“Hooky wanted to twat him. He would have done, too… and I would have let him. It was something of a set-up and the lads are a bit upset about it… I’m not, doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I think it’s all a laugh, frankly.” – Rob Gretton
Natalie Curtis was born on April 16, 1979, which was Easter Monday, a national holiday, and like many first-born babies, she arrived late and had to be induced. Ian’s joy at becoming a father and love for his daughter was tempered by the knowledge that his epilepsy might compromise the child’s safety and therefore make him redundant when it came to handling her. Like most first-time mothers, Debbie was in the full throes of mother love and fully preoccupied with taking care of her infant, and this may have further alienated Ian, both from the bonding process and from his wife. Furthermore there was no let up in Ian’s work commitments, Joy Division being obliged to play a gig in London at the Acklam Hall on the following day, April 17, at which they were supported by John Dowie and where Hooky had his guitar nicked. The pressure was on and London gigs were considered too important to cancel.
Six weeks later, on May 24, the day after a gig at Bowden Vale, Ian was at home when he had his most serious epileptic episode to date. Debbie phoned Ian’s mother that night after he was admitted to hospital, informing her that she’d called an ambulance when, after four consecutive fits, she was unable to wake him.
There can be little doubt that Ian was seriously depressed by his worsening epileptic condition and this, coupled with the various types of medication he was taking, must have had a negative effect on his mood and increased the distance between Debbie and himself. Indeed, Debbie herself has described the personality change in Ian, stating that he had “all but stopped talking to me”.1
The divide between the private Ian and the public’s perception of him, as portrayed in the music press, was increasing. With a little help from the photographers, notably Kevin Cummins, Ian and Joy Division were able to create iconic images of themselves with a seemingly natural ease. They could simply do no wrong in this respect. Wearing raincoats muffled up against the elements evoked a fashionably dour group set against backdrops of grim streets in Salford and Macclesfield, but in reality they were worn for reasons of sheer practicality. “How clever,” an Australian journalist once noted on seeing Joy Division heavily over-coated against the Stockport snow. How clever? It was freezing out there. Similarly, the famously raincoated Ian Curtis snapped with a cigarette could have been brilliantly choreographed… but wasn’t, of course. It was simply the luminous aspect of Ian Curtis; an innate ability to shine through a lens.
This natural ease was more than a mere look or vision. Almost without knowing it and, despite the protests of the actual musicians who wrote it, they had just recorded the album that most perfectly evoked the spirit of 1979. When Sounds reviewed the album, they stole a headline from the great Public Image song of the time, ‘Death Disco’. These two words would have been equally appropriate as a title for the Joy Division album, though perhaps not quite so apposite as Unknown Pleasures.
A great album needs iconic packaging and Peter Saville’s task, daunting in retrospect, was to capture the shocking simplicity of the music in one immediately striking design that leapt out from the record racks. As it turned out, it wasn’t Ian Curtis, nor Peter Saville, who discovered the Fourier Analysis that so enigmatically graced the cover of Joy Division’s debut. The image was apparently discovered by Bernard Sumner as he flicked through a copy of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia Of Astronomy by Simon Motton and spotted diagram 6.7. This curiously compelling image depicted one hundred consecutive pulses from the first radio pulsar but at the same time might be perceived as a cross section of a vinyl album or something vaguely nautical. Nevertheless, as the image was given to Saville, complete with instructions about how to place it on the sleeve, there was still a great deal of designing to be done. Saville eventually reversed the instruction to produce a black inner sleeve housed by a white exterior.
“I contradicted the band’s instructions and made it black on the outside and white on the inside which I felt gave it more presence,” he told Mojo in 2005.
“I had this idea of graining,” he continued, “because we had an expanse of flat black on the outside and texture would give it a more tactile quality.”
Knowing that it would be called Unknown Pleasures, he believed an enigmatic black object would more perfectly evoke the title than an expanse of white.
