E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
Curtis Touching From a Distance
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ISBN: 978-0-571-32241-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-32241-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Deborah Curtis is the author of Touching from a Distance, her memoir of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division.
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Once upon a time there were three bands. It was 26 May 1977 and I’d gone to see Television and Blondie at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. In the bar during the changeover I bought a copy of – ‘Not suitable for adults, a fanzine from Manchester’ it said on the front. Somewhere in the six or seven stapled-together A4 pages was a piece about new bands of the new wave who were having a bit of drummer difficulty. I have an eye for that sort of thing. One was a band called Warsaw, one called The Fall and the other V2. I could do that, I thought. I’ll ring up tomorrow. But dithering, I did nothing instead.
A month or so later, in Macclesfield, I was avoiding going back to work. I found myself looking in Jones’s music-shop window with its shiny unaffordable guitars and musical whatnots. Stuck there in the corner was a handwritten postcard which seemed to shout, ‘Drummer wanted for local New Wave Band, Warsaw. Phone Ian @@@@@@@@.’ There was that Warsaw again. This time the Macclesfield phone number made my mind up for me.
I’d been playing the drums since 1973, in and out of a few bands – mostly out – pretty unsuccessfully. Some lasted one rehearsal, others not even that – the proceedings usually ending with the words ‘not exactly what we’re looking for but …’ A couple had lasted a bit longer. They’d been either folk, rock-covers bands or chicken-in-a-basket cabaret. But then I got kicked out of school and ended up answering the phone in my dad’s office. Which came in quite handy later on.
Back at work a bit more than an hour later, I made that call.
‘Hi, is that Ian? My name’s Steve – ’s’bout the ad in Jones’s window. Are you still after a drummer?”
Yes, he said, they still hadn’t found anyone. Would I like to come to his house later that evening and talk about it around teatime?
Six-thirty saw me roll up at the house in Barton Street for the first time.
‘Hi Ian, I’m Steve – the, er, drummer.’
‘Hiya Steve, come in, come in. This is Debbie. Debbie, this is Steve.’
After a bit of chit-chat, we went into an oddly shaped light-blue room to the left of the front door, past a Dansette record player under the window, a small neat stack of familiar vinyl to one side. Bowie, The Doors, Iggy, Lou Reed, Velvet Underground. A few books neatly arranged – Ballard, Borroughs, Nietzsche, Jim Morrison – .
‘That’s where Iggy got the lyrics to “The Passenger” from.’ Lighting up a Marlboro. ‘Want one?’
We spent the evening smoking, talking about the music. I got the full history of Warsaw from the inspirational Pistols gig to the name and how Richard Boon, Buzzcocks manager, had wanted them to be called Stiff Kittens. ‘Warsaw’s a better name, though. ’s Bowie’s best album, I reckon. Want another fag?’
He described how it had been a bit of an uphill struggle, what with all the other bands starting up at the same time, getting all the gigs, and the problems he had commuting – living in Macclesfield and working in Manchester. How he used to work in Rare Records.
And the trouble they’d had with drummers.
He had a gentle charm and enthusiasm, two vital ingredients – mixed with brains and style they can take you a long way. As Ian didn’t have a tape machine, I left with a cassette of Warsaw demos to listen to and learn.
Ian wanted to do something different, radical, a bit left-field like Throbbing Gristle; he liked their attitude. Off the wall, like. Being the singer in a band and writing was all he really wanted to do. Be a laugh if nothing else. We both liked the same music and what he was saying was exactly what I had been thinking for years. This was the band I’d been looking for.
*
Two weeks later I met Bernard – motorbike and black leather jacket – and Hooky – Mk2 Jag and beard. Salford lads, the usual jokes about another woollyback from Macc.
‘Full of sheep and greasers that Macclesfield.’
In a room at Abraham Moss Community Centre, Crumpsall, we thrashed blindly through the songs from the cassette – ‘Tension’, ‘Reaction’, ‘Inside the Line’ and I think there was one called ‘Gutz’. Somehow I passed the ‘audition’ and we were off.
