik enjoyed the luxury of space for themselves. I was told he behaved in an obsequious manner to her and she in turn ordered him about like an obedient little dog.
I had a few more drinks and by the end of the set I was beside myself with jealousy, humiliation and anger. To say I was miserable is to put it mildly. Ian was already downstairs. I followed him down and tried to attract his attention. I don’t know if he knew what was coming or he had already decided to ignore me, but I played right into his hands and threw my handbag at him in a temper. He carried on talking. Someone whispered to me that Ian had intended to come home with me that night but had consequently changed his mind.
The frustration was intolerable. I was desperate for any kind of communication, I was still too much in love to think about ending the marriage for myself. Tony was heard to tell Ian to ‘rise above it’. I drove away from the club alone.
Bob Dickinson: The thing about Ian was that he was the focal point for the band, and his vocals and his lyrics are incredibly vulnerable. I was always interested in the way that he wanted to use this very strange American accent and pitched his voice very low, and it sounded to me very ethereal, like a character from a film, something that floats in front of you and isn’t quite there.
And at the same time he’s got this charisma. Hooky has charisma, Barney has charisma, the whole band has a joint charisma, but Ian’s charisma was unnerving and unsettling because of the physical things that he did onstage. Once you’d seen him, once he’d done that thing where he shook himself into a frenzy, into a kind of dance that was not a dance, it was a disturbing kind of fit, once he’d done that and you’d seen it, you knew that the next number you saw or the next occasion where you saw them, he was going to take you in that direction. You didn’t know where you were going to end up, you didn’t know what was going to happen to him. It was unsettling to watch him do it, it was thrilling to watch him do it, but you just didn’t know where it was going to take you. I think that kind of charismatic power was what really captured my attention. It still grabs me when I see them on film, I still find that really unsettling to watch. Every show was a unique journey.
Iggy cut himself up with bits of glass, didn’t he? Deliberately. Ian must have known about that. Watching Ian was a bit like watching someone like Marina Abramović or Ron Athey, performance artists who deliberately lacerate themselves, cut themselves, bleed for an audience, except with Ian he didn’t bleed, but he sacrificed something of himself for you, whether you liked it or not. You didn’t know whether it would happen; it often did happen, and occasionally it went wrong.
I saw Joy Division at the Russell Club later on, and Ian was drinking beer – a lot of beer – onstage, and he went into one of these dance routines, these fits, and he knocked himself out, he collapsed, he just blacked out and fell over onstage. I’d never seen him do that before, I never saw that happen, but I thought, ‘Well, I can understand why that’s happened: he’s worked himself up into a frenzy and he’s gone beyond the point where his body, his mind can stand it.’
The interesting thing was that the band kept playing, and Ian just woke up, and I was quite concerned about him because when he fell down he fell off the stage, he fell off and he bumped his head, and I thought he could have seriously injured himself. But he just got up, got back onstage and went on with the next number, and so there was always this worry that you’d be witnessing a show where he might go beyond the beyond, because it was going beyond what anyone else was doing at the time, but even he had limits.
There was that kind of awareness of performance art, and I suppose it came from an art-school sensibility among some bands (not all of them). It was something that went through punk rock, in the sense that singers especially or performers knew that in order to shock audiences, they could do something shocking: they dressed up in a shocking way, they could behave in a shocking way.
I’m not sure whether Ian knew about it, I just think he sensed it, and it’s something that he did because of this character that he became when he was onstage, and this character which didn’t have a name was the storyteller in the songs, the narrator, the dancer. He was like his own puppet, because he moved like a puppet, and you felt his vulnerability in that puppet-like movement, and the sense you got that he was potentially hurting himself and potentially going to suffer was something that you were really aware of.
Excerpt from hypnotism tape:
Bernard: You hire your services. What as? What services?
Ian: Trained … soldier.
Bernard: How do you feel?
Ian: Very weak?
Bernard: Why do you feel weak?
Ian: Feverish, very, very hot. Very … resigned to it.
Bernard: You’re resigned to it? What?
Ian: The end of it. It’s easy … I suppose.
Bernard: The end of your life? Would you say you’ve had a good life?
Ian: That’s not for me to … to judge.
