Remains of Ian Curtis's Macclesfield, Cheshire

As shown above, the former Labour Exchange in Armitt Street, Macclesfield, has now been converted into flats. Ian Curtis of the band Joy Division worked here as an assistant disablement resettlement officer. It was very close to his home in South Park Road.

Unknown Pleasures (1979) was Joy Division's first studio album, the first released in Curtis's lifetime, and such is the iconic nature of the album sleeve (designed by Peter Saville) that there is no need to mention either band or singer.

The Regency Mill roundabout, site of the Talbot pub where Joy Division used to rehearse and eat on occasions. The leaflet Unknown Pleasures: A Walk around Joy Division's Macclesfield (2010), published by the Silk Heritage Trust, mentions that the eccentric landlord (whose name may have been Tony) owned an ostrich whose eggs he used to serve omelettes in the pub.

(I previously published an external photo of 77 Barton Street and Curtis's memorial in Macclesfield Crematorium elsewhere on this blog.)

Ian Curtis in Macclesfield, Cheshire

I finally got round to visiting Macclesfield again: I made a post in 2009 explaining that while on the way to Atlanta (via Manchester airport) we were unable to find the kerbstone of Ian Curtis (1956–80) of the band Joy Division, although we made it to the important places in Elizabeth Gaskell's Knutsford.

Above is a photo of 77 Barton Street, Macclesfield, where Curtis lived and where he hanged himself in the back kitchen.

 

'IAN CURTIS

18-5-80

LOVE WILL

TEAR US APART'

The kerbstone memorial, which has perhaps become Macclesfield's most important feature and is certainly visited by many people from all over the world. Today was a rather miserable Saturday and no one else was there at the time of our visit:

 

But there was strong evidence that many people had visited in the recent past, leaving all kinds of tributes, including an old tee-shirt bearing the album cover from Unknown Pleasures (1979), which was recorded at Strawberry Studios, Stockport (featured in this blog earlier this year).

Elsewhere on this blog are photos of the graves of Martin Hannett, Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson in Southern Cemetery, Chorlton-cum-Hardy. Below I show photos of tributes above the kerbstone which attracted my attention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADDENDUM (June 2015): Musician and businessman Hadar Goldman – also a Joy Division enthusiast – has bought 77 Barton Street with a view to turning it into a kind of museum: article from Manchester Evening News here.

My other Curtis-related posts:

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Mick Middles and Lindsay Reade: Torn Apart
Anton Corbijn's Control

Mick Middles & Lindsay Reade: Torn Apart: The Life of Ian Curtis (2006)

I was aware of Deborah Curtis's Touching from a Distance (1995), but wasn't aware of this book until I stumbled on it last weekend. Co-authored by the journalist Mick Middles (who says he 'hovered around Joy Division for a while') and Lindsay Reade (Tony Wilson's first wife), this gives a much fuller picture of the life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the post-punk band Joy Division, who was born into a working-class family in Old Trafford, Manchester in 1956, and who killed himself in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1980 at the age of twenty-three.

Torn Apart is an appropriate title not only because it alludes to the Curtis-penned Joy Division song 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', but also because the song's autobiographical lyric refers to Curtis himself being torn apart – not only by the triangle he was in with his wife Debbie and his soulmate Annik Honoré, but also by his worsening epilepsy and his ambivalence toward the fame monster.

This book is revisionary in that it finally reveals the truth behind Curtis's relationship with Honoré, often via his (always capitalised) letters to her, or by her correspondance with the authors. Formerly, it had been assumed that Honoré was 'the other woman', which to a large extent she was, but not in the usually accepted sense of that term, hence my use of the expression 'soulmate'. What impresses the reader here is a young woman very far removed from being a groupie or hanger-on, but who was in fact an extremely sensitive person whose relationship with Curtis was, as she says, 'very platonic and very pure and romantic'.

Perhaps Ian Curtis was in part attracted to Annik Honoré initially because she was foreign (therefore exotic), but it was important that they could talk about the music, literature and cinema that thrilled them. However, although this was an intellectual, very intense and very loving relationship, it was never sexual: Curtis's illness and the prescribed drugs he was taking meant a considerable reduction of sex drive, but then the sexually innocent Honoré was too shy to allow anything to develop in that respect.

There is a wealth of information here, much of it culled from people who were directly involved with Ian Curtis and/or Joy Division in general – parents, other relatives, old friends, band members, neighbors, etc. I could have lived without knowing about the accidental drinks from cans of piss, or the shit in hand game, but then this is a kind of warts-and-all book.

And there are a number of minor errors:

The book I have is the 2009 edition, in which Appendix 1 notes the death of Tony Wilson in 2007. However, the first paragraph of Chapter 19 still ends with the sentence '[Wilson] was and remains a very busy man.'

The (Fac 51) Haçienda club deliberately had an aberrant cedilla for a specific reason, but I didn't notice it receiving any cedilla in this book: surely the authors could have managed a few more ALT + codes?

I also noticed a few spelling errors, as opposed to typos. The singer in Echo & the Bunnymen is affectionately called 'enigmatic', although Ian McCulloch is referred to as 'McCullouch' on several occasions, including in the Index. Also, although the reader is overhelpfully (and slightly inaccurately) informed in a footnote that 'Honoré' is pronounced 'Honourey', such attention to detail is not repeated by writing Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté as 'Les Chemims de la Liberte': even if a writer doesn't know a foreign language, that is no excuse to make two mistakes in a few words – such sloppiness seems almost wilful. (Yes, here too the errors are reproduced in the Index: errors which could easily have been corrected for this later edition.)

OK, I do pedantic well. Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed Torn Apart, which is a genuine contribution to Joy Division knowledge: a very worthy effort.

My other Curtis-related posts:

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Anton Corbijn's Control
Ian Curtis in Macclesfield, Cheshire

Anton Corbijn's Control (2007)

Control is the first feature film by Anton Corbijn, and focuses on the life of Ian Curtis (played by Sam Riley), the lead singer and songwriter in the band Joy Division, between 1973 and 1980. As suited to the rather bleak content of the film, it is shot in black and white. We first see him – with books such as Allen Ginsberg's Howl and J. G. Ballard's Crash, and listening to David Bowie – in his parents home, although at the age of nineteen he married Deborah (Samantha Morton), who co-produced the film which is based on her book Touching from a Distance (1995). The rest of the band – 'Hooky', or Peter Hook (Joe Anderson), Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson), and Stephen Morris (Harry Treadaway) – play relatively minor roles.

There were just three years between the band's first gig (before Morris joined as drummer, and when they were – briefly – known as Warsaw) and its abrupt demise on the eve of their American tour. During this time a great deal happened: Curtis – who had witnessed a girl have an epileptic fit and wrote the song 'She's Lost Control' as a reaction – had himself been diagnosed as epileptic; his relationship with Deborah deteriorated considerably; he began a relationship with Belgian Annik Honoré during a European tour; and he was suffering from depression.

On 18 May 1980 Ian Curtis hanged himself with a clothesline in the kitchen of his home in Barton Street, Macclesfield.

Corbijn's film is intense and compelling, the bleakness of it lessened by scatological humour from manager Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell), and John Cooper Clarke reciting 'Evidently Chicken Town'.

At the end we see smoke coming from Macclesfield Crematorium, where Curtis was cremated, and where an increasing number of followers of the rock legend come to see his kerbstone. Below is a link to an amateur video clip from the 30th anniverary of Curtis's death at the cemetery, plus my other Curtis-related posts:

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Ian Curtis, Macclesfield Cemetery

Mick Middles & Lindsay Reade: Torn Apart
Ian Curtis in Macclesfield, Cheshire