Peter Hook: The police phoned me up. They couldn’t get in touch with Rob, they couldn’t get in touch with anybody. I was the first one that they told. It was really weird because I was sitting down just about to have me Sunday lunch, me and Iris, and the phone rang. I went on the phone, and they said, ‘We’re trying to get in touch with Rob Gretton.’ And I said, ‘He should be at home.’ They said, ‘We phoned him at home, he’s not there.’ I said, ‘Why, what’s the problem?’ And they said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Ian Curtis has committed suicide.’
And I went, ‘Right, okay.’ And they went, ‘Right, okay. Well, if you speak to Mr Gretton, could you get him to call us?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, right, okay,’ and put the phone down, and went and sat back and had me dinner. And then Iris said to me, ‘Who was on the phone, by the way?’ And I went, ‘Oh, Ian’s killed himself,’ and that was it then, that was the shock of it. It was really weird, horrible, and then everything seems a blur after that. I must have tried to get in touch with Rob, or driven probably to see him – I can’t remember, to be honest.
Lesley Gilbert: We’d been out because it was a really nice day, and we’d gone for a walk in the park, and there was an athletics meeting on, so we’d stayed to watch that. Then when we got back – we hadn’t been back very long – Hooky and Iris came round and obviously told us. They’d been trying to find us, because they lived really close to my mum and dad’s, and they’d even been round there looking for us. So that was Sunday teatime-ish, I suppose.
It was numbness more than shock. I had no inkling, I had no thoughts in my mind that maybe that’s what he’d do, but I still don’t remember feeling shocked, just a bit puzzled, I suppose, and a bit numb. I can’t remember how Rob reacted. When you spend that much time with somebody and they do something like that without anybody having an inkling about it … I think everybody was just a bit, ‘Well, what was that for then?’
Bernard Sumner: The original idea was that Ian would meet me the next day, cos we were going to go over to a friend’s house near Blackpool. We were going to go water skiing. But he never turned up, and I went water skiing anyway. I came back to my friend’s house and I was drying myself off with a towel, and the phone rang, and it was Rob. It was Larry’s house or Paul’s house, out of Section 25. He said, ‘I’ve got a bit of bad news for you. I’m afraid Ian’s committed suicide.’ – ‘You mean, he’s tried to kill himself?’ – ‘No, he’s done it.’
And it was like the cymbals at that gig. The whole room just turned upside down. I put the phone down, went and washed my face with cold water. It was just the biggest shock I’d ever had in my life. I found it quite difficult to accept at first that he had actually done it. But yeah, that was it, no tour of America. Everything just collapsed, no more future. And I’m sure it was the same for everyone else involved.
I was just in a state of shock, because apart from everything else, it’s quite an incredible act of violence to kill yourself. I sometimes wonder whether Ian’s explosive personality actually gave him the bollocks to go through with it. People say that people who commit suicide are cowards, but I think the opposite is true. I think it takes a great deal of courage to kill yourself – not that I’m advocating it, obviously – but certainly in my darkest moments I would never have the courage to do anything like that, or the desire.
I guess it was just a great feeling of anger at Ian for doing it, on behalf of his family and his parents. It’s an act of violence against his parents, who had done so much for him to bring him up, so I felt really sorry for them, but angry on behalf of the group. Although I didn’t think it was an act of cowardice, I did think it was a terribly selfish thing to do, but there again, it was easy for me to sit there and think that because I was looking at it from my perspective as a human being.
I didn’t have any of the problems that he had, so what I think is pretty irrelevant really, because I wasn’t him. So in the end I dropped the anger and forgave him personally, but you just scan over: Was there any way I could have stopped him? Was there anything I could have done? But apart from putting a twenty-four-hour watch on him, no, there wasn’t, but it’s a terrible thing to do to those around you, because if not completely, it partially destroys their lives as well.
Stephen Morris: I was shocked when I first heard, but then I thought it was probably an accident, knowing him. Maybe he didn’t mean to do it, but I think he did. I think he was a bit worried cos someone had told him that they don’t like epileptics in the States. It isn’t true, but I know someone had told him that. Apart from that, I think he was looking forward to actually going to America. He was up for it: Chelsea Hotel … I didn’t think he was 100 per cent fed up with it all. Whatever it was, I don’t know, but I didn’t think he’d go all the way.
