“I’m from Salford. Why would the devil scare me?”

Natalie Curtis

Natalie Curtis, nasce il 16 aprile 1979 a Manchester, da papà Ian e mamma Deborah. Come per il figlio di Marc Bolan, fino a poco tempo fa, poco o nulla si sapeva della graziosa Natalie. Dopo il passaggio alle scuole di Macclesfield – la Henbury High School ed il Macclesfield College – la figlia dell’indimenticato frontman dei Joy Division si laurea alla Manchester School Art & Design (Metropolitan University) nell’indirizzo fotografico.

The man who bought Ian Curtis’s house: ‘Joy Division is the modern Rembrandt’

Hadar Goldman stepped in to offer £75,000 above the asking price to buy the Macclesfield house where the singer lived and died

Last February, after a group of Joy Division fans failed to raise enough money to buy Ian Curtis’s old house in Macclesfield and turn it into a museum, entrepreneur and musician Hadar Goldman decided to step in. The house had already been sold to a private buyer, but Goldman – inspired by the campaign – offered to pay a £75,000 compensation fee on top of the house price of £125,000 in order to secure the purchase. Which certainly sounds committed …

“But it was not only to help,” says Goldman, a Curtis fan himself. “It was also, I imagine, for my personal ego. Some people would pay for a Rembrandt painting; for me, Joy Division is the modern Rembrandt.”

Goldman accepts that the house is not a piece of art in itself, but says that it possesses a “raw energy” that he can now harness for good. He wants it to act not only as a Joy Division museum, but also as a digital hub to support musicians and other artists across the world.

It’s something that’s caused a bit of conflict among the former members of Joy Division. Peter Hook is supportive of the idea, arguing that Manchester bands don’t get enough credit for their achievements. But Bernard Sumner says he’s worried the house could become a “monument to suicide”, given that Curtis hanged himself in the kitchen. Goldman says he hopes he can change the latter’s mind.

“Years pass. We are left with great art, great music. And super-positive energy,” he says (for someone who claims not to be into new-age theories, he talks an awful lot about energy). “There is nothing spooky about it. I would like to take it to a place where it is like a little sun [for] energy projection.”

Would he open up the kitchen to the public – something fans had originally promised not to do, for fear it would be too macabre.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Of course! You create demand by forbidding stuff,” he says, adding that he has visited the house and “what happened there in the kitchen … it’s not there, you could not have felt it.”

Goldman was about 15 when Joy Division released Unknown Pleasures. He was a classically trained violinist – “one of these gifted boys, I won all the competitions playing all over Europe” – but hearing Joy Division’s music “pulled me to the other side”.

At the moment, Goldman says he’s tied up with the “worst part of the deal”, which means applying for permits from councils and trying to get small projects off the ground, such as putting a blue plaque on the house, which he thinks should be in place within six months. There are plans to install a board of artistic directors, too, and maybe start a fund to support local artists. Had the house retained its original decor, he would have been happy to leave it, but thinks it’s pointless to reinstate it, preferring to honor Ian Curtis’s contemporary instincts by inviting young architects from the University of Manchester to take over the house’s design work: “I’m saying let’s have a dialogue with tomorrow rather than a trip down memory lane.”

Such ideas are a nod to Curtis and the band’s forward-thinking instincts. “Today we call it ‘to think outside of the box’,” says Goldman. “I think Ian Curtis was everything but the box! I don’t think that he had ever met or seen the box!”

New-Order-Sänger Bernard Sumner über Joy Division: „Mir war ‚Unknown Pleasures‘ zu heavy“

Im Interview mit dem ROLLING STONE gesteht Bernard Sumner, dass ihm der Sound der Platten seiner früheren Band Joy Division zu hart ist, er sie nie gerne gehört hat.

Mit „Music Complete“ haben New Order nach langjähriger Pause und zwei eher schwächeren Platten endlich wieder ein überzeugendes Album veröffentlicht. Nachdem Peter Hook, Erfinder des für die Band typischen warm brummenden Bass-Sounds, ausgestiegen ist, kann man hier erstmals den neuen Bassisten Tom Chapman hören. Er macht seinen Job gut – und klingt fast wie ein Hook-Klon.

Auf dem neuen Album gibt sich die Band elektronischer denn je. „Wir waren immer eine Elektro-Rock-Band“, sagt Sänger und Gitarrist Bernard Sumner im Gespräch mit ROLLING STONE. „Und das heißt nicht nur, dass wir Gitarre/Bass/Schlagzeug und elektronische Sounds miteinander verbinden wollten. Wir hatten immer einen anderen Zugang zur Elektronik als die Clubmusik-Produzenten. Wir haben uns für alles interessiert, was neu war – aber immer versucht, die Klänge und Beats in Gestalt von Songs zu kleiden.“

So überzeugt New Order von ihrem neuen Album sind – so wenig mögen sie den Sound der alten Platten von Joy Division. Die legendäre Band aus Manchester, Vorläufer von New Order, hatte ihr Debut „Unknown Pleasures“ 1979 veröffentlicht – das heute als Meilenstein des britischen Postpunk gilt. Aber: „Ich habe mir die Platte nie gerne angehört“, sagt Bernard Sumner im ROLLING STONE. „Mir war sie zu heavy, zu hart, zu undurchdringlich.“ Und auch das erste New-Order-Album „Movement“ hat die Band in schlechter Erinnerung. Es wurde 1981, ein Jahr nach dem Selbstmord ihres Sängers Ian Curtis veröffentlicht. „Wir können die Platte nicht hören, ohne daran zu denken, wie deprimiert und verzweifelt wir nach dem Tod von Ian waren.“

Late Style

The English band New Order is thirty-five years old. Such is its influence on the large, hybrid musical territory we might call “synth pop” or “dance rock” that entire careers are impossible to imagine without it. There might have been no LCD Soundsystem, or the Rapture, or the flurry of similar acts that arose in New York in the early aughts; there would be no Radiohead, either. “It’s very difficult to genuinely impress my bandmates,” Phil Selway, the Radiohead drummer, said during a recent BBC Radio broadcast, introducing his guest, the New Order drummer Stephen Morris. His mere name, Selway explained, had reduced the other members of Radiohead to a state of hushed awe. “I made Radiohead go all quiet!” Morris replied, in his thick northern accent. “Blimey!”

