Deborah Curtis
Can we start by asking you what it was like growing up in Macclesfield? Are you very aware of the hills?
Idyllic, I think. We spent all our time building dams across the brook, bottle-feeding lambs. It was completely removed from Manchester. I lived in one village and went to school in another village.
What about being an adolescent? Was there nowhere to go?
It seemed there were places to go, because we found them. We had a picture house, and youth clubs. We used to go into pubs and get thrown out. But because we didn’t actually know what was going on in Manchester, I don’t think we noticed how quiet it was, really.
People from Manchester seem to think that Macclesfield is quite isolated, does it feel like that?
Yeah, it is really. Anything that takes off in Manchester a lot of the time doesn’t even touch Macclesfield. But there’s so much Manchester over-spill, it’s a lot larger now than it was then, but I still see all the people I went to primary school with. When you look at old photographs from when we were at school, you know where everybody is; one of the boys I went to school with runs the lawnmower shop at the roundabout. I can’t go out without seeing someone I know. It’s nice.
How do feel about the hills?
I spent a lot of my adolescence in the hills, we used to get together and walk up a hill called Teg’s Nose, for miles. That might seem boring to some people, but we enjoyed it. It’s no different from going into the centre of Manchester and sitting in a cafe and watching the traffic. It’s just a different view.
When Ian had that thing as a teenager, do you think that was important for him? When he overdosed?
I think he wanted to be like Jim Morrison, someone who got famous and died. Being in a band was very important, he was very single-minded about it. He’d always said that he didn’t want to live into his twenties, after twenty five.
Do you think that was because of his heroes, or did he choose his heroes because that was the way he felt?
I think he probably chose them.
A lot of people have those heroes, and yet they don’t do that. One thing you said which I’d like to ask about is that you thought it was unfashionable to be happy at that time.
I think it was the teenage thing. Teenagers like to have something to be miserable about, don’t they? (?) has a school friend who’s into Take That, and when Kurt died, she was crying over Kurt, and she wasn’t a Nirvana fan. I doubt if she knew what he even looked like. She’s moping around school, saying how awful it is. They do burst into tears for no reason, and they look for a reason. I think it’s physical, but they look for an explanation.
Do you think Ian carried that on into his early twenties?
Yeah, but it changed. He stopped talking about it. I don’t think he forgot about it.
Did you think this obsessiveness about the dark things in life was a bit odd?
I thought he’d grow out of it. And when… it got too late, really… he wouldn’t talk about it. You couldn’t discuss it with him, you couldn’t find out what was really going on. I mean, when we were kids, lots of people were miserable. But they grew out of it.
He’d always been interested in Germany… he failed his German O Level… we had to walk down the aisle to this German song [???]… we went to see Cabaret about a dozen times…
Do you think it made him unhappy?
I think he enjoyed being unhappy. I think he liked to wallow in it. There were times when we were happy, but they were when we were on our own. When we went out walking, or things like that. But I don’t think he liked his friends to know that he was happy. You know that Ian was very charismatic, and he tended to lead people, and people liked to be part of his will, so I don’t think anybody really questioned what he was doing very much. Because he was different, so many people admired him.
Was there a decisive point where this obsession took hold of him, or was it always there?
He was so ambitious, he wanted to write a novel, he wanted to write songs. It all seemed to come very easily to him. With Joy Division it all just came together for him. I told myself at first that it was all part of the act, you know? Part of being in the band, but it was all wrong. There wasn’t an Ian at home and an Ian in the world, it became like that all the time. I think the trouble started when my pregnancy began to show, he had that first fit. It sounds awful, but I think he liked to have the attention. I think one of the things he liked about me was that I did stand behind him, a hundred percent, whatever he did. I supported him so much. When I got pregnant, everybody made a fuss of me, and I think he was a bit jealous. I think he had a row at the gig at the Hope & Anchor, but nobody has said it was a row. My mum remembers me telling her that they were talking about Ian leaving the band, so it must have been a pretty big event. But he took it all so seriously. I don’t think he believed that the other lads took it as seriously as he did. It was all he wanted. I think he felt that other people weren’t giving as much. They were, but they weren’t making so much noise about it.
