Interview with Natalie Curtis, daughter of Joy Division's Ian Curtis
The small, shy woman sitting across from me in a pub in East London is a little tipsy. Her voice becomes just a tad louder and she is more forthright than the timid creature I'd met two hours previously.
"I don't really listen to Joy Division very much," she says. "I would if it wasn't for the fact that it's my dad singing. Who wants to listen to their dad singing? It's like watching your dad dance. It's just dead embarrassing. Your dad's never cool, is he?"
The young woman is Natalie Curtis, 26, the daughter of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who committed suicide 25 years ago this month. If anyone else were to suggest that Ian Curtis was not cool, then they would most likely be derided as someone totally out of touch with popular culture. Other than perhaps Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, there is not a figure in modern rock history that could be considered more important, culturally or musically, than Ian Curtis. His death convulsed the entire music business and sent thousands of the band's followers into deep mourning.
As the frontman of Joy Division, Curtis was not only the most charismatic, compelling and downright unsettling of post-punk artists, but also the writer of lyrics of astounding beauty, perspicacity and melancholy, lyrics that possibly foreshadowed hisdeath. Joy Division's two studio albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, are masterpieces; and the band's most famous song, Love Will Tear Us Apart, was only pipped to the post for best song of the past 25 years at this year's Brits by Robbie Williams's Angels, a result that seemed to embarrass even the shameless old showboater himself as he broke into a chorus of the Joy Division classic at the end of his own sentimental anthem.
Joy Division also profoundly influenced a number of major bands. U2's Bono is big enough to admit that the Manchester band hugely informed his music, while it's not fanciful to suggest that without JoyDivision, and their post-Curtis manifestation, New Order, there would not have been Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys, Franz Ferdinand or the Killers, among others.
When I first met Curtis's daughter, Natalie, who was just one when her father hanged himself in the Macclesfield house he shared with his wife and Natalie's mother, Deborah, I was disconcerted at her close resemblance to her father. The full lips, the pointy nose and the intense blue eyes are all taken directly from Ian's genetic stock.
Kevin Cummins, the rock photographer who shot the most iconic pictures of Joy Division, and who, in a strange twist of fate, has taken Natalie under his wing as a photographic assistant, was equally taken aback when he first met her, two and a half years ago, at a presentation he was giving in Manchester.
"It was after the talk, and this girl walked up to me and said, 'Have you got some pictures of my dad smiling?' I looked at her, and I thought, 'You don't have to tell me who you are.'"
Cummins's stark black-and-white photography had been Natalie's first exposure to her father. "Kevin's photos were the first I remember seeing: I must have been two or three. Somehow, I knew it was my dad, but I had no idea what he was doing in the pictures. I vaguely remember thinking, 'Why doesn't he smile? What's wrong?' Over time, I became aware that it was just an image that the band were trying to portray."
Natalie says she was eight before she became curious as to the manner of her father's death. "Up until then, I had no real curiosity about it. He was just dead - I didn't really think that someone could die in any number of ways." So she asked Ian's mother. "She told me that he had died of some disease such as cancer. I mentioned it to my mum, and she told me the truth."
Were you angry with him when you found out?
"I was never pissed off with him when I was younger. All I wanted to know were stories about him. I wanted to know about the happy stuff, and the funny things. And then when my mum started to write the book about dad (Touching From a Distance, a no-holds-barred depiction of a driven, sometimes unpleasant man, tortured by epileptic fits), I decided to find out more. So, I read some Joy Division books and most of them said, 'He killed himself because he had marital problems.' I knew that was rubbish. People don't kill themselves because of a failing relationship - they try to make it work or decide to move on. My dad was f*****. He was depressed, and he had terrible epilepsy that made him miserable."
Cummins, who has an almost fatherly affection for Natalie, gently prods her. "So, you're saying that you never felt anger towards your dad for killing himself."
Natalie takes a deep breath. "I have thought, 'What an idiot.' Not just because he wasn't around for me, but because he was so good at what he did and he left so little music. But being a rock star wasn't good for his health - the touring and drinking. He bloody knew that drinking alcohol stops your epilepsy medication from working."
But when you're in a successful band, it's hard to resist the temptations of life on the road.
"Well, yes, I can understand that it was all probably too exciting to be thinking, 'Oh, I'm ill, and alcohol and lack of sleep are seizure triggers, and all this will only make me more ill.' But when he decided that he'd had enough, he could have written a book instead. He didn't have to go back to a 9-5 job. He didn't have to kill himself."
Ian Curtis committed suicide on May 18, 1980, on the eve of a tour to America that was expected to break Joy Division in the world's most lucrative market. His musical legacy is small but incalculably influential. His personal legacy is no less impressive. His daughter is a bright, tenacious cookie, her steeliness shrouded by a deceptive shyness. She is also fiercely proud of her father, and touchingly defiant about the manner of his death.
