Touching From a Distance (11 page)

Ian bundled me into an ambulance that night, but didn’t come to the hospital until the next day when the birth was imminent. I was the complete coward. I drew the line at an epidural, but took everything
else they offered me. I screamed and swore and was so frightened I felt I would have done anything to keep the baby in. When it was all over, Ian said that if anything had gone wrong it would have been my fault as I had ‘done it all wrong’. I like to think that he wasn’t prepared for the strength of his feelings on seeing his own child’s birth. Ian’s initial fears turned to joy and the trauma was soon forgotten.

Natalie was tiny; my father said he had seen bigger chickens. Her features and hands were like Ian’s in miniature. Everyone could tell she was our first child because we both spent every visiting time gazing into her face. Ian was completely enraptured. In those days new mothers were encouraged to stay in hospital for longer and everything seemed to be going well, until the afternoon when I told Ian we would both be coming home the following day. Suddenly Ian seemed extremely apprehensive and dismayed. He said nothing and I carried on talking, pretending not to notice his change of attitude.

When I tried to ring him to ask him to come and collect us the next morning, there was no answer and he hadn’t gone to work. My mother and her friend had no trouble getting into the house as Ian had left the front door unbolted. He’d had a fit and cut his head during the evening.

Natalie and I soon settled into a routine, but Ian was terrified something might happen to the baby. He was reluctant to hold her in case he had a fit and dropped her, and so could not bring himself to participate in looking after her as much as he might have done. I begged him to try to hold her for a short time alone, but he had convinced himself that it would endanger Natalie if he supported her unsupervised. Ian’s fits were never totally unexpected and shortly before each attack he would experience what is usually described as an aura. I pointed out to him that he could easily put the baby down if he had any such warnings, but he said he did not want to take the risk. I accepted what he said – after all, Ian knew more about it than I did.

Instead I had to look after the both of them single-handedly. At times this was both infuriating and tiring. Ian expected his evening
meal to be ready when he came home from work and if Natalie was crying he would not even hold her while I dished out the food. To some extent I felt he was demanding his turn for attention from me, like a jealous child.

By May 1979, Joy Division were used to playing at the Russell Club in Hulme, Manchester. Tony Wilson hired what was in effect a social club for tenants of the council flats and once or twice a week its name was changed to the Factory. It was a bleak place, mirroring the area in which Ian had lived during his adolescence in Macclesfield. Hundreds of dark windows stared at the car park outside the club and I was forever haunted by the feeling that I was being watched. Of the many Factory gigs, this one was particularly important for me – it was my first evening out since having Natalie.

Ian and I drove there together and after I had parked the car we walked across to the doors of the club. I was still half a stone overweight, but managed to squeeze into a pair of jeans. Ian put his arms around me, kissed me and said how proud he was of me. To him, I looked the same as before. It was a great set. The band were better than ever and they had built up a serious following. I stood in the audience admiring my husband with everyone else. I considered myself to be well organized in my new role. I felt self-satisfied and happy in my ignorance – I believed the depressive image and emotive lyrics merely to be part of the act. Joy Division were on the brink of success and despite other people’s misgivings, I was holding on to my husband and my baby. Even before Natalie’s birth, Mr Pape, my old boss at the County Court in Macclesfield, had warned me that I may not be able to have both.

It would be wrong to say my personality didn’t change when I became a mother. My life was no longer centred on Ian. Now I had this small person who was totally dependent on me. I had always felt responsible for lan’s well-being, but when our daughter arrived I naturally
expected him to adjust and make her the centre of his life too. Not that I stopped caring for Ian, but Natalie always came first and in refusing to help me I often felt that Ian was pressurizing me to choose between them. My mother would give me little hints such as, ‘Before he comes home from work, move the drying nappies away from the fire to make him feel welcome.’

Joy Division were gigging regularly during May – at least one a week, sometimes two – and were even interviewed on Radio Manchester. It was hard for Ian as he was still working full time, and his doctor had advised him to get early nights and not to work too hard. On the evening of 24 May 1979 we were having a quiet night at home. He began to feel unwell and had four
grand
mal
attacks, one after the other. I was unable to wake him from the fourth attack, so I rang my mother to come and look after Natalie and then called an ambulance. He regained consciousness in casualty and was kept in hospital for a few days.

