The story of Joy Division

Two towns, four young men

Joy Division began with two boys from Salford. Bernard Sumner was born on the fourth of January 1956 in Manchester, and grew up in his grandparents' house with his mother, who had cerebral palsy. Peter Hook was born Peter Woodhead on the thirteenth of February 1956 in Salford. His parents divorced when he was three, and because of his stepfather's work he spent part of his childhood in Jamaica. Both boys took a stepfather's surname for a while. Peter kept his, and turned it into the nickname Hooky. They became friends at Salford Grammar School. After school Bernard found work at the animation studio Cosgrove Hall, painting and tracing cartoons for children's television. Peter later admitted he never thought about being in a band until punk came along.[1] [2] [3]

In the Cheshire town of Macclesfield lived a bookish, clever boy named Ian Curtis. He was born in Stretford on the fifteenth of July 1956, and won a place at the King's School in Macclesfield, where he collected academic prizes and fell for poetry, philosophy and literature. There was a darker side too. On a school scheme visiting elderly people, he and his friends stole prescription drugs from their homes, and at sixteen he was found unconscious after taking the tranquilliser Largactil and had his stomach pumped. He idolised David Bowie, Jim Morrison and Lou Reed, and often stole the records he could not afford. He gained nine O levels, then drifted away from his A levels to find a job.[1] [2]

Ian met Deborah Woodruff through a friend, and they started going out in December 1972, when both were sixteen. On the twenty third of August 1975 they married at St Thomas' Church in Henbury, Cheshire. He was nineteen and she was eighteen. Deborah later said she was totally besotted, and that Ian told her to leave school because he was going to make so much money she would never need a job. Instead they took on a mortgage in Chadderton near Oldham and worked jobs they both hated. Ian joined the civil service, and ended up at the Macclesfield employment exchange as an assistant disablement resettlement officer, helping disabled people find work. In May 1977 the couple moved into a small house on Barton Street in Macclesfield.[1] [2] [3]

The fourth member also came from Macclesfield. Stephen Morris was born there on the twenty eighth of October 1957 and went to the same King's School as Ian, though Stephen was eventually expelled. His father was a travelling salesman who also put on dances. When Stephen announced he wanted to be a drummer, his dad warned him that he had never met a sane drummer, and that they all ended up rotting their brains on morphine and absinthe. Stephen ignored the advice. He fell for the hypnotic, machine-like beats of German bands like Neu! and Can, and for the simple, stripped back style of Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground. Those influences would give Joy Division its strange, steady pulse.[1] [2] [3]

The Sex Pistols and Warsaw, 1976 to 1977

On the fourth of June 1976 the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, their first concert outside London. The crowd was tiny, usually estimated at thirty to fifty people. Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook were there, having gone separately, and so were Morrissey, Mick Hucknall, the producer Martin Hannett and the television presenter Tony Wilson. The NME would later call it the most important concert of all time. Bernard said the Pistols destroyed the myth that a musician was some kind of god you had to worship. The very next day Peter borrowed thirty five pounds from his mother and bought a bass guitar. The Pistols came back on the twentieth of July, and this time Ian Curtis was in the audience.[1] [2] [3]

Bernard bought a guitar, their friend Terry Mason bought a drum kit, and they started trying to become a band. They needed a singer. A school friend turned the job down after getting work in a factory, so they put an advert up in the Virgin Records shop in Manchester. The man who answered was Ian Curtis. They already knew him by sight from punk nights at the Electric Circus, where he wore a donkey jacket with the word hate painted on the back. There was no audition. Bernard said later that the whole group was built on one rule: if they liked someone, they were in. And they liked Ian. Terry's drumming never really worked out, and he soon became the band's manager instead.[1] [2] [3]

The band nearly went on stage as Stiff Kittens, a name credited to either the Buzzcocks' manager Richard Boon or their singer Pete Shelley. Instead they settled on Warsaw, after Warszawa, a brooding instrumental on David Bowie's album Low. Warsaw played their first gig on the twenty ninth of May 1977 at the Electric Circus, supporting the Buzzcocks, Penetration and the punk poet John Cooper Clarke. Their drummer that night, Tony Tabac, had joined just two days earlier. Paul Morley reviewed them in the NME and Ian Wood in Sounds, so the band got national press from their very first show. Stephen Morris later remembered Ian turning from a polite, educated young man into a whirling dervish the moment he hit the stage.[1] [2]