The music of New Order has created a kind of communion between the melodic conventions of pop and the rhythmic possibilities of dance music—and also between traditional rock instruments (bass, guitar, drums) and electronic alternatives (drum machines, synthesizers, sequencers). The musicians give something heartfelt to their machines, while the machines propel the musicians beyond their human deficiencies. The result is songs that move toward the vibrancy of dance music but don’t always arrive, getting caught instead in little eddies of melancholy. New Order’s best songs tend to be long, spilling over the boundaries of pop’s three-minute template; they feel borne along by joy and sorrow in equal parts.
Last week, the band released “Music Complete,” its ninth studio album. In the decade since its previous major release, “Waiting for the Siren’s Call,” the keyboardist Gillian Gilbert has returned, after ten years of absence, and Peter Hook—whose fluent bass lines have formed one of New Order’s most recognizable qualities—has left, in a fug of acrimony. The members of New Order consistently downplay their individual contributions, preferring to present themselves as a unit, but that hasn’t stopped people from asking: Can a New Order record properly be a New Order record without Peter Hook? (But could it be one without Gillian Gilbert?) Where does the spirit of the band reside?

The answer, though it conforms to every cliché of rock and roll, may be that the spirit of New Order was strongest when the band was in its youth. “Music Complete” is certainly the best of New Order’s late-career albums, and the best since the underrated “Republic,” released in 1993. It contains a handful of songs to add to other treasures in the band’s catalogue, along with many that are forgettable by the group’s own standards. It is difficult for the musicians of New Order to surpass themselves, or to convince a listener that they have anything left to prove.

For the band’s first twelve years, it was closely linked with, though never officially signed to, the Manchester-based label Factory Records, which shunned formal contracts. Factory was more successful as a conceptual prank than as a functioning business venture: it assigned catalogue numbers to a lawsuit, a Manchester night club named the Haçienda, and the Haçienda’s resident cat, before declaring bankruptcy, in 1992.

Factory was headed by the impresario and television journalist Tony Wilson (when he died, in 2007, his coffin was given a catalogue number), and the label’s graphic designer was Peter Saville, who is still responsible for creating all of New Order’s record sleeves. Saville’s designs for the band, using grids, color blocks, and stock photos, resemble advertising for a company that does not exist. Just as the members of New Order have tended to be subsumed by the group as a whole, the visual style creates a dislocation between the band and its audience.

When New Order fails to move—move the feet, move the heart—it is because the music and the image recede too far into the group’s expected pattern, so that the gap between the band and the listener is no longer mysterious but, rather, vacant. For another band, the title “Music Complete” might seem arrogant; for New Order it feels like a placeholder.

“Restless,” the album’s lead single, has a mood that New Order has explored many times before: a wakeful poignancy, like the dawn walk home after the best party of your life. (If New Order has never quite been a dance act, the music is nevertheless perfectly suited to the club-goer’s comedown.) The song moves smoothly, in a seamless blend of instruments; its craft is something that clumsier bands might covet. New Order can turn out a good pop song the way an athlete runs warmup laps. What “Restless” lacks is the small grain of perversity that has made other New Order songs as glorious as they are inimitable—“The Perfect Kiss,” for instance, from 1985, which includes an interlude of synthesized, ribbitting frogs. Why frogs? Why not.

One of the new album’s best songs is “Stray Dog,” which features a gravelly spoken-word narration by Iggy Pop, very different in tone from the singer and guitarist Bernard Sumner’s light and sometimes colorless singing voice. The friction between the vocals and the deft instrumental arrangement—a hint of violins; guitar that has borrowed its texture from Pop’s rough presence—makes for something worth paying attention to. And Pop’s guest appearance is highly evocative, whether deliberate or not.

New Order arose out of Joy Division, and in 1980, when that group’s singer and lyricist, Ian Curtis, committed suicide, it was widely reported that the record left on his turntable was Pop’s solo début, “The Idiot.”

Sumner, Hook, and Morris all played in Joy Division. Over the years, it has become nearly impossible to cut through the myth of Joy Division to the four young friends whose inexperienced punk racket was transformed, by their own sheer will and by the gifts of their producer, the late Martin Hannett, into unearthly beautiful music. But if any group has the right to reclaim Joy Division it is New Order, and the band does so on “Stray Dog” and on a track called “Singularity,” which begins with eerie, wavering noises and a prominent bass line; both evoke Joy Division’s sound, which was also New Order’s early sound.

New Order covering itself works better than when it tries to sound like Chic, which the group does on the songs “Tutti Frutti” and “People on the High Line.” In the past, New Order’s willingness to absorb new sounds in dance music placed it in pop’s vanguard, but to evoke disco now, two years after the disco-revivalist high point of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” (co-written by Chic’s Nile Rodgers), feels belated. How cruel that the architects of a style, despite their longevity and their widespread influence, should find themselves eclipsed by their younger pupils.

The final song on “Music Complete” is “Superheated,” and it features Brandon Flowers, of the Las Vegas group the Killers, a name taken from a fictional group in a New Order music video. The mood of the song is reflective, almost stately, though the lyrics (a career-long weakness for New Order) are banal. “Now that it’s over,” Flowers sings. New Order was born as a kind of historical accident, out of personal tragedy, and has achieved in the wake of that misfortune more than most bands will ever achieve. Perhaps now, at long last, it really is over.

© Anwen Crawford & The New Yorker

Taking Control: telling the Ian Curtis story

Even if you haven’t seen it, you already know how Control ends. A young man alone in a flat. Despair. Silence, music – and love, tearing everything apart again.

That young man is Ian Curtis, the singer and lyricist for Joy Division, a band whose fledgling career ended on the morning of May 18th 1980 when Ian took his own life.

It’s a film about a boy. You go with him from the age of 17 to 23 – he just happens to become the singer of Joy Division

Anton Corbijn

So you know how Control ends. But do you know how it begins? It begins with a boy.

We meet Ian as a schoolboy, an eyeliner-wearing, Wordsworth-quoting Bowie fan who joins the band after a Sex Pistols gig. “It’s not a music film,” director Anton Corbijn explained on its release in 2007.

“It’s a film about a boy. You go with him from the age of 17 to 23 – he just happens to become the singer of Joy Division.”

Joy Division may never have reached stadium status while Curtis was alive, but the band was on the cusp of making it big when he died. With a cult following in their native Manchester and their first North American tour scheduled to kick off the day after his death, what his fanbase may have lacked in quantity they made up for in passion.

Since then, Joy Division has reached near-legendary status. It’s hard to overstate the band’s influence on the indie scene over the past 35 years. Countless artists crowding today’s festival line-ups claim the band’s timeless, brooding post-punk sound as an influence.

ideo clips of Curtis’s inimitable performance style abound on YouTube and his life’s work has been pored over and analysed in countless books. His memory is – and was when Control was released in 2007 – alive and well.