Bernard Sumner: Ian had fallen out with Debbie and just needed somewhere to stay, so he stayed with me for a week, which wasn’t great for him because I was still an insomniac and I was staying up till five in the morning. I remember coming back from rehearsals one day and we took a short-cut through the graveyard, and I said to him, ‘You’re lucky, your name could be on one of those stones if you’d succeeded the other week.’ I said, ‘You really, really want to think about it. It’s not worth ending up like that, you know.’
And he was like, ‘Yeah, right, yeah’ – no sort of connection in the response. He’d made his mind up, I think. I don’t know, because he kept those thoughts hermetically sealed off from those around him. He had his public agenda and he had his private agenda. I’m not saying he was a secretive person – he wasn’t – but he was a very determined person, and if he was going to do something, he was going to do it, and if he was going to do it, he certainly wouldn’t discuss it with you.
I was interested in hypnotism. I read a book on hypnotic regression: that sometimes if you’ve got problems in your present, then regression could unlock problems that had occurred either in your childhood or – if you believed in it – in your previous lives. And we were just talking about it one day at rehearsals, and Ian was like, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting, I’d really like to try that.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t we try it now?’ So we tried it, and he went under very, very easy, and we came up with these experiences. He told me about when he was a kid in his cot, and he could describe the wallpaper, and then he went back further to previous lives. We just did it for a laugh, but that was months before. And then when he stayed at my house, I said, ‘You know what we did at rehearsal?’ He said, ‘Well, you’ve told me what happened, but I can’t remember anything about it.’ And I said, ‘Well, do you think it might help you in any way if, you know, you experienced some of the things?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to try it.’ ‘Well, what I’ll do this time is, I’ll record it on a cassette.’
I hypnotised him again, and he went back to exactly the same experiences that he’d had at the rehearsal room. One was a kind of pagan battlefield, which was just pure horror, bodies and limbs everywhere, horror flashing past his eyes. Then there was blackness. One I distinctly remember was about the Hundred Years War between Britain and France, and he’d been captured and was kept in a jail in Spain, of all places, and spent his days there, locked up. And the other was in Victorian times, where he was in a library of some sort surrounded by books.
What struck me was, it was so easy to put him in a trance. One of his solutions to a problem was rage, but not in a horrible macho kind of way. It was fire, he was a human blowtorch, and he’d burn you out of his way with his rage. Now his other solution was that someone would come along and play God, tell him what to do. And you can’t do that with a person’s life. Just before he died, we were loath to advise him, because whatever we said, he would have just done it, and you can’t be responsible for another person’s future, and their past as well.
Tony Wilson: It got weirder because of Ian’s epilepsy, and then Ian took the first overdose. Everyone tried to help; he even went to stay with Barney for a while. He stayed with me and Lindsay for a week. I’m not sure how much help that was because I think Lindsay was as barmy as bloody Ian. In fact, I’ve still got my one effort to help that week: I still have a little blue piece of paper I put into my collected Yeats for Ian to look at some particular Yeats poems and stuff.
Lindsay Reade: I said to Tony, ‘Maybe you should suggest that he come and stay at our house,’ because we lived in Charlesworth, a very small village in the country near Glossop. I thought if his problem is two women, then the best thing is to remove yourself from both women and have some time out. I didn’t think that Ian would accept because I didn’t really know Ian that well then. He’d never even been to our house, I think, but he accepted.
It felt as though we were just like brother and sister. It felt as though we were members of a family who weren’t normally accustomed to being together. He was chain-smoking all the time. Now, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate that, but then it didn’t bother me at all. So there was this comfortable kind of familiarity: we didn’t speak all that much, we just played records and hung out, ate meals and spent the day together, not doing anything very much.
We didn’t go out. We should have done. We just sat in the lounge, listening to music: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, those kinds of things. I felt he was very depressed. It began to get to me, because I’ve always operated on a kind of low-grade depression myself. If I’m with someone who is, then I can quite rapidly go along with them, and as the week progressed that’s what started to happen, that I started to feel depressed as well. We were both depressed by the end of the week.