In June 1977 a new drummer, Steve Brotherdale, joined, and on the eighteenth of July Warsaw recorded five demo tracks at Pennine Sound Studios in Oldham. Brotherdale had an aggressive streak, and he even tried to lure Ian into his other band, the Panik. The others decided to get rid of him in memorable fashion. Driving home from the studio, they pulled over and asked him to check a flat tyre, and when he got out of the car, they drove off without him. In August they put a new advert in a music shop window. It got exactly one reply, from Stephen Morris. Deborah Curtis wrote that Stephen fitted perfectly, and that with him the band became a complete family.[1] [2] [3]

Becoming Joy Division, 1978

There was already a London punk band called Warsaw Pakt, so Warsaw needed a new name. They found one in House of Dolls, a 1953 novella by the writer known as Ka-tzetnik 135633. In the book, the Joy Division is the name for groups of women held in Nazi concentration camps and forced into sexual slavery. On the fourteenth of December 1977 the band recorded their first EP at Pennine Sound Studio in Oldham, paying the four hundred pound budget themselves. They played their last gig as Warsaw on New Year's Eve at the Swinging Apple in Liverpool, billed under the old name to make sure people turned up. Their first gig as Joy Division came on the twenty fifth of January 1978, at Pip's Disco in Manchester.[1] [2] [3]

That EP, An Ideal for Living, came out on the band's own Enigma label on the third of June 1978. Its sleeve, drawn by Bernard under the name Bernard Albrecht, showed a blond Hitler Youth boy beating a drum, and the song Warsaw retold the life of the senior Nazi Rudolf Hess. With a name like Joy Division on top, people started asking whether the band had fascist sympathies. The members gave different explanations over the years. Peter and Bernard later said they had been intrigued by fascism, while Stephen said the imagery was about keeping alive the memory of what their parents and grandparents went through in the war. Musically, the record was still rough, fast punk, with little hint of what was coming.[1] [2] [3]

The band's luck turned on the fourteenth of April 1978 at a battle of the bands at Rafters club in Manchester. Tony Wilson, the Granada Television presenter who had hosted the music show So It Goes, was in the crowd. Ian marched up and gave him a piece of his mind for not putting Joy Division on television, and Wilson promised they would be the next band he showed. Also watching was Rob Gretton, the club's resident DJ. The next day Gretton tracked Bernard down in a phone box and insisted on becoming their manager. Wilson soon wrote to Gretton that Joy Division were the best thing he had heard in Manchester for about six months. Gretton's dogged determination and head for business would later be credited with much of the band's success.[1] [2] [3]

That spring the band were also approached by RCA to record a cover of the northern soul song Keep On Keepin' On. In early May 1978 they recorded an album's worth of songs at Arrow Studios in Manchester, but the label insisted on adding synthesiser to soften their sound. The band hated it, bought themselves out of the deal, and the tapes only circulated years later as bootlegs under the name Warsaw. On the twentieth of September 1978 Joy Division made their television debut on Granada, introduced by Tony Wilson, playing Shadowplay. That October they recorded two songs, Digital and Glass, with Martin Hannett, for A Factory Sample, the very first release on Wilson's new label, Factory Records.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Factory worked on a handshake rather than a normal contract, with profits split fifty fifty between the label and the band, and Rob Gretton became a partner to look after Joy Division's interests. But just as things began to move, trouble arrived. On the twenty seventh of December 1978, on the drive home from a gig at the Hope and Anchor in London, Ian had his first recognised severe epileptic seizure and was taken to hospital. On the twenty third of January 1979 he was formally diagnosed with epilepsy. That same month he appeared on the cover of the NME, and the band recorded their first session for John Peel. Deborah wrote that squeezed between those two landmarks was the realisation that Ian's illness was something they would all have to live with.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Unknown Pleasures, 1979

