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| Faber and Faber first UK edition, 1995 |
When I went into the dressing room to look for Ian, two of the lads were in there talking to a couple of young female fans. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the day after the gig Ian asked me not to go any more unless I had the other girls with me, as it wasn't fair if I went without them. It was gradually made plain to us that wives and girlfriends were no longer welcome. It had been OK for us to boost the numbers in the audience in the early days and we had become used to sitting on the amplifiers to stop them being stolen. It was taken for granted that we would wash and iron clothes, pack cases and make excuses to employers, but now it seemed we were bad for the image. Rob Gretton shouldered the blame, but to be fair all the boys had tongues in their heads. If they had disagreed with the 'no women' policy, they could have spoken up. I was very disappointed –– the whole scenario was reminiscent of when I was pregnant. Too big for my jeans, I had been panicked into borrowing a dress from my mother. That evening as Tony gave me the once over and then looked away without greeting or comment, I felt for the first time that my presence might be unwelcome or even unsuitable.
The Memoir: There have been dozens of reviews of this book published online, nearly all of which focus on the suicide of Ian Curtis on 18 May 1980 on the eve of what would have been the debut US tour by his band Joy Division. What prompted me to add to this avalanche of words was not any particular fascination with Curtis himself –– I respect his talent but have always preferred the music of other Manchester bands like The Fall and The Buzzcocks to that of Joy Division –– but rather the fact that his story is told in this brief but gripping memoir by his wife, the person who discovered his corpse hanging from a clothes rack in their kitchen on that chilly spring morning and knew him for much longer and in a far more intimate way than any of his bandmates or fans can realistically claim to have known him. In the minds of many people, particularly those who share the delusion that listening to and/or liking an artist's music is the same thing as 'knowing' or 'understanding' them, Deborah Curtis is the villain in his life and even regarded by some as the person whose 'selfishness' inspired him to end it –– fallacies this strikingly honest book sets out to challenge and permanently correct.
Deborah Woodruff met her future husband Ian Curtis through the latter's best friend Tony Nuttall. In fact, it was Nuttall whose girlfriend she originally became and Nuttall she would have 'a kiss and a cuddle with' whenever the three of them would spend time together in the flat owned by the Curtis family. Curtis himself was an unmissable figure in the relatively affluent Cheshire town of Macclesfield, a kid who wrote poetry, smoked incessantly, regularly took pills and wore eyeliner and black nail varnish in public in imitation of his musical heroes David Bowie and Lou Reed. Whatever else he may have been, Curtis was clearly not your average teenage boy.
Deborah's romantic relationship with Curtis began when he took her to a Bowie concert in December 1972, several months after her relationship with Nuttall had abruptly ended without warning or explanation. 'What thrilled me,' she recalls, 'was not particularly the opportunity of going out with Ian, but more the chance to get out of Macclesfield and to be included in a crowd of people who did more than catch the train to Stockport for a weekly shopping trip.' After she became involved with Curtis 'life seemed one long round of parties, pop concerts and pub crawls.' Deborah was also exposed to her new boyfriend's obsession with James Dean and Jim Morrison and other figures from the music and entertainment worlds who, like them, had died young. 'When he told me that he had no intention of living beyond his early twenties, I took it with a pinch of salt, assumed it was a phase and that he would grow out of it.' She adopted a similar attitude to his plan to start a 'proper' band of his own some day to succeed the one he and Nuttall had formed together as schoolboys. The fact that he couldn't play an instrument and seemed uninterested in learning how to do so did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for his plan. Curtis could be a very entertaining person when he chose to be and was determined to become as famous as his prematurely deceased idols had been.