This simple, effective, iconic image would eventually attain a classic status all of its own and, increasingly through the years, emerge enigmatic and proud on thousands upon thousands of t-shirts, badges and posters. With its curious and slightly disturbing power, it became a perfect visual accompaniment to the music.
Oddly enough, the striking outer-sleeve design wasn’t immediately welcomed by the members of the band. Mick Middles can recall an episode when, in exchange for a copy of the album, Rob Gretton instructed him to pick up the finished artwork from an address in Didsbury and deliver it to the manager at The Factory Club later that evening.
“I don’t really know if Rob was playing some kind of game with this,” he says. “I have no idea why he didn’t pick up the artwork himself… perhaps he simply didn’t have transport. But I certainly wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity of getting hold of a white label of the album. It was a moment I will never forget. It was upstairs at The Factory Club, near the counter where they served that goat curry. Ian McCullouch was there, from the Bunnymen, possibly Paul Morley, and Kevin Cummins certainly. Rob was just handing out the albums and instructing us to review them. I don’t think he realised that it wasn’t actually up to us. None of us had that power. But then came the strangest moment of all. I handed the artwork across, having enjoyed a sneak preview on the car journey. At this precise moment, even though it had been Bernard who handed Saville the initial image, neither Rob Gretton nor Ian Curtis, nor Tony Wilson… nor any of the band had even seen Saville’s field of black. I swear that Rob’s initial reaction was little short of a scowl… a creased face that seemed to scream, ‘How am I going to sell this to the lads? They are going to hate it.’ That’s how I read the situation, anyway.”
Rob thought the image should be larger, that it would stretch across the whole cover and not lost, as it is, so thickly framed in black. “It should have been fucking white,” he murmured, his eyes rolling up to the ceiling. “A white sleeve, because we wanted to appear upbeat, basically because we are sick of bastards like you stating that we are miserable… and it should have been fucking large.”
He had a point. Although Saville was clever enough to allow the image to lose itself on that sea of black – and, in 2005, would tell writer Colin Sharpe that he considered it his finest work – the immediate reaction to the image on that sleeve was that it seemed rather lost, rather pathetic. What would the music press make of it?
Joy Division’s relationship with the music press had been edgy since the days of Warsaw. Hooky liked to play interviews with an air of detached belligerence, even if his generally endearing nature usually shone through in the end. Barney was always the most difficult, suspicious perhaps, often awkward and opinionated and this awkwardness would increase in sync with his general confidence. Steve would be ever-friendly and musicianly, perfectly capable of chatting freely about anything from Kraftwerk to Fairport Convention without displaying any trace of reserve. Only Ian seemed genuinely intrigued by the method of the interview. As Paul Morley had discovered, Ian’s intelligence wasn’t immediately obvious, but tended to seep out as an interview progressed. To add to the strain of things, Rob liked to hover above an interview, at times peppering it with opinions that more often than not clashed with those expressed by the band. This was refreshingly honest and perhaps proof that whatever was happening with this band, it was unfolding naturally, without the overt managerial guidance that had characterised too many puppet-like bands through the ages.
This touchy relationship with the press was further exposed in July at the low-budget ‘Stuff the Superstars Festival’, a one-day affair organised by City Fun magazine at The Mayflower Club in Gorton, Manchester. The writer in question was Dave McCullough of Sounds who, after being plucked from his position as editor of the perceptive Alternative Ulster fanzine, had become the paper’s ‘left-field’ correspondent. McCullough, a huge champion of Manchester’s The Fall, arrived at the Joy Division cause fairly late. However, prior to his infamous interview, he had grown hugely committed to Joy Division, even if his knowledge of the band had, by his own admission, not been as great as one might have expected from a professional music writer. That stated, he certainly did not approach the interview with the intention of exposing any weaknesses in Joy Division. On the contrary, he was concerned that his writing might not fully capture the flavour of this most fascinating band. He was a fan… until, that is, he arrived in Stockport to interview them.
