An Analogue World Through the Eyes of Digital: Remembering Ian Curtis on his Birthday

By Analogue Ink

I’d have the world around
To see just whatever happens
Stood by the door alone
And then it’s fade away
I see you fade away
Don’t ever fade away

Digital: Joy Division

The grainy film, tinged with orange, has been slowed down — it would be over too quickly otherwise — but the image still feels far too fleeting. His is a young face. He sees the camera and turns to look at us. We know there must be someone holding the lens, but it feels like this young man is looking right at us, smiling right at us. His clothes don’t help us to identify the decade, neither does his short, dark hair. He lifts his chin and smiles at us, (or is it right through us?) as if he knows something of utmost significance, his pale eyes slowly blinking just once. He seems to recognise someone, and us, and everything. It all lasts seconds and then the blurred face has gone. Just one blink.

Search the internet for film footage of Ian Curtis smiling to the camera and this, taken during a rehearsal, will likely be the only clip you will find. His family and friends recall that he was not the morose figure of legend, that there were good times and fun times and smiles. There were problems — significant ones, we know this — but Ian was not always tormented and sad. Little ‘Hammy’, with his soft, chubby cheeks, grew up tall and with sculpted features, but along the way he liked fun and girls and footie and fags. And he adored music; his own and that of others. This is a relief to us. I like to think that somewhere there is a dusty metal cabinet full of undiscovered film reels of Ian larking about with the rest of Joy Division, messing around in daft “japes” with Hooky, Barney and Steve, and merrily sinking pints of beer. Just walking — that would be good, how did he actually walk? Or maybe even film footage of those flat Northern vowels coming from his mouth. Despite his eerie baritone singing, audio interviews reveal a soft, surprisingly high speaking voice. It would be wonderful to think that the recently-surfaced photographs of Ian larking about at an office party in the seventies, surrounded by middle-aged women, are part of a huge collection of films and pictures involving so much fun and games and hundreds and hundreds of smiles. The one smile we do glimpse is so intense, so moving. I don’t want it to be the only one.

Ian Curtis was a child of the optimistic fifties whose name is synonymous with the bleak late seventies. His musical and lyrical output was to be acknowledged by many only in the years after his death on May 18th 1980. His fame, now sealed in films and books, seems to increase incrementally as the years go by. Ian’s marital issues, young child and concerns regarding his adult-onset epilepsy have become his story, entwined as they are with the industrial North of that era and lyrics that are dark and foreboding, sometimes unbearably so. The surviving members of the band, still so young when he died, became a New Order of musicians that made the decision to keep making music. Their faces exist in film clip after film clip, photograph after photograph, album after album. CDs and DVDs and MP3s. We feel we know them so well. There they are, moving in colour, or talking, or laughing, or promoting their books or even making snide comments on film, radio and in print about each other now that there has been the obligatory acrimonious split. There they are again on Twitter, or morning TV, or running at a charity event, looking greyer and plumper and somehow sadder. We follow them as they age slowly, gradually. As we age.

Hooky, Barney and Steve made, and still make, digital music, but Ian remains captured forever only in an analogue world, never older than 23, always on the cusp of fame and fortune. The band’s last album, “Closer”, hit the shops exactly two months after his suicide, the tomb on the cover (chosen by the band before Ian died) and those bleak soundscapes sealing its fate as a symphony to sadness and despair rather than an incredibly-accomplished post-punk record by a bunch of young Northern lads. “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, the one promotional video that features Joy Division, was also not released in Ian’s lifetime, being filmed just a month before his death. In this, a group so often crystallised in crisp black and white are now tinged with layers of muted colour. An unusually and unsettlingly unshaven Ian stands still, delivering an occasional strum on his Vox Phantom VI rather than his usual frenzied dancing. His voice is that of a much older man. His legs do not pump and his arms don’t flail. The door with a scratched ‘Ian C’ opens and leads to an ominously empty rehearsal space. If ever there is a pop video that seems to represent the end of an era and the beginning of another, this is it.

Ian died the night before the band were due to fly to the USA for a tour, but there has never been the suggestion that his suicide was the result of a fear of likely eminence. He was not disillusioned with the music business, and was keen to please his fans and bandmates: perhaps too keen. Had he lived, there would have been more tracks, more videos, more interviews in the music press, more screens. He would have gone digital. In just a few years he would have encountered the bright colours, bright lights, big hair and glitz of the eighties’ music scene — what road would he have followed then? Ian’s lyrics displayed a depth and maturity far beyond his years, and there can be no doubt that in terms of literary ability the thoughtful lad from Macclesfield’s abilities would have shone brightly, likely eclipsing the efforts of his pals. Perhaps his illness would have led him away from music into poetry, or novels, or film. Perhaps he would simply have retired and opened a bookshop, something that he had considered. His thick, dark hair perhaps receding and white, that tall, thin frame maybe pot-bellied. But Ian Curtis did not live, and his literary output can be measured only in the music and his powerful, sometimes heart-breaking lyrics, published these days in his own handwriting from facsimiles of his notebooks. Carrier bags of scraps with capital letters and crossings-out and biro, his life’s work, reproduced reverently and somewhat incongruously in a coffee-table book. And because he has gone we are left only to guess what they mean.

