On November 6th, 1981, New Order released their debut album, Movement. The record kickstarted a decade of meteoric success for the band, who are now heralded as one of Manchester’s crown jewels, and whose music continues to reverberate across the globe, 40 years on from their inception.
There’s many a quote about all great art being the product of great pain. Painters such as Van Gogh, Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, writers including Plath and Hemingway, and musicians like Kurt Cobain are all – at least in part – now rationalised as tortured souls who channelled their personal suffering into ground-breaking art. I concede, this is a slightly romanticised trope – the goggles of hindsight looking back in sheer adoration, no matter how justified, at those geniuses who never quite seemed capable of fully loving themselves. Agree or disagree, when examining New Order – who were forged following a seemingly irrecoverable loss, and who originally began their careers making music now synonymous with tragedy – the trope is inescapable.
New Order rose from the embers of the pioneering, post-punk, rock group Joy Division. Consisting of singer and songwriter Ian Curtis, guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris, Joy Division broke onto the scene in the late 70s, and were – both ostensibly and eventually – destined for the critical and commercial success New Order would also achieve.
[Ian Curtis] was the cheerleader, that would pick us up by the scruff of the neck and convince us to go on
Joy Division’s first North American tour was scheduled for May 1980. On the night of May 18th, with the band scheduled to depart from Manchester airport the following morning, Curtis hanged himself. It followed an irreparable breakdown in his marriage, a deterioration of his chronic epilepsy, and an ongoing battle with depression that had already led to a previous suicide attempt. Curtis was 23.
“People assume that when he died, it was like Nirvana,” Hook told The Independent last year, on the 40th anniversary of Curtis’ death. “It wasn’t. The last gig [Joy Division] played was to about 150 people. We were not successful. Ian always said we’d be huge all around the world. It was always him that was the cheerleader, that would pick us up by the scruff of the neck and convince us to go on.”
From Joy Division came New Order
Joy Division lived on after Curtis’ death only to release pre-recorded music. June of that year saw the arrival of Love Will Tear Us Apart, now Joy Division’s most famous song, which agonisingly details Curtis’ life with estranged wife Deborah.
In July, came the band’s second studio album, Closer. It won NME’s album of the year and reached number 6 on the UK chart. There is a sparsity to the sound and a desperation to the lyrics – it’s both a force of nature and utterly detached. It’s harrowing, heart breaking, and undoubtedly beautiful, but when looking back at songs like Isolation, The Eternal, and Decades, it’s impossible not to think, how the fuck did nobody stop him?
It is a question Joy Division’s surviving members have asked themselves over the years. In the same story for The Independent, Morris, too, reflected honestly. “Towards the end, afterwards, and particularly nowadays, I sometimes wonder if I ever knew him at all, because he went through writing all those lyrics and I honestly thought they were about somebody else. Afterwards, sitting down and listening, you think, ‘fucking hell, how did I miss this?’”
Of course, it’s not that simple. There’s the clarity of hindsight compared to the whirlwind world they were living in at the time. “We were so wrapped up in music and gigging, that was all we were interested in and we didn’t want to stop.” Even when Curtis had seizures on stage, the show went on. “When Ian got ill, it made it worse because there was something else there and he wouldn’t talk about it. Ian’s major flaw was that he always wanted to please you. He would say what he thought you wanted to hear. It’s being a man again – you can’t say, ‘I’m fucking knackered. I feel really down, I don’t want to do this.’”
Last year, Sumner remembered a specific instance of Curtis begging him to choose between wife Deborah, and Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, with who Curtis was having an affair. Sumner refused, telling Curtis he had to decide for himself. He told The Times, “Towards the end, ‘[Curtis] was so suggestable that he was programmable.’”
“He was a real nice man. Very easy to, if you like, fall in love with.” Hook recalled of their initial time together. “I didn’t have to hear what he was singing about. All I had to do was look at him, and his actions let me know he was perfect.”
They are able to reflect now, but at the time they ploughed onward, blinkers on, refusing to look back. “There’s life and there’s death. We were still alive, so we thought we’d carry on doing it,” Morris told Rolling Stone in 1984.
The name Joy Division was retired and the apt moniker, New Order, came in its place. They held auditions to determine who would follow in Curtis’ footsteps as vocalist, eventually deciding on Sumner, with Gillian Gilbert, Morris’s girlfriend, joining as keyboardist.
“All we were interested in was being together, and making sure New Order survived and flourished,” Hook told Apple Music, ahead of Closer’s digital mastering in 2020. “We managed to do that by ignoring Joy Division completely. It was important for us to carry on, to throw ourselves into what we were doing and push that painful memory away.” It was, in fact, not until two or three years after Closer, that Hook was able to finally bring himself to listen. “I was able to actually enjoy it. That’s how divorced I felt from the reality of what it was: I could listen to it and think it was somebody else.”
Musically, the distinction between Joy Division and New Order is clear, but their debut, Movement, is both stylistically and emotionally the closest New Order came to Curtis. The opening track, Dreams Never End, plays against a Joy Division lyric, “Your dreams always end,” from the song Insight. There is also a mysterious, ‘The Him,’ who appears throughout the record, including titularly on the sixth track. It is all but certainly a nod to Curtis.
“I can actually remember writing the references to Ian,” Hook explained to the Austin Chronicle in 2013. “If you look at a song like ‘ICB,’ it was called ‘Ian Curtis Buried.’ You know when the flight cases come back from America? When we went as New Order, they had a sticker on them – ICB. I went, ‘Look at that. It’s Ian Curtis Buried.’ It was actually the name of the transport company, International Couriers Business or something.”
Subsequent New Order records after Movement were increasingly influenced by electronic and dance music. And then there was the subtle addition of hope to Joy Division’s pre-existing moody, post-punk sound.
New Order performing in Chile in 2019
One of their most famous singles, 1982’s Temptation, is a perfect example. It straddles the line between dancefloor anthem and introspective rock classic. For all the upbeat, “Up, down, turnaround, please don’t let me hit the ground,” there echoes, “And I’ve never seen anyone quite like you before. No, I’ve never met anyone quite like you before.”
New Order went on to sell over 20 million records and become a pioneering band in their own right.
“We got everywhere that Curtis wanted to go,” said Hook. “We got to Mexico and we got to Brazil. We did America 10 times. I often go and see him, whenever something nice happens. I’m very proud of what we’ve done and every time I go and see him I say, ‘Mongolia mate, done, China, done…I was privileged to be able to fulfil his wishes.”
Title image is by Jon Super for Manchester International Festival
