Joy Division Page #8

or the shelf and say "I like this."

and them kind of look at me and think,

"Well, you're just hopeless."

And there was something.

There was something I was very excited about.

There was a body of photographs

by a man called Bernard Pierre Wolff.

And I opened the magazine and put it on

the drawing board and stepped away.

And I think they just pointed at one

and said,

"We want this.

We want this for the cover."

It came to pass that it was

going to be called Closer.

And it was interesting:

Closer, Closer.

I had no idea that it was going to be

the last thing that he did.

It's better than Unknown Pleasures,

songs are better, everything...

you know...

He was a good laugh most of the time.

The only thing that sort of was sad about it

was Ian's illness,

but he hid that so well most of the time.

I remember talking to him one night.

Ian was saying to me that, um...

doing this album felt very strange

because he felt that all his words

were writing themselves.

And that he'd always in the past struggled

to complete a song, like, he'd have to start.

We'd all struggle to complete it.

But he just thought the whole song straight off.

And...

But he said, at the same time,

he had this terrible claustrophobic feeling

that he was in a whirlpool of being drowning,

and he was being pulled down in this whirlpool.

He was always recording on his own, you know.

The group would be recording the music

at a different time.

The image I would have in mind

was Ian was very tired and very, very quiet.

And every time he would sing,

he would turn his back

and put his hand on his head

or on his eyes.

And he was turned around from the others,

just to be in himself.

All the lyrics on the CD

are really depressing and sad.

And it's surprising nobody would pay attention.

We never really talked about his lyrics.

But we never really listened

to his lyrics that much.

It's only years on,

when you see them wrote down

when Debbie published them.

I thought,

"Oh, my God. Is that what you were singing?"

Maybe for the others, it was more like literature.

You know, Annik expressed how worried she was,

how fearful she was.

And I'm all kind of,

"No, 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? He...

When he says 'I take the blame',

he means it."

And I went,

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's just... it's just art."

How f***ing stupid can you get?

When he cut himself up with a kitchen knife,

and, you know, he said he was pissed.

And when he took his first overdose,

you think you'd have stopped and sorted it out.

It seems, you know, a complete...

unbelievable to me that we didn't stop

and sort him out.

I think he was actually in a hospital...

and booked.

We'd already had a gig booked.

And I know that if we booked a gig,

it never got cancelled.

So Tony actually brought Ian down to the gig,

and he was in no fit state to play.

I got a phone call, and it was Bernard.

And he just said,

"Oh, um, Ian's ill, and we've got a gig tonight.

We were wondering if you'd like

to stand in for him."

Alan can go on, sing a couple,

and Ian can come and sing a couple,

but it didn't go down too well with the audience.

There was a big Victorian glass chandelier

suspended above the stage.

And somebody threw a bottle or a glass,

and it hit the chandelier square-on.

Bottles started flying,

and equipment got trashed.

Hook, he fancied a bit of a fight,

I think, at that point.

Twinny just kept cackling,

"Right, come on! Sack and assault."

And they'd all go out

and try to fight the audience.

But it turned into a, you know,

a complete fiasco.

It was horrible, and, of course,

it wasn't great for Ian,

'cause he immediately thought,

"Oh, right, all this is my fault."

He just burst out in tears.

He just thought, you know...

took the blame himself, you know.

He said that he was standing

in the wings at the stage,

watching the band play without him,

and he just had this feeling

that he was looking down

and they were carrying on without him,

and that they were gonna carry on without him,

which is kind of eerie.

The Bury gig was on a Tuesday,

and I said to Tony,

"Maybe you should suggest

that he come stay at our house."

'Cause we lived in the country.

And Ian drove back with us that night

after the gig.

We just sat in the lounge,

smoking and listening to music.

That was all we did.

He stayed at my house for a week.

I think Ian fell out with Debbie,

or he had fallen out with Debbie,

and just needed somewhere to stay,

so he stayed with me for a week,

which wasn't great for him,

because I was still in insomnia.

I was staying up till 5 in the morning,

but I remember coming back

from rehearsals one day,

and we took a shortcut through a graveyard,

and I said to him,

"You're lucky."

I said,

"Your name could be on one of those stones

if you had succeeded the other week."

And he was, like,

"Yeah, right. Yeah."

You know.

No sort of connection in the response.

And...

he had made his mind up, I think.

I read a book on hypnotic regression,

that...

if sometimes you've got problems in the present,

the regression could unlock, um,

problems that had occurred

either in your childhood

or in, if you believed in it, previous lives.

And Ian was like, "Oh, that sounds interesting.

I'd really like to try that."

So I said why don't we try it now

and record it on a cassette?

It's not difficult to realize that, you know,

he was, you know, seriously destabilized

by the whole matrix of things

that was going on at that time.

But he was also on the cusp

of exactly what he wanted,

which was to get out of Manchester,

to travel and see the world,

to go to America,

the land of some of his heroes.

Why would he want to do himself in

the night before that?

You know, it's 24 hours from Tulsa,

isn't it?

24 hours from the plane to America.

Going to America that Monday,

Ian had gone back to live with his mum and dad.

I called him Thursday or something,

and he just phoned me on the Saturday

or the Friday night, one of them.

He said,

"I can't go out tomorrow.

I'm gonna go and see Debbie

before we go away."

I did kind of think "Uh-oh" a little bit,

you know.

It's gonna end in tears, at least,

or they're gonna have an argument.

So, I said,

"Are you sure?

Why don't you just come out and have a drink,

we'll have a laugh, you know?"

He was, like,

"No, I've got to see her."

I was probably in Belgium for about five days

before I was due to return to go back to England.

The last time we spoke together

was on the Saturday night.

It was very short,

and I couldn't hear him very well.

I was in the backstage

with lots of people around,

and he said that it's imperative that we have to meet

before they go to America.

Because why, it would be like seven or eight weeks

without seeing each other.

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