Anthony H. Wilson
“Something I found very interesting, coming from a high culture background, about pop music was that it was a genuinely popular (classless) art form, in a way that television isn’t. There’s a demographic to people who watch Coronation Street, to a degree. There is no class demographic to the received experience of being a Sex Pistols fan. It has the same intellectual content for a Cambridge undergraduate, and a kid of the dole.
In the very beginning, I didn’t think of Ian being a lyricist at all, but once I got to listen to the lyrics, I found that the rhythms of Ian’s writing were very TS Eliot. The prosaic but very rhythmic quality of that form of modern poetry. Much more so than many modern poets who actually followed Eliot.
Where did that come from?
It came from wherever it comes from, the ability to write melodies and lyrics. Shaun Ryder is a far more extreme example. Shaun Ryder is the last person who should be a poet laureate of any sort, but if you do the old IA Richards on either of them, you find its the real fucking stuff. Its alarmingly fabulous use of language.
Herzog was his hero, and Herzog was a concomitant factor in his suicide. He was with his parents and he didn’t want to put his dad through watching this film late at night, so he went home to watch this tragic, romantic film where the hero commits suicide at the end. You know the famous last line, where there’s a dead man in the cable car, and the chicken is still dancing, which is why with our usual sense of fun we put the chicken’s feet on the [run-out?] of the first three sides of Still, then on the last side, the chicken stops here.
A funny thing was that through all the whole Factory, Hacienda thing, I think he would have enjoyed it more than anybody. I refer to a letter, in the week that he died Annik stayed with Lynsey and myself. That was a difficult scene, I was upstairs in this tiny cottage, shell-shocked, and Annik sits downstairs and for three days, twenty four hours a day, played Closer.
Did she love him?
Oh yes. I think she understood him. I got an early train one morning to London, and walking towards the station there’s this lonesome couple walking along arm in arm. Obviously they’ve been walking the streets all night together. We got on the train and I let them be on their own, and then Ian got off at Macclesfield, then I sat with Annik. Annik was the one… we’d all thought that the overdose had been, quote, a cry for help, a plea for anaesthesia, we hadn’t thought he’d wanted to kill himself. But Annik on that train journey said, I’m really worried. I forget the line on Closer, but she said, he blames himself. That wasn’t a line in the song, he means that.
We know where acid house and Elvis Presley and the Sex Pistols came from, but I still don’t know where Joy Division came from. When god gives this gift to people, it comes to someone is changing the way it’s done, and to someone who is a star. I don’t understand this. Why don’t nerds get this gift? They have to have something else as well.
They were the first people to find the way to express those complex emotions, within the guitar, drums, bass, synth format.
I let them do everything to you they wanted to, in Shadowplay [I let them use you for their own ends?] is a very complex line.
When did you first see something really special in Joy Division?
The night of the Stiff-Chiswick test. Every band in Manchester played, and someone said, when’s So It Goes coming back, Tony? And someone said, he doesn’t want it to come back, he wants it to become a legend, it’s easier that way. That was my first meeting with Gretton. Nothing changes. I sit down and this kid in a raincoat comes and sits next to me and goes, you’re a fucking cunt, why won’t you put us on television? I said, actually, you’re next on the list, I’ve got the single… anyway, all these bands played all night, and at the very end they get onstage and after about twenty seconds I just thought, this is it. Everybody else has one thing in common: they aren’t like this. Most bands are onstage because they want to be rock stars. Some bands are onstage because they have to be. There’s something trying to get out of them, and that was blatantly obvious with Joy Division.
They were the reason that Roger eagle called me over to do Eric’s Records that day, cos he knew that I knew Gretton, and he and I both knew that Joy Division would sell records.
Tell me about Macclesfield, do you think its relevant that Ian came from there?
No, no… it’s like Gloucester now, isn’t it? People find it difficult to believe stuff like that could come out of Gloucester. [Macclesfield] is an odd little place, very much in its own little world. It has Manchester at its fringes but it doesn’t really connect to it. It isn’t one of the radial towns, its one stage out of that, and its an old town. It’s not really a rural town, that’s what’s weird about it. Where Ian lived, he wasn’t going into the country, he was going to the park.
When did Ian start to develop the dead fly?
I don’t know. One’s memory is tainted by the fact that one has watched specific visuals many, many times. When did they do Shadowplay on Granada Reports? A month after the Stiff-Chiswick Test. The movement is already there.
