Ian curtis the lead singer of Joy Division was extremely ill with epilepsy at the time the band were recording the "closer" album. Peter Hook , the bassist of the band explains that there was was awful time when the band were recording that Ian went missing for two hours. It was only when Peter went to the toilet that he discovered Ian sparked out on the floor with his head split. He had suffered from a fit and had hit his head on the sink on his way down. There were many occasions like this during the making of the album "closer" as they were only in the recording studio for two weeks, so under pressure they were.
" We didn't help by taking the piss all the time"
The album was made in March and Curtis' first suicide attempt was in April. Ian enjoyed working with the bands producer Martin Hannett, who insisted on working through the night . Fellow band members say that Curtis liked to do this because he enjoyed the peace and quiet.
The band didn't have much money, they weren't eating properly and they were too skint to spend money on drink.
"We played three nights at the Moonlight club in West Hampstead and supported the Stranglers at the Rainbow – four gigs in three days. Ian's illness was getting worse and we didn't help him, through ignorance really. But also, Ian was his own worst enemy – he never wanted to upset you, so he'd tell you what you wanted to hear. So we never knew what he was suffering or thinking." ( Peter Hook - The guardian - 1980)Ian Curtis made two unsuccessful attempts, before he got where he wanted to be. The first time he had intoxicated himself with alcohol and had hacked into himself with a kitchen knife. The second time, he took an overdose. The boss of the factory label Tony Wilson, had brought him straight from the hospital to rehearsal. As expected his band mates asked him how he was and if everything was ok.
As an adult and a father now, I feel guiltier than I ever did then. If that had been my son, I'd have gone round there and headbutted Rob Gretton, our manager, and taken him home. But there were doctors, consultants, psychiatrists, and not one of them was able to sort it out. Unbelievable.( The Guardian - 1980-Peter Hook)Rob Gretten, the bands manager had booked a gig in Bury which Ian had decided he couldn't go to. Simon Topping and Alan Hempsall had been arranged to cover for him but for one reason or another Ian was delivered to the gig. Curtis insisted that he would sing a couple of the songs, it was when he couldn't do anymore because of his serious illness that the audience started to riot. This destroyed him, it was what he had fought for his whole life and his illness was bringing him down.
"I heard what happened when I got a call from a policeman. It was horrible. Mind-numbing shock, and it's very difficult to live with as a memory. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
After something like that, you don't know what to do. The only thing constant in our lives was practice. When we left Ian's funeral we said: "See you at practice." That Sunday afternoon I got the six-string riff to Dreams Never End, which we recorded as New Order. We just put Joy Division in a box and closed the lid, but it enabled the remaining three of us to establish ourselves as New Order. Through New Order people continued to become aware of Joy Division." (Peter Hook - The Guardian - 1980)
"I had to view the death of Joy Division as a new start. All the battles we went through in Joy Division, we had to go through once again." ( Peter Hook- The Guardian - 1980)
R.I.P
Another intriguing cover by Saville, this time for New Order is Blue Monday (1983). When I first looked at this cover, truthfully I had no clue to what it was...Blue Monday. (II)
If I knew a little more about computers, then maybe I would have. However, I did not. So, I set out to do some more research. Again, this album cover is minimalistic, in the sense that the focus of this image is three different sized, simple shapes along with minimum colour, another linking factor to the music. This being New Order, the album has a somewhat different sound in comparison with Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. Something that stands out to me about this cover is the strip of mixed colours that runs down the right hand side.These colours can in fact be de-coded to represent the name of the band. This is not obvious,and perhaps it relates again to minimalism in the sense that it is kind of similar to the series' so popular with minimalist artists. The main section of the cover represents a floppy disk which was given to Saville by the band to take home.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.
"I thought it was a beautiful object. At the time, computers were in offices, not art studios. The floppy disk informs the design and the colour coding was from my interest in aesthetics determined by machines . It reflected the hieroglyphical visual language of the machine world. For example, the numbers in your cheque book aren't really for you, they're for a machine to read." Peter Saville (quoted in the Guardian (29.5.2011)BLUE MONDAY
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