Keeping fans happy when making a film about Curtis was always going to be tricky but, aside from pleasing fans, it was important for Control to do justice to Ian’s family and bandmates’ memories.

That so many people remember and revere a film’s subject is both a help and a hindrance when you’re making a biopic. How do you do them justice? And how do you tell their story without upsetting friends and family who are still around?

In Control’s case, you start with decent source material. The film is based on Touching From A Distance, the book Curtis’s wife, Deborah, published in 1995. She writes about their life together as well as the formation of the band, her husband’s infidelity and his death.

Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh took the book as a starting point, explaining that it allowed him to keep the story authentic but also to find the conflict that every film narrative needs to work: “I had a great place to start with the book, because there was so much to work with.”

Step two was to involve as many people who knew Ian as possible. Director Anton Corbijn met him when taking the photographs of the band that became their defining image: intense black-and-white shots, heavy overcoats and understated poses that somehow exude otherness.

These photographs contributed to the way the film was shot; the black-and-white film echoing the now-famous photoshoots.

As well as writing the book that inspired the screenplay, Deborah Curtis served as co-producer on the film, while her daughter, Natalie, who was just one year old when her father died, helped with research for the script. She also visited the set and met Sam Riley, the actor who played her dad, and Samantha Morton, who portrayed her mother.

“We talked until dawn about her role and I saw her notes – thoughts and reflections on how to play the character,” Natalie wrote of Morton at the time. “Spending time with her had reassured me; I knew that whatever happened she’d do a damned good job, even if she didn’t seem quite like my mother.”

Curtis’s bandmates were also on board. Having gone on to have a successful career as New Order, they created the incidental music for Control.

The actors who played Joy Division also learned their instruments so they could play all the songs live for the shoot. The likeness was uncanny, according to the band’s bassist Peter “Hooky” Hook when he went to see the film: “It was like being dissected. And then I went to take a piss and Ian [Curtis] and Bernard Sumner were next to me… Well, the actors that played them and I was like that… ‘Aaaaah!’. That was surreal.”

Despite all the careful research, the film could never completely match up to the reality of Joy Division’s short but eventful career.

“It’s sort of true, but you have to take liberties when you’re making a film because the truth is too boring,” drummer Stephen Morris said, before adding: “It’s good, very good. It’s a bit hard to watch when you’re involved in it as much as Peter [Hook] and I have been.”

Hook agreed: “I really enjoyed it, but it was like having your heart stamped on.”

As Control comes to MUBI this week, Joy Division fans around the world have been marking the 35th anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death.

There are Joy Division re-releases and a recent live show featuring Peter Hook to mark the occasion, allowing Curtis to live on through the timeless music that he made. Because, as Curtis himself wrote: “Reality is only a dream based on values and well worn principles, whereas the dream goes on forever.”

Joy Division, la storia della band che portò alla luce il lato oscuro del rock

Una parabola durata quattro anni ma che avrebbe cambiato il mondo del pop per sempre. E’ quella dei Joy Division, la band guidata dal carismatico Ian Curtis che, tra il 1976 e il 1980, con solo un ep e due album, è stata capace di entrare nel mito. Anche grazie, come spesso accade nelle storie del rock, alla tragica fine del suo leader, impiccatosi il 18 maggio dell’80. La vicenda viene ora raccontata da chi l’ha vissuta in prima persona, il bassista e fondatore del gruppo Peter Hook, nel libro “Joy Division – Tutta la storia”, pubblicato da poco da Tsunami.

E’ la prima volta che quanto accaduto in quegli anni viene affrontato direttamente da un membro del gruppo. Un gruppo che, a dispetto di una parabola estremamente rapida e di sicuro non baciata sul momento dal grande successo, ha lasciato un’eredita che andata crescendo nel corso del tempo, raccolta ancora oggi da gruppi che partono da quella lezione per muovere i primi passi, si chiamino Interpol o Editors, o prima di loro U2, Rem,Radiohead, la cui musica è piena di semi gettati dai Joy Division.

C’è sempre una storia vera dietro il mito. Con le sue miserie, le sue normalità e le macchie di sporco che intaccano il quadro luccicante passato ai posteri. Figurarsi quando il quadro è di per se oscuro, con l’ultima pennellata costituita dalla tragica fine di un’anima tormentata. Pochi personaggi nel mondo del pop hanno dato vita un culto fedele e ossequioso come Ian Curtis. Splendido poeta e uomo fragile, che proprio grazie a queste due caratteristiche è riuscito a entrare in sintonia con milioni di ragazzi di più generazioni.

Peter Hook mette insieme una ricostruzione minuziosa, completa di fatti giorni per giorno e descrizione delle singole canzoni album per album, ma depurata da qualsiasi accento agiografico, lascia da parte l’enfasi e riporta sulla terra anche il mito di Curtis. Senza rivelare particolari che ne possano intaccare l’immagine ma semplicemente riducendolo a “persona normale”, con le sue debolezze e inclinazioni. La storia dei Joy Division è quella di un gruppo che gira su un pulmino scalcinato, per locali dove spesso si trova a suonare per dieci persone o viene coinvolto in risse e deve fare i conti con la cronica mancanza di soldi. Un gruppo che rimane folgorato dai Sex Pistols e vorrebbe suonare punk ma che poi cambia la storia di quel genere aprendo un universo nuovo, oscuro ed ipnotico, dove persino Frank Sinatra trova spazio.

Peter Hook dei Joy Division e New Order

C’è ovviamente il capitolo doloroso del suicidio di Curtis. Un epilogo per il quale diversi segnali compaiono durante il percorso, e Hook è a suo modo impietoso nel non cercare scuse, per se stesso in primis ma per tutto l’entourage della band. Sottolinea più volte come, nonostante le condizioni del cantante, schiacciato da un’epilessia che andava peggiorando con l’aumentare degli impegni, fossero evidentemente sempre più precarie, nessuno volle fermare il treno. Perché il treno Joy Division era in piena corsa, stava raccogliendo i primi frutti delle fatiche e dei sacrifici, e nessuno voleva guardare il muro verso il quale stava andando a schiantarsi. A partire da Ian stesso, che, stando a quanto dice Hook, non chiese mai di rinunciare a qualche impegno e anzi rassicurava tutti ogni volta che poteva. E tutti erano ben felici di essere rassicurati.