The first thing I thought after he died was, it’s going to be like another Jimi Hendrix. You’re going to have people coming round saying, ‘What was he like?’ Which didn’t happen as much as I thought it was going to. I was sort of 50 per cent sad and 50 per cent angry: really angry at him for being stupid and doing that, and angry at myself for not doing something.
Tony Wilson: It was a Sunday, early afternoon, and I was working as an assistant producer on World in Action. We were in the editing suites in the first floor at Granada, a very sunny Sunday afternoon, and the phone goes. ‘It’s for you, Tony’. And it’s Rob. ‘Hello, Rob.’ And Rob just says, ‘Ian’s dead, he was found this morning.’ So I go, ‘Five minutes, Rob.’ Put the phone down. Now I didn’t tell the people, because obviously we were making World in Action for that next night, so I just said, ‘You don’t need me at the moment. I’ll be back in fifteen, twenty minutes.’
And then I got in my car, the old Peugeot, and drove to Rob’s. And one of my main memories is coming out of the house after fifteen, twenty minutes with Rob and seeing my car parked sideways in the middle of the road. When something like that happens, the way your car is and how it’s parked just has no relevance whatsoever, so my one memory is the fact that my car was in the middle of the street, sideways with the door open, and was left there for thirty minutes while I was inside with Rob. So that was my memory of that afternoon.
Lindsay Reade: I was with Jeremy Kerr, lying on a hill in the sunshine in Charlesworth. Tony had gone in to work. Jez had stayed at our house for some reason. We must have gone there straight away to get away from the house. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the juxtaposition between Ian’s onstage performance and his personality and a beautiful day and the most terrible news I think I’d ever heard in my entire life … I just couldn’t believe that anything so awful could have happened.
I had this huge row with Tony on the day because I didn’t think he was seeing Ian as a human being so much as this iconic pop star, which ironically is what he’s become. I just felt that he needed something that he wasn’t getting as a human being. I don’t know what it was, I don’t know if any of us could have given it to him. Well, we didn’t, and we were all guilty of not giving it to him, I think.
Deborah Curtis: It might have been that he saw death as the only way out. He told me he didn’t want to do Closer, he said he’d just wanted to do Unknown Pleasures, ‘Transmission’ and that’s it. But there must have been a lot of pressure, knowing that if you didn’t go to America, the rest of the band didn’t go to America. He couldn’t really turn around and say, ‘I’m not going.’ I don’t want to blame anybody, but somebody should have said, ‘This isn’t working, something’s got to happen.’ He should have gone into hospital, not gone on tour.
But that’s not fair to them, because Ian made sure that I wasn’t in communication with the others. Because he was telling them one thing about me, and telling me something else about them. I don’t think they realised he was telling so many lies. He was a very good liar, he was very convincing. He could go to a gig and say he was having a really bad time with Debbie, Debbie’s moaning about this and that, and people are always trying to be tactful; nobody’s going to ring me up and say, ‘What are you playing at?’
Tony Wilson: Herzog was his hero, and Herzog was a concomitant factor in his suicide. He was with his parents and he didn’t want to put his dad through watching this film late at night, so he went home to watch this tragic, romantic film where the hero commits suicide at the end. You know the famous last line, where there’s a dead man in the cable car and the chicken is still dancing, which is why with our usual sense of fun we put the chicken’s feet on the run-out of the first three sides of Still, then on the last side the chicken stops.
Kevin Cummins: I got a call from Rob, and all he said was, ‘That silly cunt has killed himself.’ Nothing else, and I knew exactly what he meant because of the way the conversation had been the previous night. He’d been saying how Ian wasn’t happy about going away, that his life was in a mess and he couldn’t cope with various things, and Rob was like, ‘When you get to America, you’ll be fine, don’t worry. It’s the best thing for you, you’ll be away from everybody.’
Annik Honoré: I took the hovercraft back very early Sunday morning, like six o’clock or so. I took the train to Calais and then the hovercraft, where I felt really sick, although the sea was quiet, and then arrived in London, and the phone call never took place, he never rang. So I thought, ‘Maybe there’s a problem, I should call his parents,’ because that’s where he was supposed to be staying. And when I called, his father just said, ‘Ian is dead,’ and he put the phone down, and that was it.