Tony Wilson: We tried to help but we didn’t. Yeah, we didn’t see it coming, we didn’t see it coming. The fact that I left poor Ian and poor Lindsay at home for the entire week while I went to work because I had a day job, and they drove each other nuts, in the sweetest possible way, I suppose, that was hardly very sensible of me, was it? If you look back and you think how stupid, the fact that none of us really saw it coming, the fact that we were, you know, it’s twenty-four hours from Tulsa, isn’t it? Twenty-four hours from the plane to America.
Annik Honoré: He tried to commit suicide, so it was obvious then that he wasn’t well, and he was saying so in the lyrics. He appeared very depressed during the recording of Closer, although in a letter he said how much he loved those three weeks of London because we could see each other regularly. But otherwise he appeared so very tired and depressed from his disease more than anything else. There’s no way out, there’s no escape. That’s probably what was depressing him the most. I had that tape of Closer, I had a Walkman and I was listening to it all the time and trying to understand, because I never saw any written lyrics. I could only understand from my hearing ‘I like watching the leaves as they fall.’ The ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and all the lyrics on the LP are really depressing and sad, and it’s surprising nobody would pay attention. Maybe for the others it was more like literature, which it was in a way, but it was also coming from his depression.
Tony Wilson: I was getting the train to London from Piccadilly for Granada, and as I drove to the station I saw Ian and Annik hand-in-hand traipsing the side streets near the station, and I said hello to them, and it was obvious they were walking the streets all night together. They got on the train, and I let them be together till Macclesfield, and then after we left Macclesfield and Ian had got off I went to join Annik.
We got into conversation, and Annik expressed how worried she was, how fearful she was. And I’m all kind of, ‘No, no, it’s just art, it’s just an album, for God’s sake. It’s wonderful, I know, but it’s nothing to be frightened of.’ And she said, ‘Don’t you understand, Tony? When he says, “I take the blame,” he means it.’ And I went, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s just art.’ How fucking stupid can you get?
Annik Honoré: I was really worried about his health and about his mood. I told Tony, but there were not so many people I could tell really. I was surprised he didn’t realise, and they probably would think, ‘Oh, this girl, she’s taking things too dramatically.’ But the thing is, I went on holiday abroad with the tape of the record, and I was reading The Idiot at the time, Dostoevsky. I was in Egypt, and it really made sense that this record was tragic.
Listening over and over and trying to understand everything he was saying, then I was absolutely sure this record was just tragic and dramatic. I was crying; even now if I listen to it I cry. I don’t know if it’s me or the mood of the record, but I kept crying listening to his songs, because you can tell he’s suffering, he’s taking it too seriously, he’s really putting himself into those songs. But they were a rock band, and so you just carry on, and when you’re so young I don’t think you realise how serious it is.
Terry Mason: The lyrics weren’t published. They were very ambiguous, and particularly helped by the band saying you can read your own interpretations into it. If people would have seen them, I think there would have been alarm bells going about Ian. You look at them now and you think the man had serious demons inside his head. They’re not right, they’re Stephen King’s darkest moments. It’s all done with hindsight, of course, but you think, ‘God, what on earth was he thinking, what was going through his mind?’
I wouldn’t have seen Ian in the music business for that much longer. I would have seen him as a writer of prose, and I think that’s what he possibly would have wanted, to get away from it. He’d got the stepping stone by being in the band and he was an incredibly talented writer.
Iain Gray: I used to see Ian at gigs, and the last time I ever saw him was in the Beach Club that April. He was always very polite. The Pop Group were on, and he was there with Debbie. I went, ‘Hi, Ian, do you mind if I have a quick word with you?’ He went, ‘No.’ I just went, ‘I haven’t seen you for a while. Unknown Pleasures is great.’ He said he’d been recording in London, and he mentioned about going to America.
I said, ‘I saw you at the New Osborne club, and that track you open with …’ He’d just stood there, the first three minutes of instrumental, just doing the dance. I’d seen them loads of times by then, and even then it was still messianic. I said, ‘What is it called?’ – ‘“Dead Souls”.’ – ‘Oh, it’s brilliant.’ He went, ‘Oh, ta.’ He wasn’t big-headed. He was just having a nice quiet drink with his wife, watching the Pop Group. They seemed very happy together.
I knew him quite closely for a period of time, but I never equated what he was singing about with what he did. When you talked to him, he was such a sweet guy, laughed, joked, but there was always something of the night about him, even when I knew him, moments when he was keeping things back. Maybe he was a very good actor – it was all a facade.