Was Ian interested in Nazism?
I think so. It’s difficult to say what I think he thought. He was intrigued. I think he liked all the pomp, and the uniforms and the strutting around.
Did any of the attitudes go into his life at all?
Well, I didn’t get much say in anything, if that’s what you mean! He thought Margaret Thatcher was fantastic. He liked to have his own way, to be in control, and it worked. He flattened me, to some extent, not that he was trying to flatten me, but he knew he could easily get his own way with me. I don’t think he could have married someone who was like, bossy.
[doorbell rings
… you couldn’t have an argument with him about anything, because he’d just back down. He’d stick to his beliefs, but he wouldn’t upset anybody. Like this Nazi thing. He wouldn’t discuss it with me. I think that was because he knew we didn’t think along the same lines, so rather than have an argument – he didn’t like confrontation, so he’d just keep quiet.
Can you remember what he used to read?
History of the Third Reich! Kerouac, JG Ballard… anything that was fashionable to read. I think Tony Wilson recommended books to him. And the music that he recommended. After Ian died I went on a mad spree of buying records that I knew he would disapprove of. Hideous stuff.
Do you think that authoritarian side came from his parents?
His dad’s a bit of a dark horse. He was a policeman. I don’t think he communicated with his parents very well. They don’t like to believe anything bad about him. I asked them if they minded being interviewed for the book and they said they would, but when I realised the way the book was going… Ian has a cousin who’s the same age as Natalie, and they started to meet up, and I had some feedback and I realised it wasn’t such a good idea to talk to them about it.
Can you pinpoint when he actually met Annik?
No, I think it must have been after the fits started, I think it would have been when Natalie was about six months old, from what Terry Mason told me. It must have been the August ’79. Natalie was born in April.
Bernard said it was after the Buzzcocks tour.
I think it was before that. Unless it sort of got under way then. Because he was having his fits and behaving very peculiar anyway, I just assumed that was what it was. …getting a health visitor to arrange for an appointment with the doctor, I knew something was desperately wrong, but I didn’t think it could be that. He was so possessive with me, that it didn’t occur to me that he might go the other way.
Why do you think the fits started? Do you think it was something latent that was brought out?
Yeah, I think it was there all along, which is why I can’t understand when people say they never saw him have a fit earlier on. I talked to his childhood friend, who knew him so well, and he never saw it, and I can’t believe his parents never saw it. If I’d seen it at sixteen, somebody must have spotted something.
He’d had fits before?
Yeah, he’d had one while I was there at a local gig, and I can’t remember, but there were some funny incidents. I can’t believe that his mother didn’t notice anything. I find it really strange.
What were the Victoria Park flats like?
They were horrible. His parents used to live in Hurdsfield which is like towards the hills. Very neat, very clean, and why they asked for a transfer to those flats, I’ll never understand, it was ridiculous.
You mentioned something about Ian having this dream about you on the beach. Do you think he was psychic?
No, I think he invented scenarios that he would make come true. I think Annik could have been anybody. I think he needed to find a justification for what he was doing, to find a reason for it all. Rob won’t be interviewed, but he did tell me after Ian died that he knew Ian was very unhappy, and I know Ian was going around saying our marriage was over and he was really unhappy. I had no idea at all. I was trying to look after him with his epilepsy, and I had no idea that I was a problem for him. Rob said he thought that when he met Annik, the fits would stop, cos then Ian was happy. I got the impression Rob thought the fits were caused by Ian’s unhappiness with me. But they got worse.
