Control

[peterbirks]

I know that it's an old cliché, but if you had told me 25-odd years ago when I was discussing the just-reported death of Ian Curtis with some poker-playing buddies (I played the game for fun, then) that in 2007 there would be a movie about Ian Curtis's life, I would not have believed you.

Indeed, even in the wake of 24-Hour Party People and a BBC documentary The Factory Story, you would have thought it unlikely that there would be much of a market for a film biography of an epileptic lead singer of a band that made little more than a marginal impact on mainstream pop sensibility before Curtis committed suicide.

But, well, such are the ways of the world. The first clues appeared a couple of years ago when a number of bands seemed to be harking back to Joy Division -- Interpol and The Editors to name but two (although it's only the second Editors album that seems closer to the Joy Division legacy, the first is far more reminiscent of The Sound, and I doubt that we will be seeing a biopic of Martin Borland). Clearly the cult of JD, Factory, The Hacienda and Tony Wilson are set to live on for some time.

I suspect that part of the reason is that, once you have seen that oft-shown clip of Curtis appearing on So It Goes (or whatever the Wilson vehicle was at the time) then you never forget it. In the land that is TV, you only need a single electrifying performance to go down in history.

Control probably won't be that great a movie, but that won't matter so much. Early deaths have always been a good career move in popular beat combos. On the plus side, look at how much money Curtis saved by not being around to subsidize The Hacienda.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Pete,

If I’d been having that conversation with you 25 years ago I’d have probably suggested that it wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. There’s a ready-made narrative and complementary soundtrack as well as the opportunity to scratch beneath the surface of a deeply tormented soul.

But I’m biased because I was a huge fan at the time and can still remember the sense of shock I felt when John Peel broke the news of his death. On the anniversary of Curtis’s death, Peel said nothing but opened his show with ‘New Dawn Fades’. It’s funny how you remember these little things.

I think you underestimate the legacy of Joy Division. A few years back I was genuinely surprised when a friend of mine (he’s a few years younger than me and would have been about 7 when Curtis died) began enthusing about the band. I assumed the music and the band’s legacy meant little to anyone who wasn’t around at the time. But they endured in a way that few if any of their contemporaries did. Death, as you say is often a good career move, but I think in Curtis’s case it also conferred a degree of veracity and depth upon his music.

I remember seeing the ‘So It Goes’ performance, but when I think of the band I always think back to the photos Corbijn took for the NME in about 1979. They captured a brief moment in time. When I think back to the grey 70s, I often think of those images. In a way the inter-related story of Joy Division, New Order and Wilson is the story of Manchester and the north. It was the end of a grim decade, the end of the industrialised north and the beginning of the hedonistic Thatcherite 80s. Of course the fact that Curtis’s death occurred when it did was mere coincidence, but nonetheless I think it carries symbolic significance for people of a certain age.

I haven’t seen Control yet, but judging by the reviews it’s a terrific film, beautifully filmed with great performances from the two main characters.

Now, it can only be a matter of time before we get the Malcom Owen Ruts biopic :-)

Best.

Jamie

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I was watching Performance (ca 1970) and there was some brief external film footage of a London train terminus. It was an incredible culture shock, and I was living in London at the time. All the trains were a kind of dowdy green, and all the taxis were a uniform black. The long shot of the station's exterior was an apparent never-ending desert of greyness. The Dickian dystopia of advertising has crept up on us, but even I was dismayed at how dreary those shots of late 1960s London looked. No wonder youngsters flocked to the King's Road for a bit of colour!

I was a definite JD fan and I think that I had bought the first album about three months previously (I was too busy playing poker to listen to much proper radio in those days, so it took some time for the band to sneak its way into my consciousness).

In The Factory Story there are some great shots of the canal in the late 1970s - another culture shock for people who know it today. What little association I had with the north in my youth (besides those who emigrated and made their way to the more insulated land of Canterbury) was Birmingham and the occasional trips up to Scotland, plus some late 1960s journeys to Preston, Blackpool, Sheffield, etc for football matches -- none of which gave you much opportunity to see much of the city. But I remember the Gorbals in the last year or so before they were torn down. That was horrific.

People forget that London too was 'industrialised', although it was light industry rather than heavy industry. When I was a kid there were a myruiad of small production places within walking distance of my home - milk-bottling plants, production presses (Dalton's Weekly was written and printed just up the road!). All of these were gone by the end of the 1970s, to be replaced by the 'service sector'. I can't say that I miss those old factories, and any nostalgia for the industrialised north strikes me as odd. What was bad was that nothing was put in to replace it, not that the system was exported to other countries such as China.

London also had its tenement blocks - the Elephant & Castle was a mini-Glasgow. I just about remember these before they were torn down around about my 10th birthday. They were slums, pure and simple. And I remember the council flats that didn't have bathrooms. In the 1930s a bath was thought unnecessary. There were the public baths down the road. Lambeth Walk still had one of those when I was a kid, and all the swimming pools doubled as 'public baths' in a very real sense.

PJ