Hannett loved to play mind games with musicians to create tension. On one occasion, he forced Morris to dismantle his entire drum kit because of an unwanted rattling sound (which Hannett may either have imagined or simply invented). According to Chris Nagle, the studio engineer on Joy Division’s debut album,
Unknown Pleasures,
and the singles “Transmission” and “Atmosphere,” Hannett would sometimes go to sleep under the mixing board in order to deliberately “create a state of panic. Then he’d just impose his will on people and they’d go back into the studio really wound up.” Nagle’s diabetes became another weapon for Hannett. He’d turn the studio air-conditioning to its coldest setting, supposedly on Nagle’s behalf. “We’d literally be shivering,” says Morris. Hannett wanted to actively discourage the musicians from sticking around after they’d laid down their parts so he could have free rein with the material. The arctic temperature in Strawberry Studios seems to have seeped into Joy Division’s music. Listening to
Unknown Pleasures,
you can almost see Curtis’s breath forming condensation in the cold air.
At the time, Joy Division hated what Hannett did to their music.
Unknown Pleasures
sounded drained and emaciated to their ears. They would rather have had something closer to the full-on assault of their live performances. Hannett had used one of his favorite devices, the Marshall Time Modulator, to deliberately suppress the guitars and other instruments. “It just made things sound smaller,” says Morris. “A big tom-tom riff of mine would come out sounding like coconuts being hit with matchsticks!” Yet without Hannett’s denuded production,
Unknown Pleasures
would not have been such a strikingly wintry soundscape.
Released in June 1979,
Unknown Pleasures
caught the eye as well as the ear. The cover, designed by Factory’s art director Peter Saville, was a matte-black void apart from a small scientific diagram of rippling lines, whose crinkled crests and sharp slopes resemble the outlines of a mountain range. Bernard Sumner found the diagram in the
Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Science
. It’s a Fourier analysis of one hundred consecutive light spasms emitted by the pulsar CP 1919. Left behind when a massive sun exhausts its fuel and collapses in on itself, pulsars are highly electromagnetic and emit regular flashes of intense energy, like a lighthouse in the pitch-black cosmos. Was this how Ian Curtis was beginning to see himself, as a star sending out a signal, a beacon in the darkness? Could he possibly have known that pulsars belong to a distinct class of heavenly bodies known as
misanthropic
or
isolated
neutron stars?
People started to tune in to the signal. The slow-burning success of
Unknown Pleasures
and the hypnotic single “Transmission” gave Joy Division an increasingly obsessive following, nicknamed the “Cult With No Name” and, according to stereotype, consisting of intense young men dressed in gray overcoats. Joy Division understood the power and attraction of mystique from the start (the text on
An Ideal for Living
declared, “This is not a concept EP, it is an enigma”). The band’s refusal to do interviews (after some early bad experiences) only helped to enhance their aura. The cult expanded through the second half of 1979 as Joy Division played more prestigious gigs, performing high on the bill at John Keenan’s Futurama festival and supporting (and upstaging) Buzzcocks on the latter’s U.K. tour.
Joy Division’s next single, the breathtaking “Atmosphere,” would surely have given the group their first hit had it come out on Factory. Instead, the band gave it to the obscure, ultra-arty French label Sordide Sentimental, who put it out in March 1980 as a tiny limited-edition release under the title
Licht und Blindheit
. With its vast drumscape, permafrost synths, and cascading chimes, “Atmosphere” sounds like some dream collaboration between Nico and Phil Spector. The cover image on the original Sordide Sentimental release—a hooded monk, his back turned to the viewer, stalking a snow-covered alpine peak—captures the moment when a certain religiosity began to gather around Joy Division.
“Possessed,” is how the normally dry and sardonic Hannett described Curtis in an interview with Jon Savage. “It was me who said ‘touched by the hand of God,’ to a Dutch magazine. He was one of those channels for the gestalt, the only one I bumped into in that period. A lightning conductor.” But you don’t need to wax mystical to see Curtis as a seerlike figure, someone whose private pain somehow worked as a prism for the wider culture, refracting the malaise and anguish of Britain in the late seventies.
