The comparison Bernard Sumner drew between Ian Curtis and Beethoven
By the summer of 1985, New Order was comfortably positioned as one of the top synth-pop bands on the planet, having dropped an all-timer of a hit single in ‘Blue Monday’ and two consecutive UK top ten albums in Power, Corruption & Lies and Low Life.
In America, however, the band’s profile was considerably lower, and as such, their distance from the narratives of the past – specifically the Joy Division era and the death of Ian Curtis – felt greatly reduced. Curtis had been gone for five years, but New Order frontman Bernard Sumner was rarely involved in a stateside interview that didn’t focus on his ghost.
“A lot of people think Ian was a depressive maniac,” Sumner told the Boston Globe in 1985, speaking of his late bandmate and friend. “He wasn’t. He was completely the opposite, more or less, of his lyrics.”
As Sumner had often explained to journalists since Curtis’s suicide in 1980, Joy Division’s admittedly “very sad” music wasn’t really a reflection of Curtis’s dark soul or a warning of an impending tragedy. “Because Ian died the way he did, they become tragic songs,” he said, “Rather than just sad. But there’s nothing you can do about that, is there?”
Sumner attributed Curtis’s downward spiral to his struggles with severe epilepsy, which had required him to start taking strong barbiturates as a means of preventing seizures.
“He changed completely after being on the drugs,” Sumner said. “One minute he’d feel like laughing, the next he’d feel like crying. But he had to take the drugs or else he’d have a fit.”
There’s an underlying frustration in so many of the New Order interviews from this era, not just for the obvious reasons of missing Curtis and wishing his fate could have been different, but because so many critics had gotten the wrong end of the stick when it came to Curtis’s art. Joy Division, even by the mid-80s, had been re-contextualised as one of the forebearers of “goth rock”, emphasising the doom and gloom of their records without as much recognition of their beauty and subtlety.
New Order, despite firmly establishing their own sound by the time of their third album in ‘85, were still routinely labelled as a “mopey” group in the same tradition, but Sumner did his best to defend the potentially uplifting qualities of sad music, especially in a pop landscape inhabited by no shortage of soulless dance pop and hair metal.
“I like sad music,” he said. “It tends to be more touching. I like a lot of Beethoven’s music—the 7th Symphony, which I find very emotional, but at the same time, sad. But I don’t care that it’s sad; it’s such touching music.”
Sumner described Curtis’s songs almost identically: “very sad but beautiful.” It’s not to suggest that he held Beethoven and Ian Curtis in equal regard as composers. The argument was simply that, through most of the history of music, exploring darker themes and plaintive melodies wouldn’t get an artist pigeon-holed as a “depressive goth.”
The same respect, he felt, ought to be granted to Ian Curtis.