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| Faber and Faber UK, 2007 |
Curtis's relationship with Deborah was totally one-sided, with him always taking the dominant role and making every decision for both of them. While this arrangement would be viewed today as being completely unacceptable by most young women, it was very much the norm in the 1970s for a girl to put up with behaviour from her boyfriend –– which, in Curtis's case, included mood swings, prolonged bouts of depression, possessive jealousy and refusing to allow her to wear make-up –– that would now be classified as manipulative if not borderline abusive. (And let's face it, there's no shortage of relationships today which continue to function, or not, in precisely the same manner.) But Curtis also had his gentle and romantic side which expressed itself by reading the work of Oscar Wilde and other writers he admired aloud to Deborah and in the sympathy he displayed toward marginalized members of society like the disabled, the mentally ill and the homeless. The latter was reflected in the hard work he did as an Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer after being transferred from his former civil service job at the Ministry of Defence to a new position at the Macclesfield Employment Exchange.
Deborah's parents were against the idea of her marrying a strange moody boy like Curtis but marry him she did, becoming his wife on 23 August 1975 at St Thomas's Church in Henbury and then honeymooning with him in Paris. She too had left school and was working by this time –– as a receptionist at ICI Chemicals among other jobs –– and they returned to England to live with his grandparents while they saved the money they needed to purchase a home of their own. They were nineteen years old but determined to show their families their marriage could work despite the early warning signs that it had been a terrible mistake. 'One night,' Deborah remembered, 'I was in a giggly mood. I waited until Ian went to the bathroom and hid… at the bottom of the stairs. When Ian passed by, I leaped out and gave a loud cry. I was stunned when he scurried on all fours to a corner of the landing and cowered there, whimpering. Seconds later he was up on his feet again. He descended the rest of the stairs as if nothing had happened and resumed his television viewing. I wanted to ask him about the incident, but I could tell that he was completely oblivious to what had happened.'
Choosing not to discuss this behaviour with her husband proved, as she readily admits, to be another serious mistake. Curtis was later diagnosed with epilepsy, one of the symptoms of which is exactly this type of 'forgotten' disassociative episode. But that was still in the future at this point in their relationship. For now, Curtis was more concerned that he was making no headway with his plan to start a band –– a concern brought into even sharper focus in July 1976 after he took Deborah to see The Sex Pistols perform live at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall. As it would for so many other would-be musicians and performers, attending a gig by the doyens of British punk proved to be a life-changing experience for Curtis. Also in the audience that night, sitting a few rows away from himself and Deborah, were Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Terry Mason –– young men he'd known at school and would shortly go on to form a band with that briefly called itself Warsaw (after the opening track on Side Two of the newly released David Bowie LP Low) before changing its name to Joy Division. By May 1977, with new drummer Steve Morris recruited to replace Mason, they were regularly performing in and around Manchester with Curtis writing their lyrics in addition to serving as their lead vocalist.
In September 1978 Joy Division made its first appearance on So It Goes, a local TV program hosted by Tony Wilson, club owner and co-founder of the new Manchester-based independent record label Factory Records. With the help of Wilson and new manager Rob Gretton the band became a local and then a national phenomenon, as famous for its starkly minimalistic stage performances as it was for refusing to cooperate with journalists during interviews and its intense and challenging music. Nothing, it seemed, could now stand in the way of Curtis's long-held dreams of stardom.
Nothing, that is, except for epilepsy. He experienced his first seizure in December 1978 and, after seeking medical advice, was prescribed a variety of anti-convulsive medications to control the condition –– medications that were continuously being changed and which were not in any way compatible with the alcohol and other recreational drugs he had regularly been using and abusing since his teenage years. Joy Division might have been a New Wave band, but they proved no less immune to the trappings of stardom than any of their old wave predecessors had been. Soon Deborah, who had been there from the beginning, was being told by Rob Gretton not to come to gigs anymore or, worse, being denied access to her husband altogether by not being given contact numbers so she could telephone him while the band was touring. This was partly due to the band's growing success and the need to keep it a solid indivisible unit and partly due to the fact that Curtis had begun having an affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian journalist and music promoter, in October 1979. (Honoré claimed in a 2010 interview that theirs had been a platonic relationship, a claim I find difficult to accept given they regularly shared hotel rooms and Curtis chose to keep their alleged 'friendship' a secret from his wife.) That the affair had begun a mere seven months after the birth of their daughter Natalie on 16 April did not make Deborah's understandable feelings of anger and rejection any easier to bear. But she does not use her memoir as an excuse to vilify her rival. 'During the time he spent with Annik,' she notes, 'Ian's personality became more serious… At home, Ian stopped sharing his life with me. Rather than tell me amusing stories and gossip, he began to name drop and use catch-phrases which meant nothing to me.'