I think the Ian that Ian became he must have hated, because it wasn’t him. The real Ian was this kind of Waltons guy, a really loving, caring individual. But the lyrics he’s singing are of a guy who’s going through the heart of darkness. He’s there, soulless and bent on destruction. It is black and white, and I think Ian always wanted to get back to the white, and he couldn’t. He talked about opening a bookshop and desperate things, wanting the old Ian, but it had gone.
I think the Ian Ian became was always there. He was just fighting it and he was a very good actor, but there were moments of strangeness where you would think, ‘What’s that about?’ On the train journey to London in late 1976, he talked about, ‘Have you ever thought of dying, Iain?’ I just started laughing: ‘What are you on about?’ And he went, ‘I sometimes think, is there anything else?’ It was just a throwaway remark, but I thought afterwards it was a really strange thing for someone to say who is picture-postcard happy.
Since then I’ve worked in mental health for many years, and I’ve seen people like him who, people would say, ‘What a shock, they killed themselves.’ But Ian was doing it onstage. I think we all have demons inside, and the demon inside Ian must have been an awful one. He was obviously fighting that when I spoke to him in April. We were talking about Werner Herzog, and he was saying he was really into that. I mentioned Stroszek, and he said, ‘Oh, I’d like to see that, that’s supposed to be really good.’ And then it was on television three weeks later.
- 28 April 1980: T. J. Davidson’s Rehearsal Rooms, Manchester, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ video shoot
Bernard Sumner: That video for ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was shot just after Ian had tried to commit suicide, so it was a really trying time for us. There are some very famous photographs. Anton Corbijn took them. Me and Ian are carrying a flight case, and Ian’s sat down, like this, and he looks quite depressed. He wasn’t normally like that, but that was quite near to the end. We felt, ‘Well, what can we try to do to cheer him up? We’ll write a couple of songs.’ And we wrote ‘In a Lonely Place’ and ‘Ceremony’ in a week, we shot the video, but it was all hopeless really.
Anton Corbijn: Rob Gretton had contacted me: could I send them some contact sheets from the previous session? And they used it on this Sordide Sentimental release in Belgium, with ‘Dead Souls’ and ‘Atmosphere’ on the other side. I used the horizontal picture in there, which was quite different. And that’s also the reason they asked me to come up to Manchester a couple of months later, because they actually liked the pictures – nobody else did – and they asked me to come up for the video shooting of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as a fly-on-the-wall kind of thing.
They said, ‘We won’t pose for you, but we’d love you to take some pictures.’ So that’s what I did, and then I got the picture of Ian where he sits on a speaker or an amplifier, staring into the abyss, in a way, with a cigarette. That was the second good picture I took. I think I only took two good pictures, but they’ve lasted all those years. I guess there was something in there that everybody can relate to. I assumed he was tired, but I didn’t realise it was maybe he was tired of life. How many things went through his mind …
I have the feeling everyone was in a good mood actually; there was nothing that I would have thought was like doom or gloom. I just thought Ian was tired and they had to do this video, but that was all a whole new world to me as well – it was the first time I was at the making of a video. There’s another shot of the same place where Ian was sitting, which is a different atmosphere, the light is different and how he looks is different. The other is more intense.
Stephen Morris: ‘Ceremony’ and ‘In a Lonely Place’ were the last two songs that we did. God knows if they’re the right lyrics. We couldn’t make them out. All we had was a really naff rehearsal tape of it.
- 2 May 1980: High Hall, Birmingham University
Jeremy Kerr: He was not well, Ian. I remember the mixing desk – it was Pink Floyd’s mixing desk, all fluorescent lights – that’s the only thing I can remember about that gig, and it was a nice room. They were good, but he was ill.
Tony Wilson: The last conversation we had, which was at the Birmingham gig, which was the last gig ever, was about how interested I was in his and Simon Topping’s use of archaic language. Now I can’t quite remember which: there’s a line from A Certain Ratio and a line from Joy Division around that time which interested me. I think one of them is ‘When all’s said and done’. It’s an archaic use of language, and that interested me that they both used it.
