Touching From a Distance [Paperback]

A superb, insightful and chillingly honest portrayal of Ian Curtis and his life with Joy Division. Its all too easy to reflect on dead musicians as icons especially when they made such heart-stopping music as Joy Division. Truly no-one ever wrote lyrics like Curtis and the depth and soul of his delivery will ensure that his legend will live on.

However, what this book tells us is the other side: the young northern man prone to jealousy, emotional manipulation and adultery. Walking a fine line between genius and homewrecker, confusion and cruelty, Curtis comes across more human than ever as is unable to deal with his domesticity and the dark soul of Joy Division.

As his illness increases, so does the band's success and his split (on the one hand a poetic, intense man with depth and vision and on the other a brutal, immature boy with attention-seeking qualities) becomes more and more polar until his inevitable inability to hold the two disparate sides of his life together.

A wonderful book, well-written and very close to the bone. Deborah Curtis has succeeded in showing the lesser-known side of Ian Curtis without resorting to the type of bitching so frequent of biographys. Complete with lyrics (of their entire catalogue and unreleased stuff) and discography etc. this is an essential book for any music fan.

Next year will see the 30th anniversary of the death of Joy Division's lead singer, Ian Curtis (1956-1980). Such were the forces of heroisation after his suicide in May 1980 that NME took to exclaiming "Ian Curtis died for you!". In this book by his widow, Deborah Curtis - who had initiated divorce proceedings prior to his death - doesn't go quite as far as that, but she does claim that his suicide at 23 was motivated by a desire for lasting cultural relevance: "All he needed was the excuse to follow his idols into immortality and being part of Joy Division gave him the tools to build the heart-rending reasons."

Thankfully that kind of mythologisation - which obscures his achievement, reducing it to a symptom of his illnesses, and suppresses other factors that played a role in his early demise - is tempered by a generally down-to-earth narrative of their married life. After they met as teenagers, Deborah became besotted and devotional, willing to give up everything to cater to Curtis's every whim: "Without me realising it, he began to take control of my life very early on in our relationship." When she heard Ian's lyrics and occasionally saw him perform on stage, she - along with his bandmates and management - downplayed the darkness and fatalism that emanated from him: "I felt self-satisfied and happy in my ignorance. I believed the depressive image and emotive lyrics merely to be part of the act." With the benefit of hindsight, his bandmates have since admitted that they were young and immature and didn't recognise the signs of Curtis's distress and the toll that mounting responsibilities - a wife, a baby daughter, the sudden rise to fame and notoriety, a UK and European tour, the stress of interviews - were taking. His epilepsy and fear of fits only increased the strain with Deborah apparently viewing it as an "abnormality" and doctors prescribing excessive medication and poorly monitoring his treatment.

Deborah seems almost blithe about the ascent of the black dog in Curtis's life - "Perhaps I wasn't giving Ian the attention he required at home. Who knows?" - and indeed much of her commentary on him tends towards the superficial. But it is precisely that which gives us insight into Curtis's environment: Surrounded by diverse sources of pressure without anyone truly understanding the precariousness of his mental state and not being able to communicate it more clearly to those around him, Curtis's decision to kill himself seems more of an extremely desperate attempt to escape a situation that had become intolerable and is likely to have been more spontaneous than the romantic mythology of the doomed artist allows.

In his obituary in Melody Maker Jon Savage lamented that "Now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous." Fans of Curtis will no doubt hope that through the semi-fog of biopics, biographies and memoirs, his achievement can be remembered and celebrated.

Ian Curtis, a mesmeric frontman and renowned lyricist is every bit deserved of his mythical-iconic status. So, do you want to hear 'the story' recounted from the perspective of the cheated wife? Well, I did. And admittedly, it WAS an interesting read, revealing a man not without fault, but ultimately a dedicated, hard-working person who painstakingly forged a promising musical career. Sadly, however, it was his escalating personal problems that ironically became his groups' 'selling point'.