In truth, and despite McCullough’s considerable journalistic talent, it was a piece of writing as dark and drab as the Stockport buildings he ridiculed en-route to the interview. This didn’t exactly endear him to his northern readers. Unusually for the normally perceptive McCullough, he dropped a clanger during the bizarre intro, which painted the town in a curiously archaic image.
He wrote: “There is a carnival of sorts throughout the town, and the effect of seeing mums, dads, granddads and kids decked out in flowers and straw-hats, beaming benignly at the silly pomp of marching brass bands and bouncing, scantily-clad Lancastrian lasses, is a surreal, living, Lowry landscape.”
A surreal, living Lowry landscape? Worse still… Stockport, as even a London-based music scribe should have known, is very much a Cheshire town. Nevertheless, McCullough’s interview proved to be one of the most fascinating of Joy Division’s short career, even if the writer couldn’t seemingly be bothered to check out the band names.
Here is a snippet. “Everything started off calmly enough. I spoke with singer Curtis and the guitarist (yes, ‘the guitarist’! I didn’t discover the names of the other three members of the band, such was the impersonality of their communication) who told me the band formed in May ’77 some time after they’d seen the Pistols, the catalyst of their inception.
Has the sound changed since then?
Ian: “It’s changed quite a lot, yeah…it’s still changing now. We wrote those songs on the album a long time ago… the sound of the album isn’t dated, but style-wise it has.”
How long did you spend on the album?
Ian: “Four and a half days at Strawberry. We worked, say, from two o’clock in the afternoon to four in the morning getting it done.”
Were you surprised by the favourable reactions it received?
Ian: “Yeah, I’m a total pessimist, I suppose. I mean our first single got bad… I mean UNFAVOURABLE, but, I thought, very well written, reviews. One compared it to John Lennon, another to Stockhausen… the comparison between the two was quite good!” (general guffaws)
Guitarist: “Thing is, we don’t go that much on reviews.”
If that latter remark is the case, I can only say each member spent an EXTRAORDINARY amount of time during the next three hours talking about the, ahem, Rock Press.
Similarly I ask them about the mechanics of their music and with formulated stiffness, like rehearsed dummies under the eye of manager/overseer Rob Gretton, clearly not at his brightest on the day, they trotted-out statements about democracy and miraculous spontaneity in song writing.
“We don’t want to give people straight answers. We’d rather they question things for themselves.” Ho hum.
The irony was, of course, that even by, as they thought, remaining inscrutable and, ahem, Obscure, the band provided us with gargantuan evidence of their pseudness and, more to the point, their cerebral shortcomings. Ian remained contentedly silent as I became increasingly irritated by the absurd masquerade that was taking place. Manager Gretton (obviously assured of his own cleverness) and the bearded bassist in particular gave the impression that they suffered from serious mental deficiencies as they groped about in the dimness of their ‘attitudes’, smugly spouting non-sequiturs that wouldn’t sound too polished on a very bad episode of Crossroads, and generally giving the impression that they’d spent much too long watching BBC2.
I suggest for instance that the Nazi imagery of their first single confused a lot of people. No reaction. Much later I ask Ian how the band’s name came about, knowing by chance that Joy Division was the term used by the SS to describe the Jewish women they saved from the gas-chambers for their own pleasure. Ian tells me that it’s just a name.
I become angry.
Soon it is the bearded bassist who takes control of all the verbal rallies, with a bludgeoning, clumsy style, revealing raging neurotic symptoms as he tells me everything in inverse, ironic confessions.
“So you’re saying the lyrics are pessimistic, then, are you?” he bawls, as Slattery and self, knowing I hadn’t so much as mentioned the word ‘pessimistic’ throughout the conversation, can’t help but start laughing.
“Aw, fuck off…”the bearded-one tells me. I switch the tape off and get up to leave.
“Sorry, d’you want a drink?…”
I thought afterwards how pathetic that sounded: when it came to the crunch, what they wanted more than anything else, more even than presenting me with an honest account of themselves (even if the contrived anti-image is really them) was a couple of pages of publicity in Sounds. So much for the vague psychology, so much for the steaming hot guitars, the chaps wanted A MENTION!”
