Ian Curtis the demonic ring master, a man passessed, electrified by his own scowling intense music, lost in his own world, as he marches back and forth like a crazed Wehrmacht sentry, rhythmically clutching at imaginary ghosts. Peer closer, and his eyes are glazed and haunted. It's as if he's seeing something we cant. Maybe he was.
After watching all the video's of his performances cult filmmaker Fabrizio Federico noticed that ''the audiences loved him because he made them gape with astonishment with his unique cataclysmic choreographic style. His brooding haunting vocal delivery was the icying on the cake. Ian was a crooner from a black hole from the underworld, the voice of a dark lord from a terrifying void from centuries past. The phenomenal vacancy and desolation in his eyes as he loses himself to the music is astounding. You can feel the power of the music going through him, but he's not excited, he's terrified. His dancing showed us what the music looked like. There was desperation, anger, honesty and fear in his dancing, with the weight of the world on his shoulders as he danced like a lost marionette. He was mesmerizing and trying to escape from his body, like a helpless puppet on some strings. This style of dancing can be traced back to David Bowie performing Stay on the Dinah Shore TV show. His impulsive, choppy dancing is a strange counter-balance to his lifless eyes.''
Ian was possessed by some very strong powers onstage, while his band created emotional, icy magic, his soul-searching performances made him vulnerable and immolated, like he was in another world, appearing both very powerful and very fragile. He'd come onstage looking very shy and quiet, and then he would go inside and take command, as if he was pluged into a huge electrical voltage, twitching and jerking. This tranced out symbol of a human being. When he shook himself into a frenzy you didnt know where it was gonna take you, like a performance artist who sacrificed a part of them selves. He treated each show as a laboratory experiment, performing each show as if it were his last. With his dancing Ian had tapped into unknown dark forces that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life.
Ian Curtis had the room and the support to take centre stage, to calibrate to the room, and then launch himself into the void. At the 1979 Plan K gig, by the second song "Wilderness", from the album Unknown Pleasures, Curtis begins with his characteristic "dead fly" dance partially derived from northern soul moves. Although he is loose-limbed, he holds himself erect and stiff. The effect, whether intentional or not, is paradoxical: he is seeking escape, if not transcendence, yet his whole body language indicates that this is impossible. Transported by amplified electricity, he enacts his visionary words with lightning fast, jack-knife movements. As the camera closes in, he shows an open face, with watery eyes, that is all emotion.
Through his lyrics he had powerful psychic abilities, he was a channel for the Gestalt. A lightning conductor. Haunted by the spirits of the past like in the song Dead Souls. Here Ian cast a spell that felt more like an invocation as he spelled it out: ''Someone take these dreams away, that point me to another day.'' It went beyond aesthetics into something undeniable, making the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. There were forces that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life, and Ian had tapped into them.
Or when he alluded to having been reincarnated through many different times, like in the song Wilderness. Other topics featured: guilt, fear, rage, claustrophobia, disgust, self-hatred, and fatalism. Darkside immersion also included: mass murders, summary violence, radical right wing politics, and Nazism inspired by J.G Ballard, Burroughs, Kafka etc... ''A lot of people think he was on drugs. He wasn’t on any drugs at all. That was just him losing himself in the music.” So said Ian Curtis’ former Joy Division bandmate, Stephen Morris, of his extraordinary dancing. On May 18th 1980, Ian Curtis lost his battle with depression at the age of just 23.
Ian's expressive, confused vocals croon over recurring musical patterms which themselves mock any idea of escape. Possessed by demons as he danced spastically and with lightning speed, winding and unwinding as the rigid metal music folds and unfolds over him. In his short life, he released two seminal albums, and cultivated one of the most captivating live performance styles of all time. Dubbed, perhaps a little insensitively, his “epilepsy dance” (Curtis suffered from epilepsy, as did the subject of his song ‘She's Lost Control’), Curtis’ twitchy, possessed dance moves are inimitable.
“When we rehearsed he used to literally just sit in the corner mumbling into a microphone,” said Morris, "and then you’d do a gig with him and he’d turn into this… dervish thing.”
Curtis had held a keen interest in music since the age of 12, and this interest developed greatly in his teenage years, with artists such as Jim Morrison and David Bowie being particular favourites of his, and thus influencing his poetry and art. Curtis could seldom afford to purchase records, leading him to frequently steal them from local shops. By his mid-teens, Curtis had also developed a reputation among his peers as a strong-willed individual, with a keen interest in fashion. Despite gaining nine O-levels at King’s School, and briefly studying A-Levels in History and Divinity at St. John’s College, Curtis soon became disenchanted with academic life, and abandoned his studies to commit himself to finding employment. Despite abandoning his studies at St. John’s College, Curtis continued to focus on the pursuit of art, literature and music, and would gradually draw lyrical and conceptual inspiration from ever more insidious subjects.