In April 1979, over three weekends at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, Joy Division recorded their debut album with Martin Hannett. Hannett thought punk was timid in the studio, and he set out to build space into the sound. He used brand new digital delay units and slipped in strange noises: a smashing bottle, someone eating crisps, the studio lift. He recorded Ian's vocal on Insight down a telephone line to make it sound distant, and had Stephen record each drum separately so nothing bled into anything else. According to Pitchfork, he even turned the studio heating down so low that everyone could see their breath. Hannett later said the band were a gift to a producer, because they didn't have a clue and didn't argue.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band did argue afterwards. On stage they were loud and heavy, and Hannett had turned them into something cool and ghostly. Bernard said they had drawn a picture in black and white and Martin had coloured it in. Peter complained that it sounded like Pink Floyd. Stephen and Ian, though, were happy with it, and Stephen felt a record and a gig should be different experiences anyway. Stephen also recalled that there was no money to try again, because the sessions were squeezed into John Cooper Clarke's downtime at the studio. Decades later Peter came round completely, admitting in 2006 that Hannett had done a good job and that there was no two ways about it: Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound.[1] [2] [3]

The sleeve became even more famous than the music. The band handed designer Peter Saville a page from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy showing radio pulses from a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star, with Bernard or Stephen choosing it depending on whose account you trust. The plot had been made around 1970 by the radio astronomer Harold Craft at the Arecibo Observatory, for his PhD thesis. Saville reversed it from black on white to white on black, against the band's stated preference, because he thought black was simply sexier, and he printed it on textured card. Craft had no idea for years. When a friend finally told him, he went to a record shop, found it, and bought a copy.[1] [2] [3]

Unknown Pleasures came out on Factory in June 1979, the label's first album. Gretton had estimated it would cost eight thousand pounds, but Wilson later said the real bill came to eighteen thousand. The first pressing of ten thousand sold slowly at first, and unsold boxes piled up in co-founder Alan Erasmus's flat, which doubled as the Factory office. Then the non-album single Transmission arrived that autumn and the pressing sold out. Critics were impressed. Jon Savage, writing in Melody Maker, called it an opaque manifesto and possibly one of the best white English debut albums of the year. It missed the national chart at the time, but when the first UK indie chart appeared in January 1980, it was at number two.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifteenth of September 1979 Joy Division played Transmission and She's Lost Control live on BBC Two's Something Else, their only nationwide television appearance. The following month they began a twenty four date UK tour supporting the Buzzcocks, which finally let them give up their day jobs. Ian's day job had already fed his songs. At the employment exchange he had met a young woman with epilepsy who had seizures during her appointments. When she stopped coming, he assumed she had found work, then learned she had died during a seizure. That became She's Lost Control. At home, his daughter Natalie had been born on the sixteenth of April 1979, but Ian's condition was so severe that he rarely dared to hold her, in case he had a fit and dropped her.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Atmosphere, Closer and the last winter

In October 1979 Joy Division made their first trip abroad, playing the opening night of a Brussels venue called Plan K on the sixteenth, on a bill that also featured Cabaret Voltaire and William Burroughs. Around this time Ian met Annik Honoré, a young Belgian who worked at her country's embassy in London and wrote about music. The two grew close, and Deborah Curtis has always described it as an affair. As the relationship deepened, the rest of the band felt Ian becoming distant, even a bit lofty. When Annik stayed with them during recording in London, Bernard remembered Rob and Peter treating the couple like John and Yoko, and playing jokes on them until Ian lost his temper.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The songs were pouring out. In October 1979, with Hannett at Cargo Studios in Rochdale, they recorded Atmosphere and Dead Souls. On Atmosphere, Bernard played a cheap brown plastic reed organ from Woolworth's and a string synthesiser, and the shimmering sound came from Stephen striking a tambourine balanced on a pair of scissors. Remarkably, the band gave both songs away to a small French label, Sordide Sentimental, which released them in March 1980 as Licht und Blindheit, German for light and blindness, in an edition of just one thousand five hundred and seventy eight copies. Peter later explained that they weren't precious about music back then. If they gave a song away, they figured they would just write another one.[1] [2] [3]

Then came Love Will Tear Us Apart. A version was recorded at Pennine in Oldham on the eighth of January 1980, but Ian and Hannett were not happy, so in March the band re-recorded it at Strawberry Studios. Tony Wilson had given Ian a Frank Sinatra record to use as a model for his vocal. Hannett believed it was special and kept remixing it, and he called Stephen back at four in the morning to redo the snare drum. Stephen says he still grits his teeth whenever he hears it. The lyric laid bare Ian's failing marriage and his struggles with epilepsy. On the twenty fifth of April the band filmed its video themselves at an old rehearsal room. It was the only promotional video they ever made.[1] [2]