Nel libro entrano spesso riferimenti ai New Order, che raccolsero l’eredità dei Joy Division, e ai rapporti sempre più tesi (fino alla rottura definitiva negli ultimi anni), con l’altro fondatore, il chitarrista e poi cantante, Bernard Sumner. Nonostante questo Hook riesce a non deragliare troppo dal racconto e, per quanto possibile, a non farsi trascinare da rancori personali. Per quelli ci sarà tempo, come dice lui in chiusura, “per il capitolo di un altro libro”.

Leigh Open Air Pop Festival

The Leigh Rock and Music Festival was a 3-day mini-festival co-hosted by Zoo Records and Factory Records, held in Leigh on 25, 26 & 27 August 1979. Factory gave the event the catalogue number Fac 15 and the title ‘Zoo Meets Factory Half-way’. The roster included A Certain Ratio, Joy Division, Crawling Chaos, The Teardrop Explodes, OMD, and Echo and the Bunnymen. The event was so-titled because the town Leigh is Half-way between Liverpool (the home of Zoo) and Factory. Catalogue number also allocated to a poster for the event which was designed by Peter Saville.

Bill Drummond was the head of Zoo Records and in his excellent book ’45’ he recalls the event: “Tony Wilson phoned me from Factory Records. They had started at about the same time as Zoo. There was some sort of friendly rivalry between the two labels, which mirrored the less friendly rivalry that existed between the two cities of Liverpool and Manchester. There had even been a rather sad and pathetic attempt at a festival in the summer of ’79 – ‘Factory meets Zoo Half-way’ – on some derelict ground outside Warrington. The bands featured were A Certain Ratio, The Teardrop Explodes, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Echo and the Bunnymen and Joy Division. Tony Wilson tried to dissuade me from signing the Bunnymen to a major label. He told me that it doesn’t have to be this way, that Joy Division, as we spoke, were recording an album to be released on Factory. We should do the same with the Bunnymen. Up until then none of the rash of indie record labels that had sprung up around the UK in the wake of the Punk DIY ethic had produced anything but seven-inch singles. As far as I was concerned, this was part and parcel of some vague ideology. I assumed that most other people out there running small independent labels must think the same way. That they too were going for the eternal glory of pop and the seven-inch single. The Alan Hornes, the Bob Lasts. So when Tony Wilson implied I was selling out and buckling in to the power and money of London, I didn’t get what he meant. As far as I was concerned he was the one compromising, by giving in to the indulgent muso tendencies of Joy Division and letting them record an album for Factory. (There is another side to this. We were skint. Tony Wilson was on telly every night earning loads of money. We needed the cash the southern bastards could tempt us with.)”

Setlist:

1. Disorder
2. Leaders Of Men
3. Colony
4. Insight
5. Digital
6. Dead Souls
7. Shadowplay
8. She’s Lost Control
9. Transmission
10. Interzone
11. Sound of Music

“We didn’t know Ian Curtis was approaching his breaking point”

Thirty five years ago, JOY DIVISION arrived in London. Their mission: to escape Manchester, have a laugh and make a classic second album. Now, BERNARD SUMNER, PETER HOOK, STEPHEN MORRIS and those closest to them tell the full story of those initially thrilling, ultimately traumatic few weeks. A tale of Frank Sinatra, fancy sandwiches, all-night sessions and boyish pranks. And of IAN CURTIS who, unnoticed by his bandmates, was falling to pieces…

Joy Division arrived in London in March 1980 to begin work on what would become Closer, their second album. The previous year had seen the band’s fortunes rise in a frantic, occasionally troubling, way, and the prospect of escaping from Manchester for a few weeks was enticing – not least to Ian Curtis who, away from his wife, Deborah, could live openly with Annik Honoré, a Belgian girl he had met at a London show in August.

Tony Wilson, the owner of Factory Records, installed them in a pair of adjoining flats on York Street, between Baker Street and Marylebone on the edge of the West End. Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and the band’s manager, Rob Gretton – “The loud bastards”, as Hook describes the trio – settled into one. “They weren’t very luxurious but to us, coming from Salford, the fact that they had an indoor toilet and a big kitchen was great.”

Curtis, Bernard Sumner and Martin Hannett, the producer, established themselves in the other, opposite, along with Honoré. “They had the cultural flat,” remembers Morris. The loud bastards’ flat, he recalls, had a larger population of mice.

“They were the boorish unimaginative lot, we were the creative backbone, there to make the album,” says Sumner. “I was sleeping in the lounge, on a dining table. But we didn’t spend much time there; we were making the album at night.”
“A more musing, intellectual flat,” Hook suggests, but all of Joy Division were entirely capable of boorish behaviour, not least Sumner and Curtis. The band would turn up at Britannia Row Studios, Islington, in the late afternoon, and work through the night, subject to Hannett’s whims. Free to put the speakers wherever they wanted, they had the run of the place. “Very good for creativity,” says Sumner.

“One night, we found John Peel’s phone number on reception and phoned him up at four o’clock in the morning, at home. It was Ian’s idea. I think Peel told us to go and fuck off. We didn’t tell him it was Joy Division.

“Me, Barney and Rob had a terribly evil sense of humour,” says Hook. “We would wind Ian up. From a working-class point of view, we were used to getting our own way with the women we knew. Then along came Annik, who was a strong woman. She just went, ‘Fuck off!’ I’d never met anyone like Annik before. We were always messing about and she hated it. She’s Belgian, for fuck’s sake. They weren’t blessed with a sense of humour. Every time her and Ian went out, we’d fuck around, tip the beds up, string her knickers off the lights, just stupid things. And then when Ian came back, he obviously had to defend her honour. She was going fucking apeshit.”

“The strange contradiction with Joy Division was, it was a laugh being in that band,” says Sumner. “We had lots of jolly japery, it was a real good time. But I guess everybody’s got two aspects of their personality, at least, and the music reflected the other aspect of everyone’s personality. With Ian, there were definitely two agendas going on, but I can only really say that with hindsight, because at the time the only clue to his darker side were his lyrics. And we never listened to his lyrics.

“We were very much a band, but very much not a band. The way I like to think of it was, we were all stood on our own pedestals, and there was no cross-fertilisation. We were all making our own record, and we didn’t really talk about it. Which I guess contributed to the rather unusual sound we came up with. No-one sat down and said, ‘Have you read Ian’s lyrics, they’re a bit…’ because he was a normal, happy guy. It was very difficult to tell with Ian what he could and couldn’t handle. We had no idea – we hadn’t known him that long. We didn’t know he was approaching his breaking point.”

Hindsight has endowed the making of Closer, Joy Division’s second album, with all manner of terrible intimations. Entire theses may well have been written parsing Curtis’ every action in the months running up to his suicide, seeing harbingers of doom in the most mundane acts.

The real story of Closer, though, is less melodramatic and poetic, and a lot more human and complex. It is about spirited young men on the cusp of fame, still uncomfortable with the idea of discussing – or even confronting – each other’s emotions. As 1979 came to a close, the quartet found themselves at the centre of a burgeoning cult, with June’s Unknown Pleasures having attracted the attention of Warner Brothers US. Using Hannett as a conduit, the label offered Joy Division – or at least Tony Wilson and Factory – £1 million for distribution rights and videos.

“We never heard about it,” a rueful Morris says now. “The solution Factory came up with was to send Martin and [sleeve designer] Peter Saville to do the negotiating. That’s why it never happened. If it was us, and somebody had offered us a substantial sum of money, we would have taken it.”

“Martin had arranged it,” adds Hook. “An A&R man came down. Martin was very upset, because he felt that was definitely the way to go. He’d been instrumental in getting this whole thing together and Rob and Tony [Wilson] just laughed at it. I think Martin had no illusions that people like Warners could have made life very easy for us, and made us huge.”

Meanwhile, the band themselves innocently got on with their business in Cheetham Hill, more or less fumbling towards transcendence. Their rehearsal room was opposite North Salford Youth Club, where Hook and Sumner had hung out as 14-year-olds. Here, between plays of Low and “Heroes”, Iggy’s Bowie albums and Kraftwerk, the songs of Closer began to take shape.

“We wrote a tune a week,” says Hook. “You could only practise for two hours on a Wednesday and three hours on a Sunday, which used to cost us 50p an hour. And the songs were mainly instigated on Sunday and finished off on Wednesday. We were on £1.50 a day during the whole of Joy Division. Unfortunately, we were happy on £1.50 a day.”

By early 1980, nearly all of the tracks that would make up Closer were at least half-written. “I’d say they were all written,” reckons Hook, “but then Martin [Hannett] got involved in adding more parts.”

“We’d all do our own thing,” says Sumner. “We didn’t really jam, we didn’t talk to each other about it. It was a pleasurable time, but with a certain uncertainty about Ian, because of his health. We’d finally got where we were aiming for, and America was beckoning. We were on the cusp, we were fantastic live. But on the other hand, we worried about Ian’s fits.”

Curtis’ epilepsy had started affecting Joy Division shows seriously when the band toured with the Buzzcocks in October 1979. “Really, we should have stopped then, but we didn’t, we just carried on,” admits Morris. In January 1980, the band made a chilly tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, unveiling some putative versions – untouched by Hannett – of the Closer material. With a comical austerity typical of the band, their haircuts were administered by Rob Gretton.

Six more UK gigs in February followed, before the band returned to where they’d recorded Unknown Pleasures, Strawberry Studios in Stockport (owned by 10cc and disapproved of by Sumner: “We didn’t like the sound in there, it was real ’70s gear, carpets on the wall. Everything was dead”) for a first attempt at one of the new songs. “‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ came about due to the bass riff,” says Hook, “and me and Steve getting the backing track. There’s hardly any keyboards and on the first version there’s hardly any guitar. It was written quite simply.”

Morris: “Martin [Hannett] was into sonic experimentation. It was, ‘Fuck what the band want.’ He wanted to make a classic record. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is best described as a war of attrition. You’d do it, then you’d think you’d done it, and then you’d do it again and again and again…”

Sumner: “We were unhappy with the results. It was this constant to-ing and fro-ing with Martin. We all thought his production on Unknown Pleasures was really interesting, but it just didn’t catch the power of the band live. Peter Hook and I were keen for it not to happen again. We were constantly pushing him to make the sound more powerful.”

Hook: “Tony felt the songs we were writing were slower and darker, which I think you can safely say Closer is. I don’t know whether it was half in jest, but Tony suggested Ian listen to Frank Sinatra. And then Rob went out and bought him some Sinatra records and Ian did get into listening to Sinatra, which was quite funny. Quite nice, actually.”

Sumner: “We were at our friend Jasmine’s house in Walthamstow, before we got the ferry to go out to Europe [for live dates], and Frank Sinatra came on the telly. Ian said, ‘Frank Sinatra’s great.’ Either me or Rob went, ‘No, he’s shit.’ ‘No, he’s great.’ ‘No, he’s fucking SHIT!’ ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, he’s fucking GREAT!’ And the whole argument escalated… I think Ian sang like Frank Sinatra on ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ to fuck us off.”

By the end of the Strawberry Studios session, however, the band were still unsatisfied with “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. Soon after, they moved the operation down to London, settled into their new flats and, on Monday, March 17, began a formal three-week session for Closer at Britannia Row. “In the short time since Unknown Pleasures, they’d moved from buying out-of-hours time at Strawberry Studios to having a 24-hour lockout at Britannia Row,” says Terry Mason, Joy Division’s tour manager.

“Strawberry was pretty plush,” remembers Sumner, “but at Britannia Row, at lunchtime on the first day, the receptionist brought us tea and sandwiches. I had ham and tomato with a little bit of horseradish. We thought, ‘Fucking hell, we’ve made it now. I can get used to this.’ It was a pretty nice studio, the desk was kind of old-fashioned, but the sound was phenomenal.

The sounds of the speakers were a lot of the inspiration for the sonics on Closer, and also a big part of the sonics on ‘Blue Monday’, which we made in the same studio. The room sounded fantastic; I’d never heard bass like that before.”

Michael Johnson, the house engineer at Britannia Row, had been away in the States on The Wall tour with the studio’s owners, Pink Floyd. “When I came back,” he recalls, “I was assigned to this band I didn’t know anything about. It wasn’t that flash a studio, to be honest, it was kind of rough and ready then. The studio had gone from being Pink Floyd’s base to being a commercial studio, so at that point there wasn’t even a lounge for the artists. They used to use the reception area when the rest of the building had gone home. Ian would go upstairs to listen to a record-player in one of the offices, things like a Frank Sinatra record. He did his vocals in a few days; it didn’t take him very long. After that, we never really saw him again.”

Terry Mason claims that “the band started with the intention of working reasonable hours, but that seemed to go out of the window very quickly” – inevitable, perhaps, when they were working with someone like Hannett, who was also chainsmoking joints.