When Kurt died, I heard some deejay say, and where were all the people who made money out of him? But that’s unfair. As Courtney said, he alienated himself, and that’s why there was no-one there. That’s what people do, when they want to kill themselves. They make sure they’re alone. There’s nothing anybody else can do about it. I don’t know if it’s fair.
Did Ian do that?
Yeah.
When he tried to commit suicide in the January, was that the first time that he’d tried? The pills in the Bible?
There was that episode when he was sixteen. So far as I know that was it. But then he did it again in May. The Bible was when he was very drunk. The he took the phenobarbitones later.
Bernard was saying they had been talking about not gigging, and so on, but couldn’t someone have just said, okay, Ian, just stop. Would that have helped?
Well, yeah, it might have been that he saw death as the only way out. He told me he didn’t want to do Closer, he said he’d just wanted to do Unknown Pleasures, Transmission, and that’s it. But there must have been a lot of pressure, knowing that if you didn’t go to America, the rest of the band didn’t go to America. He couldn’t really turn around and say, I’m not going. I don’t want to blame anybody, but somebody should have said, this isn’t working, something’s got to happen. He should have gone into hospital, not gone on tour. But that’s not fair to them because Ian made sure that I wasn’t in communication with the others. Because he was telling them one thing about me, and telling me something else about them.
Did they not know about all this other stuff that was going on?
I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I don’t think they realised he was telling so many lies. He was a very good liar, he was very convincing. He could go to a gig and say he was having a really bad time with Debbie, Debbie’s moaning about this and that, and people are always trying to be tactful, nobody’s going to ring me up and say, what are you playing at.
One of the bad things about Manchester is that nobody does communicate. It’s very different from other cities because everyone keeps everything inside.
I never considered myself a Mancunian, so I never fitted into that. That might have been one of the problems.
Did you feel excluded?
Yeah. I don’t like Manchester, as a city. You know what it’s like: everybody has to wear black and like the same kind of music. I’ve never been into that living thing. I never fitted in. When I met Roger in a local pub he said I looked so different because I’d go out in Macclesfield and I looked as if I belonged to Factory. If I went to the Factory, I’d dress differently.
Did you feel there was a whole thing about Factory and Joy Division, very quickly.
It was like a family. I heard Iris, Hooky’s girlfriend saying, they’re a family, we can’t get into it. They were close, they’d protect each other. They’ll exclude anyone who isn’t quite what they’re looking for, you know?
Did that happen to you?
I think so. Nobody has said it out right. I remember when I was expecting |Natalie and standing at the door of the Factory, and Tony looking me up and down and it was written all over his face what he was thinking: how can we have a rock star with a six months pregnant wife standing by the stage? It wasn’t quite the thing. Then this glamorous Belgian turned up. I don’t remember seeing her, except in the cemetery once. She was attractive and she was free, and she had a nice accent. I don’t blame Ian. I think most people need a partner, and if you exclude that partner you have to find somebody else. It’s only natural. He must have been very lonely.
He needed somebody there to look after him, he couldn’t look after himself. He wasn’t a grown-up.
Looked at from the perspective of the age we are now, it seems that being uncool to be happy, and not to have a pregnant wife… now, you’d be really pleased. Isn’t that odd. Looking back on it, it seems really peculiar.
He said yes, let’s have a baby. I was talking to Tony before Ian died, about Natalie, and he suddenly turned round to me and said – you mean he wanted Natalie? I thought, what a strange thing to say. I thought, maybe Ian told people it was an accident or something. I don’t know. I have no way of knowing what he told anybody.
On the night he killed himself, you didn’t have any sense that he would do it, did you? I read the account in your book. You were just glad to be home cos you were so tired…
I was, yeah. I’d had enough. I was working so hard, and all these money problems. My mum was looking after Natalie. Having a baby makes you grow up. It didn’t make him grow up. It’s easy to talk, but I don’t know what I should say.
I could have stayed with him that night, but he made it clear that he didn’t want me there. I would have fallen asleep, I was dead on my feet, and I could have woken up the next day and he’d have done it while I was asleep.