So I called Rob. I was desperate to find out what it was, and Rob hadn’t heard, he didn’t know. They all went out the day before, and he said, ‘No, they must be playing a cruel joke on you,’ he said something like that, and he said, ‘I’ll call you back in a minute.’ It seemed to last a long time, and when he called back, it was to confirm that Ian was dead. Yeah, Sunday afternoon.
To me, this suicide is somehow still an accident, because he had been drinking alcohol, and the mixture of the pills and staying up late and being tired, and probably having some arguments about the divorce with Debbie, altogether it was just too much for him to take. I realise it takes a lot of courage to hang yourself, so I don’t know exactly how he managed to do that. But I don’t think he planned it the day before; it was just something he did on the spur of the moment. Suddenly there was no other possibility.
Because six weeks before, he appeared very sincere in the fact that it was an accident, that he never does it again. I think it was a time also when we were not seeing each other because it was getting far too dramatic and complicated for me to be in a triangle. It’s the worst thing, and I was very young and I didn’t want the guilt of going out with a married man. It was getting far too complicated for me to take.
When Debbie found out, she called me and she was absolutely going out of her mind. That day I decided it was over, that I couldn’t take any more and it would be more simple to separate, but I don’t think that’s what he wanted either. I can’t say, it wasn’t clear in his mind; maybe he wanted both women. The disease was the worst – I still think you don’t die because of a wife and a girlfriend, for God’s sake – but he was very unhappy to be sick, that’s how I see it.
Bernard Sumner: We joined a group so that we could be utterly irresponsible and extend our adolescence, and we were in that frame of mind. To have done something for Ian would have taken someone with responsibility, and it was nowhere to be found, and I just think that’s because of the head space we got ourselves into. Because it started so suddenly with Ian, we had this difficulty: we didn’t know how severe it was, and it’s easy in retrospect, but we didn’t really know. It wasn’t just the epilepsy either, he was in a terrible state emotionally.
In fact, when he first tried to commit suicide and took the overdose, it was a complete surprise. It was the breakdown of his relationship, accentuated by the quantity of barbiturates he was taking to subdue his epilepsy. Barbiturates make you so you’re laughing one minute, crying the next. He’d had a physical breakdown, a relationship breakdown, which caused an emotional breakdown. Apart from this strange suggestibility, which I don’t really think anyone else noticed, he was mentally all over the place.
If it had been me, I would have been extremely worried, but if we agreed that we were going to keep the band together but weren’t going to do gigs any more, how come a month later we were going on an American tour? It wasn’t right. People start getting all the wrong priorities once you start becoming successful. They don’t know when to leave you alone and give you a fucking rest. You need more than one kind of sleep in this profession.
I think there’s always another reason why they do it that nobody knows. There’s all the public reasons, but there’s another reason: that last section of a personality that no one knows about. Ian would hide those thoughts from you completely. It was a bit like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m really looking forward to going to America, can’t wait. Yeah, I’ve been out buying clothes. Yeah, we should do this song, we should do that song, it’s going to be great.’ That was what he was like, never mentioned his fits and was just completely positive and really looking forward to it: ‘Next time we go back I think we should be doing this kind of tour, we should play these sort of clubs next time.’
There was never any indication. Obviously there was after the first time he tried, and I tried to discuss it with him then and talk him out of it, but once he’d made his mind up, he’d made his mind up. I remain convinced to this day that if someone is going to commit suicide, they’re gonna do it, no matter what the fuck anyone says to them. Ian was gonna do it. According to Debbie, he’d talked about doing it years ago.
Deborah Curtis: I think he wanted to be like Jim Morrison, someone who got famous and died. Being in a band was very important, he was very single-minded about it. He’d always said that he didn’t want to live into his twenties, after twenty-five. I think it was the teenage thing. Teenagers like to have something to be miserable about, don’t they? But it changed. He stopped talking about it. I don’t think he forgot about it. I thought he’d grow out of it. And when it got too late really, he wouldn’t talk about it. You couldn’t discuss it with him, you couldn’t find out what was really going on.
When we were kids, lots of people were miserable. But they grew out of it. I think he enjoyed being unhappy. I think he liked to wallow in it. There were times when we were happy, but they were when we were on our own, when we went out walking or things like that. But I don’t think he liked his friends to know that he was happy. You know that Ian was very charismatic, and he tended to lead people, and people liked to be part of his will, so I don’t think anybody really questioned what he was doing very much. Because he was different, so many people admired him.
