4/19/2023 0 Comments Don t walk away in silenceIf fans like me have a skewed perception of Ian’s life and legacy, it’s not from bad faith, at least not entirely. The book, therefore, moves beyond pop culture mythmaking, in the process creating the connection Joy Division’s music reaches for but is never able to grasp. The Ian of Touching from a Distance is crueler, more human, and more tragic than popular conceptions allow of him. It’s the lure of the artist who burns too bright and dies too soon, who embodies a slice of the overwhelming loneliness and despair that engulfed me when I first encountered his lyrics.īy the time I picked up Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Deborah Curtis’s 1995 biography-cum-memoir of her husband’s life and their troubled marriage, I knew that this picture was incomplete, although I was perhaps unprepared for just how real and flawed Curtis’s portrayal of Ian would be. I was a few years younger when I first listened to Joy Division, and now I’m a few years older, but I can still see what drew me to him. If there’s any better evocation of the uncertainty of young adulthood, I haven’t found it.Ĭurtis was born and raised in Manchester, UK before rising to fame with Joy Division he struggled with epilepsy and died by suicide in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. Late at night, in the dark, I would put my phone on my pillow, open Spotify, and let the lyrics of “Atmosphere,” a song written in the final years of Curtis’s life, wash over me: But he had never heard of Joy Division, and the band became my own in a way that made me love them even more. Most of my musical tastes at that point were shaped by my father, who played Bob Dylan for us during our teenage meltdowns and passed along old U2 cassettes. I discovered Joy Division, the post-punk band Curtis was the lead singer for, in college. It’s easy to fall in love with Ian Curtis.
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