Hook: “Martin insisted that we work through the night, because he felt the vibes were better, a condition that Bernard caught off him after that. We were all moaning about it. Martin was a bastard when he felt it wasn’t going well. But on Closer, he was at his best. He introduced us to sequencers, which we used on the more dreamy tracks.”

Sumner: “We messed about with ambient noises on Unknown Pleasures, but I don’t think we had any keyboards then. For Closer, Martin brought a big ARP modular system in, which sounded great, but it’d take a day for him to get a bass drum sound on it, plugging cables in when he was stoned. He just had a very guess-what-I’m-thinking attitude. He liked his drugs, did Martin, and whatever mood he was in depended on how many he’d had.”

Morris: “On ‘The Eternal’, Martin’s thing was, ‘Right, I don’t want you to play on this one at all, I just want you to make funny noises…’ That’s when we did the synths on the sequencer. It’s quite uncanny that the sequencer fucked up – there’s a big mistake in the drums in the middle of ‘The Eternal’, which we couldn’t figure out. We kept it in, but I should have taken that as a bit of a bad omen. I think Martin fucked about more than we did. He loved fucking about with the drummers, it gave him something to look forward to. How can I torture the drummer today? There was method in his madness, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but he saw his role as producer to weave a complex web of tensions, and he did that very well. He did love winding people up, particularly studio managers.”

Hook: “Martin mixed the first two tracks – ‘Heart And Soul’ and ‘The Eternal’, I think – and I fell out with him because the bass was too quiet. I had a row with him, and he told me to F-off. I had to go back to Manchester for some reason, but I told Bernard and Steve to make sure the bass was loud enough – but the bastards stiffed me! Which became the story for my career…”

“They weren’t friends outside of the studio,” says Susanne O’Hara about the relationship between Joy Division and Hannett, her boyfriend at the time. “They never met up.

Ian had a very intense relationship with Martin. I know there was a feeling between him and Ian; sometimes they were the only two who understood each other.”

The rest of the band, however, were becoming a little more distanced from Curtis, as, in Hook’s assessment, “His illness was getting worse and his girlfriend, Annik, was getting more demanding.” But though Curtis would record his vocals separately, he would sometimes listen in on the instrumental sessions. “He would encourage us to go down certain routes,” continues Hook. “He wasn’t musical, but he started playing quite a lot of guitar by the time we got to Closer. He was very amateurish, but it really had a nice charm to it.

“The most difficult person in all the bands I’ve been in has been Barney. If he didn’t like a track, he wouldn’t play on it – he was a cunt for that. He was generally the most unhelpful person, whereas Ian was so eager to please. The majority of the time it was me, Steve, Barney and Rob in the pub, nursing our one warm pint, on our £1.50 a day, while Ian got on with the vocal takes with Martin.

“Then, because he was with Annik, they would disappear off. She was there when he wrote. He definitely relied on her a lot more than us. We didn’t get involved in the lyrics, because he was always so good at it. Fucking hell, I can’t even remember him asking. Ian did guide vocals on all the songs, mumbling the ones he didn’t have lyrics for.”

“Ian changed when he was with her. He became a bit more lofty; he wasn’t one of the lads,” agrees Sumner. “He also became vegetarian when he was with her, which didn’t go down too well. Once in Germany, we went out to a restaurant and there’s this thing in Germany called schweinhacksen, which is basically pig’s leg with sauerkraut. I don’t know whose idea it was, but we went to a restaurant that specialised only in schweinhacksen, so Ian and Annik were sat at the opposite table eating dry bread, because that’s all they could get. There was a lot of rubbing Ian up the wrong way when he was with Annik, which I thought was a bit uncalled for.”

Morris: “We had to hide all evidence of meat. We were living on lamb kebabs from the kebab shop round the corner. Ian memorably decided he was a vegetarian, then he had to have some of ours when she wasn’t looking.”

Sumner: “Ian got so pissed off with us taking the piss out of him and Annik that he was like, ‘Fuck it, they’re a bunch of bastards. I’m going to leave.’ But it was just reacting against the way he was being treated by the band. For a while, he wouldn’t hang out with us. He started hanging out with this weird Dutch guy, this weird sycophant guy who wore T-shirts with strange slogans on. Which was daft.”

“One night we all went for a meal,” recalls Peter Saville. “Ian and Annik sat on another table, and every time I glanced over at them, Ian was crying. We all have relationships in our twenties and they can be pretty superficial, but it was quite plain to me that was not Ian’s feeling towards her.”

The crying may also have been caused by the barbiturates Curtis had been prescribed for his epilepsy, which appeared to be worsening. “The problem with barbiturates is you lose your grip on reality when you have a lot of them,” explains The Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly, a good friend of Curtis, “and they were giving him high doses. He’d be sat at a table and he had a line of these pills that he had to take. They left him finding it difficult to keep a grasp on things, and hold things together.”

One night, Curtis went missing from the Britannia Row studio. After about an hour, Hook went looking for him and found him in the toilets. “He’d had a fit, fallen and banged his head on the basin. Ian was always his own worst enemy, because he always told you what you wanted to hear. He immediately said he was all right, didn’t want to go to hospital, and he was up bouncing around like fucking Tigger. Like nothing had happened. He really was fighting it tooth and nail.”

Nevertheless, the sessions were progressing well, even though the band had barely discussed what they were doing. “We never talked about music ever,” admits Hook. “The only thing we would talk about was, ‘Oh we need another fast, dancey one.’ To me that was one of the beauties of the group.”

They began with the songs they were most familiar with: “Colony”, “Twenty Four Hours”, “Passover” and “A Means To An End”. “We did ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ quite early on,” remembers Morris. “We did it with all kinds of layers. We’d do a guide track and then a lot of overdubbing and funny little noises over the top. There were a lot more tracks other than these that ended up on [1981 album of live tracks and rarities] Still. I think ‘The Sound Of Music’, ‘The Only Mistake’, as well as the flexidisc stuff [‘Komakino’, released April 1980]. We hadn’t learned how to fuck about yet.”

“Decades”, however, proved more complicated, not least because, in Sumner’s words, “We had all these new synthesisers. Perhaps six months earlier, I’d built one, but I didn’t really know what I was building, some sort of weird electronic machine that made sounds. I found it fascinating.”

“‘Decades’ took a long time to sort out. It just didn’t seem to be going anywhere,” says Morris. “Then it suddenly turned into that Martini advert. It was kind of James Bondish. That was the first thing we agonised over. I think we might have been on the point of putting it on the flexidisc, then it just kind of happened.”