Closer was recorded between the eighteenth and the thirtieth of March 1980 at Britannia Row, the Pink Floyd owned studio in London. By now Ian was having an average of two major seizures a week. Once he went missing for two hours, and Peter found him unconscious on the studio toilet floor, having hit his head on the sink. Ian also grumbled that the keyboards made the album sound like Genesis. In early April the band supported the Stranglers at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. The lighting crew switched on strobes despite Rob Gretton's instructions, and Ian collapsed against Stephen's drum kit. He then insisted on playing a second gig that night in West Hampstead, where he suffered his most violent seizure yet.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In early April 1980 Ian took an overdose of phenobarbitone, the drug he was prescribed for his seizures. He survived, and later told Bernard he had definitely meant to die. Peter has also described an earlier night when Ian, very drunk, cut himself with a kitchen knife. Within days the band were due at the Derby Hall in Bury, and Ian was too ill to perform. Alan Hempsall of Crispy Ambulance and Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio stood in, Ian managed a couple of songs, and some of the crowd threw bottles and rioted. Peter said it destroyed Ian. Joy Division's final concert was on the second of May 1980 at the University of Birmingham. It included the only performance of a new song, Ceremony, and ended with Digital.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The eighteenth of May 1980

Joy Division were about to leave for their first North American tour. Ian had talked about it with enthusiasm, but Deborah said he dreaded flying and was frightened of how American audiences would react to his fits. Bernard went into Manchester with him to buy clothes for the trip, and remembered Ian choosing suede winklepickers that Bernard told him looked like dead men's shoes. He never knew why he said it. On the evening of the seventeenth of May, Ian went to the house on Barton Street to see Deborah, who had started divorce proceedings. He asked her to drop them. Then he asked her to leave him alone in the house until he caught his train to Manchester the next morning.[1] [2] [3]

According to Tony Wilson, Ian spent that night watching Stroszek, the Werner Herzog film about a man who goes to America hoping for a new life and ends up taking his own, and listening to Iggy Pop's album The Idiot. In the early hours of Sunday the eighteenth of May 1980, Ian Curtis hanged himself in the kitchen. He was twenty three years old. Deborah found him when she returned later that day. He had left her a note saying he loved her, but it did not say he was going to kill himself, and it has never been clear whether it was meant as a suicide note. Their daughter Natalie was just thirteen months old.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band heard the news in different ways. Bernard was at a friend's house near Blackpool after a day learning to water ski when Rob Gretton phoned. He assumed Ian had tried again, and Rob had to tell him several times that this time Ian was dead. Peter got the call from a policeman. Tony Wilson later admitted that they had all underestimated the danger and had not taken it seriously. Ian was cremated at Macclesfield Crematorium on the twenty third of May, and his ashes were buried at Macclesfield Cemetery beneath a stone reading Ian Curtis, eighteen five eighty, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Bernard could not face seeing him in the coffin. He wanted to remember Ian as he was alive.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 1980 Love Will Tear Us Apart was released. It reached number thirteen in the UK, Joy Division's first real hit, and topped the indie chart. Peter remembered hearing it on the radio chart rundown while driving, and turning it off, because for him Joy Division had gone. Closer followed on the eighteenth of July and reached number six. Its cover, a photograph of a tomb in Genoa's Staglieno cemetery, had been designed months before Ian died, and the NME had proofs in its office, yet Peter Saville was horrified when he realised they had a tomb on the sleeve. The NME named Closer its album of the year, and Unknown Pleasures finally crept into the national chart at number seventy one.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After Joy Division

