Oral interviews of all the Joy Division related folks. Predictably great. ( )

Bernard Sumner: I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of thin air, we never, any of us, were interested in the money it might make us. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to and stirred our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career, or any of that. We never planned one single day.

Peter Hook: Ian was the instigator. We used to call him the Spotter. Ian would be sat there, and he’ d say, ‘That sounds good, let’s get some guitar to go with that.’ You couldn’t tell what sounded good, but he could, because he was just listening. That made it much quicker, writing songs. Someone was always listening. I can’t explain it, it was pure luck. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. We never honestly considered it, it just came out.

Stephen Morris: He was pretty private about what he wrote. I think he talked to Bernard a bit about some of the songs. He was totally different to how he appeared onstage. He was timid, until he’ d had two or three Breakers, malt liquor. He’d liven up a bit. The first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage, I couldn’t believe it. The transformation to this frantic windmill.

Deborah Curtis: He was so ambitious. He wanted to write a novel, he wanted to write songs. It all seemed to come very easily to him. With Joy Division it all just came together for him.

Tony Wilson: I still don’t know where Joy Division came from.

This book is a continuation of sorts. Where some good Joy Division film documentaries—paired with Peter Hook's and Bernard Sumner's autobiographies, and Deborah Curtis's Touching From a Distance—has incorporated a lot of stamina and breadth as to how Joy Division were seen, this book focuses on providing Jon Savage's edited transcripts from interviews with members of Joy Division, people who were seemingly close to the band, Deborah Curtis's book, and gig reviews.

Even though I've personally read much about Joy Division, this book is undoubtedly a fervent project to Savage, and the music, the intensity, youth, frustrations, depression, and, ultimately, Ian Curtis's suicide, all come through the pages.

Most of the quotes provide plenty of allure for myself, mainly as they are provided by quick-witted people; I love the dry wit and curt humour.

Stephen Morris: I’d get the train and go in to Savoy Books – before it was Savoy Books it was called The House on the Borderlands – and we used to have a right laugh at the old blokes looking at the porn. There was science fiction, weird books and over in a corner there’d be naked ladies, and surprisingly enough the science fiction had little appeal for the vast majority of the clientele, who were going over to the naked-lady corner. I’d just be trying to negotiate some sort of discount on a large, expensive book: ‘Yeah, have you got Michael Moorcock’s new book?’ Ian had The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, and also a collection of Jim Morrison’s poems. I seem to remember that you could go to W. H. Smith’s and they had a lot of Burroughs and a lot of Ballard, and it was just mixed in with the rest of the stuff.

Bernard Sumner: We eventually ended up at the famous Sex Pistols gig at the Free Trade Hall. It wasn’t that the Sex Pistols were musically brilliant and I thought, ‘Oooh, I really want to be like them.’ It was the fact that they were not musically brilliant and could just about play together and it was a right racket. I thought they destroyed the myth of being a pop star, or of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship. In fact, a friend who was with me said, ‘Jesus, you could play guitar as good as that.’

Previous to that, in the seventies music was all based on virtuosity, Rick Wakeman playing a thousand-notes-a-second solo. A lot of that prog-rock and West Coast of America stuff was a bit soft and soppy: you were supposed to bow down. They were kind of gods, musicians: ‘Oh, he can play it so well, it’s amazing’ – almost a jazz mentality. When they came on, the Sex Pistols trashed all that. It was like, you don’t need all the crap, all you need is three chords, right? Learn three chords, write a song, form a group, that’s it.

And that’s what we did, me and Hooky. I bought How to Play the Guitar, he bought How to Play the Bass. We went to my grandmother’s parlour, which was just across the Irwell. I remember we didn’t have any amps. She had an old gramophone from the forties, and I took the needle out of it and wired two jack sockets on it. It sounded good, plugged into the gramophone – we didn’t have any money, that’s all we could do – and then we just started writing stuff together.

Bernard Sumner: We had about a week to come up with a name, and some guy at the animation place where I was working gave me a couple of books. One was called House of Dolls. I knew it was about the Nazis but I didn’t read it. I just flicked through the pages, saw this name Joy Division, and it was the brothel that the soldiers went to, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s pretty bad taste, but it’s quite punk.’ Everyone I told the name to went, ‘That’s a great name,’ so we just went for it. We knew it had connotations, but we just thought, ‘Well, we’re not Nazis, so fuck it, it’s still a great name.’ We were very determined, and it was a bit of ‘Fuck you, we’ll do what we want’ as well in our heads, but I guess it is pretty bad taste.