Many believe that Curtis's relationship with Honoré was a motivating factor in his decision to commit suicide. Whether this was true or not, there's no denying that he was a deeply troubled individual by this time, attempting to juggle his responsibilites as a husband and father with a tremendous amount of guilt, plus epilepsy and the artistic demands placed on him as a member of what was now a successful full-time band. (Joy Division played over 120 gigs in roughly two and a half years in addition to recording an EP, several tracks for various compilation albums plus two full length studio albums –– a punishing schedule even for a healthy twenty-three year old not afflicted with a debilitating medical condition.) But Deborah suffered just as much if not more from his frequent absences, some of which were explained or quickly glossed over but many of which were not. 'My only communication with the rest of the band,' she recalled, 'was through Ian and, although he was causing them some concern too, I felt they blamed me for many of Ian's problems. People weren't as friendly as they used to be and it was understandable… Our marriage was over and he hadn't told me.'
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| ANNIK HONORÉ c 1977 |
The situation could not continue. The moment of realisation came when, as Curtis and Deborah were walking home from a friend's housewarming party that he had uncharacteristically agreed to attend with her, he turned to her and said that he wouldn't be upset if she wanted to sleep with other men. Always possessively jealous before this –– to the point where his parting words to her each time she left the house were 'Watch yourself,' his domineering way of warning her not to flirt with any males she might encounter –– it was undeniable proof of the fact that he no longer loved her. 'Every day I wanted Ian to come up behind me, put his arms around me and tell me he hadn't meant it. After eight years of him telling me what to wear, what make-up to use and what music to listen to, I suddenly felt lost, as if I had been given my freedom and didn't know what to do with it.' A visit to his parents, in front of whom he was always careful to maintain a cheerful demeanour, gave her brief cause to hope that their problems might one day be resolved, but this proved not to be the case. After searching his notebooks and finding Honoré's name and London address in one of them, Deborah confronted him and had her hitherto unspoken suspicions immediately confirmed. 'My reaction,' she says, 'was to run to the blue room [the room in their house where Curtis did his writing], break David Bowie's Low into pieces and then smack Ian around the head… Eventually, when I asked him what he intended to do, he asked for time to break off their relationship. I agreed. I was relieved that there were no protestations of love for her and no threats to leave… He didn't ask for my forgiveness; I just assumed that he would want it.' Again, this proved to be an unjustified assumption on her part. Several weeks passed –– weeks during which Joy Division recorded what would become their final album Closer, now considered one of the most influential post-punk recordings ever released –– before he could bring himself to make a half-hearted attempt to stop seeing his mistress, who would occasionally call the house looking for him when Deborah was there.
In early April 1980, while playing a three night residency in London, Curtis allegedly had an epileptic fit onstage –– an episode he found profoundly humiliating but which Joy Division fans assumed to be a new element of his increasingly erratic but frequently rivetting performance style. Nor did he immediately return home following these shows. He stayed in London with Honoré until 7 April, when he returned to Deborah and announced, while they were getting ready for bed that night, that he'd taken an overdose of phenobarbitone, a narcotic barbituate often prescribed for the treatment of epilepsy. The fact that he had left a suicide note, stating that there 'was no need to fight now' and asking its discoverer to 'give his love to Annik' should have provided a clue to his state of mind. But these warnings went unheeded. He was admitted to hospital, with Deborah completely unaware that his suicide attempt had not been prompted by the still unresolved problems in their marriage but by an argument with his mistress. The hospital's attending psychiatrist judged him to be non-suicidal and released him into the custody of Tony Wilson. Once again, Deborah was left with no way to contact her husband and the father of her child. The next night Joy Division played a gig in Bury, with Curtis watching from the wings because he was still too sick to join his bandmates on-stage.