Lesley Gilbert: We went and stayed with him for a couple of nights while Lindsay and Tony were away. I thought he seemed okay then, he seemed as if he’d decided what he was going to do. Now whether that meant he was going to commit suicide … That’s not what I thought. I thought it meant he’d decided which way he was going to go, Debbie or Annik. He didn’t say which way, but the overall feeling that I got was that he’d come to some sort of decision and felt quite relieved about it.
Annik Honoré: In the last letter he writes, he does say that he’s looking forward to going, especially … I can’t remember which city, but there’s a city in particular he’d like to go to, because there they would have a few days off, so it would give him a chance to rest and visit. Maybe it was New York. So he was looking forward to that, but he was mentioning that it was a long time not to see each other and that he wished I was going with them. Everybody thought he was happy to go there, to the States – another adventure.
Peter Hook: It was horrible, the pain you felt witnessing Ian. He was obviously ill, he was obviously really struggling, but he never gave up, he never stopped, he didn’t want to stop. I never read Ian’s letters, but I found them recently and I was reading Ian’s letter to Annik just before we were supposed to go to America, and it was just really weird to read the letter and him looking forward to it, and then for him to commit suicide. I still haven’t come to terms with it. It just seems really weird.
Terry Mason: The minder role was to have started the first day on the US tour. My job would have been to make sure Ian takes his medication, get him back to the hotel, try to have him go to bed, make sure that he ate properly, because quite obviously, once we were on tour in America, the band would be playing places where fans would want to have their ten minutes of fame with the new Jim Morrison. It would have been a fantastic job to have done as well: it would have given me more time with Ian. Also, we could talk about owning dogs.
The tour was never in doubt. Ian’s position inside the band and Factory was such that if Ian really didn’t want to go, I’m sure he could have turned round and said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it now.’ No one would have had any complaints if he’d said, ‘Look, I just want to sort out me life, get me health on a better track than it is now.’ I was round at Ian’s house on the Thursday before we were supposed to go, and he’d gone out and got his passport photos done for the American embassy. As far as I’m concerned, Ian wanted to go.
In his letters to Annik he was saying how he was looking forward to doing it. He was a bit apprehensive, but I think Ian probably felt he was carrying the weight of the world. At that point all of Factory and the people involved in Factory were basically on Ian’s shoulders. If he’d said no, there would certainly have been repercussions for an awful lot of people by him not carrying on. Ian was a very honourable person, and I always got the impression that he would do it to keep up his side of the agreement in being with Factory and being with the band.
By the Thursday Ian seemed to have got his head sorted out: he was going to get divorced from Debbie, he was still going to see Natalie, and at the end of the US tour he’d got to have six months off. All he had to do was the US tour, and then there would be six months’ complete break. At that point he could have walked away, if he wanted to. You have to think that something happened, something snapped on the Saturday night, because Ian showed no signs of not wanting to go to America.
Lesley Gilbert: I bumped into them on the Friday. Ian was with Rob and Hooky. I worked on Deansgate and I just bumped into them in my lunch hour, and they’d been shopping for clothes to go to America because they were going on the Monday, so it was, well, the day before he died. They were so excited and showing me what they’d bought, and Ian was really looking forward to it. Rob Gretton Notebook
Peter Hook: We rehearsed on the Friday night and I drove Ian home in me Mark 10 420G, the red one with the gold flash at the side, KFR 666F. I drove him home cos I lived in Moston and he was staying with his parents in Moston, and we were laughing and screaming in the car because we were going to America on the Monday morning. We were over the moon, we really were. I dropped him off at his parents’, and he said he was going back tomorrow to see Natalie before he went. He said, ‘I’ll see you at the airport,’ and that was the last time I saw him.
Kevin Cummins: It was the night of Mick Middles’s wedding, and Rob and Lesley and me and a girl I was seeing at the time went to the wedding, then to the reception and back to Rob’s afterwards, and we were up virtually all night. I was going to go to America with them. We were just talking about the tour, and how things had moved on so brilliantly, and how exciting it was going to the States. We were all looking forward to it. It was everybody’s first trip to America, and you’re not going to say no to that.
