Joy Division

Joy Division lasted two years, recorded two albums, and in that very brief stretch changed the course of music.

They came out of Manchester in the late seventies, when punk dominated everything with its fury and its speed, and they did exactly the opposite: they slowed the tempo, darkened the tone and built something cold, deep and melancholy.

That would be post-punk, and it would be the seed of almost all the sombre, elegant music of the decades that followed.

At the centre was Ian Curtis, who was more poet than rock star. At the end of this piece there is a painful part, handled with respect, and a note about where to find help.

Inventing melancholy

To measure what they did you have to understand what they were reacting against.

In the late seventies punk was pure energy: rage, speed, three chords at top volume. Joy Division came from there and went somewhere else.

Instead of shouting outwards, they looked inwards. Their music was spacious, with a melodic bass pushed to the front — a very rare thing — guitars that made atmosphere rather than riffs, cold and precise drums, and over it all Curtis's deep, desolate voice.

They did not sound like rage. They sounded like despondency.

For that they are usually named as the band that opened the door to everything that followed: goth, darkwave, a good part of melancholy alternative rock. The sound of elegant sadness begins, to a large extent, there.

The dance and the seizures

Ian Curtis had a way of moving on stage that was hypnotic: a spasmodic, stiff dance, with his arms shaking. Audiences found it fascinating, and it became part of his legend.

That dance was already his trademark before he was diagnosed with epilepsy, in January 1979. Over time, the two became indistinguishable.

By day, Curtis worked at the Macclesfield employment exchange as an Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer: he found jobs for people with disabilities.

One of the women he dealt with there had epilepsy and died of a seizure. He wrote "She's Lost Control" about her. Not long afterwards he was diagnosed with the same illness.

He wrote about epilepsy before he knew he had it.

There are documented concerts in which what the audience saw was not dancing: they were real seizures, fits that struck him up there, in front of everyone.

It happened at the Rainbow Theatre, on 4 April 1980: the technicians switched on the strobe lights against the band's instructions and Curtis collapsed onto the drum kit. That same night they played another show in West Hampstead, and there he suffered the most violent episode he had ever had.

Two days later he tried to take his own life for the first time, with an overdose of his own anticonvulsant. He survived.

The following night the band had to go on without him, with two borrowed singers and bottles flying in from the crowd.

The illness got worse with the pace of touring and with the lights. And it terrified him: his daughter Natalie was born in April 1979, and he could barely hold her in his arms for fear of having a seizure while she was on him.

Behind the icon who danced like nobody else there was a sick, frightened man.

The eve

Curtis carried a great deal: the epilepsy that would not let up, a deep depression, a broken marriage and the pressure of a fame arriving too fast.

Deborah had filed for divorce over Curtis's relationship with Annik Honoré. On that last night he asked her to withdraw the petition.

In the early hours of 18 May 1980 he took his own life in the kitchen of his house, in Macclesfield. He was twenty-three.

The following day he was due to meet the band at Manchester airport. It was Joy Division's first tour of the United States, the trip that was going to establish them on the other side of the world.

A month later, in June, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" came out and reached number thirteen in the United Kingdom. It was the furthest any song of theirs ever got, and he did not live to see it.

What came after

The three who were left could have given up. They carried on, with another name and another direction.

They called themselves New Order, added Gillian Gilbert in October of that same year, and out of that band — which crossed post-punk with dance electronics — would come "Blue Monday" and a good part of the sound of the eighties dance floor.

Out of Joy Division's tragedy there was born, without anyone looking for it, another of the most influential bands in history.

What to remember

Joy Division is proof that two years can weigh more than two decades.

Put on "Love Will Tear Us Apart", "Disorder", "Atmosphere" or "Transmission", and you will hear the birth of a sound that marked everything that came after, from The Cure to Radiohead and many more.

And you will hear a young poet who put anguish and loneliness into words with a depth almost nobody has matched, and who did not live to see what his music would mean to millions.

His story is a hard reminder: behind the most magnetic intensity there can be a pain that does not show. He left us, in two albums, a treasure of sombre beauty.

Listen to him for that, and remember him whole.

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This piece discusses suicide, depression and epilepsy. If you are going through a difficult time or having thoughts of harming yourself, you are not alone and help is available. In Chile you can call *4141 free of charge, the Ministry of Health's suicide-prevention line, available 24 hours a day.

Sources

Joy Division, British post-punk band formed in Manchester in 1976, initially as Warsaw, made up of Ian Curtis (vocals, lyrics), Bernard Sumner (guitar), Peter Hook (bass) and Stephen Morris (drums); it recorded for the Factory Records label. They are considered pioneers of post-punk for replacing punk's fury with atmospheric, melancholy music, with the melodic bass in the foreground; they influenced goth, darkwave and alternative rock. They released "Unknown Pleasures" (1979) and "Closer" (1980, posthumous). Ian Curtis (Old Trafford, 15 July 1956 – Macclesfield, 18 May 1980) was diagnosed with epilepsy on 23 January 1979; his spasmodic dance was already his trademark before the diagnosis, and over time it became indistinguishable from the seizures, of which there are documented episodes on stage, among them the one at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park in April 1980. His daughter Natalie was born on 16 April 1979 and Curtis could rarely hold her for fear of suffering a seizure. He died by suicide at the age of 23, on the eve of the trip to the United States for the band's first North American tour. "Love Will Tear Us Apart", recorded in March 1980, was released in June 1980, a month after his death, and reached number thirteen in the United Kingdom. The three remaining members formed New Order, joined by Gillian Gilbert in October 1980; their track "Blue Monday" is a key piece of electronic dance music. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of their work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Britannica, Wikipedia, Mojo and other coverage.