In hindsight, which is always perfect and unclouded by variables like circumstance and shifts in allegiance and personality, Curtis's death just over one month later should have shocked nobody. He was severely depressed and suffering from some form of emotional paralysis which prevented him from choosing between his wife and daughter or remaining with his mistress –– a paralysis so crippling that at one point he asked his bandmate Bernard Sumner to make the decision for him (which Sumner swiftly and wisely declined to do). Deborah, still kept in the dark, finally cracked and told her parents what was happening in the marriage, prompting them to contact Curtis's parents and inform them of the situation –– a 'betrayal' met with stony silence by her husband. 'I took it for granted that once the secret was out I would lose him forever, but it was different now. It was clear I would have to lose him in order to start living again, and deep down inside he must have wanted to lose me too.' She contacted Honoré and screamed at her that she was going to divorce him, to which Honoré calmly replied that she would cooperate in every way with whatever choice she made. 'It was difficult initiating the divorce, but once I had made the decision it felt wonderful… For that short time, I honestly believed that Ian was not my problem any more… I believed I had done him a favour by eliminating one of his biggest worries –– me.'
Curtis moved back in with his parents after this, but did pay several visits to Macclesfield during the next few weeks to catch up with Deborah and Natalie. He was there on the weekend of 16–18 May, having come, he said, to watch the Werner Herzog film Stroszek –– about a man who kills himself because he's unable to choose between the two very different women in his life –– that would have upset his father had he attempted to view it at his parents' house. He and Deborah spoke after she got home from working as a waitress at a wedding reception where, in typically polite fashion, she had told the guests who knew them both that their own marriage was fine. Curtis asked her to drop the idea of divorcing him but the matter was left unresolved when she took Natalie to stay with her parents and then returned to spend the night with him. But Curtis had changed his mind about that during the short time she was out dropping off their daughter, telling her he needed to be alone and that she should not return to the house before ten o'clock the following morning, when he planned to leave Macclesfield to catch a train back to Manchester.
In the end, Deborah did not return to the house until nearly midday, which was when she found her husband hanging from the wooden ceiling-mounted clothes drying rack in their kitchen and a long letter in which he spoke of their life together, his love for her and Natalie and his hatred of Annik Honoré. 'I never heard him say he hated anyone. I think he wrote that to try to please me. He told me,' Deborah adds, 'that he couldn't bring himself to be so cruel as to tell her he didn't want to see her again, even to save his marriage… By the time he had finished writing, he told me, it was dawn and he could hear the birds singing.'
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| IAN CURTIS, c 1979 |
Touching from a Distance is mostly described by other reviewers as a 'brave book' and it is, offering the reader a glimpse into the tormented physical and emotional life of a musician who has become something of a cult figure since his death and, like other cult figures before and after him, the subject of much fervent speculation regarding what inspired him, drove him and led him to take the irrevocable step of hanging himself at the age of twenty-three. Valuable as that is, what sets it apart as a memoir is the perspective it offers into the day-to-day workings of the music business and the means by which the abstractions (and distractions) of 'fame' and 'success' became more important to those around Curtis than his physical and mental well-being and, eventually, his life. Deborah was even advised to hold off on divorcing him for a few more months, by which time he was sure to be rich and would then be in the position to pay her larger amounts of alimony and child support. Throughout the book she reveals herself as someone who had no power over her husband, who accepted what he told her and did what he wanted her to do because she was too naïve and trusting to question his decisions and those made on his behalf by his manager and record company. 'I was just totally besotted,' she confessed to a journalist during a 2005 interview she gave to promote a new edition of her book. 'I think the fact I didn't stand out was an attraction for him. I think he thought I would be easy to mould, to control.'