Sumner also recalls “some ghostly whistling” that kept being picked up on the PA system on either “Decades” or “The Eternal”, “like somebody was whistling along”. “Psychic vibes,” claims Morris. “Syd Barrett came in, sat down, walked out again.”

Then there was “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, which the band seemed incapable of leaving alone. Michael Johnson suggests the vocal was re-recorded at Britannia Row. Sumner, meanwhile, remembers, “When we insisted that the song was done again, Martin sulked. We did all the music, recorded it, and Steve went home to bed, across the other side of London. I was staying there doing the Beach Boys bit at the end on my crap 12-string guitar. It was three o’clock in the morning, everyone was happy with it, and Martin says, ‘I’m not happy with it. I want Steve to double-track the snare drum, and he’s not here, is he?’ So he got him out of bed, dragged him all across London. I think his attitude was, ‘You’ve made me do it twice, so I’ll make you do it twice.’”

_____________________

March 29, 1980. As the Closer sessions came to an end, Joy Division’s wives and girlfriends – with the significant exception of Deborah Curtis – were invited down from Manchester for a visit. Morris was dispatched to pick them up.

“That was just a fucking bad idea,” he recalls. “I got the times wrong, left them waiting for two hours at Euston. It didn’t get off to a good start, and then went downhill.”

“It was disastrous,” says Hook. “I don’t think Ian’s wife came, and everybody else’s wife was as miserable as fuck. We’d been home for Unknown Pleasures and it literally took five days to record the album. Then when we went away for three weeks, it was a period of adjustment for us, and also our other halves were adjusting to the fact that we were away, which was at Martin Hannett’s insistence. There was no communication in those days – nobody had phones and nobody had money. It was a struggle.”

Another night, Michael Johnson went to answer the doorbell at the studio and found “these four little bedraggled Irishmen stood there saying, ‘Is Martin Hannett here?’ This was U2. They’d obviously walked from the bus stop, four little urchins, soaking wet. I can’t recall how long they spent there, but they were talking to Martin about working with him.

“I walked in and saw these really skinny little young kids staring open-mouthed at Martin,” says Hook. “I think I went and got the others, saying, ‘Come and have a look at these turkeys, they’re terrified.’ Because we were 23 then, they were just kids. We were the daddies. Martin was having a meeting with them and they were practically bloody shaking. At the time, it appealed to my warped sense of humour.”

Sumner: “They seemed like pretty nice chaps. I think they were Joy Division fans. I have said some bitchy things about Bono since then, but the truth is, if I’m honest, I’m a little bit jealous of them. They were our peers, but things seemed to go so smoothly for them, whereas things seemed to go disastrously wrong for us at every turn. We seemed to be ill-fated…”

By early April, Closer was being mixed, and Factory booked the band three shows as part of a label showcase at the Moonlight in West Hampstead – “A folly of Factory-sized proportions,” says Terry Mason. “Our major preoccupation was keeping an eye on Ian to look for the signs of a seizure taking hold.”

On the last night, April 4, Joy Division played twice: a headline slot at the Moonlight, and earlier at a Stranglers benefit (Hugh Cornwell had just been busted for heroin), at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. During both, Curtis suffered grand mal seizures. “I hauled Ian offstage and forced my way to the dressing rooms,” continues Mason. “This time it was different. In the past, Ian would just lock up, but on the way downstairs he seemed to lose every bone in his body and was like a rag doll.”

Two days later, on Easter Sunday and back at home in Macclesfield, Curtis took an overdose of barbiturates. Tony Wilson, Gretton and Lindsay Reade, Wilson’s wife, were driving over to see him, playing Closer in the car.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Bloody hell, this is really amazing,’” says Reade. Remarkably, the band’s next show – in Bury, on April 8 – was not postponed. Instead, Curtis sang two songs from Closer, “The Eternal” and “Decades”, while Alan Hempsall of Crispy Ambulance and Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio filled in for him on the other songs. “Hooky told me of Ian’s suicide attempt and neither of us could understand why it was going ahead,” says Mason. “It brought a new realisation of Ian’s condition. After Bury, the obvious thing would have been to just shut up shop for a while, but yet again there was still the need for bringing money in to help fund the forthcoming US tour.”

“It was quite handy to have the softer, quieter songs for the simple reason that Ian didn’t get as wound up during the sets,” adds Hook. “On the faster, rockier ones he would go off like a rocket. He sang a couple of the quiet ones in Bury, but we shouldn’t have done Bury. That was a really bad mistake.”

“Ian was his own worst enemy,” says Hempsall. “If he’d turned around even once and gone, ‘Actually guys, I’m not up for this, I can’t do it,’ that would have been understandable. But he didn’t, because he wanted the band to be a success. That was all just a by-product of people sweeping things under the carpet and pretending everything was OK.”

“Rob [Gretton] said to me he thought it was a cry for help,” remembers Vini Reilly. “I actually told Rob I didn’t think it was a cry for help, I thought it was genuine. The fact that he told Debbie when she arrived that he’d taken an overdose was neither here nor there. He was serious – he really wanted out because he couldn’t bear it any more. He was in a very dark place in his mind, but because he had the social skills and was so good at just being one of the lads and having a laugh, it was very hard to spot.”

Susanne O’Hara recalls a time in early May when she was loading a film projector into the back of her Volvo. “I bent over to push it into the back seat and Ian smacked my bum,” she says. “He made some remark about a nice bum. He was cheerful.”

Sumner: “You never had a heart to heart with Ian. But he did say to me late one night that he felt like he was in a whirlpool, and it was dragging him down, and he couldn’t get out of it. He also said all his lyrics seemed to be coming to very quick conclusions, like they seemed to be writing themselves.

“As far as his relationships go, his marriage [to Deborah] and being with Annik, I regarded that as his territory. There was group business, and what he wanted to do with his private life was his own business. Ian had a certain unpredictable quality as well, and his way of dealing with problems was very extreme and explosive. He wanted our music to be like that.

In Bury, Curtis told Lindsay Reade that “he saw it going on without him. He felt very removed from it. With the epilepsy, he just knew he couldn’t carry on with the performances. He’d sort of hit a pinnacle with Closer, and he knew he couldn’t go on.” Afterwards, Wilson and Reade invited Curtis to recuperate at their cottage in Charlesworth near Glossop, in rural Derbyshire. There, he wrote love letters to Honoré and, during a long phone conversation with Vini Reilly, insisted his suicide attempt was serious.

“I think he was able to tell me because I was considered loopy, anyway,” says Reilly. “I was on all kinds of anti-depressants; they were messing about with medication to try and get me functioning. I think he realised that I would be a bit more simpático and understand that state of mind, where you are capable of ending your own life.”

