Bono’s unique insight into the Joy Division anthem ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’: “Talking to Ian Curtis was a strange experience”
If you had never heard of Joy Division and came across their songbook, on a musicological level, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, is typical of good, old, ‘jangly’ indie. However, when you stow away the sheet music, put aside the instrumentation, and plonk the needle into the whirling disc, you’re greeted with something that surpasses what simple guitar music should be capable of. It reaches hymnal heights, containing multitudes beyond orchestral measure.
Similarly, the lyrics to the song are ostensibly seem like they chart the end of a relationship and the life-tearing impact that will have on the participants. At the time, the biography of Ian Curtis seemed to match this tale, too. His relationship with his wife Deborah was battered out of shape by the strains of touring, and into that growing void entered the journalist Annik Honoré.
Honoré has since told Focus in 2010: “It was a completely pure and platonic relationship, very childish, very chaste… I did not have a sexual relationship with Ian. He was on medication, which rendered it a nonphysical relationship. I am so fed up that people question my word or his. People can say whatever they want, but I am the only person to have his letters… One of his letters says that the relationship with his wife Deborah had already finished prior to us meeting each other.”
However, Bono just happened to be present at Pennine Studios for a period while the band were recording the song because U2 wanted to inquire about whether Martin Hannett would produce their single, ’11 O’Clock Tick Tock’, and he has a different take on the meaning of the song having seen it first-hand. “Talking to Ian Curtis is … or was a strange experience because he’s very warm … he talked—it was like two people inside of him—he talked very light, and he talked very well-mannered, and very polite,” he recalled.
“But when he got behind the microphone he really surged forth; there was another energy. It seemed like he was just two people and, you know, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, it was like [when] that record was released … it was like, as if, there were the personalities, separate; there they were, torn apart.”
In other words, the tearing relates to the dichotomy of Curtis’ own persona and the impact that was having on his life as opposed to the singer forecasting the befouling that comes with a tragic break-up in its inevitable final throes.
This interpretation opens the floodgates to a slew of different inputs. With the stresses of an impending tour lying ahead, perhaps it was his love for his art that he felt would tear apart the reparations with Deborah that were underway. And beyond that, there are myriad other influxes that swirl into the welter of what makes this song so powerful. Either way, it’s a profound masterpiece.