It was purely common sense that prompted me to call an ambulance and it appears I knew less about epilepsy than I thought. I read in a book, which wasn’t published until 1984,
‘Grand
mal
status
epilepti
cus,
in which the subject does not recover consciousness between generalized tonic-clonic convulsions, is a medical emergency.’ Following this, a brain scan was arranged at Manchester Royal Infirmary. This could have shown up cysts, scars and abnormal blood vessels in the brain, or even have identified a tumour – but the results were normal.

Ian did not have any epileptic attacks during June 1979 and he did try hard to settle down into the relative tranquillity of family life. We lived a very short distance from South Park in Macclesfield and on warm summer evenings we would take Natalie in her pram and walk the dog. For me at least, these times were idyllic.

In July, Mick Middles reviewed a Factory gig for
Sounds
and obviously saw something in Joy Division’s music which he had not previously noticed. After calling them ‘orgasmic and mind-blowing’, he went on to say:

Once, when interviewed, Ian commented:

If Ian hadn’t argued with his manager he would have been very unusual. Musicians often behave like children and any manager will find himself acting as a father figure, solving problems and generally smoothing things out. Ian wasn’t the only person to fall out with Rob Gretton, but sometimes he did react rather badly. One argument culminated in Ian stalking up and down the rehearsal room with a drum case on his head. The more he stalked the more mad Rob became and the more the rest of the band laughed. Ian’s impractical approach to money always caused him difficulties. It was a concept he never understood. Once, he rang me from a hotel in the south of England. He was presented with a bill for £5 – the exact sum he had in his pocket. Furious with Rob Gretton, he blamed him for not warning him about the cost of hotel telephone bills.

Ian’s quest for extra pocket money for himself was never ending. He even stooped to cleaning the rehearsal rooms as the rest of the band could afford to pay him. When Factory pressed the first Durutti Column album,
Return
of
the
Durutti
Column,
Tony Wilson needed someone to glue the sheets of sandpaper to the sleeves and Joy Division were drafted in. Ian did most of the job himself because the others became engrossed in the porn movie hired to alleviate the boredom and Ian needed the money for his cigarettes.

When the time came for Joy Division to start their own publishing company, it was decided to credit all the songs to Joy Division rather than any individual. The song-writing royalties were split four ways, with each person then paying Rob Gretton 20 per cent as his manager’s commission. At the time I was stunned. Initially, I helped Ian financially, emotionally and practically to follow his chosen career, but when Rob started managing the band I became very much an outsider. I assumed epilepsy to be the main cause of Ian’s silence, but, unknown to me, he had painted Rob a grim picture of his home life.

Yet Ian still thought enough of me to come back for consolation when he realized that the other members were not going to give him the credit he was expecting. I was out of touch with their song-writing methods and, as far as I could see at the time, Ian was a substantial contributor. As I understood it, he wrote the melodies and the lyrics – I thought he deserved at least half the credit. He was sad when he told me what had happened and although he accepted the situation, I think he must have felt he had sold out for the sake of friendship, otherwise he would not have even mentioned it. Yet, he never expressed any dissatisfaction to the band. Perhaps I was guilty of idolizing him in the same way as the press. Despite the fact that he had ceased to help in the home, to me he was still perched up there on his pedestal. When the press tried to present the band as ‘Ian Curtis and Joy Division’, Ian fought against it. Press interviews had always been traumatic and serious. As Ian was more approachable than the others, journalists began to ask for personal interviews.

Unknown
Pleasures
was released in June 1979. Packaged in a black
linen-look sleeve with a white Fourier analysis in the centre, the sides were called ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’. ‘Inside’ contained ‘Shadowplay’, ‘Wilderness’, ‘Interzone’ and ‘I Remember Nothing’. ‘Outside’ contained ‘Disorder’, ‘Day of the Lords’, ‘Candidate’, ‘Insight’ and ‘New Dawn Fades’. The tracks ‘Auto-suggestion’ and ‘From Safety to Where … ?’ were recorded initially as part of the album, but were rejected and appeared later on Fast’s
Earcom
2
with other contributions from Basczax and Thursdays.