My first gig was in August at Eric’s in Liverpool. It was obvious after a couple of songs that Ian wasn’t just the quiet cheery soul he seemed to be when we rehearsed. Live, Ian became someone else – frantic, moving a bit like Iggy, he reacted to what we were playing. While the three of us concentrated hard and got lost in what we were doing, Ian would direct all his energy outwards, kinetic like lightning. Live, it was all about energy.
In the beginning it felt like the whole world was against us. When Rob Gretton became our manager (more than that, really – another member, like someone’s older smarter brother) he said we’d been acting like we had a huge chip on our shoulders. Before Rob we’d all tried to be managers. Get on the phone at lunchtime and try to be an apprentice McLaren, mithering for support slots, pestering what we thought was the Manchester music mafia for a break. But whether we had a gig or not we would always practise twice a week. In upstairs rooms in pubs in Macclesfield and Salford, then TJ Davidson’s near International Marine, and finally the upstairs room next to Broughton baths. Learning, writing songs that kept getting better. Ian and his plastic shopping bag of words – lyrics and titles. We’d start with the bass and drums – cycling round ‘play two of them riffs then two of that other one’, not even a cassette recorder when we started, keeping the songs in our heads. Ian shuffling sheets of paper, writing in a notebook, mumbling into a mic, words struggling to get out of the two crap Vox columns and Carlsboro amp that we called a PA. ‘That’s good, Barn, keep playing that,’ until it sounded right. We all knew when that was somehow. Then stop, have a can of Coke or Tizer, a fag, talk a bit, then do it again only better. Ian would try different words, the lyrics would evolve, he would change the title until it painted the picture he wanted. Somewhere along the way we stopped being Warsaw and turned into Joy Division.
It was only when we went into the studio that I could hear what he was singing clearly. I remember recording ‘New Dawn Fades’ with Martin Hannett. We finished off writing in the studio and the song went through a couple of lyric changes. But I remember the very first time we played it through together at Strawberry in Stockport, hearing the lyrics properly for the first time and getting those shivers down the back of the neck, that feeling that happens when you hear something really incredible, something beautiful and moving, and thinking, This is fantastic, being deeply affected by the words he was singing.
The last time I saw Ian, nearly three years to the day since the Television gig, I gave him a lift to Manchester, dropped him outside the BBC on Oxford Road, not that far from the Free Trade Hall. Across the way was Amigos – a Mexican restaurant not open long. He said maybe he’d try a burrito, get a taste for that American food we’d be eating soon. We talked about watching on the telly that weekend. ‘See you at the airport,’ he said, crossed the road into the traffic and was gone.
What happened in between is here in Debbie’s book, her account of the time they shared together and the way the band changed both their lives. Reading it today I am surprised there was so much I never knew about Ian – his audition as a gigolo, he kept that one quiet – all that stuff he never told me himself.
One of the things that I learned about Ian over the years was the way he would say the words he thought you wanted to hear, do what he thought would make you happy and get him what he wanted with the least amount of fuss. He was tenacious, though; if he wanted something he would keep on trying to get it, even if it was clearly impossible.
We all remember the past slightly differently, have different perspectives, and each time it gets told the story gets changed slightly, embellished. We all have our own version of Ian. The one thing they all have in common, though, is the way he could suddenly change from being happy and quiet to a full-on angry ranting maniac. He’d boil over into a fury in an instant. Sometimes it was hard to know whether his outrage was serious, a joke or just one tin of Breaker too many. Sometimes it was all three.
The thing that amazes me the most is all the near-misses – how we lived in the same town, went to the same school, both indulged in the same bizarre combinations of drugs and solvents for kicks, yet never met; drank at the same pubs, yet our paths never crossed; frequented and robbed the same record shops, bought the same albums, went to the same gigs, all those Bowie and Iggy gigs, and never even noticed each other. Uncanny!
That Ian’s illness was a cruel blow is to say the least. The doctors’ advice – live a quiet normal life, don’t stay up late, don’t drink – was like telling him to stop doing everything he enjoyed, to stop doing what he had always wanted. To stop living. The medication he took also seemed to dilute him somehow, made him even less himself, turned him more inward.
It should have been the emergency brake. We should have slowed down or even stopped. Perhaps the closest it came to that was a phone conversation. Ian called, said he was leaving the group, leaving it all behind. Leaving the country, going...