Joy Division a name that will live in infamy. This moniker was derived from the 1955 novel The House of Dolls, writen by Ka-Tsetnik 135633, born Yehiel Feiner, which featured a Nazi concentration camp with a sexual slavery wing called the “Joy Division”. The cover of the band’s first EP depicted a drawing of a Hitler Youth beating a drum and the A-side contained a song, “Warsaw”, which was a musical retelling of the life of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess.
While performing with Joy Division, Curtis became known for his quiet and awkward demeanour, and a unique dancing style often reminiscent of the epileptic seizures he began experiencing in late 1978. If you watch the Apollo performance the opener Dead Souls, with its progressive, intense build up, it allowes Ian to position himself and read the audiences atmosphere as the band lock in behind him, so he can calibrate himself to see how far he wants to travel in his trance.
Throughout Joy Division’s live performances in 1979 & 1980, Curtis collapsed several times while performing and had to be carried off stage. To minimise any possibility of Curtis having epileptic seizures, flashing lights were prohibited at Joy Division gigs; despite these measures, Bernard Sumner later stated that certain percussion effects would cause Curtis to suffer a seizure. In April 1980, Terry Mason was appointed as a minder to ensure Curtis took his prescribed medications, avoided alcohol consumption, and got sufficient sleep. Regarding the choreography of Curtis’s stage performances, Greil Marcus in The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs quotes Jon Savage from Melody Maker: “Ian’s mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that Deborah Curtis had to cope with at home.” Marcus remarked that Curtis’s performance “might also have been a matter of intentionally replicating fits, re-enacting them, using them as a form of energy and a form of music.” Curtis’s final live performance with Joy Division was on 2 May 1980. This performance was at the High Hall of Birmingham University, and included Joy Division’s first and only performance of “Ceremony”, later recorded by New Order and released as their debut single. The final song Curtis performed on stage with Joy Division prior to his death was “Digital”.
In West Hampstead to honour their commitment to perform a second gig in one evening at this location, although some 25 minutes into this second gig, Curtis’s “dancing started to lose its rhythmic sense and change into something else entirely” before he collapsed to the floor and experienced the most violent seizure he had endured to date.
According to Tony Wilson, prior to his suicide, Curtis had watched Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek and listened to Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot. His wife recollected that he had taken photographs of their wedding and their baby daughter off the walls, apparently to view as he composed his suicide note.
It was the band’s performances that got the press going, particularly due to the transparent movements of frontman Ian Curtis. He was like a pale phantom. A dark cloud of sweat starting out small and then moving south along his button-down shirts. His movements on stage were chaotic and unpredictable: a moment of stillness followed by a windmill of rapid arm movements, or his body, twisting and turning into a brief and uncontrolled tornado before settling into abrupt calm again. There are videos online – compilations of these moments that people can watch and marvel at. Through the grainy black and white footage, the small fists of Curtis cut through the darknesses, like he’s fighting some invisible demon, circling the stage. The sight of Ian trembling and alone onstage singing ''dance, dance, dance to the radio...'' is one of the truly iconic sights of the post-punk era. If you watch the Facrory video Here Are The Young Men you can see how Ian could physically wind the music to new levels of intensity. When Ian danced Joy Division became a better band. Flicking his wrists, violent swaying, nodding his head, a backwards shimmy, standing on his tip-toes. No dance instructor would recognize his ferocious movements.
Joy Division’s Ian Curtis’ favourite 32 books:
- Adrian Henri, Environments And Happenings
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
- Antonin Artaud, The Theatre And Its Double
- Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In Hell
- Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
- Dawn Ades, Dada And Surrealism
- Franz Kafka, In The Penal Colony
- Franz Kafka, The Castle
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of The Idols
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Great Short Works Of Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
- J.G. Ballard, High–rise
- J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
- Jean–paul Sartre, Nausea
- John Heartfield, Photomontages Of The Nazi Period
- John Wilcock, The Autobiography And Sex Life Of Andy Warhol
- Ka–tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel De–nur], The House Of Dolls
- Michael Green, The Art Of Coarse Acting
- New Worlds [British Science Fiction Magazine] Nik Cohn, Rock Dreams: Under The Boardwalk
- Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
- Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde
- Selected Poems By Thom Gunn & Ted Hughes
- Various, A Century Of Thrillers: From Poe To Arlen
- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
- William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind
- William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys
