Kept Alive by my Irritability

I recently awoke on a warm summer morning with an idea buzzing in my head. Call it the curse, or gift, of a writer. I reached for my phone and began tapping an email to self on re-connecting with the music of Manchester band, Magazine. I’d recently bought the re-mastered CD of a long-lost album from my youth, The Correct Use of Soap. Once I’d got my initial thoughts down, I performed my morning ablutions and a bit later roughed it up into this expanded article on early musical memories. We were once the young men Ian Curtis’s sang about, and I was a youth in Liverpool in the late 70s and early 80s.

How did the Greater Manchester area (yes, I know Salford is a city, Macclesfield and Stockport towns, each with their own identities) spawn so many soulful lyricists, backed up by searing post-industrial-wasteland self-taught rock musicians? We’d all grown up with 60s and 70s rock, pop and soul music ringing in our ears, but somehow the raw energy of Rock, the ragged anarchy of Punk Rock, seemed more appropriate to the task of observing, describing and reflecting life in a grim urban landscape. I’m talking about the front men of Magazine, Joy Division and the Smiths – Devoto, Curtis and Morrissey. I saw them all in concerts where I connected with their music, reflected on the power of youth to challenge, the sour lot of the working class, how to build hope out of urban decay, and how to be alone in a crowd. Add to this the notion that emerging young adults see the world around them with a clarity and purity of thought as yet unpolluted by the capitalist dogma that has created the consumer bubble in which we are trapped. I think my nostalgia for the punk and new wave bands of my youth is a recognition that the ideas conveyed through music helped with my orientation and gave me a sense of identity and location. I’m talking about roots. We all come from somewhere and home for me was Liverpool, where I had the freedom to meet up with my mates, jump on a bus and go into town to see bands at Erics Club, and others that followed, like the State, where I saw Howard Devoto and his band just after he left Magazine. He still performed some of the old classics – Shot by both sides, Philadelphia and Song from under the floorboards. A man made old and wise before his time by his sharp wit and trademark receding hairline. It’s his introspective, almost paranoid lyrics that I’ve recently rediscovered:
I am angry I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin, my irritability keeps me alive and kicking. The opening lines to A Song from Under the Floorboards – a track on Magazine’s third album, The Correct Use of Soap. I’m putting it on my funeral playlist, along with Decades by Joy Division (see below). Don’t be alarmed – I’m not ready to check out just yet.

Spiral Scratch EP cover – Howard Devoto front right

This was in the early 80s and I was already a veteran of over 50 gigs. In my early 20s, perhaps a year or two younger than my onstage heroes, I also had a swagger and surety that I knew something, that the World and all its riches were waiting to be discovered. Armed with notebook and biro, I scribbled impressions to later be forged into pithy gig reviews for my music column in a local community news magazine. I interviewed the Stranglers at Brady’s in 1980 and chatted with Andy McClusky at a Psychedelic Furs gig.
By pure chance (or fate?) I had been the wide-eyed junior reporter in BBC Radio Merseyside’s studio on the morning of Tuesday 9th December 1980 when the breaking story that cleared the decks was the news that John Lennon had been shot in New York. I heard the news that day, oh boy. Janice Long, later Radio 1 and TOTP presenter, then Studio Assistant, was detailed to look after me. Yeah, I’ve had a mug of tea made for me by Cheggers’ sister. A truly surreal morning. Alan Jackson and Roger Phillips were true pros, conductors at the heart of a city waking up to shocking news, pulling together a reverential and sentimental wave of music and sound bites, a collage that portrayed an outpouring of grief over the fate of Liverpool’s best loved son (sorry Paul). I wince every time I hear Imagine – it was played to death that week. I’ve got a good face for memories.
The Beatles’ rock n roll legacy were the northern new wave bands I now spent my meagre wages going to see and buying their records. Echo and the Bunnymen were new on the block, my new favourite band in the fickle world of pop music, and I adopted their look with dark crombie overcoat, drainpipe black jeans and baseball boots. In those days my wild frizzy red mop of hair grew out in an unkempt afro. No gel required.

Morrissey (left) and Johnny Marr, the Smiths

But back to my gig memories. In 1978 I made a good choice to go and see the north’s answer to the Pistols – the Buzzcocks. I’d bought their Spiral Scratch EP (with ‘Boredom’ on it – scan pictured) co-written by Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto, in his pre-Magazine days. Devoto had left the band by the time of the Buzzcock’s ’78 UK tour. The speed of delivery and energy were there, but the Buzzcocks had better-formed songs than the Pistols. I’d heard their support band, Joy Division, on the late night John Peel radio show, and was intrigued. But I was simply blown away. Joy Division’s set was mesmerising, and once I’d seen Ian Curtis’s manic butterfly dance to She’s lost Control, I was hooked. It was a performance that can only be compared to footage of Jim Morrison fronting the Doors, although this was no imitation. Like Morrison, he was a driven poet with a vision to share. Curtis was locked in his own world of pain, but his thoughtful, introspective lyrics painted graphic visual images of suffering, set against a bleak landscape, but tinted with hope, defiance and resilience. In reality, he was suffering with a debilitating condition – epilepsy, treated with mood-altering medication. Add to this a self-destructive ménage à trois that he couldn’t resolve, he reached overload and took his own life on the eve of what was to be the band’s first US tour in 1980. A poet and philosopher, his legacy survives in a huge global following for Joy Division’s slim body of work forty years on. I saw them three times, the third one of their last gigs in April 1980 at the Russell Club/Factory in Manchester. Dead souls, Atrocity Exhibition, Decades and LWTUA stood out. I don’t mind admitting my eyes welled up with tears when I read Paul Morley’s obituary of Ian Curtis in the NME.
But let’s get back to the lyrics of these three great Northern poets/lyricists that are still inspiring new generations of young people. To hear today’s students singing along to Morrisey’s lyrics at a Smiths tribute band gig in 2020 was a pleasant surprise. So, now to some favourite lyrics and links to YouTube:

Philadelphia by Magazine (extract):
Buddha’s in the fireplace
The truth’s in drugs from outer space
Maybe it’s right to be nervous now
Everything’d be just fine
If I had the right pastime
I’d’ve been Raskolnikov
But Mother Nature ripped me off
In Philadelphia
I’m sure that I felt healthier
Maybe it’s right to be nervous now…

Where have I seen you before?
‘Same place you saw me, I expect
I’ve got a good face for memories’
In Philadelphia
I’m sure that I felt healthier
Maybe it’s right to be nervous now…
Lyrics: Howard Devoto – great guitar riffs from John McGeogh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dBLEA2o3Gc

Decades by Joy Division (extract)
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders
Here are the young men, well where have they been?
We knocked on the doors of Hell’s darker chamber
Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in
Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying
We saw ourselves now as we never had seen
Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration
The sorrows we suffered and never were free
Where have they been?

Weary inside, now our heart’s lost forever
Can’t replace the fear, or the thrill of the chase
Each ritual showed up the door for our wanderings
Open then shut, then slammed in our face
Where have they been?
Lyrics by Ian Curtis – an eerie foretelling of his fate? The track has a funereal feel and a timeless, compelling beauty…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n272UVfsciM

What difference does it make? By The Smiths.
All men have secrets and here is mine
So let it be known
For we have been through hell and high tide
I can surely rely on you
And yet you start to recoil
Heavy words are so lightly thrown
But still I’d leap in front of a flying bullet for you

So, what difference does it make?
So, what difference does it make?
It makes none
But now you have gone
And you must be looking very old tonight

The devil will find work for idle hands to do
I stole and I lied, and why?
Because you asked me to!
But now you make me feel so ashamed
Because I’ve only got two hands
But I’m still fond of you, oh-ho-oh

But no more apologies
No more, no more apologies
Oh, I’m too tired
I’m so sick and tired
And I’m feeling very sick and ill today
But I’m still fond of you,
Oh, my sacred one…
Lyrics by Morrissey
Impossible to pick a definitive example of Morrissey’s lyrics, given his wide body of work, but I’ve gone for an early hit and personal favourite, What difference does it make? I stood three feet from Johnny Marr as he played the jingly-jangly riff to this immortal classic when they supported the Sisters of Mercy at an impromptu University of London SU gig in 1983. My mate was from Manchester and had already ‘discovered’ the Smiths in early ’83, and we were familiar with their early singles Hand in Glove, its brilliant b-side Still Ill, and This Charming Man. I remember them slowing the tempo with Reel Around the Fountain – still a favourite from the first album. It’s time that the tale was told.