You think he’d thought about it before?
I think he’d decided, he was just trying to pick his moment. I don’t think he had any intention of going to America, he was frightened of flying, and he possibly didn’t want to die in America. Maybe the American thing hurried it up.
One phrase caught me in your book, you said that he “engineered his own hell”. Do you think he really did?
It was something he talked about from when we met, but as we got older, and it got nearer the time, the more I had a feeling that he hadn’t forgotten about it. But he wouldn’t talk about it. He actually walked out of the house once when I tried to talk to him about it.
Do you think the way he danced onstage was connected to how he was when he had his fits?
I don’t know, he danced like that before he got epilepsy. I think he was looking for an original energy to express. Roger said he watched him on television and the way he moved his feet was amazing. It was original.
Did you feel he was being celebrated for something that was causing you difficulties?
Yeah, people admired him for the things that were destroying him. I don’t think people understood that he would still be like that when he came home. It wasn’t just a show.
Can I ask you why you decided to do the book, and how you feel about it now that you’ve finished it?
I went to great lengths to push everything to the back of my mind at first. I threw things away, mementoes that I wish I hadn’t now. I thought it would help. Seeing articles that dismiss his death as, oh, he had marital problems, and he didn’t commit suicide because he had marital problems. He had marital problems because he wanted to commit suicide. I felt really annoyed that people were writing about it without speaking to me. I felt angry with him because he got the last word.
How can you be angry with someone who’s dead? They aren’t there, you can’t shake them, you can’t smack them around the face. You’re totally impotent, it’s horrible. It’s like putting a big sign up, saying, there, I’ve done, it, and you can’t do anything about it. So much for your talking. I just wanted to tell the real story. People have written books about Joy Division with huge gaps, and they’re just lists of gigs, or something. I didn’t know whether I was going to finish it, or publish it. I interviewed Paul Morley, and I didn’t really know whether I was going to do anything with it. I felt a bit of a fraud. And when I finished it, I still didn’t know. Victoria was supposed to ring on a particular day, and she didn’t ring for a week, and I just thought, I can’t stand waiting, and if Faber don’t want it, I’m just going to put it in a drawer, and that’s it. But it’s helped me, because its meant that I can talk to people. Before that the only person I could really talk to was Rob. We talked a lot just after Ian died, and talking to people helped me to put things into perspective. I can see now the order in which things happened, why they happened. It helps. Now I fell that I can put it away and think about the good things.
How did people react after Ian’s death?
I don’t think anyone knew what to say. I read somewhere that I blamed the band, but I didn’t. I never said anything like that. I blame them for allowing the alienation, but that wasn’t really their fault. How were they to know that Ian was telling so many lies?
Do you think it hit Rob hard?
Yes. You see at the time Lesley was still working out of the house and Rob was at home. And I was at home, so he’d ring up, and sometimes he was in more of a stupor than I was. I used to walk a lot, up to the cemetery, but I don’t think Rob would have ever done anything like that.
Do you think it partly led to his later illness and breakdown?
I didn’t find out until a lot later that anything had happened to him. They’re quite a close circle. There’s probably a lot of things that I don’t know, which may be why Rob won’t be interviewed. Maybe if he had talked about it, he wouldn’t have had a breakdown.
He must feel terribly guilty, being the group’s manager, as well.
That’s another reason I wrote the book, I wanted to talk about it, but you can’t just talk. If you write a book, if anybody wants to know, they’ll buy it. But you can’t just bore other people to death by going on and on about it. Roger encouraged me, he thought it would help me. I’ve been on anti-depressants at times, and he thought I could get it out of my system. Boz, that guy that you just met, has been fantastic. he was a big Joy Division fan, he gave me loads of cuttings that he kept, and he wrote a three page piece telling me how to do it, and why I had to do it. I couldn’t have done it without him. Peter Bossley.