"Depression has become less of a taboo now, but suicide is still not talked about much. I remember when a friend of mine killed himself a few years back, nobody would talk about itin front of me. It really annoyed me. I thought if suicide was good enough for my dad, then it's good enough for anyone."
"I don't really listen to Joy Division very much," she says. "I would if it wasn't for the fact that it's my dad singing. Who wants to listen to their dad singing? It's like watching your dad dance. It's just dead embarrassing. Your dad's never cool, is he?"
The young woman is Natalie Curtis, 26, the daughter of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, who committed suicide 25 years ago this month. If anyone else were to suggest that Ian Curtis was not cool, then they would most likely be derided as someone totally out of touch with popular culture. Other than perhaps Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, there is not a figure in modern rock history that could be considered more important, culturally or musically, than Ian Curtis. His death convulsed the entire music business and sent thousands of the band's followers into deep mourning.
As the frontman of Joy Division, Curtis was not only the most charismatic, compelling and downright unsettling of post-punk artists, but also the writer of lyrics of astounding beauty, perspicacity and melancholy, lyrics that possibly foreshadowed hisdeath. Joy Division's two studio albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, are masterpieces; and the band's most famous song, Love Will Tear Us Apart, was only pipped to the post for best song of the past 25 years at this year's Brits by Robbie Williams's Angels, a result that seemed to embarrass even the shameless old showboater himself as he broke into a chorus of the Joy Division classic at the end of his own sentimental anthem.
Joy Division also profoundly influenced a number of major bands. U2's Bono is big enough to admit that the Manchester band hugely informed his music, while it's not fanciful to suggest that without JoyDivision, and their post-Curtis manifestation, New Order, there would not have been Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys, Franz Ferdinand or the Killers, among others.
When I first met Curtis's daughter, Natalie, who was just one when her father hanged himself in the Macclesfield house he shared with his wife and Natalie's mother, Deborah, I was disconcerted at her close resemblance to her father. The full lips, the pointy nose and the intense blue eyes are all taken directly from Ian's genetic stock.
Kevin Cummins, the rock photographer who shot the most iconic pictures of Joy Division, and who, in a strange twist of fate, has taken Natalie under his wing as a photographic assistant, was equally taken aback when he first met her, two and a half years ago, at a presentation he was giving in Manchester.
"It was after the talk, and this girl walked up to me and said, 'Have you got some pictures of my dad smiling?' I looked at her, and I thought, 'You don't have to tell me who you are.'"
Cummins's stark black-and-white photography had been Natalie's first exposure to her father. "Kevin's photos were the first I remember seeing: I must have been two or three. Somehow, I knew it was my dad, but I had no idea what he was doing in the pictures. I vaguely remember thinking, 'Why doesn't he smile? What's wrong?' Over time, I became aware that it was just an image that the band were trying to portray."
Natalie says she was eight before she became curious as to the manner of her father's death. "Up until then, I had no real curiosity about it. He was just dead - I didn't really think that someone could die in any number of ways." So she asked Ian's mother. "She told me that he had died of some disease such as cancer. I mentioned it to my mum, and she told me the truth."
Were you angry with him when you found out?
"I was never pissed off with him when I was younger. All I wanted to know were stories about him. I wanted to know about the happy stuff, and the funny things. And then when my mum started to write the book about dad (Touching From a Distance, a no-holds-barred depiction of a driven, sometimes unpleasant man, tortured by epileptic fits), I decided to find out more. So, I read some Joy Division books and most of them said, 'He killed himself because he had marital problems.' I knew that was rubbish. People don't kill themselves because of a failing relationship - they try to make it work or decide to move on. My dad was f*****. He was depressed, and he had terrible epilepsy that made him miserable."
Cummins, who has an almost fatherly affection for Natalie, gently prods her. "So, you're saying that you never felt anger towards your dad for killing himself."
Natalie takes a deep breath. "I have thought, 'What an idiot.' Not just because he wasn't around for me, but because he was so good at what he did and he left so little music. But being a rock star wasn't good for his health - the touring and drinking. He bloody knew that drinking alcohol stops your epilepsy medication from working."
But when you're in a successful band, it's hard to resist the temptations of life on the road.
"Well, yes, I can understand that it was all probably too exciting to be thinking, 'Oh, I'm ill, and alcohol and lack of sleep are seizure triggers, and all this will only make me more ill.' But when he decided that he'd had enough, he could have written a book instead. He didn't have to go back to a 9-5 job. He didn't have to kill himself."
Ian Curtis committed suicide on May 18, 1980, on the eve of a tour to America that was expected to break Joy Division in the world's most lucrative market. His musical legacy is small but incalculably influential. His personal legacy is no less impressive. His daughter is a bright, tenacious cookie, her steeliness shrouded by a deceptive shyness. She is also fiercely proud of her father, and touchingly defiant about the manner of his death.
"Depression has become less of a taboo now, but suicide is still not talked about much. I remember when a friend of mine killed himself a few years back, nobody would talk about itin front of me. It really annoyed me. I thought if suicide was good enough for my dad, then it's good enough for anyone."