Ian Curtis (15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. He is best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the post-punk band Joy Division. Curtis, who suffered from epilepsy and depression, killed himself on 18 May 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first North American tour, resulting in the band’s dissolution and the subsequent formation of New Order. Curtis was known for his bass-baritone voice, dance style, and songwriting filled with imagery of desolation, emptiness and alienation. In 1995, Curtis’s widow Deborah published Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, a biography of the singer. His life and death have been dramatised in the films 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Control (2007). (More from Wikipedia)
I think of Joy Division as being a really extreme rock band, and one that could only have come from England. Suicide is sadly quite common among rock musicians and artists in other endeavors as well, but it is not hard to see that the intensity and extraordinary conviction found in the songs of Joy Division could lead someone to end their life. Lead singer and lyricist Ian Curtis also suffered from ill health for many years, including epileptic seizures while performing. In the summer of 1980, the band finally began to find commercial success when the re-release of their magnificent signature song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” went to #13 on the U.K. charts. Just two days before Joy Division was to begin its U.S. tour, Ian Curtis was found dead.
An overview of Joy Division and its importance in rock music by John Bush can be found in Allmusic: “Formed in the wake of the punk explosion in England, Joy Division became the first band in the post-punk movement by later emphasizing not anger and energy but mood and expression, pointing ahead to the rise of melancholy alternative music in the ’80s. Though the group’s raw initial sides fit the bill for any punk band, Joy Division later incorporated synthesizers (taboo in the low-tech world of ’70s punk) and more haunting melodies, emphasized by the isolated, tortured lyrics of its lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. While the British punk movement shocked the world during the late ’70s, Joy Division’s quiet storm of musical restraint and emotive power proved to be just as important to independent music in the 1980s.”
(June 2014)
