Part
2: Ian Curtis
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders
by Kilian
The
life of Ian Curtis was a search. With his band he tried to find a
sound beyond contemporary punk rock mainstream, his intellectual home
should become the literary works of J. G. Ballard, William S.
Burroughs and T. S. Eliot. In addition he longed for domestic
happiness and family harmony with his wife Deborah and daughter
Natalie. At the same time Curtis' needed ways out of the booming grey
of the northern English suburb of Macclesfield. Somewhere there he
left the path of an idealized pop icon and entered his personal hell.
The
web of apparently insoluble problems was spun between four major
coordinates of his life: his wife Debbie, the young Belgian
journalist Annik Honoré, the band and his disease. At the beginning
he was slaved away with his double
commitment: a job in an employment agency that he had to do because
of financial reasons and his band activities including nightly gigs.
Ian later abandoned the job when the band yield
enough to support his wife and child. Between the release of the
first album Unknown Pleasures and the recordings of its
successor Closer the band extendedly toured Europe. During
this time Ian's critical symptoms that slowly and silently surrounded
his life increased. In the course of his absence from Macclesfield he
estranged from his wife Deborah, who he married at the age of 19.
Although he regarded the birth of their daughter Natalie as a great
blessing this alone could not bring back what was already lost. The
liaison with the Belgian Annik Honoré was kept from his wife by him
till the end. But there is more than one truth to know about this
triangle since Deborah Curtis offered a completely different
perspective in her 1995 book Touching From a Distance than
Annik Honoré in her rare interviews. However Ian was massively torn between these two women.
He was burdened with
another heavy load since he suffered an epileptic attack on the way
back from the first London gig. As it was barely seriously
treatable in the 1970s this was the beginning of Ian's nightmarish
descent into the hells of the disease.
The doctors could only offer heavy drugs to ease the symptoms while
Ian feared its side effects. A single sound or a ray of light in the
wrong moment were enough to cause an attack and this sadly happened
above-average on stage. His bizarre dancing style in front of the
microphone marching on the spot with
spastic movements of the arms became famous under the name dead
fly dance. This often led into another attack. Fans
misinterpreted these as rehearsed performances which made him and his
band famous in musical press. Anyway this led Ian to serious
self-doubt. The loss of control in front of the crowd eroded his
self-confidence and made him feel overstrained with the band's
progress.
When
Joy Division prepared their first US tour Ian became aware that he
was not able to cope with all the demands of the band, its
management, his family and his individual needs any more. Whereas
Sumner, Morris and Hook had great pleasant anticipation to tour the
USA Ian felt differently. In the early morning of the 18th
May 1980 the 23-year-old hanged himself in his Macclesfield apartment. The night
before his suicide he saw the film Stroszek by Werner Herzog
and put on the record The Idiot by Iggy Pop. Only when it was
too late his fellow men recognized that his death did not come out of
the blue. Over months they underestimated his actual mental state but
it seems Ian wanted nobody to know. In most situations he adapted to
the cheerful and funny atmosphere among the band members and their
environment celebrating their incredible success they did not get
used to very fast.
His
inner diremption was camouflaged and
thus he channelled his personal suffering into the bands lyrics. To
inconspicuously encrypt the knell of his suicide was definitely
possible for Curtis' poetry had always been multidimensional. In Joy
Division's lyrics he interwove the
psychic abyss that he knew in himself with other poetic contexts.
Blackout, loosing control over the own actions and being helplessly
lost were all experiences Ian had made before he wrote She's Lost
Control:
But
she expressed herself in many different ways
until
she lost control again
and
walked upon the edge of no escape
and
laughed, I've lost control.
Motives
of pain, loss, violence, madness and absurdity run through many of
Joy Division's songs. Atrocity Exhibition
includes the narration of entertaining violence in a gladiatorially
mad world and Disorder
depicts surrealistic disorientation while in Shadowplay
the own death is staged. Entering the cold fantasy of this poet we
can learn that with hope also disappears fear (Insight)
and how alienation feels like when one is separated too long from
another person (I Remember Nothing).
Travelling the chimerical past with its unavenged schemes in
Wilderness is as
revealing as Heart and Soul
where the pictorial narration is open to interpretation the most. In
eternal contrast all good and rational comes together with
horror, barbarism and arbitrariness.
It
was Ian Curtis' personality to bear Joy Division. His fascination for
the dark in human soul gave the band its incomparable aura. Finally
the frontman shattered because of the negativity that he extroverted from the inside.
sources
of pictures:
Ian
Cig: http://www.lastfm.de/music/Ian+Curtis/+images/392372
Ian
Sing: http://www.lastfm.de/music/Ian+Curtis/+images/3319323
Rehearsal:
http://anencounter.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/joy-division-rehearsal.jpg