The visuals behind were…
a World in Action about the CIA, and David Liddiment [?] directed it. The new head of BBC Entertainment. It was one of his first ever jobs. Obviously we all adored the BBC footage, where he does that second verse… and Transmission, I was obsessed by its structure. The fact that you come out of the second chorus directly into the third verse, means that the third verse is screamed, that was the tension of it.
I thought he was remarkable because the distance that you get with many performers wasn’t there…
You’re absolutely right, he was completely there. Old Bono says he was the best of his generation, I was always number two.
Did Bernard say how Ian was during Closer? I wasn’t there much, but I remember Rob saying he was in a trance-like state for the entire second period of that recording.
One of the most enlightening moments of my life, on a lovely summer’s day, feeling great, dropped off at Martin Hannett’s house to get these two cassettes, of Flight, by A Certain Ratio and Closer, which he’d just mixed the previous week and kept me away from… driving down the motorway with those two things, I couldn’t believe that I was involved with this shit.
The mood he was in when he wrote that stuff is a very big question. Its almost as if writing that album contributed to his state.
The usual idea is that when you write, you get it out of your system. That doesn’t seem to have worked.
What I’m saying is he immersed himself in being it, rather than just expressing it. I don’t want to really be quoted too much on this, it is the archetypal, there is no way out. I cannot leave, and I cannot stay. If you’re totally in love with another woman, you can leave. If she’s your best friend’s wife, you can fuck her. You can do anything. The only thing stronger than if you’re madly, passionately in love with a woman, is the parental thing…
He felt things in a different way than me or Hooky. My psyche is, I’m the guy who took two tabs of acid on a Saturday night when he had to go and judge the Stretford and Urmston Women’s Co-operative Rosebud Competition, to see if I could make it. Going as a TV personality. Wow. That’s why Lynsey went off me. And Hooky’s a bit like that. But Ian certainly wasn’t, he didn’t live life like that.
Did anyone talk about the Bury riot night?
What happened?
It was all Simon Topping’s fault. We had this gig in Bury, Joy Division, Certain Ratio and Section 25. Ian had had his first go, been in hospital, and they took the decision to do the gig, but in a different way, basically everybody onstage, doing bits and pieces. So they did it, they explained to the audience. Towards the end, a couple of pint pots got thrown from the back, and it all went off.. Rob dived in, Terry dived in, I was holding Hooky back from diving in… I went upstairs afterwards, and Ian was in tears. I said, Ian, it was an event, man. Remember the Lou Reed concert? Wasn’t that a great event? And that cheered him up a lot.
How did he seem when he stayed with you?
Quite okay and quite easy. He was reading a lot, I remember talking with him about WB Yeats. Ian wasn’t a difficult person to get on with, at all they were the funniest cunts in the world, including Ian. They didn’t take themselves at all seriously. Certainly Ian didn’t. The whole japing thing. It was their word for what they did.
You’d have to ask Lynsey, cos she spent the whole weeks with him, and by the end of the week was going into a fucking fit. Cos she’s pretty weird anyway, and Ian was pretty weird, so the two of them… it was alright for me to say we’ll look after Ian for a week, I went into fucking Granada every day. By Saturday morning, Lynsey had started screaming, so I said to Ian, we better get out of here, and we got into the car and drove.
Did you ever see much of Deborah at that point?
Deborah took the usual position of a musician’s girlfriend, which is, not there very much. Not part of the travelling team.
It was Debby who introduced Ian to Iggy. I think it was the lads told me this. Debby is the Iggy Pop fan. Ian met & fell in love with Debby, and she started playing him her Iggy albums. The whole point of music is the coming together of influences, so in that moment, you’ve got something as important as Ibiza. Because Ian took Iggy… to the band.
Did you notice anything going wrong with Ian?
No, not at all. The epilepsy was there. You’re brought up to know that Napoleon and all these famous people were epileptic, it was something you went with… it provided one or two stage moments for us all, I think. You could always tell when things were getting difficult when Hooky and Barney either side of him would look at each other as if to say, he’s going again.
They always used to pay him, did you know about that? He was always so easy-going, and always needed a bit of spare money, a typical example was the Durutti Column album sleeve. Which required all the sticking. We got them all in, said here’s fifteen quid each, Here’s 2,000 sleeves, 4,000 pieces of sandpaper, and two buckets of paste. What was lovely was when I returned about nine o’clock, cos Alan had left them with some porn videos, as usual, they all gave Ian their money, and there’s Ian at the back table, slopping away, there’s them sitting watching the porn videos, and the fact that the paste that was flying around the room looked like semen, made a really fucking great image.