Bernard Sumner: I came to terms with it pretty well straight away, because it was the third one. I knew why he’d done it. Or I could put my own reason on why I thought he’d done it, why I would have done it. At the time I remember going very silent, not being able to speak very much. Just feeling very down. I think it makes you very hard. I feel now that I’m quite cold, and when I was a child I was very warm. Now I can be quite cold and detached. I can never really make close friendships, just because everything I’ve ever been close to has died.
It just seems a bit callous to do that towards the people that love you. If you’re going to do that, you’ve got to think about your parents and your close ones more than yourself. It seems quite a cruel thing to do, so my heart’s angry but my brain is saying, ‘Don’t be so judgemental.’ It’s hard to get in Ian’s head and think, ‘What did he think his future was going to be?’ He must have had a bleak image of his future, because he was very, very ill, very ill, and those days weren’t these days: the care for it wasn’t as good as it is now.
Mark Reeder: I was completely surprised. And angry that he’d robbed us of more brilliant music. I couldn’t believe it. I spoke to him at his home in Barton Street about two weeks before they were going to America. I knew he was having a bit of trouble and I said, ‘When you’ve done these gigs in the States, come to Berlin. Just have a break.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do that.’ I know he was a bit frightened about flying, and at first I thought it might be that. But that’s stupid really.
It was Monday morning when my friend Mark Farrow phoned me up and goes, ‘Have you heard about Ian?’ – ‘What? They’re going to America.’ – ‘No, he killed himself.’ – ‘Who told you that?’ He said, ‘Rob just phoned me.’ And I was like, ‘Are you mad?’ I didn’t believe it. Then I put the phone down, and five minutes later Rob phones and tells me. This was the worst news I’d ever heard in my life, at that moment. And it affected me so much. I was distraught, I didn’t know what to do. I was devastated. Rob was trying to console me on the phone. I was in tears. He phoned me up every single day, tried to calm me down. He said that Ian had left a note. He told me everything and said, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ Who am I going to tell? Who would I talk to about it? This is personal business. It’s got nothing to do with anybody else. I was hoping to go to the funeral, but I never managed it.
Rob told me what was in the note. It wasn’t about the band at all. And it wasn’t really about Debbie, either. It was just that he couldn’t deal with the situation. I think, personally, that he just didn’t want to give up on the relationship that he was having with Annik or the relationship that he was having with Debbie. I think the decision was, ‘If I can’t have one or the other, then no one is going to have me at all.’ It was the worst day.
Peter Hook: The next time I remember anything was when we all went and sat in the Bluebell Inn, Moston Lane, and just sat there staring at each other, until Rob presumably got involved in the funeral arrangements and things like that. I spent most of the time in the pub. We spent most of the time together, all of us – me, Twinny, Terry, Barney – we’d all go and sit together, just sit in the pub. I think we couldn’t take it in really, what had happened.
I mean, one of my greatest regrets in life is that I didn’t go and see him after he was dead. I really, really do regret that, but I think we were so young we didn’t know what the bloody hell. Nobody offered. You’d think someone would say, ‘Do you want to go and see him?’ Fucking right, do I want to go and see a dead body? Do I fuck, you know? I’m twenty-two, I’m going to the pub, fuck that. But I really do regret not seeing him and saying goodbye now, I really do. It was only Bernard and I that didn’t go. Everybody else went.
We went to the funeral. I mean, you just felt like you were watching a TV programme really. I remember going for something to eat after the funeral and being really shocked when his sister screamed at the funeral, so we didn’t go to the wake, we didn’t feel like we were welcome really, I don’t know why. And the next thing I remember after that would be the inquest. Was there summat happened at the inquest? Something really weird, his dad said something really weird at the inquest.
I’m sure he killed himself because he couldn’t handle it. I’ve been through break-ups that have driven you to the brink, and if there’s nobody there to pull you back, it would be quite easy. When you take into account what he was going through with epilepsy, mistress, child, wife … Fucking hell, all the ingredients are there, all the warning signs were there – cutting himself up with a knife, taking his first overdose – everything was there. You don’t need to be a bleeding genius to work out that he’s going to top himself sooner or later, and he did, and that was it.