One of many great nights seeing raw emerging talent on tiny stages, belting out future hits. Snapshots in time, but music destined to be not only for their contemporary generation but future ones as well. Thank you Devoto, Curtis and Morrissey for sharing your thoughts and feelings with us through such inspiring and memorable songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOx8TyvUmI

These songs, these lyrics, these memories have formed the soundtrack to my life. I followed my own muse and became the editor of the student magazine at the Polytechnic of Wales (now University of Glamorgan) in South Wales in the early 80s, reporting on such gigs as New Order, the band re-born from the ashes of Joy Division, in January 1983, when they first played Blue Monday to an audience at Cardiff Uni JSU. Musical taste evolves and I carried my love of now, happening live music forward with me on my journey through life, but occasionally pausing to listen to early loves and influences from the great days of my youth.
Viva music, viva la vida.

Checkout my books here: https://timwalkerwrites.co.uk

Here Are the Not-So-Young Men

I recently met a fellow Joy Division fan – Kully – and our enthusiastic banter led to him reading my post – Shadowplay – An Imagined Day in the Life of Ian Curtis – and then sending me an in-depth article he had written on the band, and his permission to post it on my blog (see below). We are now in our 50’s, but our shared enthusiasm for this Manchester band whose short career ended 38 years ago in 1980, remains undiminished. The legacy of their music still leaves a huge footprint on the British rock scene and continues to speak to us across the years. We are yesterday’s young men, reliving the energy and hope of youth through their fascinating and compelling music.

It is impossible to write about Joy Division without an element of gloom, as their short career came to an abrupt end in 1980 with the suicide of lead singer, Ian Curtis. From the ashes of Joy Division, a new band emerged, with the remaining members forming electro-rock band, New Order. I was privileged to have seen Joy Division three time in concert – twice in Liverpool in 1979 (first, supporting the Buzzcocks at the Mountford Hall, and second at Erics, supported by fellow Factory band, Section 25), and then at the Hacienda (then the Russel Club) in 1980 where they played tracks from their second album, Closer, in addition to the ultimate love-gone-wrong song, Love Will Tear Us Apart. This last gig is still one of my most memorable concerts – I will never forget searing versions of Twenty Four Hours, Atrocity Exhibition and Decades – this last song giving us the immortal line that came to epitomise the band, “Here are the young men, a weight on their shoulders.” From the moment I first saw Ian Curtis’s tortured butterfly dance – elsewhere described as the dance of a headless chicken with 100 volts shot through it – I was hooked. Not just that but the feel of the music that seemed to encapsulate the hardship of life in a post-industrial northern wasteland, tinged with defiance in a strangely uplifting vibe. Once seen, once heard, never forgotten…

EXCESSIVE FLASHPOINTS – An Inside Portrait of Ian Curtis and Joy Division by Kully.