During the week prior to the interview, Dave McCullough had telephoned Mick Middles to enquire about the band and their attitude towards the music press. Although Middles can’t recall the exact conversation, he feels he may have warned McCullough about Hooky’s apparent belligerence and would have certainly have mentioned the contrast between this attitude and Ian Curtis’ apparent fascination with the music press.
As it turned out, McCullough’s infamous article, which angered the band considerably, actually paralleled many similar encounters. Later on that same day, the relationship between the band and the Sounds team seemed only to worsen.
Rob Gretton, sitting in The Rock Tavern pub in Gorton, puffing profusely on a ‘cigarette’, was heard to offer the opinion: “He’s a cunt, that Dave McCullough.”
This might seem a touch harsh in print, but Gretton’s delivery was laced with typical humour. McCullough wouldn’t take offence… which was just as well as he was standing well within earshot.
“Let’s just say that the interview wasn’t exactly a success,” Gretton stated, and moaned that Sounds had seen fit to assign a “… London-based wanker to interview the band.”
“Hooky wanted to twat him,” he continued. “He would have done, too… and I would have let him. It was something of a set-up and the lads are a bit upset about it… I’m not, doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I think it’s all a laugh, frankly.”
This wasn’t captured on tape and we can’t be sure of the exact words, but Gretton brushed the incident aside with his usual sardonic aplomb.
Six feet away, standing squarely at the bar, flanked by photographers Paul Slattery and Kevin Cummins, encircled by members of The Distractions and Fall manager Kay Carroll, Dave McCullough was bemoaning the lack of grace displayed by Joy Division. He had a point. Every burgeoning rock act in the country wanted Dave McCullough to travel to their home town, Slattery in tow, to capture them amid parochial tomfoolery. Not surprisingly, the only member of Joy Division who seemed willing to converse with McCullough during the day was Ian Curtis. The cynic might suggest that this was simply because Curtis was concerned about the damage that an incensed Dave McCullough, probably the most influential non-NME writer of the time, could do to the band’s image. This wouldn’t be the first or, indeed, the last time that Ian openly displayed his dislike of the band’s general aloof attitude. They wanted to be portrayed as a distant, arrogant group of musicians, supremely self-confident. Rob Gretton certainly revelled in this professional ‘stand-offishness’ and openly encouraged it with Joy Division and, later, with New Order. It was good fun and seemed to square with Factory’s stylish sense of distance not just from the rock press but from virtually everything else that related to the traditional music industry.
Ian Curtis, however, always appeared keen to display a desire to communicate, be it in person, to a gathering of fans or to journalists. Throughout his short career, Ian, regardless of the attitude of the rest of the band, showed journalists both respect and politeness. This might not have been a particularly ‘sexy’ image, and it has certainly become lost in the intervening years, but it is difficult to find a single music writer who disliked Ian Curtis, something that cannot be said about the rest of the band.
The ‘Stuff the Superstars’ event might, in retrospect, sound like a rather glamorous affair. It wasn’t. The Mayflower was the most austere and unwelcoming hell-hole venue in Manchester; appalling toilets, undrinkable beer, dirty plastic glasses, an inconceivably muddied sound and, at all times, an icy cold ambience.
Terry Mason described it as the “world’s smelliest venue” and remembers that Barney left his jumper there.
Dave McCullough reported on Joy Division’s set with these words: “… and later that evening I saw them live. The songs are even hotter and more vigorous than on the album, but on reflection suffer from a stunning lack of anything approaching contrasting humour. The black, over seriousness denies any real, life-like communication and you are left with what is by its very nature a contrived, engineered set of songs.
“Later in the evening the guitarist was seen searching around the Mayflower for his ‘woolie’, which he’d lost. It was a funny, contrasting scene, but somehow I don’t think it’ll ever make its way into a Joy Division song. It’s maybe too close to reality for that.