Deborah Curtis: He didn’t commit suicide because he had marital problems. He had marital problems because he wanted to commit suicide. I felt angry with him because he got the last word. How can you be angry with someone who’s dead? They aren’t there, you can’t shake them, you can’t smack them around the face. You’re totally impotent, it’s horrible. It’s like putting a big sign up, saying, ‘There, I’ve done it, and you can’t do anything about it. So much for your talking.’
Tony Wilson: Certainly on the first night that we went to see Ian in the chapel of rest, my memory of that was of Alan going in first, and then Alan making us wait outside cos Ian’s mum and dad were there. What Alan did – typical Erasmus, wonderful Erasmus – they’d got the collar down here, so the fucking rope marks were all here, so Alan – I don’t know how he did it – had just moved the collar up so that Mr and Mrs Curtis wouldn’t see the rope marks. I thought that was very sweet of Alan.
Paul Morley: Wilson actually showed me the body of Ian Curtis, which Wilson now claims he didn’t do, being Wilson. I do remember it because it was so preposterous, but he said to me at the time, ‘When you write the book …’ He was planning already, and he’s had his way, which we might call sweet or sour or bitter or charming or whatever. He said, ‘When you write the book, you’ve got to have seen the body,’ so it was all a bit odd for me.
Tony Wilson: Then our job – this was Lindsay’s and my job – was to look after Annik, so that Annik wouldn’t go to the funeral. There was all that kind of shittiness going round, so Annik didn’t go to the funeral because it was my job to make sure that she got on the plane back to Brussels and there was no scene at the funeral. Certainly, looking after Annik for five or six days – I’m sure she probably doesn’t remember this much – she was playing both albums back to back, non-stop, twenty-four hours a day for the entire time she stayed in the cottage. There you go.
Annik Honoré: I arrived back in London on the Sunday, and my landlady saw me absolutely devastated and so she gave me some sleeping tablets and I explained to her, and decided I will go to Manchester. And so I took a train to Manchester the day after. I think the first person I saw was Rob. He had arranged to meet me at the station or somewhere, and in the meantime he had agreed that I could visit Ian at the chapel of rest. He had discussed with Debbie that if I was to go there, then would I not go to the funeral? I could only say yes, so he took me to the chapel of rest, and Tony and Lindsay arrived. I remember Paul Morley was there too, but I don’t think he came with me. I was on my own when I saw Ian, and from there they decided that the best place to go would be to Tony and Lindsay’s. They were living in the countryside, in Charlesworth – from what I can remember, a very isolated place. But Lindsay kept giving me sleeping pills and stuff to calm me down because I was crying non-stop.
So it’s a bit vague, but I can never thank her enough, because everybody was lost. It was extremely nice of her, and of Tony. And so I stayed there for five days, because I still had my plane ticket for when I returned to Brussels on 23 May that Tony bought, and my name said A. Curtis because he didn’t know my name, Honoré, and so I came back to Brussels and Michel Duval was waiting for me at the airport.
Mark Reeder: After Ian died, Annik contacted me. I was in the middle of nowhere, in Berlin. Ian kills himself, and she had no one to turn to. No one in Manchester had any time for her. The band didn’t know her: they didn’t have anything to do with her, even when she was with Ian. In Rob’s eyes, she was the Belgian bint, you know? They didn’t know anything about her at all. I got to know Annik very well, and she became my girlfriend.
And then I realised exactly what kind of relationship she’d had with Ian. Because she was a virgin at twenty-four, and it was, ‘How does that work?’ I thought they’d been having this sexual relationship, and they hadn’t at all. It was only about her being an intellectual sparring partner for Ian.
Paul Morley: I think in our private lives – not just with me but everyone – love lives, family, it was all disaster, but we didn’t talk about it. We were very determined to locate value and purpose and greatness and art and this stuff, but we didn’t really talk about our lives. You’d never really get to know anybody at all. I remember going round to Factory Records after the funeral, and they played The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, and I just remember being frozen throughout it.
I think we were all frozen at the aptness and yet the absolute stupidity that we should be doing this. It was classic putting on a brave face, doing it in a showy way and not really dealing with the emotion. That idea that Joy Division was all about emotion, but none of us ever displayed any emotion in front of each other. It was almost like we were too damned self-conscious about maintaining a ridiculous kind of degraded cool, a kind of cool that time was meant to destroy, but we still didn’t really talk to each other.