Long before, the band had agreed that if anyone left, the others would change the name. After the funeral they told each other, see you at practice, and that Sunday Peter came up with the riff for Dreams Never End. First calling themselves the No Names, Bernard, Peter and Stephen became New Order, with Bernard as singer. In October 1980, at Rob Gretton's suggestion, they brought in Stephen's girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards and guitar. She had already filled in on guitar at Joy Division shows. Their first single, Ceremony, released in 1981, grew from the last songs written with Ian, and Stephen said sitting down to work out Ian's words was one of the most painful things they ever did.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The wider Joy Division family scattered. Martin Hannett had been due to produce U2's debut album, but after Ian's death he was too distraught to work and pulled out. He fell out with Factory, sued the label, and his career declined amid heavy drinking and heroin use. He died of heart failure on the eighteenth of April 1991, aged forty two, and his headstone calls him the creator of the Manchester sound. New Order, meanwhile, grew into a huge dance-driven band, and Factory opened the Haçienda nightclub with them as partners. Rob Gretton managed New Order until he died of a heart attack in May 1999, aged forty six. Ian Curtis's Vox guitar passed to Bernard, who played it on early New Order songs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Factory kept Joy Division's music in circulation. Still, a mix of outtakes and the full final concert in Birmingham, came out in October 1981 and reached number five. In 1988 the singles collection Substance reached number seven, and gave the band their only American chart entry, at number one hundred and forty six. That year Anton Corbijn, who had photographed Joy Division as a young NME photographer, directed a video for the reissued Atmosphere, with hooded figures carrying huge pictures of the band. When Factory went bankrupt in November 1992, the catalogue passed to London Records, and the 1997 box set Heart and Soul gathered almost everything the band ever recorded.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 1995 Deborah Curtis published Touching from a Distance, a frank memoir of her marriage named after a line in Transmission. Jon Savage, who wrote the foreword, had urged Faber to publish it, saying it offered a rare woman's perspective on the music industry. It described Ian's controlling side, his illness and the affair, and it later became the basis of the film Control. Tony Wilson, the man who put Joy Division on television and on record, died on the tenth of August 2007, aged fifty seven, after a battle with kidney cancer. Annik Honoré, who had left music to work for the European Commission, died of cancer on the third of July 2014.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Control, feuds and the Hall of Fame

Joy Division have been dramatised twice. In Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, about Factory Records, Sean Harris played Ian and Steve Coogan played Tony Wilson, who cheerfully said the film was all true and all not true. In 2007 Anton Corbijn made his directing debut with Control, a biopic of Ian based on Deborah's book, with Sam Riley as Ian and Samantha Morton as Deborah. Corbijn paid half of the four and a half million euro budget himself, and shot in colour before printing it in black and white. It premiered at Cannes on the seventeenth of May 2007 and won several prizes. That year Grant Gee's documentary Joy Division, written by Jon Savage, let the band tell their own story.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fascination sometimes spilled into obsession. In 2008 Ian's memorial stone was stolen from Macclesfield Cemetery, and its replacement was cemented in place. In 2019 someone took another stone from the grave. In 2015 the house on Barton Street went on sale, a fan campaign to buy it fell short, and an entrepreneur named Hadar Goldman paid about one hundred and ninety thousand pounds to secure it, promising a museum. Bernard said he was torn, worried it would become a monument to suicide. Meanwhile the pulsar image from Unknown Pleasures spread to fashion lines, streetwear and even a Disney Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and in 2019 the album's fortieth anniversary reissue reached number five, its highest chart position ever.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The survivors did not stay united. In May 2007 Peter Hook announced that he and Bernard were no longer working together, and New Order later carried on without him. He formed Peter Hook and the Light, and on the thirtieth anniversary of Ian's death played every song from Unknown Pleasures. In 2015 he sued his former bandmates in the High Court, claiming they had quietly licensed the New Order name to a new company and cut his share of the income. In 2017 the two sides reached what they called a full and final settlement. The bitterness lingered. In 2026 Stephen Morris told Rolling Stone that Peter seemed angry and unhappy, and said he did not know if they would ever reconcile, although life is too short.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joy Division's influence reaches from U2 and the Cure to Interpol, Editors and Nine Inch Nails, who covered Dead Souls, and to the rapper Danny Brown, who named an album Atrocity Exhibition after their song. In 2005 the band entered the UK Music Hall of Fame. After nominations in 2023 and 2025, Joy Division and New Order were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a single act in April 2026, with the ceremony set for the fourteenth of November in Los Angeles. Stephen Morris joked that getting in as a double header made them feel like a bargain basement deal. In September 2026 the band released Eternal, a live box set restoring sixteen concerts, many of them taped secretly by fans.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Joy Division

Ian Curtis and Deborah Curtis. They met as teenagers and married in 1975, when Ian was nineteen and Deborah eighteen. Deborah later described Ian as controlling, steering what she read and listened to and disliking her wearing makeup, while she was, in her words, totally besotted. She was kept outside the band's circle, and after his affair with Annik Honoré she began divorce proceedings. She found him after his death, wrote Touching from a Distance, and co-produced Control. Asked in 2005 whether Ian had truly known her, she said no, she did not think he had.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ian Curtis and Annik Honoré. Ian met Annik Honoré, a Belgian embassy secretary and music writer, in 1979, and their bond became one of the great strains of his final months. While recovering from his overdose he wrote her letters declaring his love. At one point he asked Bernard Sumner to decide for him whether to stay with his wife or be with Annik, and Bernard refused. Honoré went on to co-found Factory Benelux and Les Disques du Crépuscule, and was played by Alexandra Maria Lara in Control.[1] [2] [3]

Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. Salford schoolfriends who started the band after the Sex Pistols gig, they built Joy Division's sound together. Bernard's distorted guitar left gaps, while Peter carried the melody high on the bass, partly because his cheap amplifier only let him hear the high notes. Ian loved it and kept telling Peter to do it again, while Bernard would ask him to just follow the guitar. The friendship later collapsed: in 2007 Peter announced they were no longer working together, and years of legal fighting followed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joy Division and Martin Hannett. Hannett produced every Joy Division studio recording, from Digital in 1978 to Closer. He was brilliant and maddening, making Stephen Morris record drums one at a time and summoning him back at four in the morning. Peter Hook quoted a studio man who said Hannett could make any band want to slash each other's throats within five minutes. The band resented his cool, spacious mixes at first but came to value them. Ian's death left Hannett so distraught that he pulled out of producing U2's debut album.[1] [2] [3]

Joy Division and Tony Wilson. The Granada presenter saw the Sex Pistols in 1976, gave Joy Division their television debut after Ian berated him at a gig, and released their records on Factory, the label he started with Alan Erasmus. He handed Ian a Sinatra record to shape his vocal on Love Will Tear Us Apart, and took him to recuperate at his Derbyshire cottage after the overdose. He later admitted they had all failed to take the danger seriously. He co-produced Control and died in 2007, months before its release.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Joy Division and Rob Gretton. A Manchester City fan and the resident DJ at Rafters, Gretton saw Joy Division in April 1978 and the next day cornered Bernard Sumner in a phone box to demand the manager's job. He steered them to Factory rather than a major label, reasoning a fifty fifty deal could pay as well and spare him trips to London. He became a Factory partner, broke the news of Ian's death to Bernard, and managed New Order until his death in 1999.[1] [2] [3]

Joy Division and Peter Saville. A young Manchester designer who had made posters for Wilson's Factory club nights, Saville created Joy Division's sleeves, from the Unknown Pleasures pulsar to the tomb on Closer. He was a Factory partner, and famous for missing deadlines. His austere designs became so iconic that the pulsar now appears on clothes all over the world, and he went on to work for major fashion houses and was made a CBE in 2020.[1] [2] [3]

Joy Division and Anton Corbijn. The Dutch photographer moved to England in 1979 largely because of Joy Division's music, and within twelve days had taken the famous shot of the band in a subway passage. His stark black and white NME photographs shaped how the world pictures them. He directed the 1988 Atmosphere video and in 2007 made his feature debut with Control, paying half the budget himself. He has said that in other people's eyes he was forever linked with the band.[1] [2] [3]

Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis. Both went to the King's School in Macclesfield, and Stephen was the only person to answer Warsaw's advert for a drummer. He later said he always thought Ian was cleverly writing from someone else's point of view, and only after Ian's death realised he had been writing about himself, something he says he has to live with. In 2026 Stephen said his favourite imagined future is one where Ian left music to become a writer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert. Gillian Gilbert's teenage punk band rehearsed next door to Joy Division. The band once agreed to give her friends a lift home only if they bought a single, which the girls thought sounded horrible. She began dating Stephen, filled in on guitar for Joy Division a few times, and joined New Order in October 1980. The couple married in 1994 and live in Rainow, near Macclesfield.[1] [2]

Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert. After Peter left in 2007, the split turned into a legal battle. In 2015 he sued his former bandmates, arguing they had secretly licensed the New Order name to a new company, leaving him with one and a quarter percent of income. His barrister compared it to George and Ringo quietly cutting Paul out of the Beatles. They settled in 2017, but in 2026 Stephen Morris said he still did not know whether they would ever reconcile.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Joy Division