“It was such thoughts that drifted through my head as we rattled back down the blank highway the following evening. Conclusions began to form. You can’t equate Joy Division’s earnest technique (grim dress, grim image) with the hard, real, financial, ‘Factory’ Records zeal in which they are plainly shackled. The ardour is always tempered by the money and no amount of under milling obscurity will convince me that Joy Division’s static, murky militancy is real.
“For, at the moment, the music is too supercilious (like the people) to ring true. It too often seems intended to make the listener feel inadequate. On the other hand bands like the Gang Of Four have made good business out of the same mind-game. Maybe these days you like being made feel inadequate… Maybe Joy Division don’t print their names on their records cos they’re frightened of something. It could be themselves.”
It’s possible that Dave McCullough sensed a mild unease within the Joy Division camp which certainly wasn’t apparent from the band’s onstage form. Few of those who witnessed the ‘Stuff the Superstars’ appearance could be left in any doubt about the growing presence of Ian Curtis on stage; the ferociously driven focal point of the most exciting band in Britain. This was now a band fast approaching the peak of their game and critics from across the music press were simply squabbling over superlatives. But such success brings with it a whole new bundle of pressure of expectation. Curtis had stepped into stardom, a fact bemoaned by Deborah Curtis who felt now felt that her husband, the pop star, had become “public property”. It is understandable that she should have felt estranged, as key decisions concerning Ian’s future were now taken solely within the context of the band without regard to Deborah and their baby daughter.
The situation was hardly uncommon. Beatle John Lennon’s wife Cynthia gave birth to their son Julian on April 8, 1963, just as ‘From Me To You’ was ascending the charts and lighting the fuse that would explode in Beatlemania. After three years hard graft in Hamburg and Liverpool, Lennon was hardly likely to abandon the escalating success of his group in favour of a nine-to-five job that brought in a steady income to pay for nappies and ensured he was home at nights to help change them. Indeed, it’s a situation shared by everyone married to a burgeoning pop star, particularly a front-man (or woman). An aspect of the character is snatched away for public consumption, be it in the day-to-day activities of a band on the road or in interview. It is virtually impossible to successfully fulfil both roles.
The night before the Mayflower gig, on July 27, the band played a concert at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool. The gig was promoted by Section 25. Larry Cassidy, the lead singer, recalls: “There was us, Joy Division, The Last Torpedos from Liverpool, OMD and another local band called Final Solution. I think we were on last. Paul Wiggin1 and I had seen Joy Division at Eric’s and we really liked them. Everyone got £30 – each band. It was quite a big room – a ballroom. There was no bar or anything so we could let in kids. It was in aid of a charity – International Year of the Child. We made badges and everything. We made a few quid and we sent it to them – not a lot. Rob Gretton said he quite liked what we were doing – and would we like to make a record. So we fixed up at Cargo – went there one day and did ‘Girls Don’t Count’. Rob and Ian produced it and the engineer was there – the guy that owned Cargo at the time. Ian liked us. It wasn’t like coming up and slapping you on the back and saying ‘You’re great’ or anything like that.”
According to Terry Mason the wives and girlfriends of the band – Sue, Debbie, and Gillian, Stephen’s girl – were unwilling to let their men loose for a wild night in Blackpool and were therefore all present at the gig and keeping an eye on them – much to their annoyance.
He also remembers a black Hillman Avenger in the car park of the hotel on which someone had sprayed the bonnet with the squiggly lines from Unknown Pleasures, and – from the sublime to the ridiculous – that they all stopped to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken on their way out of Blackpool.
On August 2, Joy Division returned to London to headline at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, in front of a sizeable crowd, including many from the all influential music press. Indeed, for hip young Londoners, this gig was deemed wholly unmissable.
Legend tells of a below par and tentative Echo & The Bunnymen nervously opening this show, Echo at this stage in their career being a drum machine, the one member of the pre-Pete Defrietas band not armed with a ready stream of Scouse wit. Teardrop Explodes, another Liverpool band evolving at considerable pace, were also on the bill.