When you’re playing local gigs around Manchester, Huddersfield and everywhere within a twenty-mile radius, the first time you played the Marquee or wherever in London was always so exciting. It was a landmark gig. When Buzzcocks played the Marquee, we organised a coach trip from Manchester to go and see it. The whole idea of it was so exciting. And this was a step up. ‘We’ve got to go to this.’ And with America, you’re not going to turn it down, you’re just not.
Bernard Sumner: He had been staying at my house, and we used to stay up late talking about various things. He always used to talk about Nietzsche and a lot of books that he’d read, a lot of philosophers and stuff. We used to go out into Manchester and play pool in a couple of bars. We used to go out with this strange guy that I worked with at the animation place, a guy called Paul Dawson. He was very odd. He was into magic tricks and used to call himself the Amazing Noswad.
Well, Noswad is Dawson backwards, and me and Ian and Paul used to go out, but he was very strange, very, very strange. He used to collect stuffed animals – like the guy out of Psycho. I remember he got made redundant and he spent all his redundancy money on buying stuffed animals, and his ambition was to buy a stuffed human being. Ian found him fascinating, and so we were due to go out with him for a drink on the Saturday night.
We were going to America on the Monday. Ian had gone back to live with his mum and dad on the Thursday or something, and he phoned me on the Friday night and said, ‘I can’t come out tomorrow, I’m going to go and see Debbie before we go away.’ You kind of think ‘Oh-oh’ a little bit, ‘It’s going to end in tears.’ I just thought they were going to have an argument, so I said, ‘Are you sure? Why don’t you just come out and have a drink? We’ll have a laugh.’ But no: ‘I’ve got to see her.’
It was on the Saturday night that we were supposed to be going out. I said, ‘Well, I’m actually going over to Blackpool tomorrow to see Section 25,’ which was another group that was on the Factory label, good friends of mine over near Blackpool. I said, ‘So I won’t see you on the Sunday, I’ll just see you at the airport on Monday.’ I did have trepidations, I was a little bit worried, but he seemed quite calm and rational, because he always did. That was the last time I spoke to him.
Annik Honoré: I returned from my holiday in Egypt during the week before Ian died, so we managed to call each other a few times. I was probably in Belgium for about five days before I was due to go back to England, and we managed to speak three times. He was desperate to find out if I was okay after this holiday. It appeared like a dangerous place to go and very far away, so he really wanted to know how I was.
The conversations we had later were always about the trip to America and how we could arrange to meet before, because I was due back on the Sunday and they were due to fly to America on the Monday. The last time we spoke was on the Saturday night, when I was at Plan K, backstage with Digital Dance, and it was a short conversation where basically he said that I have to call him, that he would call me on the Sunday when I’m back home in England, in London.
I always thought I was the last one to talk to him, but apparently so many things happened on that Saturday night. He saw Debbie after that, late, because it’s an hour earlier where he was, so maybe it was like nine or ten at Plan K, but it was only eight or nine in Macclesfield. But it was very short and I couldn’t hear him very well – I was backstage with lots of people around – and basically we just agreed that he should call me at home the following day, and he told me he was listening to a record and was going to watch a film and he was alone. But I could feel he wasn’t well.
I’d spoken with him a couple of days before, and he was impatient for me to come back – it had been such a long time. He hadn’t seen me for more than three weeks now, and he said that it’s imperative that we meet before they go to America, because otherwise it would be like seven or eight weeks without seeing each other. So that’s what we were saying on the phone: he was trying to give me the latest news about the arrangements to the airport and the flight and things like that, but we had only very short conversations in those days from abroad.
Deborah Curtis (from Touching from a Distance): I’d had enough. I was working so hard, and all these money problems. My mum was looking after Natalie. Having a baby makes you grow up. It didn’t make him grow up. I could have stayed with him that night, but he made it clear that he didn’t want me there. I would have fallen asleep, I was dead on my feet, and I could have woken up the next day and he’d have done it while I was asleep. I think he’d decided, he was just trying to pick his moment. I don’t think he had any intention of going to America, he was frightened of flying, and he possibly didn’t want to die in America. Maybe the American thing hurried it up.
Richard Boon: I basically think he couldn’t cope with success. All the psychic and physical places, the degree of success they’d already had was disrupting his family life, making him travel, having a lot of uncertainty about what he was doing. Maybe he wasn’t happy necessarily with what they were doing. Did he want more of it? He just said no.