That was part of the era – the rock-star aspect. “We grew up watching pop programmes on television. I think that’s why he read so much.”ĭraft lyrics written on scrap paper his wife Deborah brought home from her job at the local council Photograph: PRįor Deborah, releasing his handwritten prose is a way of fulfilling a legacy she believes Ian wanted: that of writer rather than rock star. “Ian didn’t have an unhappy childhood,” says Deborah. The covers of books he loved form the final part of Permanence, alongside his own work. There are obvious references to writers in his track titles: Atrocity Exhibition ( JG Ballard), Colony ( Franz Kafka) and Dead Souls ( Nikolai Gogol). Partly, that’s because Ian would lose himself in literature, and much of the dystopian fiction he immersed himself in filtered into his work. Was he trying to displace what was going on in his own life? “I don’t know how much is fiction and how much is reality,” says Deborah. Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry.” But earlier drafts of the lyrics, featured in the book, show him playing with variations: your bedroom, this bedroom, the bedroom.

The track has since been dissected by fans and critics as his final outpouring of turmoil after facing an impossible choice between his wife and his mistress. She first heard Love Will Tear Us Apart after his death, too. Curtis played with variations of ‘your’, ‘this ’, and ‘the bedroom’ in earlier drafts Photograph: PR You just think, ‘How come he couldn’t talk to somebody about it?’”Īn early version of Love Will Tear Us Apart. Hearing the album for the first time, says Deborah, was “shocking. Yet they were deeply personal, even more so on Joy Division’s second and final album Closer, released two months after Ian’s death. Ian rarely talked about his lyrics certainly not in the few interviews he did, and never with Deborah at home. Knowing him, he must have thought about what was going to happen to his work.” I gather that when someone is thinking about dying, they do start giving things away. I’m guessing he didn’t want the lyrics there because he hadn’t recorded them yet. She didn’t read it until his bandmates, who went on to form New Order, told her they were looking for the exact lyrics to tracks the band had rehearsed but never properly recorded. By then, he was already a cult figure locally: a poet and a writer who carried his work around in a plastic bag, even after his band found success.Īfter his death, Deborah stored the work in two large envelopes. He was an awkward, lanky figure who wore skinny jeans and eyeliner. The lyrics for Joy Division’s 1979 single Transmission, in Curtis’s distinctive capitalised handwriting Photograph: PRĭeborah met Ian when she was a teenager in Macclesfield.

So this is permanence