While Joy Division were thundering to new and exciting levels, Echo & The Bunnymen were proving no less intriguing. Armed with a handful of distinctive songs, in Ian McCullouch they had a golden voiced pretty boy singer who, in terms of sound and vision, could have posed a genuine challenge to Curtis. McCullouch had plenty of presence and his porcupine appearance would emerge with considerable natural charisma during the following twelve months.
Ian Curtis, however, was a different prospect altogether. In common with Iggy Pop – and as most accurately displayed on the Factory video Here Are The Young Men1 – Curtis had developed his skill of physically winding the music to new levels of intensity. To put it succinctly, when Ian danced, Joy Division were instantly a better band. It might begin with a flick of the wrists, a couple of gentle sways, a nod of the head, a backwards shimmy, standing on tip-toes, a sway to the left. No dance instructor would recognise such moves. But co-ordination and a frenzied rhythm combined to produce one of the most compelling sights in the history of British rock, a natural perfection, channelling the emotive power, spilling out onstage. This YMCA gig has often been cited as one of the band’s most mesmeric, not least by Rob Gretton, whose enthusiasm for his own band almost exploded at the sight of the opening ‘Dead Souls’, a ferocious number on any given occasion but here, before the rowdiness of the London audience, offering unprecedented levels of intensity. Joy Division was indeed a happening band and there was no doubt that Ian Curtis was its true star.
As if to emphasise this fact, an NME front cover at the time depicted a self-assured and now familiar Ian Curtis relaxing into this role alongside a comparatively uncomfortable looking Bernard Sumner. Familiarity is the trick of fame, and Ian Curtis now looked as if he had finally found his true home.
Three weeks later, on August 27, Joy Division headlined one of the most bizarre events in the history of British rock. The Leigh Festival was, in terms of seizing the moment and attracting a crowd worthy of its extraordinary bill, an unprecedented disaster.
It took place in a field directly adjacent to the site of the most famous festival ever to grace the north west of England, 1972’s extraordinary Bickershaw Festival, in which a most unlikely defunct mining village played host to the likes of, amongst others, The Grateful Dead, Dr John, Captain Beefheart, The Kinks and Country Joe McDonald. At the end of that particular affair, festival organiser and future TV presenter Jeremy Beadle was heard to bemoan the “… ‘Gigantism’ that will kill rock festivals.”
It wasn’t ‘gigantism’ that dogged the Leigh Festival but quite the reverse. If any rock event could claim to be the precise antithesis of the commercial scale of Glastonbury then Leigh would effectively fulfil that role. Within Factory circles, it would become known as ‘the festival of the giant turd’, simply because that was apparently the object that so entranced Ian Curtis during the course of the event. However, it remains possible to sense a metaphorical significance within Ian’s sighting of that turd. It did seem an apt discovery.
Arriving at Leigh Festival was in itself unsettling in much the same way that away supporters can be unsettled on arrival at a non-league football ground where the locals might be hostile if, indeed, there are any locals at all. Leigh Festival was signposted by a strapped-up rip of cardboard daubed with juvenile writing informing punters: “Festival site… this way!”
This make-shift sign was the handy work of Lewis Knight, an entrepreneur who owned a string of furniture shops in the area as well as the land on which the festival was sited. “It was a slag heap, miles from anywhere,” says Terry Mason. “It was only when I came to drive away that I found out that the truck I’d rented had no lights. I drove home with the hazards on instead.”
One of the organisers of the event, Chris Hewitt, recalls: “It was a three-day event and the organisation had started long before Factory or Zoo came on board. In fact, I am pretty sure it was my idea to contact Tony Wilson… I thought it would guarantee a lot of publicity. It’s funny because on all the websites now, we see all these Peter Saville posters advertising the Leigh Festival. But I don’t ever remember seeing any Peter Saville posters anywhere. The only publicity I remember was that Lewis Knight had some small box trailers like you tow behind a car that he would leave parked around Leigh as free advertising. They normally said ‘Lewis Knight’s Discount Three Piece Suite Centre’ on the side so he changed the poster signs to big sheets of paper saying ‘Pop Festival’. He also hired some goons with walkie-talkies to stop a Woodstock-type breach of the non-existent fence – obviously they just walked up and down the boundaries of the industrial waste grassland and challenged probably one person trying to get in over 72 hours.