Wilson was busy with Factory and his day jobs – television work for Granada Reports  and World In Action. “I don’t think he read the signs at all, but then again the signs weren’t visibly there,” says Reade. “Ian was with me for a week, and he was obviously very depressed. It was just me and Ian, driving each other around the twist. I’ve always been very empathetic, so I ended up really depressed, too. And we didn’t have a single visitor.

“Tony’s father was gay, and his partner, Tony Connolly, was a very good friend of mine. He said to me he thought Ian was very depressed and would commit suicide. But the only person who saw it was Annik, as far as I’m aware. She actually warned Tony about it. She said, ‘He means what he’s saying.’

“None of us had really listened to the words before; they just sounded like good lyrics to us. We just didn’t think he was going to go.”

“I honestly thought Ian’s lyrics were really brilliant, but that he was writing about somebody else,” says Morris. “That’s how naive I was. I thought it was brilliant how he could get in the mind of somebody else. Even after he attempted to commit suicide, it didn’t seem that he was that hellbent on destruction.”

“There was never a moment when I was with Ian when he acted anything but normal,” says Peter Hook. “He never, ever led me to believe for one moment that he was depressed. He never let you know what he was feeling, really. Whether that was bravado or foolishness, the thing you most wanted to hear in the world was that he was OK.”

_____________________

On Monday May 19, Joy Division were scheduled to fly out for their debut US tour.  About midday on Sunday 18, Kevin Cummins, a photographer working for Factory who was booked on the same flight, got a call from Gretton. “‘That silly cunt’s killed himself.’ That’s all he said,” remembers Cummins, “and I knew immediately who he meant. We knew Ian was a bit down about going to America, but there was no hint he was going to kill himself. Rob would’ve had a 24-hour guard on Ian if he thought something was going to happen.”

The news was announced by John Peel on his Monday-night radio show, followed by “Atmosphere”. Curtis had hanged himself in his Macclesfield kitchen the previous day, discovered soon after by his wife, Deborah. The incident merited, according to Cummins, “a two-paragraph story on page 8 of the Manchester Evening News, or something. They weren’t known, they were just a local band.”

In Grant Lee and Tom Atencio’s documentary, Joy Division (2007), an epilepsy specialist analysed Curtis’ prescription from the time and concluded that it was guaranteed to kill him. “They didn’t know much about the condition back then,” says Hook. “That made you feel a little better, because you realised you couldn’t have done anything about it anyway.”

“After he died, we did listen to his words and thought, ‘Well actually, this is someone who sounds like they’re in a lot of trouble emotionally,’” says Sumner. “But the person you had in the room wasn’t like that. And Ian wasn’t in trouble emotionally until perhaps a month before he died. Then we tried everything under the sun to try and help him, but obviously he wasn’t interested.”

“It was a shame Annik wasn’t with him, because she understood him,” says Reade. “But you do blame yourself, and I did. It was horrific, the guilt I had. I also blamed Factory – Factory became very dark for me after that. They shouldn’t have been doing those gigs. They should have given him some downtime.”

Hook: “I can’t really remember anything. The only thing I do remember was sitting in my car one morning. I went to tax my car at a place in Stretford; I drove there in my old Jag that cost £135. Just as I got there, I was listening to the Top 20 on the radio, and they went: ‘New in, No 13, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division…’ It broke my heart. It was things like that which brought home to us what we’d lost. It was awful.”

The release of Closer was postponed until July, when it became Factory’s first Top 10 album. “You’ve just done an album, you’ve put a lot of work into it, what do you do?” asks Morris. “Do you just bin it? We had made the decision we were going to carry on, but it still wasn’t easy.”

In fact, Sumner, Hook and Morris had resolved to continue as a band on the night of Curtis’ death. By June, they had gone so far as to try out another Factory artist, Kevin Hewick, as their new frontman.

“I thought they were just doing a session as my backing band,” Hewick remembers, after Tony Wilson had offered the band to him the night before a shift at Graveyard Studios in Prestwich. “We did two of my songs, no rehearsal. Martin Hannett came in and, very droll, said it sounded like something by Fairport Convention, then lay down and fell asleep under the mixing desk. As the day wore on, I found Bernard a little edgy. At one point, he threw his guitar on the floor and stormed out. But Peter said to me, ‘Bernard’s taken Ian’s death the worst, and he’s finding it really hard, because you’re standing where Ian would have stood.’

“I overheard Peter Hook tell the recording engineer that they’d decided on the New Order name the night before. When I helpfully chipped in that Ron Asheton of The Stooges had already used that name for his band, Hooky just said witheringly that only somebody like me would know that.”

Now, Hook says that New Order actually began for him on the Monday after Ian Curtis was cremated (on May 23, 1980). “I really didn’t care about Joy Division until years later, when we started playing the songs again as New Order. His lyrics, when you look back, say it all. We just chose not to listen. We were too inexperienced in the ways of the world. We were too young, and none of us handled it well.”

Hook plays Closer “quite a lot” these days. “In a strange way, it seems somehow divorced from me.” Morris thinks it’s brilliant, and treats it similarly: “The only way you can listen to it is when you can put it on and pretend you had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

Sumner, on the other hand, doesn’t listen to an album that he prefers to Unknown Pleasures, but which he calls “very claustrophobic. It’s been so long since I played it. Once the past is past, that’s it.”

“It was only the second bloody album we made,” says Sumner. “He hung himself a bit prematurely. You shouldn’t joke about these things, but…”

Music Complete Deluxe Vinyl Box Set

8 piece deluxe vinyl collection.
New album on double clear vinyl.
Extended versions of all 11 brand new tracks on 6 pieces of vinyl.
Coloured vinyl 12”s plus 1 sided black etched vinyl.
Packed in an archival acid free box, using 1300 micron grey white board and a wire stitch. Box is debossed on the lid and base.
Art Direction by Peter Saville.

200 copies will be signed by all 5 members of New Order; the signed editions will be dispatched at random and are exclusive to the New Order store.

All orders receive Music Complete HD and MP3 digital files on the official release date 25th September. HD and MP3 digital files of the Extended Versions will be available when the box is dispatched.
THE ACTUAL BOX SET WILL DISPATCH EARLY NOVEMBER. 
Instant grat download of first single ‘Restless’ available immediately.
Please note: Price does not include postage and packing.

Pre-order here: http://store.neworder.com/uk/music-complete-deluxe-vinyl-box-set-1.html