• Peter Hook bought his first bass the day after the Sex Pistols gig, with thirty five pounds borrowed from his mother. It was a copy of a Gibson EB-0 from a Manchester music shop. He used it on Warsaw's first demos in July 1977, and he still owns it.[1] [2]
• Peter Hook's high basslines began because his first amplifier, bought from his old art teacher for ten pounds, was so weak. Against Bernard Sumner's loud guitar, Hook could only hear the high notes, so he played up the neck. Ian Curtis loved the sound and kept urging him to do it again.[1] [2]
• Warsaw got rid of a drummer by asking him to check a flat tyre, then driving off without him. Steve Brotherdale played on the band's first demos in July 1977, but they found him too aggressive. On the drive home he got out to look at the tyre, and they left him at the roadside.[1] [2]
• Bernard Sumner, credited as Bernard Albrecht, drew the Hitler Youth drummer on Joy Division's first EP cover. The drawing was on the 1978 seven inch of An Ideal for Living. When the EP was reissued on twelve inch that year, the cover was swapped for a scaffolding design by the cartoonist Steve McGarry.[1]
• Making their first EP, the band asked the engineer to copy the drum sound of Bowie's Speed of Life. He couldn't. Stephen Morris told the story to Uncut in 2001. Bowie's producer Tony Visconti refused for years to explain how that famous Low drum sound was made.[1]
• Interzone began life as Joy Division's attempt at the northern soul song Keep On Keepin' On. RCA had approached the band in 1978 to cover the NF Porter song. They reworked it into Interzone on Unknown Pleasures, with Peter Hook singing lead.[1] [2] [3]
• On an early live recording, Bernard Sumner opens by shouting about Rudolf Hess, a moment remembered more than the song itself. The track, At a Later Date, appeared on the compilation Short Circuit, Live at the Electric Circus. The band had taken the stage shortly after a fight with members of the Drones.[1] [2]
• Martin Hannett recorded Ian Curtis's vocal on Insight down a telephone line to make him sound far away. He also used the sounds of a smashing bottle, someone eating crisps and the Strawberry Studios lift. On Insight, Stephen Morris said the treated Syndrum sounded like a flock of marauding pigeons.[1] [2]
• Stephen Morris bought a Syndrum because he thought he had spotted one on the cover of Can's album Tago Mago. The electronic drum became part of the Unknown Pleasures sound, adding the kind of pinging noise then common on disco records.[1] [2]
• The astronomer who made the Unknown Pleasures image did not know it was an album cover for years. Harold Craft plotted pulsar CP 1919 at the Arecibo Observatory for his 1970 PhD thesis. When a friend told him, he bought the album and a poster, because it was his image and he ought to have a copy.[1] [2]
• Peter Saville only discovered years later that the Unknown Pleasures inner sleeve photo was a famous Ralph Gibson picture. The black and white image shows a hand near a door handle. It is Hand Through a Doorway by the American photographer Ralph Gibson.[1]
• In 2012 Disney sold a Mickey Mouse T-shirt using the Unknown Pleasures cover, and it was not meant as a joke. Saville says the image adapts to anything because it is cool in every sense, from fashionable to cold. The rapper Vince Staples based his 2015 album cover on it.[1]
• The shimmer on Atmosphere came from a tambourine balanced on a pair of scissors, drenched in effects. Bernard Sumner played a brown plastic Woolworth's reed organ and a string synthesiser. An early version of the song, called Chance, was recorded for a Manchester radio session in June 1979.[1]
• Atmosphere first appeared on a French single limited to one thousand five hundred and seventy eight copies. Sordide Sentimental released it in March 1980 as Licht und Blindheit, with Dead Souls on the flip. Ian Curtis described it as a French limited edition magazine cum record thing.[1] [2] [3]
• Ian Curtis's own guitar had a built in repeat effect misspelled on the control panel as replat. He bought the Vox Phantom VI Special in September 1979 and played it in the Love Will Tear Us Apart video. Bernard Sumner inherited it and used it on New Order's Everything's Gone Green.[1]
• Stephen Morris and Peter Hook were questioned by police in 1979 during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Joy Division's gigs in Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds and Manchester happened to match the movements of the killer Peter Sutcliffe, which drew police attention to the band.[1]
• Love Will Tear Us Apart was re-recorded at Strawberry Studios, where Love Will Keep Us Together was recorded in 1973. Joy Division's title reads like a bleak reply to that Neil Sedaka song, a 1975 hit for Captain and Tennille. Stephen Morris said the band were listening to Sinatra and Sparks at the time.[1]
• In the Love Will Tear Us Apart video, the door carved with Ian's name was reportedly the start of an abusive message. The rest of the carving had been erased. The band shot the video themselves at T. J. Davidson's rehearsal studio in Manchester, just three weeks before Ian died.[1]