Tony Wilson: Martin took it the worst in the end, leaving the family aside, who obviously suffered much more. I always think that Martin never recovered from Ian’s death in many ways, because Martin had found his performer, the person through whom his art could find its way to the world. How stupid we were, the fact that we didn’t see there being real problems. I can remember there was that line on the Closer album – ‘A cry for help, a hint of anaesthesia’ – that’s what we thought that first attempt was. It was just like, ‘Oh well, it’s just that.’
Martin Hannett: It was an accident, wasn’t it? Thirty-two barbs and half a bottle of scotch. I never saw the inquest. It totally did my head in, that. I was in the Townhouse with the Buzzcocks, and for some reason I wrapped the session up, rocketed back to the hotel, threw everything in the boot of my car, drove home to Manchester, got home at ten, was enjoying a coffee, and Tosh Ryan phoned and told me. That was the day after, Monday morning. It wasn’t totally unexpected, because he’d tried to do it weeks earlier.
Tony Wilson: Well, there’s a thousand theories. Did Ian take it all too hard, and did he blame himself? I used to think he blamed himself. I know that Bernard’s point of view is that the drugs they were giving Ian for his epilepsy were profoundly taking him over the edge.
I have my own personal belief, which is that if you have a child, you love that child, and Ian loved Natalie. But you’ve grown out of love with your first wife and you’ve fallen in love with somebody else, you can’t stay in the marriage but you can’t leave your child, and guess what the only way out is? The only way out is to top yourself. So that’s my version, but of course the only version that really counts is Ian’s version, and we’ll never know.
Paul Morley: I still didn’t realise with Ian, even though he was writing those lyrics, even though he was having terrible trouble in his private life, even though he was collapsing onstage, even though he was obviously very ill, even though he tried it a few times before, you still didn’t really, really believe that it would happen.
But yeah, that distraction he played all along – certainly towards the end – of everything being okay. Even my brief conversations with him, having very recently had my own experience with suicide, knowing the distraction and the disguises and the con tricks that the potential suicide can play on you, to the very bitter end, as if there’s nothing wrong: ‘I’ll see you later,’ and you never do.
Peter Saville: The day Tony phoned me to tell me that Ian had died, it was during that conversation that I suddenly thought of the cover we had, and I felt it necessary to point it out, and Tony was very concerned. The notions of sensationalism or exploitation were there, and I said, ‘Tony, we’ve got a tomb on the cover of the album,’ and he was like, ‘Oh fuck.’ The cover was done, I don’t know, weeks before Ian died. It was done by the time the album was done, and it had gone to print, or at least to proofing.
They had to decide whether to go ahead with it or not, and it had been decided: the group chose it together, including Ian, it was their cover, and it’s a great cover. Anyway, so he went away and he and Rob and Steve and Hooky and Bernard dealt with that. I mean, what was going through Ian’s mind at the time, we don’t know.
There is one song on that album which I’ve found upsetting for all these years. I cry when I hear ‘Isolation’. I cry a little bit just thinking about it. It’s far too upsetting listening to it. It’s such a straightforward statement of feeling, but a far more troubled feeling than we’ve come to associate with people writing pop songs. People project, but obviously with ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, and ultimately with ‘Isolation’, Ian wasn’t projecting, wasn’t going somewhere and then coming back out of that place. He was obviously too long in that place.
‘Isolation’ is a letter from that place, from a place where there doesn’t seem to be any point in going on. I mean, we all have times like that – hours, weeks, days – but most of us have the filters to protect ourselves in that mood. It is most likely a chemistry thing, and all I can imagine is that Ian got into one of those moods at that time, wrote from that mood but didn’t come out of it, and the whole thing becomes extreme: the cover becomes extreme, the images strangely predictive.
It’s difficult to listen to ‘Isolation’ knowing that somebody has written a song and killed themselves soon afterwards. The line ‘Mother, please forgive me, I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am,’ it’s very difficult to hear someone say that, it’s very difficult to hear anyone ever say it. But in the context of somebody that you know and respected who has then committed suicide as a cumulation of those feelings, it’s terrible to listen to. It’s like listening to someone’s suicide note.