Ian Curtis pic If you stand on the threshold of 77 Barton Street and look inside the slight Victorian terraced house, you will see a small triangular room to the left of the stairs. This was called ‘the blue room’ and was Ian Curtis’s private space – his writing place. This is where he wrote the lyrics, the lyrical poetry that became the voice of Joy Division. To the right of the stairs is the rest of the house – this was his wife Debbie’s place and later, her and her infant daughter’s place.
The house exists on a bend in the road. This means that 77 Barton Street is actually bent in two and the window of the blue room – Ian Curtis’s view, actually faces a different direction to that of his wife and daughter. An isolated view – maybe this is symbolic; maybe this is real.
Ian Curtis was not your average young man. The working class lad that dropped out of grammar school – he essentially taught himself. His reading matter was well beyond anything that his friends, colleagues, band-mates were reading; witness: Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Rimbaud, Poe to Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard (Crash, High-Rise, The Atrocity Exhibition). So, amidst the dystopian fiction, deeply philosophical works; combined with an interest in art (Andy Warhol, Dada and Surrealism). It was a proper education.
Like most teenagers, he couldn’t imagine himself at thirty. I know when I was that young, I felt the same way. It seemed an impossible age away. Now I’m over fifty and I can’t imagine being that young again. If Ian Curtis was alive today, he would be a musician – I think he would be a fine, fine writer.
But when you’re in your teens – it’s music that grabs you first. It’s much more real – much more visceral, more immediate and ‘in yer face’ – as they say in modern parlance. And so it was when the Sex Pistols turned up to gig in Manchester – not just once, but twice in the summer of 1977. I know there was the glam and pop of Bowie and Bolan before this, but it was actually the Sex Pistols that showed the inhabitants of Manchester that anyone could get up on stage and perform … anyone. All you needed was three chords and determination.
So it was that Stiff Kittens was born … which then transformed into Warsaw and then finally Joy Division – a band that was already walking away from the dying embers of Punk to carve out their own identity. Joy Division have been described as ‘an original of the species that was to become Goth’ by no other than Bono of U2 (themselves a fledgling punk band around this time); but there was no dark eye-liner and dressing all-in-black that the genre seemed to define with Joy Division – they walked their own path.
It’s hard to define their sound. The music is certainly serious, you could call it heavy rock but it’s not metal. There’s more to it than that – but then certain songs like Twenty Four Hours do rock out in the traditional rock sense. It is the vocal and subject matter that is different; there is also a pace, a build-up and a coming down that is not present in other rock songs. It’s their sensibility which sets them apart from other bands. Charles Shaar Murray described their sound as ‘awful things carved out of black marble’ – but like marble, there are patterns of pale beauty and melody laced throughout.
The name Joy Division was taken from a book – a lurid piece of holocaust fiction entitled House of Dolls by Ka – Tznetik ( a pseudonym for Yehiel Feiner). It was written in the form of a diary and told about the section of a Nazi concentration camp where young women were forced into sexual slavery – not the Labour Division – but the Joy Division. By the time the group selected the name in 1978, this sensationalist memoir had sold millions. Joy Division’s guitarist Bernard Sumner had been given a paperback copy.
Since they were essentially a ‘rock band’, Sumner’s guitar sound was very important. It tended to give a discordant edge to a lot of Joy Division’s music. At other times, it’s tone was chiming or performing a perfect counter-point melody, as in Decades. Everyone in Joy Division was a multi-instrumentalist which helped the band enormously.
Stephen Morris – the last member to join the band, is a talented drummer. He has a precise – even militaristic style, that suits the music and was evident even then. It goes well with his greatest ambition: that is to drum as well and as accurately as any drum-machine.
Peter Hook’s bass-lines are the emotional pulse of Joy Division. It was an inspired move to bring them to the front and centre-stage of the music. It’s what sets their music apart from everyone else’s. Hook wrestles the sounds out of his bass like a rock-star; stiff-legged and bent over his instrument – not quietly strumming along in the background as most bassists do.
Something needs to be said at this stage about Ian Curtis’s voice. It’s deep, sonorous – almost a baritone; and it carries a depth, a weight missing from all his peers. It absolutely suits his lyrics – the two compliment each other perfectly. The weight of the voice gives the lyrics – about alienation, guilt, isolation and despair – a solidity, a maturity – a grandeur that a lesser voice would never be able to reach. Voice and words inter-lock b ian-curtis eautifully – giving both an authenticity – something borne of experience rather than just imagined.
The two people most responsible for the ‘look’ of Joy Division is designer Peter Saville and the photographer Anton Corbijn. Peter Saville’s cool, austere graphical style made each Joy Division record sleeve a collector’s item. Whereas Anton Corbijn’s stark black and white photography of the band lead him to not only direct the music video of Atmosphere when it was re-released, but also to direct the movie of Ian Curtis’s life with Joy Division in the film Control.