• Factory pressed fifty thousand free Komakino flexi discs, but some shops charged customers for them anyway. The flexi was meant to come free with Closer. Peter Hook called the shops that charged around fifty pence rotten devils. The title Komakino roughly translates as coma cinema.[1] [2]
• Ian Curtis complained that the keyboards on Closer made it sound like Genesis. Bernard Sumner recalled the remark in his memoir. A letter shown at a 2010 Macclesfield exhibition even had Ian calling Closer a disaster.[1] [2]
• Ian Curtis once phoned Stephen Morris to say he was moving to Holland to open a bookshop. The next minute, Morris said, Ian was asking about a gig in Bradford that Saturday, and the idea never came up again.[1]
• The day before Ian died, Bernard Sumner watched a riderless white horse gallop straight up to him in Heaton Park. He was with Simon Topping of A Certain Ratio. The horse stopped in front of them, tossed its mane and dipped its head. Bernard later wondered whether it had been some kind of omen.[1]
• Digital was the first song Joy Division recorded with Martin Hannett and the last song they ever played live. They recorded it at Cargo Studios in Rochdale on the eleventh of October 1978. It closed their final concert at Birmingham University on the second of May 1980.[1] [2]
• Joy Division's only live performance of Ceremony was finally released complete in 2026, on the Eternal box set. Stephen Morris said Ian's microphone was barely working that night, so parts could not be rescued, but hearing the song from beginning to end still shocked him.[1] [2]
• Ian Curtis's memorial stone was stolen in 2008, and its replacement uses the same words in a different typeface. Police said there was no CCTV and no leads. A council spokesman said staff were agog that anyone had gone to the trouble of taking it.[1] [2]
• In 2014 the kitchen table from Ian Curtis's home sold on eBay for eight thousand four hundred pounds. His former bandmates called the sale distasteful and upsetting, saying it caused great distress to his family.[1]
• A wall in Wellington, New Zealand has read Ian Curtis Lives since shortly after his death, and is repainted whenever covered. A second message nearby appeared in 2005 with the wrong dates. When the council painted over it in 2009, fans had chalked it back within a week.[1]
• In 2012 Ian Curtis was among the British icons Peter Blake chose for a reworked Sgt Pepper cover. The new collage marked Blake's eightieth birthday. Curtis appeared alongside figures such as Amy Winehouse, JK Rowling and Twiggy.[1] [2]
• Love Will Tear Us Apart topped Australian station Triple J's very first Hottest 100 in 1989, and again in 1990. NME later named it the greatest single of all time, and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys called it his favourite pop song ever.[1]
• Moby's cover of New Dawn Fades appears on the soundtrack of the 1995 Robert De Niro film Heat. The Guardian ranks the original among the greatest songs on Unknown Pleasures, for its thrilling surges of power and disturbing lyric.[1]
• The Closer song The Eternal was inspired by a child with Down's syndrome who lived near Ian Curtis in Macclesfield. According to the Guardian, it is Robert Smith's favourite Joy Division song, and its misty sound clearly influenced the Cure's album Faith.[1]
• Nine Inch Nails' cover of Dead Souls was the first song they recorded at the former Sharon Tate house. It was made for the 1994 film The Crow with New Order's approval. Peter Hook said it was so faithful that he sometimes thought he was hearing Joy Division.[1]
• The Substance sleeve actually spells Subst1mce, because of the experimental typeface it uses. The letters come from Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet. Designer Brett Wickens, then at Saville Associates, said the choice was purely aesthetic.[1]
• Joy Division played Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express over the PA before going on stage, to build momentum. They loved Kraftwerk's marriage of humans and machines. After Ian's death, Peter Hook said Kraftwerk was one of the few things that helped, partly because of those memories.[1] [2]
• Unknown Pleasures spent one hundred and thirty six weeks on the UK indie chart. It was number two on the very first indie chart in January 1980 and later reached number one. It only cracked the main albums top ten with its 2019 fortieth anniversary reissue.[1] [2]
• Bono met Ian Curtis while U2 were at the studio to see Martin Hannett about producing a single. Bono said Ian seemed like two people, gentle and polite in conversation but surging with another energy behind the microphone.[1]
• Tony Wilson's coffin was given a Factory Records catalogue number, FAC 501. Factory numbered almost everything, from records to posters. Wilson died in August 2007, and his headstone was later designed by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.