They used to get Ian to do all the odd jobs by pooling together and paying him.
No, you didn’t see him getting worse… Hooky has this beautiful line: thirty six hours more, he could have screwed his way across America, and never looked back. And that’s very probably true. In other words, I don’t think it was inevitable, there was a balancing edge there. Either that or we were all stupid. We didn’t think he wanted to kill himself, we thought he wanted help.
He was just faced with one of the great irresolvable problems of life, and very very young. For someone like me to consider it, which I did, there is no choice. When you can’t leave, and you can’t stay. There is another thing. Of course, it achieves absolutely nothing for anybody. A complete disaster.
Do you know when he first started to see Annik?
I think they’d been together about a year…
What was the best gig you ever saw them do?
[long pause] The Factory gigs were fabulous. The gig at the first Factory New Year Party. Lesley was blind drunk… very significant character in this, is Lesley, and never mentioned. Very significant.
In what way?
She is Rob. Central to Rob’s life, a very powerful person, and she’s been at the centre of this all the way through. Probably has a lot more insight than any of us. I think it would be fascinating to hear what her reaction was. She was always with the women, and because she was the manager’s girlfriend, she wasn’t quite… of the women.
Do you remember Leigh?
Ah, the mud of Leigh. That was the night of the turd, wasn’t it? A very big moment. Barney told me years later that he and Ian had gone to the bogs and Ian had come out terribly excited, cos there was a piece of shit like, that long, as long as half an arm, and they all went down to have a look at it. It made their day.
Do you think Ian was in control of what he was doing?
Not in his lyrics and music which was more calculated, but in his performance, he was very… fatic? That word for the Dionysian thing, the wind blowing out of you. The greatest example in rock’n'roll in probably Van Morrison, and there was an element of that in Ian’s performance. As if he was possessed. Which is how it should be. All great art is that getting out of you. The most chilling line in the press about that was that girl’s review which said, ‘I swear to you tonight when Ian Curtis sang, “I hear them calling me”, I heard them too’.
When did you start getting worried about Ian, if you were?
I didn’t. Rob had been out with him on the Saturday afternoon, and he was great. Bought a pair of shoes, had a haircut. They were going to America, it was all happening. And at that age, how were we to comprehend the turmoil in his head about Natalie and Annik. It isn’t about Debbie anymore.
How important was Martin to them?
He was an inspirational producer, and a remarkable man. Lynsey asked me once if I had cried when Martin died, and it was like being woken from a dream, and it had really happened. I did cry when Martin died, I was terribly upset. I think it probably happened to everybody who knew him…
Do you think Ian’s death broke him up?
Yes. Outside of his personal family, the worst affected was Martin. Martin was in love with rock’n'roll, and he had this wonderful thing.
He liked to create things, situations. That business with the drum sound, taking hours and hours over it. He was just winding them up.
I may have made a slight contribution, giving Ian a Frank Sinatra album, which I noticed around when they did Love Will Tear Us Apart. I like to think so…
I think that was why when time came for them to go their separate ways, which was about the time of Movement, he found that so hard to bear.
Have you ever been aware of Ian’s presence since?
Yes. He makes his presence felt. Like when we had the Festival of the Tenth Summer, and Kevin Cummins did ten postcards which came back from the printers and nine of them were printed too dark, the only postcard that worked was Ian. The high spot of the summer was McCulloch and Barney doing Ceremony.
He made it all more serious, somehow. Bizarrely enough, several deaths followed. It made it something that wasn’t just a business, a game that was played… Ruth Polski dying, Dave Rowbotham… Bernard Pierre Wolff, who was one of the first people to die of AIDS.
There was a sexual thing as well, there seemed to be an enormous number of highly sexed people, Catholics… Sex & Death is the title of Vini’s new album, by the way.
I wonder to what extent we were all playing with stuff that we didn’t understand.
Absolutely… but people think that Ian’s death had something to do with Joy Division making it. It had absolutely fuck all to do with it. It had everything to do with us all not becoming millionaires, right. [?] Leavis Tony Michaelides, the promo and sales guy came to me at Granada on the Wednesday of the week before, and he said he’d never seen anything like it, the shops were so up for them. It had already happened.