Curtis was a closed-in person. What he projected on the outside was different from his internal climate. Curtis found it hard to reconcile his role as a husband and as a father with his role as the lead in a rock band. It certainly caused friction between him and his wife and there were people around the band that wanted this distance to be maintained. They didn’t want the lead of a rock band to be seen with a heavily pregnant wife – what sort of image would that send out? A family man is certainly not ‘rock and roll’. I think this disconnect is the growing chasm that his wife was talking about in the title of her first book on Curtis Touching from a Distance – a title taken from the song lyric for Transmission.
Like a lot of people, Ian was a rage of inconsistencies. He went into things that he later wanted to back out of. In the song Passover, he sings – ‘back out of my duties when all’s said and done, I know that I’ll lose every-time.’ He wanted something – when he got it, he didn’t want it anymore. This kind of fruitless behavior can leave many a person feeling unfulfilled. As ready consumers in an empty, increasingly materialistic society – we are all destined to remain unsatisfied.
As writers, we sometimes write about what we’re drawn to – maybe this is where the alienation and guilt and despair come in. Maybe, as his wife suggests – Ian Curtis was, what we nowadays call bi-polar. Maybe it’s what all around us in our personal sphere – or maybe, even in the wider environment.
Someone once said of Ian Curtis: ‘he could see the madness in our area’. Maybe they were right. After all, this was late 70’s Manchester – with it’s dark satanic mills standing empty and alone. Sometimes this city has a dour, grey pessimism which forms the very weather plus a history that produced a society dispossessed and broken … and of course, left behind. The ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979 also hit this post-industrial town and produced a general feeling of malcontent and despair – that things were going wrong and this feeling leached into the very music and lyrics that the band were producing. Joy Division could not have come from anywhere other than Manchester.
Like Curtis, Manchester is a closed-in taciturn city. It’s inhabitants are not prone to talk about their feelings. So a certain isolation is there already. Combine that with the air of desperation that is already present … just below the surface – a historical malcontent. Joy Division were the only band that were able to express that feeling, make it coherent and whole for the rest of the world.
By 1980 everything was coming to a head. The diagnosis of his epilepsy had occurred while his wife Debbie was pregnant with his child. Then there was his intrinsically, introspective nature. His imploding marriage – partially caused by his growing relationship with Annik Honoré – the girl he met while on tour in Europe, was becoming white hot. I believe, the disintegrating relationship with his wife, and the song Love Will Tear Us Apart about a relationship fracturing, are more than just coincidence.
All writers essentially write about themselves; and the stuff that’s going on around us often bleeds into our work. It’s what makes our work individual and of the time and place. Curtis was no different.
And sometimes we’re actively drawn to what destroys us. A love triangle where no one wants to ‘break the chain’ as Stevie Nicks eloquently puts it in Fleetwood Mac’s awesome The Chain – (itself a testament to relationships crumbling) from the Rumours album – describes the situation perfectly.
With his epilepsy getting worse – very probably exacerbated with the late nights, flashing lights and alcohol and drugs of a life ‘on the road’. Everything was getting worse, coming to a head – and the warning signs were being ignored.
As he sings in Twenty-Four Hours (a song written in his final year 1980) – ‘excessive flashpoints, beyond all reach’ says it all. I think this was a description of his mental state at this time with his epilepsy firing off in his head, the medication – maybe even making him feel worse, and his relationships crumbling and the prospect of a tour to the USA coming up adding further pressure – those ‘excessive flashpoints’ were firing faster and faster. And they were putting him beyond our reach … beyond anyone’s reach, if true be told.
Like most people, on the outside it was a smile and ‘sure, I’m coping’ when it was clear inside that he was not. There was only one way this was going to go. Something desperate had to give. It’s always the weakest link in the chain that goes … and so it was with Ian Curtis.
On the evening of 17th May 1980 Ian Curtis wanted to be on his own. He had already moved out of the family home on Barton Street. However, he wanted to watch the noted German film director Werner Herzog’s movie Strosek that was playing on TV that night. Rather than subject his parents to a foreign language film, he decided to go back to Barton Street – knowing that the house would be empty. The film is about a newly released prisoner in Germany with mental health problems, who becomes a European émigré to the USA. Once there, he becomes so alienated by a foreign American culture that he succumbs to suicide.
The next morning Deborah Curtis found her husband’s hanged body in the kitchen. There was a glass of whisky and a cigarette on the coffee table and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot on the turntable.
Tony Wilson, the TV presenter and director of Factory Records – Joy Divison’s record company, described the final scene of the movie and the demise of his friend and artist:
“There’s a dead man in the cable car and the chicken’s still dancing.”
And in the run-off grooves of Joy Division’s final album ‘Still’ is scratched the legend:
“The chicken’s still dancing.”

