Ian Curtis

Ian Curtis took his own life before experiencing the full scope of his reach. As vocalist and chief songwriter in Joy Division, he sank into intense personal gloom until continuing to exist felt pointless. Starting with the band Warsaw in 1977, he examined the bleak core of everyday existence, shouting stark lines that fused Iggy Pop’s punk aggression with the Sex Pistols’ outward fury turned inward. Warsaw soon became Joy Division, and Curtis’s low, mournful singing together with his somber, autobiographical writing won widespread critical praise when the group issued its debut album, Unknown Pleasures, in 1979. Onstage his raw force and sudden, convulsive movements—echoing his epileptic seizures—held crowds spellbound. In 1980 the band recorded Closer, an unsettling landmark that signaled the arrival of gothic rock. On that album Curtis filled the pages with unbroken sorrow and defeat; in the song “Passover” he sang, “This is a crisis I knew had to come/Destroying the balance I’d kept,” pointing toward his coming suicide. On May 18, 1980, he hanged himself in his wife’s kitchen. In the mid-’90s his widow Deborah Curtis published the memoir “Touching From a Distance,” recounting their marriage and the affair with another woman that finished just before his death. Artists as different as the Cure and Nirvana have carried Curtis’s example forward, prompting many others to confront and voice their private torment.