Written by: Dave Cantrell
It’s difficult to articulate how much these moments meant to me.
Buying an import copy of Unknown Pleasures the moment it reached the US in late June 1979, the tactile mystery of that cover, running my fingers over it. Playing it the first time, the second time, the third time, knowing, with the same intensity and conviction as one knows one’s in love, that an historic wave, one built on the momentum of Buzzcocks, Magazine, Gang of Four, The Damned and countless others, was being crested. The rush and thrill and visceral excitement quietly stunning, you were constantly caught between catching your breath and filling with a dark joy.
Buying this copy of NME the moment it reached the newsstand in Berkeley in late August 1979. Sitting in my room at Haste & Fulton, futon on the floor, gazing at it in a kind of innate awe. Devouring every word because it was imperative. Imperatives filled the air that summer. We lived in constant animation. Things had been building since Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols became Spiral Scratch became Real Life became Fear Of Music. In September Entertainment! would arrive. In September I would see Magazine two nights running at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco. On the second of those dates I would make the decision to go to London.
Sitting in a bedsit in West Hounslow on an October evening, listening to John Peel on a tiny clock radio. Joy Division’s new single, “Transmission,” will be released in a day or two, and naturally has its world premier on Peel. The small room in which I sit grows larger until it simply has no walls. The edge of the bed I’m sitting on I don’t really feel. The words “Radio, live transmission” – after that deep runneling Peter Hook bassline, after the urban canyon echo of Stephen Morris’ drums, Barney’s guitar slicing through to the marrow – leave the tongue speechless but the body alive, and by “dance, dance dance to the radio” I’m in a state of splendid agitation, frozen but kinetic. Not, in the end, my favorite Joy Division song (though not too far down the list), its reception is easily the most momentous, an eternity lives in that moment.
Saturday, November 10th, Joy Division supports Buzzcocks at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. We’re too broke to have afforded advance tickets but the woman I’m living in London with and I have been bravely working horrible little jobs just to stay alive and so, regardless of the show being sold out, find ourselves on the Tube anyway in hopes of blagging tickets outside. In my mind, we’ll pay whatever, starve later. On the train we befriend a guy with a marijuana leaf earring hanging from his left ear who invites us to Walthamstow to smoke pot. I’m not much of a stoner by that time but with a fateful shrug of the shoulder and a statement that shall live forever in a personal infamy – “That’s OK, they’re touring the States in the Spring, I’ll see ‘em then” – I accede to my girlfriend’s wish to alter our course. That night, that visit with the friendly stranger, is a fine memory of an adventurous time that, through no fault of its own, is now and forever tarnished by the tragedy of a mundane decision.
In 1980 news didn’t travel at the speed of the internet. By May, following my return from London just before New Years Day, I’d been handed the reins of a small record store out in the suburbs near where I grew up, trying, like the benighted idealist I am, to bring a taste of Small Wonder or Rough Trade to Walnut Creek. The 19th was a Monday and I walked from the BART station into town past newspaper boxes blasting news of the previous day’s catastrophic eruption of Mt St Helens, profligate spews of ash in suffocatingly beautiful black and white. The event held a passing fascination for me but in truth, beyond the visual, it was mostly background chatter. I didn’t watch TV, read novels far more than the paper, devoured the NME and Sounds and played records deep into the night. I’m sure that Monday, like any other day, I was preoccupied, quite possibly reading as I walked. Just past noon an ex-pat Brit named Sal walked in, a welcome customer even if all he could normally afford to do was talk music. He wore an unusually dark expression.
“Did you hear about Ian Curtis?”
Questions that begin with ‘Did you hear..’ nearly always have grim answers and yet “What?” comes out of our mouths as a reflex. Beyond the details we often already know the outcome, and indeed between that syllable falling out of me and Sal answering, I knew. The rest of the day I was split in half: one side in a state of floating disbelief and a heavy, sensate mourning, one side behind the counter in a retail numbness. Aside from Sal’s face I don’t remember a single detail of that day past that moment.
Because of all we know now, the countless (and insatiably riveting) books movies interviews and retrospectives, the shock of Ian’s suicide has become the inevitability of Ian’s suicide. So many and so great were the cumulative circumstances leading to his death the actual act itself has become something of an anti-climax. Perhaps suicide always is, at least in a retrospective sense. The fact of the matter is, the death of Ian Curtis has become an inseparable, and perhaps even dominating, piece of the Joy Division mystique. It’s understandable. He has become his lyrics. But the joy in Joy Division for me is to remember them as the living, intensely exciting band that they were. The ultimate testament to any band or artist is when it’s innately understood that greatness is being witnessed as it happens, that regardless of what the future brings, these times right now, these records, these moments, will forever be held in a kind of ambered awe. Joy Division’s music, and the time in which it was made, both are deathless, and Ian Curtis lives.