Jon Wozencroft: It’s well documented that he had tried a few weeks previously to overdose on pills. The night of his suicide doesn’t add up, though, even if he had succeeded in engineering an evening where he was going to be on his own, for the first time in ages. If one accepts that Ian was a chameleon-like figure who could be various things to various people at various times, added to the fact that he was having serious personal problems, what was less clear to anyone outside his close circle was the way that he was being seriously destabilised by the treatment for epilepsy that he was on. All treatment was an experimental treatment at the time.
But he was also on the cusp of exactly what he wanted, which was to get out of Manchester, to travel and see the world, to go to America, the land of some of his heroes. And he didn’t want to let anyone down.
We know that he’d drunk a bottle of whisky, we know that he was on some pretty powerful medication, we know that he was listening to Iggy Pop, we know that he’d just watched Herzog’s Stroszek, which is an extraordinarily depressing film, but also a very powerful one, uplifting in some ways, because it doesn’t come darker than that. The film would have finished by the early hours. There’s a haunting scene at the end, with the auctioneer’s voice selling off Stroszek’s trailer home. Money worries were a big thing for Ian. Nearing dawn, evidently reaching breaking point, he wrote a letter to Deborah. Afterwards there was only a perfunctory inquest and no full coroner’s investigation into the last hours or even days of his life. Deborah found him hunched over the washing machine in a foetal position, kneeling, with his hands stretched forward. It could well have been a grand mal fit.
So the fan is left with this kind of myth of Ian, the rock suicide, which I think does him an extreme disservice. I think it’s a very personal tragedy. I think it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the demise of people such as Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain. I think it’s incredibly sad and poignant and tragic in the closest familial sense.
Terry Mason: Everyone thinks there’s some deep, dark, mystical secret, and there’s not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way that he could think of out at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets. Cut. I’ve had that, though, for years. No one would go up to Barney: ‘Hey, Barney, why did Ian do the old …’ But for me: ‘Oh, you’re not close enough to care, but you’re close enough to know the secret.’ Anyhow, there’s no secret.
Paul Morley: I think suicide ultimately will find a way. Oddly, in full view of us all, he could hide himself, peculiarly, so it was the best set of circumstances for someone who will inevitably do it. He was sending us messages, very literal messages about his state. His life was in turmoil, people knew that. There were undoubtedly conversations internally about the pressure he was under. He’d tried it, and it’s easy now to say, ‘Well, we must have known. How come we didn’t?’
But he would have found a way, either in full view of everyone and yet hidden, or later, or in America, or when it had quietened down. I think in the end the suicide has that sense of destiny, and certainly once you start to try it, you get a taste for it. My father tried it, you see, my father tried it a few times. He clearly got a taste for it, a weird glamour, I think, a weird way of becoming a murderer. All of that would have played into Ian’s mind.
There is a sense of you could become something, and the weird idea that you could be a self-murderer, you could enter the territory of Dostoevsky and Kafka and you could make that grand move. My father was a fairly ordinary bloke in one sense, but there’s no doubt that once you’re thinking on those levels, that must play into it a little bit to make that move, to make that moment, to know, and in one sense the vastness of America coming up might have been a big contributing factor.
It’s such a soap opera, such a sitcom, such a tragedy that we all try and say, ‘Well, how come Wilson’ – because obviously he becomes our metaphor for blame – ‘how come Wilson didn’t sort that one out?’ But how could he have sorted it out? Or Gretton, the managers that were around that were organising the situation but didn’t want to deal with the reality? That’s a northern thing: we quite like the glamorous kick but we don’t want to deal with the reality. We just hope that sorts itself out.
It was anarchic, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a conventional set-up in any area whatsoever. Everybody was making it up as they went along, artistically, musically, and that was exciting, and all of us were getting a big kick out of that, the idea that something real was happening. There’s definitely a northern element about that and there’s a human element as well: you don’t want to get too close to people even though the whole thing was about closeness, it was about intimacy, but that didn’t necessarily mean that that would transfer into the way we dealt with each other.
Tony Wilson: The great thing about rock’n’roll is, far from being bullshit and hype and everything else, it is totally, totally honest: it’s all about the song. Whatever you spend on a band, if you haven’t got a great song you can spend £20 million and not make a penny. If you spend nothing and the band’s got a few great songs, they’re going to be successful. It’s about great songs, and if there wasn’t ‘Transmission’, if there wasn’t ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, if there wasn’t ‘Atmosphere’, we wouldn’t be here.