Nearer to the truth than most people imagined,
Unknown
Pleasures
was reviewed in
Sounds
under the headline ‘Death Disco’. The reviewer wrote a short story around the album; his opinion was that if one was contemplating suicide, Joy Division was guaranteed to push you over the edge. Initially, I disliked
Unknown
Pleasures.
This may have been owing to my jealousy at being gradually ousted from the ‘tightening circle’, or a genuine apprehension about the morbid dirges. As I became familiar with the lyrics, I worried that Ian was retreating to the depression of his teenage years. He had been inordinately kind to me during my pregnancy and yet these lyrics had been written at the same time.

‘But I remember when we were young’ – Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth. After pondering over the words to ‘New Dawn Fades’, I broached the subject with Ian, trying to make him confirm that they were only lyrics and bore no resemblance to his true feelings. It was a one-sided conversation. He refused to confirm or deny any of the points raised and he walked out of the house. I was left questioning myself instead, but did not feel close enough to anyone else to voice my fears. Would he really have married me knowing that he still intended to kill himself in his early twenties? Why father a child when you have no intention of being there to see her grow up? Had I been so oblivious to his unhappiness that he had been forced to write about it?

Perhaps I wasn’t giving Ian the attention he required at home. Who knows? But adoration from the press doesn’t seem to have been enough for him. The reviews increasingly began to dwell on Ian’s distinctive dance. To me it was just part of the act and I saw my role
as looking after the actor at home. I tried to provide a steady background life for him to depend on – a shelter. I was hardly likely to be impressed by his manic jerking on stage when I spent my life concentrating on eradicating the possibility of any seizures at home. Had the act become reality, or reality become the act? I endeavoured to treat him as a ‘normal’ person, as one should an epileptic, but he had difficulty in switching from his stage life to his home life. I could have looked after him for all time. I had been there when he was a schoolboy and yet he treated me as he might one of the sycophants who infiltrated the cushion of his friendships within the band.

Ian all but stopped talking to me and in desperation I turned to my health visitor. She was very sympathetic and arranged an appointment for me to see Ian’s specialist at the hospital. Ian made it obvious he didn’t want me to go and it might have been a more fruitful meeting had I gone in secret. As it was, Ian came with me. We sat in the surgery – me with Natalie asleep on my knee and Ian pouting, with his arms folded like a difficult teenager. The doctor was no help at all. I explained Ian’s change in personality and all he could do was assure me that it was perfectly normal under the circumstances. I was left without a hint about how to cope with the situation and a feeling that there was something I wasn’t being told. Whether the meeting would have been different without Ian’s stolid presence, I do not know.

Bernard Sumner had also noticed that Ian’s moods had become even more erratic: ‘He had a manic personality … in his performance. If he didn’t get what he wanted he could raise hell, but in a funny way sometimes.’ My parents were dismayed at the opposition I was facing in trying to find out more about Ian’s problems. My father was determined to get some answers for me and made an appointment with a doctor at our local practice. We felt that although medical matters are supposed to be confidential between patient and doctor, we were at least entitled to an explanation of Ian’s prognosis. My father found the GP to be evasive, rude and unhelpful. He came away from the surgery insisting that the doctor himself was mad. This was not too far from the truth – within weeks the uncooperative man shot
himself. Ian reacted very squeamishly to the news, despite the fact that he barely knew him.

For one evening at the end of July, Manchester’s Mayflower Club was renamed the Funhouse to present the ‘Stuff the Superstars Special’. The morning before this gig, Dave McCullough made the journey to Strawberry Studios in Stockport to interview Joy Division for
Sounds.
One pompous band member was quoted as saying: ‘We don’t want to give people straight answers. We’d rather they question things for themselves.’ The interview had started off well, with Dave McCullough gleaning information about
Unknown
Pleasures
from Ian, but he was unable even to find out the names of the other band members, let alone delve deeper into Joy Division’s music. Despite the fact that he walked away with the impression that Joy Division were devoid of intellect, he still awarded them two pages of undeserved publicity.

In August 1979 they played the Prince of Wales Conference Centre at the YMCA, Tottenham Court Road. That Thursday night, Joy Division played alongside Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and Essential Logic. Essential Logic missed out rather as apart from having to take the stage after Joy Division, they went on so late that many fans were already on their way home. Adrian Thrills in the
NME
enthused about each individual Joy Division member in turn and finished saying: ‘They have the spirit and the feeling.’ There was no doubt about it – Ian was famous. He had achieved what he always wanted; already he was public property. I was sick of other people making observations about Ian’s personality. There was nothing left of him for me, the husband and father ceased to exist and any plans he made were made with Rob.