Control

It’s hard to narrow down all the great music of my lifetime to an even dozen, or twenty, or even 100, let alone a single act that would encapsulate an age, but Joy Division would come as close as any to being that band. I’ve been trying to get friends to start a Joy Division cover band for several years now, but I don’t think I need to do that anymore, because Anton Corbijn’s “Control” did that for me.

The first thing that a music pic should do is convey a love for that music, and that I think that is the strongest point of Corbijn’s film. Joy Division recordings are mixed in with the “Control” band’s renditions, and the band, led by singer Sam Riley in the Ian Curtis role, do a credible job of channeling the original’s musicianship and energy. At times, the soundtrack swells, like the sound engineer was a teenager turning the receiver up to “11”, and with classic cuts like “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” blasting out of the big theatre speakers coupled with Corbijn’s music video imagery, my hunger as a fan was fed.

Much of the film’s narrative was based on “Touching from a Distance”, a biography of Ian by his wife, Deborah Curtis. Corbijn, who knew Ian Curtis personally and was one of the band’s photographers, went to the closest source material he could find to fill out Ian’s biography, and to the degree that the movie is Deborah Curtis’s recounting of events, it is the tale told by a rather provincial English girl, in love with the poetic rock n’ roller next door but neither understanding nor accepting of the world in which he moved. In this telling, Ian’s tragedy is one of a life doomed by his love of two women (his wife Debbie and his mistress, an exotic Belgian siren named Annik) in tandem with his drug use, his epilepsy, and the callousness of the music world that wanted more from him than he was prepared to give.

It is a vision colored in large part by Deborah Curtis’ weepy eyed English Romanticism. Of course, Ian would kill himself because of his conflicted love for two women. I mean, didn’t Romeo and Juliet die for love? So why not a Wordsworth-quoting singer like her husband? It’s a valid view of the man, she was certainly a lot closer to the action than most, but I don’t think that it is a definitive portrait. With Joy Division still sounding as relevant as ever, with many of their songs beginning to approach the timeless quality of a Mozart or Miles Davis, I suspect it won’t be the last one, either.

Perhaps the freshest insight “Contact” gives us into the poetry of Ian Curtis is how he reflected the culture of industrial northern England, how Ian’s recital of a Wordsworth poem as a young teen, something he might have picked up in the local public school, dovetails with his own poetry, how his pleasures outside of his writing and his music are kind of quaint and very English, down to his favorite color being “Manchester Blue”, that of the local soccer team.

The film quoted the following excerpt from “Touching from a Distance”, taken from a poem that Ian wrote to Debbie on Valentine’s Day when he was just 16 years old: “All New York city’s broken hearts and secrets would be mine, I’d put you on a movie reel and that would be just fine.” Which is both emotionally intense and oddly innocent, and provides the context for a young man who 7 years later would sing: “Beyond all this good is the terror, the grip of a mercenary hand, when savagery turns all reason, there’s no turning back, no last stand. Heart and soul, one will burn.” It’s dark stuff, sure, but exciting in that its an original voice in the cultural wilderness, unmitigated by the demands of commerce or rock cliché.

The common line on Ian Curtis is that, a classic tale of a young rock god who died too young, he can encompass all of our myths about rock ‘n roll without any of the baggage. Like Jimi Hendrix or Buddy Holly, we never have to watch him grow old, to make a mediocre album, to sell out to a life as English gentry or Hollywood foppery. But I think this is selling the tragedy short.

When Kurt Cobain died, I, like thousands of others, went into a brief state of depression, not so much because of who he was or what he’d done, but because of what he could have been. Sure, “Bleach”, “Nevermind”, and “In Utero” were all great records, but it also seemed like Nirvana was on the cutting edge of something of more general importance, that millions of kids around the planet were getting turned on to the same song at the same time, and with this collective enthusiasm for something intense, for something that was honest and real, came the prospect that the world could change, that one day we would wake up and the sky would be purple, just because we willed it so. I know it sounds goofy, but that’s how it felt listening to them.

I never thought that I would say this, but with over a decade of perspective after Cobain’s death, I now think that the suicide of Ian Curtis was probably the greater loss. While Nirvana wrote a bunch of great music, a lot of it, at least to my ears, now sounds dated, a product of the environment around it at the time, a blending of hard rock chord patterns with “alternative rock” song structure and sentiment. However, Joy Division remains timeless, a musical font to which I keep returning, a pure melding of sonic electricity, of poetry, of song.

I could recite the musical advances of the band, such as Peter Hook’s use of a 6-string bass, the higher range allowing him to take over the melody line while Sumner’s guitar focused on creating a wall of sonic ambience that played off this melody. Or I could discuss my theory that punk rock broke down a wall so that is was once again cool for white teens to make white sounding music, focusing on the front beats, unlike all of the blues inspired rock of the 1960’s and 70’s, that “post punk” is an all-encompassing term used to categorize all the bands playing out this idea, and that no band did this with more intensity than Joy Division, that they did it first and they did it better. Or I could point to the dozen or two brilliant songs later penned by Sumner, Hook, and Morris after they went on to form New Order, posing the obvious question: Just how good would they have been with Ian still fronting the band? However you pose it, the loss of Curtis’ voice and what it could have meant for music, for the planet, for my life, is huge.

I think that in one sense that is what killed both Curtis and Cobain, or more exactly what drove each of them to take their own lives: that they both realized the genius of what they were doing and it scared the shit out of them, if for no other reason than they weren’t sure if they could keep it up, that each of them were in a creative state of grace, driven in no small part by their cockeyed psyches, minds that had tasted more deeply of existence than most of us mortals, and that this was a creative peak upon which they could not forever stand.

As Curtis sang in “Decades”: “Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders, Here are the young men, well where have they been? We knocked on the door of Hell’s darker chamber, Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.”

It is this spirit, of a life given totally in an effort to see wider and feel more intensely and then to convey this feeling through music, that I celebrated while watching “Control”.