“The Factory poster only lists the Monday as it wasn’t really a Factory or Zoo Event. Factory meets Zoo was just one third of a three-day event organised by local Leigh people, and myself. Look at the picture of OMD playing and there are just over two people in the crowd – I don’t reckon there was ever more than about thirty or forty there and Mick Middles and Jon Savage had hyped it up in the press, probably because they were in the pockets of Factory. There was a joke amongst the bands that ‘it’s your turn to be the audience now whilst we play’.”
The full story of the Leigh Festival disaster belongs elsewhere but for Ian Curtis, performing to a scant gathering in the open air next to a defunct colliery, it was arguably the most ludicrous gig he had undertaken since Bowden Vale youth club.
Backstage on the final day, Curtis was nose deep in a book. Distractions singer Mike Finney enquired as to the nature of this tome, and it turned out to be Jean Paul Sartre’s The Age Of Reason, the first volume of Sartre’s acclaimed trilogy, Les Chenims de la Liberte (The Roads To Freedom).1
This was extremely hip reading matter of the time and as liberal arts philosophy goes, quite an accessible and enjoyable read. Unknowingly, Curtis had started a trend here insofar as his habit of carrying esoteric reading matter around in a plastic bag – initially a Manchester joke of the time – would soon be copied by a number of supporting bands. Arthur Kadmon of Ludus would never be seen without his ‘hip bag’, more often than not containing the works of Camus, Mailer or Fowles. Mark E. Smith even lam-pooned the trend in the song ‘Carry Bag Man’.
Ian’s reading habits acquired a certain local infamy and speculative reports of his literary nourishment began to find their way into City Fun magazine. At Leigh Festival he told Mike Finney that he had also enjoyed Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment and was particularly fond of the first paragraph which resurfaced in Howard Devoto’s ‘Song From Under The Floorboards’. Other apparent favourites included Albert Camus, J. G. Ballard, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
The link between The Distractions, who performed early on the Leigh bill, and Joy Division is worthy of a mention. Although only fleetingly a Factory band, with one albeit great single, ‘Time Goes By So Slow’, the connection between the two bands was forged on a series of dates during which the lightness of their pop songs perfectly balanced Joy Division’s dark introversion. Inspired by these gigs, Paul Morley once claimed: “If Joy Division are the perfect rock band for the Eighties, The Distractions are the perfect pop band”. Intriguingly, while the remainder of Joy Division shied away from the hip core who surrounded The Distractions (who have been largely written out of their considerable central role in the Manchester scene), Ian Curtis warmed to Mike Finney, whose cheery bonhomie may have seemed a welcome refuge.
“Ian was always extremely open and agreeable with me,” says Finney. “When we played with Joy Division he absolutely went out of his way to seek me out and talk about the two bands. It seemed natural at first, because that’s how I always knew him. Then, slowly, I started to realise that perhaps he wasn’t like that with everyone. I also noticed that the rest of Joy Division, while always being perfectly OK with us, were also a little bit wary because we were very much a live band. I am not saying for one minute that we were on the same planet as them in terms of sheer talent… we weren’t. We were a dance, pop soul band who liked to get up on stage and lighten up the crowd. He once… it could have been at Leigh… I am not sure… but he once went on and on about ‘Time Goes By So Slow’. He wanted to know when it was written. Had it been written immediately after a break up? Was it written in a state of despair, I suppose that, looking back, you could look too deeply into that. My theory is that he was just discovering that song-writing could be cathartic. I don’t know if that was ever the point with Joy Division but I did sense that that was what he was thinking. I knew nothing about his private life. I don’t remember meeting Deborah and, frankly, The Distractions were a sexual and emotional minefield at the time. I think Ian wanted to know how we dealt with all that. I don’t know, frankly. But there was a kind of link between us.”