Tony Wilson: It was all four of them, without any question. People talk about drummers being important to groups, and there’s no Joy Division without Stephen driving it that way and Bernard’s slash guitar, and clearly the core melodic element is Hooky’s high-fret playing of that bass, which no one had done before then. All of them had something to say, and they’d all been freed by the Pistols. And I don’t understand why that should glue together, that amalgam of those four people – it wasn’t just Ian, it was all four of them.

Also, there's a lot of personality issues and wonders; anybody looking back at their inchoate youth can relate.

Deborah Curtis: Then this glamorous Belgian turned up. She was attractive and she was free, and she had a nice accent. I don’t blame Ian. I think most people need a partner, and if you exclude that partner you have to find somebody else. It’s only natural. He must have been very lonely.

Tony Wilson: My great memory was walking down some very large flight of stairs at some big club in Paris one night, and suddenly Rob shouting out, ‘Where’s your Belgian boiler, Ian?’ And Annik going, ‘I’m right behind you, Rob.’ I remember enjoying that enormously.

Stephen Morris: He said he didn’t remember anything about it, that he had a blackout, which I can believe to a certain extent. But it’s more likely that he just got pissed and vented his frustration. The stuff he was taking anyway was pretty heavy. He was on Largactil. It must have been horrible. He was having more and more fits. The more successful we got, or the more you could see success beckoning you, the worse Ian’s condition became. It’s bleeding obvious really: if you’re going to carry on doing something that involves staying up all night, drinking, running about and acting like an idiot when you’ve got epilepsy, you’re not going to make it any better. The only way we could have sorted it out was just to say, ‘Right, that’s it, it’s over, let’s forget about it. We can’t carry on because he’s ill.’ But we very naively ignored that and went along with it. With Annik, it was part and parcel of the same thing, because you’re knocking about with the extra. He got himself in a situation. He was never a person who would say no; he would say whatever you wanted to hear. So he’d got himself into a situation where he was saying something that would make Debbie happy, and he’d met this other person who wasn’t one of the one-night-standers, and they’re saying, ‘What are you going to do?’ He’d say, ‘Well, whatever you want me to do.’ He’ d got epilepsy as well, and you can see it’s a disaster happening in very slow motion.

Bernard Sumner: In Macclesfield there was a little Down’s syndrome kid that lived in a house with a garden. Ian grew up round there, and the kid would never be able to come out of the house, and the kid’s whole universe was the house to the garden wall. Ian said many years later that he moved back to Macclesfield and walked past the house, and by chance he saw the kid. Ian had grown up from being five to twenty, twenty-two years old; the kid still looked exactly the same, and his universe was still the house and the garden, and that’s what ‘The Eternal’ was about.

Stephen Morris: I don’t think he really knew what he wanted. About a month before his first suicide attempt, he told me on the phone he was packing in the group and him and Debbie were going to go off and live in Holland, and open a bookshop. Which really surprised me.

Annik Honoré: He tried to commit suicide, so it was obvious then that he wasn’t well, and he was saying so in the lyrics. He appeared very depressed during the recording of Closer, although in a letter he said how much he loved those three weeks of London because we could see each other regularly. But otherwise he appeared so very tired and depressed from his disease more than anything else. There’s no way out, there’s no escape. That’s probably what was depressing him the most.

I had that tape of Closer, I had a Walkman and I was listening to it all the time and trying to understand, because I never saw any written lyrics. I could only understand from my hearing ‘I like watching the leaves as they fall.’ The ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and all the lyrics on the LP are really depressing and sad, and it’s surprising nobody would pay attention. Maybe for the others it was more like literature, which it was in a way, but it was also coming from his depression.

Tony Wilson: I was getting the train to London from Piccadilly for Granada, and as I drove to the station I saw Ian and Annik hand-in-hand traipsing the side streets near the station, and I said hello to them, and it was obvious they were walking the streets all night together. They got on the train, and I let them be together till Macclesfield, and then after we left Macclesfield and Ian had got off I went to join Annik. We got into conversation, and Annik expressed how worried she was, how fearful she was. And I’m all kind of, ‘No, no, it’s just art, it’s just an album, for God’s sake. It’s wonderful, I know, but it’s nothing to be frightened of.’ And she said, ‘Don’t you understand, Tony? When he says, “I take the blame,” he means it.’ And I went, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s just art.’ How fucking stupid can you get?

This is a beautiful memory piece. And I remember that New Order came out of it all.

Stephen Morris: Why did we decide to carry on? Well, we just carried on, we never even thought, ‘Should we carry on or not carry on?’ We went to the funeral, we went to the wake at Palatine Road, so ‘Monday, see you on Monday then,’ that was it. To this day we’ve never really sat down and said, ‘Well, we’re going to do this and we’re going to this and we’re going to do that.’ You just start and do it and hope for the best, because that’s the way we are.

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