*********** THE END ***********

Kully’s contact: kulwant.randhawa@outlook.com

Living With Terrorism

The head of the UK intelligence service says more attacks are inevitable as Britain sees ‘dramatic upshift’ in Islamist terrorism, says a report in The Guardian (18/10/17). Must we now accept this as the new ‘normal’?

The alarmist report continues: “Britain is facing its most severe ever terrorist threat and fresh attacks in the country are inevitable, according to the head of Britain’s normally secretive domestic intelligence service in a rare public speech.

Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, said the UK had seen “a dramatic upshift in the threat” from Islamist terrorism this year, reflecting attacks that have taken place in Westminster, Manchester and London Bridge.

The spy chief said: “That threat is multi-dimensional, evolving rapidly and operating at a scale and pace we’ve not seen before.”

He added: “It’s at the highest tempo I have seen in my 34-year career. Today there is more terrorist activity, coming at us more quickly, and it can be harder to detect.”

Clearly, it not just the terrorists who want to alarm us – the authorities also wish to ‘prep’ us and ensure we are receptive to warnings and security measures. When the two sides clash, you need to get out of the way as quickly as possible.

This must undoubtedly have a waring effect on the population, particularly of large cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester. Engendering fear and intimidation amongst the civilians of a country targeted by extremist political and religious groups is the aim of terrorism, and the greater the atrocity, the more likely it is to succeed. People will inevitably be on their guard, more suspicious and more easily spooked by loud random noises and the sound of sirens. More security checks slow down people’s progress and have become a major inconvenience of modern life.

I have tried to capture some of these issues and feelings in my short story, ‘Geraniums’, in my book, ‘Postcards from London’. In this story, my main characters are retired couple George and Maggie Taylor who embark on a theatre trip to London by train. They take advantage of good weather to walk along the South Bank and onto Westminster Bridge, noting the recent addition of steel pavement furniture following a previous terrorist incident. They pose for photos with the Houses of Parliament behind them when…BANG!

“A flash of light was followed a nano-second later by a loud explosion that shook the bridge under our feet, causing us to stagger. I put my arm around Maggie and we instinctively crouched by the stone wall as bits of masonry and assorted debris rained down on us. A large black cloud billowed over the Underground station entrance – with screams and shouts providing a chilling soundtrack. My ears were ringing and I felt dazed – I looked at Maggie to check that she was all right and we slumped into a sitting position as I held her tightly around her shoulders, trying to stay calm.

Flower petals settled on us and I picked one up. I was in a surreal dream of odd shapes and noises; an unfamiliar world where time has been slowed and distorted.

“Pelargoniums,” I slurred, hardly hearing myself over the ringing in my ears. “We call them Geraniums – a single red flowering plant… native of South Africa, I believe… popularised by US President Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century…”

Maggie looked at me with a combination of shock, annoyance and concern in her blue eyes. Picture postcards of London scenes and debris from a kiosk rained like confetti. One, singed at the edges, fluttered into her lap. Tower Bridge by moonlight. Someone then tripped over my outstretched foot and stumbled, falling to their hands and knees…”

Read on in ‘Postcards from London’ – order the e-book or paperback here:-

Postcards From London