Macclesfield, 1980, a few months after Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, had killed himself, and I was walking to the record shop after school, the same school Curtis (and drummer, Stephen Morris) attended a few years earlier. Having just moved to the Manchester suburbs from rural East Anglia as an 11-year old, I was feeling disorientated, out of place, speaking with the wrong accent. I didn't yet have any friends in my new hometown, the hills of which were foreboding after the flatlands of Suffolk.
At the shop, I bought Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division's first album, with its iconic Peter Saville cover of the first discovered pulsar radiating against a black background. The record was thick vinyl and felt important under my arm as I made my way to the bus stop. I played the album several times that night, the next night, and for months after that. From the opening drums, rising-falling bass and mesmeric vocals of Disorder ("I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand") to the lost-in-a-city soundscape of Interzone ("I was looking for a friend of mine"), I found words and music that spoke directly to my sense of estrangement. So began an intense relationship with the desperately visceral yet strangely life-affirming music of Joy Division.
Of course, being at the same school had its perks. I found a desk where Curtis used to sit – one of those grammar-school wooden desks – inside which I found some Velvet Underground lyrics scribbled and signed by "IC". I made contact with the teacher who taught him religious education, for which he won a prize. I wore black shirts and lapels covered in Joy Division badges; the obligatory trenchcoat soon followed. I collected live bootlegs, videos, scrapbooks from Afflecks Palace, Manchester's emporium of second-hand cool, and picked up an interview picture-disc on which Curtis, barely audible above the slot-machines of a Macclesfield cafe, stresses that "we're not gloomy at all".
During school lunch breaks, accompanied by a fellow fanatic or two, we'd cross the road to the cemetery, where we'd smoke beside Curtis's cremation stone, inscribed "Love Will Tear Us Apart". I quizzed, relentlessly, the classmate whose father had been the first policeman at the scene of the Curtis's death. And a girlfriend introduced me to the band's original drummer. Yes, my passion for the music had become an obsession, and to such an extent that my parents could no longer tolerate the lugubrious basslines and vocal pleas rattling their nerves each night. One evening my mother put my Joy Division records in the oven and switched it on. I got there just in time to save them.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of Ian Curtis's death. My relationship with the music is no longer quite so intense, but it's certainly fraught with memory. I was at the Hacienda when New Order played Love Will Tear Us Apart for the first time, as a rare encore. Indeed, everyone was drifting out of the old boathouse when Hooky's bass started up and I rushed back to the stage, my nose ending up close to the toecaps of his biker boots. Five years later, during my Madchester days, especially at Dave Haslam's legendary Thursday Temperance Club nights at the Hacienda, I danced to Joy Division all over again. It was around that time, too, when sitting with my friend Tim Burgess, from the Charlatans, in the Briton's Protection, a Victorian pub backing on to the canal and that world-famous club, that Peter Hook walked in and joined us. The circle felt complete.
More recently, I watched the film, Control, in Berlin, with its early scenes of Curtis in his school uniform. And I felt a certain pride, not about the school, but how Curtis had come through that disciplinarian mundanity (and he'd been a prefect!) and the market town provinciality of Macclesfield to make such great music. Soon after, I watched a documentary about the band in a packed-out art-house cinema in Krakow, Poland. When the lights went up, a few of the young women were crying. I asked the Polish guy beside me why he was interested in Joy Division. "I grew up with them," he said. "They were everything to me." And, of course, I knew exactly what he meant.