Before the suicide that boosted record sales and confirmed Curtis' status among legends, the music press were already drawing attention to his burgeoning problem with epilepsy. Spurred on by his frantic, spasmodic dancing, live audiences must have seemed like eager spectators in a freak-show, baying for the crescendo of an on-stage fit. While this focal point may have generated the hype the band needed in a highly competitive industry, to Ian - whose depression was compounding his illness - the press reviews struck some disturbing paralells close to the bone ("In his opinion they were like psychiatric reports, even using the appropriate terminology and references"). Deborah reveals a man deeply embarrassed of his illness, yet obviously aware of its play in his desperate bid for success. She portrays a man of contradictions, a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure: one-of-the-lads to his bandmates and friends, while concealing a darker personality that sought refuge in thoughful literature (Hesse, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Ballard), held an interest in Nazism, and was fascinated by "extreme concepts and philosophies". Not to mention a death wish.

The book briefly dips into Ian's trouble-free childhood and drug-experimenting adolescence, but concentrates mainly on the period of their relationship/marraige that coincided with the origins and eventual rise of Joy Division - and hit the rocks when Ian began his affair with the Belgian woman Annik Honore. Deborah interestingly sheds light on Ian's strongly held (and very serious) romantic notions of rock'n'roll death and suicide, and expresses her shocking opinion that "he engineered his own hell and planned his own downfall". He is described as an habitual depressive whose problem took a marked dive for the worse as his epileptic condition became debilitating, exacerbated by the barbiturates he was issued. Little was known about effective ways to treat epilepsy. Doctors showed Ian little sympathy or care. Remember, this was back in the 'pull-yourself-together' age of 1970s Britain which, particularly in this book, seems like the Dark Ages. Mental illness and 'mysterious' conditions such as eplepsy were airbrushed from public consciousness, and dubiously treated.

Nowadays, in hindsight, Curtis' lyrics may read as obvious cries-for-help or predictions of tragedy - even suicide notes. But at the time, nobody close to Ian was paying enough attention to acknowledge the danger in their increasingly extreme content. Deborah was shocked upon hearing the darkly-confessional lyrics of the 'Closer' LP (released just after his death). She says that had she heard it beforehand she "could have gained an insight into what was happening in his mind". And got some help. Couple this with the fact they had a one-year-old daughter, and it simply adds to the tragedy. However, she does suggest the tragedy as something probably inevitable.

Deborah's discovery of Ian's body in the kitchen of their terraced Macclesfield house - he'd polished off a bottle of whisky and hung himself, Iggy Pop's 'The Idiot' still spinning on the turntable - is sequenced in chilling dreamlike flashback. And, an example of the shameful heartlessness of the music industry is conveyed as bassist Peter Hook (generally good guy throughout) is shown as offering Deborah "one of the few expressions of sympathy shown to me by Ian's music business friends". Curtis died at just 23 years old.

The book is an emotional trawl through a dark, difficult past that raises many unanswered questions and much speculation. Being the only biography of Ian's life by somebody close to him, it cannot help but present a one-sided view that - for Ian's sake - could do with some counterbalance from elsewhere. While Deborah DOES glance over the kinder aspects of Ian's nature (he loved animals / took an "extremely personal interest in his job helping the disabled" etc.) she seems a little over-eager to emphasise his negative traits, frequently listing his selfish, cruel and sometimes bizzarre behaviour towards her. In places, her writing makes you wonder what she actually saw in him in the first place. There are also some petty moments, such as when she complains about Ian's "racism" while forgetting that she earlier mentioned his love for reggae and going to clubs "where white people didn't normally go".

Ultimately, the book is a riveting - if one-sided - read. However, with Deborah's recent solo-insistence upon pushing ahead for 'the movie'(always a bad idea) it quite naturally throws suspicion upon what the project was actually accomplished for. Nevertheless, to any Joy Division fan, or indeed anybody interested in Ian Curtis' writing, the inclusion of the full lyrics alone makes this book not only well worth the cover price but an essential possession.