The private pain was pretty specific stuff, though—grown-up problems like a failing marriage, adultery, and illness. Curtis had fallen out of love with his wife just as they were having their first child, and he’d become embroiled in an affair with a glamorous, demanding Belgian woman named Annik Honoré. If all these conflicted emotions weren’t enough, Curtis also had to deal with epilepsy. Strangely, he’d been dancing onstage in a twitchy, convulsive style that resembled an epileptic fit for some time before he suffered his first attack in December 1978. Was he somehow able to channel a latent form of this electrical disorder of the nervous system and transform it into his performance signature? Or had the dancing actually brought on the symptoms? Both Deborah Curtis and Bernard Sumner recall Curtis becoming friendly with an epileptic girl at the rehabilitation center where he worked. The girl later died during a fit and is said to have been the inspiration for “She’s Lost Control.”
No one knows why Curtis became epileptic, but it’s clear that the heavy-duty tranquilizers prescribed to control the condition—downers like phenobarbital and carbamazepine—clouded his head, sapped his spirits, and made him even more vulnerable to the guilt and confusion caused by his infidelity. Hardly surprising, then, with such a pall hanging over the lead singer, that a “strange social climate” (as Hannett put it) surrounded the March 1980 sessions for
Closer,
Joy Division’s second album. Hannett described the record as “kabbalistic, locked in its own mysterious world.” Sumner recalled staying in the studio all night, sometimes sleeping in the control room. “At night you got a weirder atmosphere.” Compared with
Unknown Pleasures,
the textures of
Closer
are more ethereal and experimental. Hook often used a six-string bass for more melody, while Sumner built a couple of synthesizers from DIY kits. Morris had acquired a drum synth and did things like feed it through what he describes as “the shittiest fuzz pedal you can imagine,” generating the slaughterhouse of hacking and shearing metal-on-bone noise in the background of “Atrocity Exhibition,”
Closer
’s opener.
In typically repressed British manner, neither Curtis’s bandmates nor Hannett were able to really talk to the singer about his problems. Yet they appear to have absorbed his pain and recreated it sonically. Listening to
Closer
is like being inside Curtis’s head, feeling the awful, down-swirling drag of terminal depression. Side one is all agony: the swarming knives of “Atrocity,” the ice shroud glaze of “Isolation,” on which Curtis sounds swaddled in a barbiturate haze, his voice mineralized by Hannett’s effects. The treadmill motion of “Passover” feels like the group’s batteries are running down. It’s followed by the tough, punitive rock of “Colony” and “A Means to an End,” on which the drums do finally decelerate like a dying machine.
Closer
’s second side is somehow more disturbing for its serenity, as though Curtis has stopped struggling altogether. The numb trance and narcotic glide of “Heart and Soul” give way to the alternately desperate and resigned “Twenty Four Hours,” its beautiful bass like the pulse of a heavy heart, while Curtis’s voice is disturbingly deep, like the microphone is right inside his chest. The mist-wreathed epic colonnades of “The Eternal” conjure an unnerving sense of Curtis’s watching his own funeral procession. Finally, there’s the insuperable world-weariness of “Decades,”
Closer
’s closer, with its listless, clip-clop beat and synths that sound eroded and washed-out, like aged Super 8 home movies of happy childhood memories.
Curtis wrote the
Closer
lyrics in a trancelike state, with no editing or rewriting. There are allusions to the dead marriage (“a valueless collection of hopes and past desires,” “the sound from broken homes”), to dislocations and a crushing sense of failure (“I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through/I’m ashamed of the person I am”). Most of all, there’s fatigue. According to Sumner, Curtis told him: “I feel like there’s a big whirlpool and I’m being sucked down into it and there’s nothing I can do.”
The barbiturate tablets Curtis was taking for his epilepsy were like little doses of death, freezing him from the inside out. “The barbs change people’s personality,” said fellow Factory artist Vini Reilly, who had his own psychological problems and bonded with Curtis during this period. “You lose a sense of reality. That’s what happened and he got further and further out, and so far out he couldn’t get back.” Songs like “Isolation” and “The Eternal” come from the same lifeless emotional landscapes as Nico’s
Desertshore
and
The Marble Index,
cut off from the warm-blooded mainland of human contact and fellowship. The last lyric Curtis ever finished, “In a Lonely Place,” featured a death wish reference to “caressing the marble and stone.”
In the three-month gap between finishing
Closer
at the end of March and its release in July 1980, Curtis had already attempted suicide with an overdose of pills. On top of everything else, he was depressed by his worsening epilepsy, which interfered with his ability to fulfill his role in the band. On one occasion he had to leave the stage after suffering an attack. Simon Topping, front man of labelmates A Certain Ratio, took his place, resulting in an audience riot. “The doctor was telling him the only way to control epilepsy is to live a really quiet life,” says Peter Hook. “No drink, no drugs, no excitement. And here he was the singer in a band that was getting really big.”
Despite Curtis’s overdose and his deteriorating condition, no real attempts at reducing the band’s workload were made. Joy Division’s first American tour was in the pipeline. Curtis told some people he wanted to take time off, but in front of his bandmates he feigned excitement. He didn’t want to disappoint his comrades or Factory. By this point the label was essentially carried by Joy Division. At Factory’s big London showcase at the Moonlight in April 1980, Joy Division played all three nights. They were the big pull that would lure people in to see the label’s roster of lesser lights. Yet Curtis must have had severe doubts about being an icon. In “Atrocity Exhibition,” he alternates between being the ringmaster of the horror show and the freak entertainment itself, prostituting his own neurosis and twisting his body onstage.
The breaking point came on May 18, 1980. After visiting his estranged wife and asking, unsuccessfully, for her to drop the divorce, Curtis stayed up all night, watching a movie by his favorite director Werner Herzog and listening to Iggy’s
The Idiot
. He finally hung himself as “that awful daylight” (“In a Lonely Place”) approached.
Curtis’s suicide at twenty-three made for instant myth. The sheer commitment of the act confirmed the authenticity of Joy Division’s words and music in a way that was quite problematic, entirely logical, and ultimately inevitable. As Curtis always intended, he joined the pantheon of those who lived too intensely and felt too deeply to make it for long in this world of half measures and settling for less. Brushing away the tears, Factory threw itself enthusiastically into building and burnishing the legend. Peter Saville gave the posthumous single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” an exquisite abstract cover that looked like the lustrous marble interior of a cenotaph.
Closer
’s sleeve actually featured a photograph taken in a Genoa cemetery, a sculpted tableau of the dead Christ surrounded by grief-stricken mourners.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” became Joy Division’s first U.K. chart hit. Curtis’s crooning vocal, Hook’s bass, and Sumner’s keyboard all trace, in unison, the same shy, crestfallen melody, while Morris’s drumming skitters with feathery unrest. On “Love Will Tear” and its savage B-side “These Days,” the singer and the music both sound raw and exposed, like they’ve got no skin. The words are laceratingly candid glimpses into a dying relationship, snapshots of bad sex and broken trust. Although the marriage breakup was only one factor and not widely known, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was taken as Curtis’s suicide note to the public, the official explanation.
MARK E. SMITH ONCE SUGGESTED
that there were two kinds of factory in Manchester: the kind that make dead men, and the kind that live off a dead man. An unfair jibe, but it’s true in the sense that Curtis’s death sealed Factory’s stature forever. It also condemned the label to struggle for years to find a group as weighty and epochal as Joy Division. The two closest contenders on Factory’s early roster were A Certain Ratio and Durutti Column.
The Durutti Column was the name Tony Wilson came up with on behalf of guitarist Vini Reilly. Buenaventura Durruti had led a nomadic brigade of revolutionaries during the Spanish Civil War. Wilson was fond of a situationist comic strip called
The Return of the Durutti Column,
which invoked the Catalonian anarchist’s guerrilla spirit. The military allusion couldn’t have been more incongruous for Reilly’s fragile music, spun from intricate skeins of guitar fed through an Echoplex and always played with the fingertips, delicate and prismatic like frost on a windowpane. Far from being a soldier, Reilly had gone AWOL from normal life. He suffered from anorexia nervosa, and his music sounded as translucent as you’d expect from someone with almost no flesh. On the second Durutti album, 1981’s
LC,
Reilly recorded a tribute to Ian Curtis, but the song, “Missing Boy,” could just as easily have been about himself.