As to the problems of Leigh, Ian Curtis knew a disaster when he was about to play in one. Tales of giant turds aside, he was the one member of Joy Division who was concerned when he scanned the audience from the area behind the stage which, incidentally, stood on top of a half-sunken pub cellar. His “What the fuck?” look at Rob Gretton was met by the kind of shrug that Gretton, and only Rob Gretton could suitably affect. Meanwhile, a trickle of people entered the arena and sat cross-legged, awaiting the action.
Those who arrived in cars were actually instructed to park at the rear of the field. While this might have seemed like simple commonsense at the time, it did little to fuel the performance fervour of the bands. There is an image of Freddie Mercury at Live Aid of which most people are aware. Taken from behind the Queen singer, it captures the moment when he punches the air in triumph, no doubt in the knowledge that his band has blown every one else on the bill clean away, while the vast Wembley crowd stretched away to Wembley’s rear circle. Well, Leigh Festival was nothing like that. From behind the stage, amid various tufts of grass, a few knots of sundry post punks and sullen raincoated youths were scattered hither and thither, with half a dozen cars – it was even possible to name the owners of the vehicles – parked to their rear. As a vision of a spectacular festival, this lagged somewhere behind a parochial village fete.
Behind the stage, the nervousness that preceded a performance before a thin scattering further dampened the atmosphere. Members of A Certain Ratio huddled, team-like around Tony Wilson, a green-wellied figure in a white suit, urging his troops on, as if a football manager.
In terms of the performances, Wilson had little to worry about. Although it was a catastrophic commercial failure, Leigh was an artistic success, with superb sets throughout the day. Highlights included a spirited A Certain Ratio who seemed to stress the differences between themselves and Joy Division.
“Just don’t compare me to Ian Curtis,” said Ratio singer, Simon Topping and he certainly had a point. ACR had moved swiftly and naturally away from any such musical comparison. “We don’t even like Joy Division,” they added, almost in unison and not unreasonably. One of the most obvious problems was that Topping, resplendent in savage short back’n’ sides, did resemble Ian Curtis onstage, not in action and certainly not in voice but in his immediate physical presence and the clothes he wore which, despite Wilson’s ambition to garb then in hot funk desert shorts, bore a strong resemblance.
There was little resemblance backstage, with Topping vociferous and laddish while Curtis chose to drift quietly in the shadows, aloof from Ratio and aloof also from the powerful and profoundly Liverpudlian banter emanating from the Echo & The Bunnymen camp. Elsewhere backstage, most members of most bands chose to amuse themselves by leering at a particularly attractive technician who had unwisely chosen to wear a skirt when her job entailed climbing up the scaffolding.
There were few dull moments. OMD appeared edgy and somewhat adrift, but nonetheless armed with glorious melodies. Echo & The Bunnymen had discovered the potential within the voice of their enigmatic singer and Teardrop Explodes were quite simply ‘going for it’.
But without any question of a doubt the event belonged to a tense and striking Joy Division, with Ian Curtis framed by the spotlight on a rapidly darkening night, riding beautifully on the band’s rolling fractious intensity, wrapping himself around the mic, hurling his voice into the Lancastrian air.
‘Transmission’, their finest song of that moment, capped the performance and strayed into the subconscious of many onlookers for many years to come,
Tony Wilson hugged Ian Curtis as the band eventually filed from the stage.
1 In Touching From A Distance, Faber & Faber, 1995.
1 The guitar player in Section 25.
1 Released September 1982.
1 A vivid depiction of the Paris of 1938; a city of nightclubs and galleries, communities of students, communists and homosexuals; a world of intellect and degradation. Against this squalid background, the hero Mathieu Delarue plots to force an abortion on his reluctant mistress.