Simply put, the group's debut full-length Unknown Pleasures, released in 1979, sounds like little that came before it. A lot of credit goes to eccentric producer Martin Hannett, and it's the production- not Curtis's well-parsed words or the band's suddenly ubiquitous biopic cachet- that benefits most extensively from cleaned-up deluxe reissues of the band's two utterly essential albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer. ( "A Day Without Me", a single from U2's 1980 LP Boy, was allegedly inspired by Curtis' suicide.)Īnd then there's the music, a conflation of tribal primitivism and sophisticated art-rock that set the template for those twin poles of post-punk. And unlike such dead-before-their-time predecessors as Nick Drake and Chris Bell, Ian Curtis was a bona fide star in the making whose impact was already being felt throughout the underground, and whose presence was being picked up on by such prescient mimics as Bono. A month after Curtis' death, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" would become the group's first hit. On the other hand, Joy Division's popularity was on the rise. "This is the way, step inside," intones Curtis at the start of the group's posthumous sophomore release Closer, an album title whose double meaning imparts almost as much menace as the fact that Curtis already sounds like he's singing from beyond the grave on the sepulchral lead track "Atrocity Exhibition". His marriage was falling apart, his epilesy was worsening, and at their most uplifting, his band's lyrics set new benchmarks for melodrama, paranoia, and depression. It's easy to say, in retrospect, that people should have seen it coming.
Sometime early on the morning of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis, at the age of 23, watched Werner Herzog's Stroszek, played Iggy Pop's The Idiot, and hung himself in the kitchen. Rock history is jammed with messy, stupid, and tragic ends to promising starts- plane crashes, overdoses, gunshots- but Ian Curtis' death is still striking.
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