An analogue life is an impermanent one. Analogue is about capture of the moment, of recording the now, to be savoured briefly but ultimately lost. Analogue is warts and all, knobbly knees, chubby cheeks, grainy orange smiles, divorce, illness and sometimes sadness and death. Analogue for most people was never altered, faked, cropped or re-taken repeatedly so that life looked better and neater and shinier and happier. Analogue would normally age and die, spools of film degrading into bitty nothingness, photographs stickily becoming paler and paler. Analogue would normally eventually become just a memory, lasting only as long as someone was there to think about it.

Look at photographs of your family or your town in the nineteen-seventies and it may as well be the eighteen-seventies, so different is it to our digital world, so analogue. Photographs were an event, a ceremony, a task, that required the person with the camera to buy an expensive film and take it to a developer, and pictures came back weeks later with blurs or stickers or sometimes not at all. People, places, houses in these pictures often look oddly unkempt and dirty and grimy, such is the quality of the film and the fashions, fixtures and lighting of the era. Hair is big, or long, or lank, or uncut. Sideburns are bushy, glasses are black and plastic, people stand off-centre or out of focus and all this this is done without irony or self-conscious hipness. Shiny-faced people wear ludicrous clothes, and curtains and sofas — settees — are flowered brown and orange. If Britain when Ian was born was proud and bright and shiny space-age then Britain in the seventies appears decidedly gritty and unwashed. This was still a time when you could smoke on a bus, or in a cinema, or in your office. Pub ceilings were yellow and fetid. It was not seen as unusual to take a bath once a week. From our sanitised digital viewpoint, our antibacterial and artificial cocoon, people look as though they might have smelled.

Analogue is sound and odour and taste as well as orange, blurry transience. Digital has recently attempted to replicate analogue, coercing photographs into a fake, forced graininess and failing at every turn. A filtered, posed selfie or carefully arranged and de-saturated photo of your pizza and glass of Merlot misses the point. Analogue photos have slowly degraded and changed over time: in their day they did not have self-consciousness and they were of the moment, new, optimistic. Put one of these old photographs in a frame in daylight and it will fade away and mute, but store it in a certain way and the colours will remain brighter for longer.

His wife Debbie writes of entering the house on that morning and noticing that there was no fug of cigarettes. From this distance Ian’s death seems so analogue and so gritty-seventies: the young couple and the money worries, the oddly-shaped terraced house; the little kitchen; that awful ceiling clothes dryer. And then there is that photograph of him with the baby, the last one of him taken by Debbie. That sensible brown shirt and short, dark hair appear once more, and again you cannot tell by his appearance that this is 1980. Yet this time his large, pale eyes look intently at the camera in a different, more unnerving way, and his position within the picture is unusual. He seems to be leaning in from the outside, almost superimposed onto the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph as if he is not there with that red dummy and the plastic changing mat and his chubby-cheeked child. He is with them — this is untouched analogue, after all — but Ian looks alone and his expression is undecipherable. Despite the baby and her daddy crouching by her this domestic scene seems unnaturally cold and awkward, shaded in turquoise-teal rather than the brown fuzzy-warm of family photographs or the moody monochrome of promo shots. Analogue’s brief life, its transitory nature, can be unpleasant. No-one has airbrushed Ian’s skin in this picture, his strange placement in the composition or his unnerving expression.

Ian died on the crossroads, the interzone, between analogue and digital, and arguably no event illustrates more clearly the demarcation between these two better than the line between Joy Division and New Order. Black and white bridges in the snow becomes stadium synth; the strobes no longer banned because of Ian’s terrible seizures. The coldness of freezing rehearsal rooms is replaced by the Ibiza sunshine, and pints of beer become tabs of Ecstasy. Gradually the world of the real and the oppressive and the dirty becomes a digital world, a place of fakery, glitz and imitation. Teeth are bleached to shine, money is earned and spent and lives become self-conscious. The utilitarian rolled-up sleeves that came straight out of the Disablement Resettlement Office still appear these days, but this time as fashion statements: as irony or retro honour, not necessity. Glamour and money are slick and thick now, and even rowdy urban pubs banish cigarettes.

But these worlds, our cleansed and altered digital worlds, do not diminish the past. They magnify it, being as it is so precious and raw and fleeting. It is hardly surprising that his daughter Natalie has become a photographer. We know that Ian was sometimes very troubled and it upsets us that he was very ill. Married at 19 and gone by 23, he seemed to want to live a compressed life, to experience existence quickly and intensely. We listen to his words and the band’s music and we cannot help but mythologise it and him. Left to the albums and words and photographs — the glorious analogue residue of his short life — we are in danger of seeing his existence as one only of despair, regret and loneliness. Ian’s suicide has cast such deep shadows over his life and memory that it is hard to see the rays of sunshine that we know there must have been: in the media the date of his death is often acknowledged more than his birth. This is to misunderstand both analogue and the past. Just because something is not sealed forever in a digital recording does not mean it did not occur and there are lives of millions who came before us that have left no trace. Ian Curtis was once captured on film happy and we can all watch his young face turn to look at us, smile and blink. The impact never dilutes. Once, his secret smile would be glimpsed in a moment and lost, an analogue moment gone forever and forgotten. We must be grateful. In a digital world, it, and he, will never fade away. Happy Birthday Ian.

Ian Kevin Curtis 15th July 1956