They say that no man can ever be a hero to his wife and the story of Ian Curtis proves that to be true. He may or may not have been the genius that so many fans and music critics claim he was –– I leave that to better qualified minds than mine to decide –– but there's little doubt that he could be a selfish control freak when it suited him and that his attitude to his loving and supportive young wife could be appallingly callous at times. He was a man who consistently refused to take responsibility for his own actions, behaving for much of his life like a dependent child who managed to convince everyone he knew that he was an autonomous human being capable of making rational adult decisions when, as the evidence all too pointedly suggests, this was seldom if ever the case. Deborah Curtis is to be commended for the honesty it took to reveal the human side of a legend –– someone, according to her, who enjoyed a good practical joke and spent several hours listening to Frank Sinatra prior to recording the vocal for Love Will Tear Us Apart, the biggest selling song that Joy Division would ever release –– without succumbing to the urge to practise the art of hagiography on her subject or excuse her own role in what was probably always going to be his unpreventable death.
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| DEBORAH WOODRUFF and IAN CURTIS, c 1973 |
The Writer: Deborah Curtis (née Woodruff) was born in the northern English city of Liverpool on 13 December 1956. Her parents, wanting to raise her and her younger sister in a more suburban environment than this large bustling sea port could offer at the time, moved to Wiltshire and then to Sussex before permanently settling in the town of Macclesfield in the county of Cheshire in (or around) 1961. Deborah attended Sutton Primary School before moving on to Macclesfield High School for Girls, considered the sister school to the boys only King's School attended by her future husband Ian Kevin Curtis. Her childhood, she wrote, '…had been spent looking for birds' nests, building dams across the river Bollin, and feeding orphan lambs.' She also spent many hours at the youth club sponsored by her local church.
Deborah began dating Ian Curtis in December 1972, shortly after he had entered hospital to have his stomach pumped following an overdose of Largactil, an anti-psychotic medication he'd secretly stolen from the medicine cabinet of an old age pensioner he was visiting as part of his school's social service program. She had initially been the girlfriend of Curtis's close childhood friend Tony Nuttall, with whom they would gradually lose contact after becoming a couple and eventually marrying, at the ages of eighteen and nineteen respectively, on 23 August 1975. Three years after their wedding her husband experienced his first epileptic seizure, casting Deborah in the role of his primary caregiver for the remainder of his life.
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| DEBORAH CURTIS, 2007 |
Deborah Curtis was supportive of her husband's desire to write his own songs and start his own band and attended the first-ever Joy Division gig –– they were then known as Warsaw –– on Sunday 29 May 1977 at a club called the Electric Circus in Manchester. She would remain closely involved with the band until the birth of her daughter Natalie on 16 April 1979, shortly after which her husband began a relationship with Belgian journalist, concert promoter and embassy employee Annik Honoré. This affair, along with her husband's successful music career, elevated drug intake and worsening health problems, was the catalyst for her decision to divorce him in 1980 –– a divorce that never occurred because neither party could make up their mind to go through with it before his death by suicide on 18 April of that same year.
In 1995 Curtis, now remarried (although she later divorced), broke her fifteen year silence about the true nature of relationship with her first husband by publishing the memoir Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. The book went on to inspire the 2007 film Control, directed by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, for which she served as co-Executive Producer with journalist, impresario and former record label/nightclub owner Tony Wilson (who died of cancer two months prior to its UK premiere on 5 October). Curtis was portrayed in the film by Samantha Morton with the role of Ian Curtis played by musician Sam Riley. Annik Honoré, who left the music business in 1985 and also died of cancer on 3 July 2014, was played by German-Romanian actress Alexandra Maria Lara.
Use the link below to read a short 2005 interview with DEBORAH CURTIS:
The 2007 biopic Control, written by Mancunian journalist and screenwriter MATT GREENHALGH and directed by Dutch photographer and filmmaker ANTON CORBIJN, remains widely available on DVD and online streaming services.
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| Film poster, 2007 |
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Last updated 16 October 2021 §
