Hardly any song in rock history is so closely linked to the fate of its creator: Joy Divisions dark "Love Will Tear Us Apart" remains forever surrounded by the knowledge of the suicide of its frontman Ian Curtis at the age of 23. However, his myth not only overlays the narrow work of the British postpunk band, which decided to continue under a different name after Curtis' death on 18 May 1980. He also inspired numerous artists. But who was this man whose desperation became legend?
In the last 20 years, there have been several opportunities to engage with the short life of Ian Kevin Curtis. Especially the highly acclaimed autobiography of his widow Deborah Curtis, "Touching From A Distance" (1995), and Anton Corbijn's successful film "Control" (2007) provided deeper insights. And yet Ian Curtis remains strangely alien to the neutral observer, and his musical legacy increasingly appears as a mysterious monolith that survives time in a dark and rigid way, decisively shaping the dark image of its creator.
Curtis was born on 15 July 1956 in Stretford, not far from Manchester. Already as a child he began to write poems. At 19 he married his schoolmate Deborah Woodruff; in 1979 his daughter Natalie was born, Curtis' only child. If one believes his biographer and the people who knew him, it was precisely this responsibility as husband and father that unduly burdened the sensitive, fragile young man from the very beginning. In order to feed the family, he pursued various bourgeois occupations. But his main interest was music.
He had met Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook at a Sex Pistols concert in 1976. The three formed a band to which Curtis contributed the lyrics and vocals. Already the band name indicates the direction in which the music and especially the dark lyrics of the group would move: The term "Joy Division" comes from the Holocaust novel "House of Dolls" by the Israeli writer K-Teznik 135633 (actually Yehiel De-Nur), it describes a "brigade of lusts" in concentration camps...