It’s just great songs. Yes, it’s a fabulous story: the story of the rebuilding of a city that begins with them, the story of a tragic suicide, a moral story and a cultural, academic, intellectual, aesthetic story, but at the heart of it it’s only here because they wrote great songs, and great songs never die.
Martin Hannett: The interesting thing about Ian for me was that onstage he was totally possessed. It was me who said ‘touched by the hand of God’ to a Dutch magazine. He was one of those channels for the gestalt. A lightning conductor. He was the only one I bumped into in that period.
Paul Morley: When you ask the question, ‘What’s your favourite Joy Division song?’ obviously you want a one-word answer, but I’m incapable of giving a one-word answer. You suddenly realise that Joy Division spins you off into quite a number of groups, as if they actually did have quite a long career.
I’d go to ‘Transmission’ instantly, because there was a hit single that wasn’t even a hit single, but in a way was; and I’d go obviously to ‘Atmosphere’, because it seemed to be the iced-over lake that Ian strolled over to go to his doom, and yet is really, really exciting to listen to, you’re not weighed under the horror of it; and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, because there was another great single; and then ‘Isolation’. It’s very hard, because the snob that I was cannot possibly answer ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, because it’s too corny.
But there is a world where that’s the answer, not least because of the way that it’s entered the canon and has now become possibly one of the greatest songs written in the twentieth century. It can take multiple interpretations and constantly releases meaning. You think you can’t possibly re-release meaning, but it does because it was an extraordinary piece of writing: just the words, let alone the fact that somehow these young northerners managed to find a way to sonically piece together music that matched the quality of the words.
Bernard Sumner: We were making it up as we were going along, and we had a great sense of discovery in the music and in what we were doing. We were like, ‘Oh look, you can do this. Hey, here’s another chord, what is it?’ – ‘It’s a D chord, isn’t that fantastic? Yeah, what can we do with that?’ And I think that makes it fresh. I think the closer to perfection you get, the more boring you become, and we were quite far away from perfection but we were still quite tuneful. We didn’t just make a racket, we had tunes, and anyone can make a racket, but to write strong melodies is a very difficult thing.
Peter Hook: There was never any question of not carrying on, because I think we were enjoying ourselves doing what we were doing so much, there was no question of not carrying on. We didn’t know how we were going to carry on, and it was very, very difficult. There was no question of it – we were having a great time, Rob was having a great time, we were all enjoying being successful musicians – so we just had to carry on, and we wanted to find a way. I don’t think Ian would have wanted us to stop.
I was glad to have Ian for as long as I did have him, and I think he left something behind that still moves people now: an amazing legacy that we created very much together, which is the beauty of Joy Division. The four of us didn’t know what we were doing, and the chemistry was unbelievable, but talk to one of us and we didn’t know. Maybe Ian might have known, but I suppose that’s something we’ll never find out. But it was easy, it was easy writing those songs and playing that well, it was easy, and it only got difficult when he died.
Bernard Sumner: That was tough. Ian would give us the direction. And he was very passionate at those moments, and we really missed that when he died. Suddenly, we didn’t have any eyes. We had everything else, but we couldn’t see where we were going.
We’d had a taste of the good life by then. By that I don’t mean loads of dosh and the rest of it; I mean we enjoyed making music and the creativity and the freedom that it gave us, and we’d all given our jobs up and couldn’t go back to them. We all had responsibilities, girlfriends, and we needed somewhere to live and some way of earning money, but then it was, ‘How do we follow in the shadow of a group like Joy Division, when they made such a big impact? How do we carry on?’
So I don’t think there was any question that we didn’t want to work together, the three of us: ‘Right, well, Ian’s gone, and I don’t want to work with them two.’ That was never the case; we always knew that we’d carry on, but it was a question of how. We weren’t a contrived band, we’d done everything by instinct, we never had a plan for anything, so it was like, ‘How do we reinvent ourselves?’ It’s not just going to happen, is it?
Stephen Morris: Why did we decide to carry on? Well, we just carried on, we never even thought, ‘Should we carry on or not carry on?’ We went to the funeral, we went to the wake at Palatine Road, so ‘Monday, see you on Monday then,’ that was it. To this day we’ve never really sat down and said, ‘Well, we’re going to do this and we’re going to this and we’re going to do that.’ You just start and do it and hope for the best, because that’s the way we are.