The story of Joy Division
Frost covers the council streets of Macclesfield pinning Ian Curtis’ young eyes to the ground as he admires the crystallising dust of the cold over cracked paving slabs. But as he strolls along, his gaze is soon broken by a commotion in the driveway at the bottom of his street. A young lad with learning difficulties is playing in his front garden, but he is being ushered by a guardian away from the fence and the dangerous outside world that lingers beyond it.
A good ten years later, young Curtis is now an adolescent, strolling along with his wandering thoughts drifting to punk rock, but once again, his focus is broken by the same house at the bottom of the street he grew up on. Once more, perched in the garden is that same boy, now a man but still fearing the world beyond the fence. It strikes Curtis that this fellow’s existence, his entire world, will never escape the confines of a three-bedroom council house with a 12ft garden in Macclesfield. Curtis eventually writes ‘The Eternal’ about this grim presentiment.
Many of Joy Division’s songs are borne from that same street. In fact, they are the band that most closely resembles the council estate upbringing many of us can relate to from our youths. Both band and estates are equally misunderstood because rather than being entrenched in eternal misery, there is a hymnal beauty that sometimes shines through, and everything else is at least quirked with the silver lining of strange surrealism—an inexplicable horse in a lounge, one random flat that is definitely occupied, but the owner has never been seen, drunkards sheltering from the rain and quickly learning why there is no such thing as indoor barbeques. This is the world of Joy Division.
Much has been said about Soviet brutalism and folks like Fyodor Dostoyevsky lingering in the welter of Joy Division, but for the most part, it is the streets of Macclesfield in all their strange wonder that contrives to form the fertile inspiration for the band’s back catalogue. But not everyone from these streets sees the world the same way, and there were some notable moments that shaped the poetic views of Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris.
The first of which occurred in an old people’s home. A bookish boy, Curtis excelled at his studies in his latest year 11 term. So, teachers nagged him to apply himself in an extracurricular manner that would surely bolster his inevitable university applications. Thanks to a rumour Curtis had heard, he needed surprisingly little convincing. He signed up to volunteer to visit the elderly in a heartbeat. The rumour in question was that these facilities were resplendent with a cornucopia of fast-acting and free prescription drugs.
At the time, Curtis had been poring over the pages of music mags, enamoured by the drug-addled antics of Iggy Pop, who had smoked his way through spider webs to reach the divine inspiration needed to muster an album like Raw Power out from under the stilted status quo of prog. As a fellow outsider, Curtis figured he, too, might tentatively try out some drugs. The old people’s home had a ready-made free supply of NHS-approved allsorts.
His buddies would ransack the old people’s drug troves in between bouts of serving them tea and biscuits and being called ‘nice young lads’. Then when their volunteering was over, they’d sneak off into some park and swig down dosages of Largactil to see what the hell that might do to them. Aside from the one incident where Curtis passed out and required his stomach to be pumped, the effect it had was largely a spiritual one, serving to disenfranchise the future frontman and his buddies from ordinary, preordained existence. It was a ceremony that decreed them as outsiders, and outsiders went to the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall, not university.
Sumner and Hook were aware of this too. So, they paid it a visit one sunny night in June in 1976. That night, a little-known band called the Sex Pistols were on, and when they emerged and utterly Chernobyled everything they cared to – including the concept of the pop star and the very notion of banality – these two young lads felt certain that a career in music is what awaited them. Hook even confidently said to his dad, “I’m a punk musician now,” and his father replied, “You won’t last a week.” Almost half a century later, he still remains one of the most copied musicians in the world.
A myth had been destroyed for them that night—the myth that rock stars were ready-made idols. Hook just decided to be one. He set up a band of his fellow stragglers who came and went favouring factory life over Factory Records, and for a while, Hook’s father’s summation seemed fated to come true. Perhaps that even inspired Hook not to give in and let his old man win.
Curtis was in a similar position. He had left school and took up a job in a record shop, in part because it meant that he wouldn’t have to keep stealing the albums. In some ways, this shows how the band were shaped by the struggles of being working class. Curtis had initially turned to the formative old people’s home because of the freebies it afforded him, and the same can be said for the record shop. But he knew freebies wouldn’t get him through life, and he was now a married man, determined not to let dismissing university become a rueful decision.
Alas, the most fateful freebie would soon come his way: an offer to become the singer in his old school pal’s band. Hooky hired him without audition. When they finally convinced Morris to join on drums, Warsaw were born. They were shit. Derided and laughed at by Manc punks who had ironically gotten sick of all the copycats knocking about. But soon Curtis would curtail the failing enterprise of attempting to channel David Bowie’s album Low, which had given them their name, through a punk filter, and take up the age-old advice of writing what he knew.
What he knew was his favourite clients failing to turn up at the Macclesfield job centre where he now worked because they had died following an epileptic fit (‘She’s Lost Control’); he knew about bickering domesticity (‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘These Days’); he knew the William Burroughs books that told him the streets of the disenfranchised were just the same across the pond (‘Interzone’); he knew the books of Franz Kafka that let him know that those streets have always been the same everywhere (‘Colony’); he knew Thatcherite decay (‘Disorder’); he knew old men going mad in their semi’s, still suffering from undiagnosed PTSD after the war (‘Decades’); but he also knew the moments when the sun breaks through, and even the concrete of Macclesfield could be lit up like a Roman candle, all kept together with sincere hopes of getting away, that for a moment looms stunningly close and exultantly plausible (‘Atmosphere’).
And get away, they would. The unsure Warsaw became the certain and singular Joy Division. Famed producer Martin Hannett would help to hone the distant yet immediate sound, like a ghost hammering on your wall, that matched Curtis’ lyrics and disposition, and they’d head off to Germany, to drink beers with Mark Reeder, Factory Record’s Man In Berlin. They’d also head over to Holland and eat nothing but chips because the rest of the food in Europe was not to be trusted. They’d disproportionately respond to a prank by their touring buddies in Buzzcocks, whereby they put Talcum powder in Morris’ snare drum by showering them in maggots and infesting their tour bus with mice. They were, suddenly, the newest type of rock idol—one conceived at a Sex Pistols gig just a few years earlier.
They lived the life of young working-class lads getting out there in the world, a band of brothers born from nought, now gallivanting around Europe. But the tether of Macclesfield and all their pasts was a tugging one. This was particularly true for Curtis, who was now expected to be a rock star, a father, a husband, a pioneering writer and musician, an epilepsy sufferer, and the fulcrum of Joy Division and everything that entailed. He was 23. And he was dreading further flights, anxious gigs, public epilepsy attacks, and long-distance arguments with his increasingly estranged family. He was, in essence, dreading life beyond his own little council house, yards from the street where he grew up.
Like the unfortunate lad from ‘The Eternal’, he too was entrapped by the separatist estate where he was born; like we all are, the band were somehow tethered to their pasts, which is perhaps why even in their present, they sounded like ghosts. But it would be a falsehood to think that meant they represent grief and misery alone, because even when that is the bludgeon of their back catalogue, you’d be hard pushed to say there isn’t a brutalist beauty to it. A sense of looking at something as despairing as a boy who will never know life beyond his yard and turning it into the epic poetry of ‘The Eternal’.
Much like the brooding imbuement that has since been bestowed upon Curtis’s tragic end. But lest we forget that all began with the view of having a fucking good laugh and getting the hell out of Macclesfield. And they did that in such style that they will forever live on; it’s just that there’s truth in the portent that it can be perilous beyond your own backyard, but ‘Atmosphere’ will always be proof that daring to surpass it is a worthwhile pursuit.
