Joy Division’s Stephen Morris: ‘Ian’s death still haunts me’ (2024)

A few weeks before Ian Curtis killed himself he phoned his Joy Division bandmate, the drummer Stephen Morris, and told him that he wanted to leave the band and open a bookshop in the Netherlands. Curtis, the baritone singer of such timeless songs as Love Will Tear Us Apart and Atmosphere, had been troubled for a while. His severe epilepsy was a struggle and he had already tried to take his life once. He was 23 years old and Morris just a worried friend — who had no idea how to help.

“I said, ‘That’s fantastic! Yeah Ian, you should do that,’” remembers Morris. Curtis was hyperliterate. He wrote a lot. His bookshop idea did not seem outlandish. “Now, looking back, I wonder if he just wanted me to say no? ‘No, don’t — we need you.’ Maybe he wanted me to show him a bit of love? But I just thought if a bookshop is what would make him happy, he should do it. Sometimes I imagine a parallel universe in which he’s standing outside a bookshop in Holland, flogging JG Ballard and Philip K Dick. He would’ve been great at it. He would.”

Morris, a remarkably tender, funny and open man, is at home in Macclesfield, where he was born in 1957. Curtis is from the same town and they formed Joy Division in 1976 in Salford with the guitarist Bernard Sumner and the bassist Peter Hook. When Curtis died in 1980, leaving behind his wife, Debbie, and daughter Natalie, the band’s second and final album Closer was not out yet and the three remaining members needed to regroup. Together with Morris’s girlfriend, now-wife Gillian Gilbert, they did spectacularly well as New Order— one of the most influential British bands of the 1980s — but Curtis never left them.

Which is why we met. Forty-two years after Curtis’s death, New Order are ambassadors for the mental health charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), one of three charities chosen for the Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal. The organisation aims to help people who feel suicidal and organises campaigns to challenge stereotypes and stigma. Their figures make bleak reading. Every week, 125 people kill themselves in the UK and it remains the single biggest killer of young men. Men account for 75 per cent of suicides in the UK and Calm is there to help. Their helpline answers a call every 59 seconds, but people are still reticent to talk. Research shows that 84 per cent of men in the UK bottle up their emotions. Curtis did, too, and it still haunts his friends.

“It’s just such a waste. A complete waste,” says Morris. “CALM is something I feel very strongly about. When I was growing up, you never talked about your feelings. You just put on this front and built a prison for yourself. And once things start going wrong for young men, it just gets worse because they refuse to talk to anyone. There are people to talk to, you just refuse. And you end up in a situation where the only solution you can see is to take your own life. It’s just such a waste.”

Even after Curtis died, Morris, Sumner and Hook barely talked about it. New Order was their sanctuary — the band made euphoric rock and dance music that helps fans forget themselves. It helped the Joy Division trio move on too, but the drummer says there are generations-upon-generations of stigma to break through. He cites a stoic northern sense of humour for the lack of communication. “Why did he do a bloody daft thing like that?” was about as far as the conversation went about Curtis, and they never got an answer.

“It’s the question you can’t answer,” sighs Morris. “But, at the same time, I can give you a million answers, yet none of them would be right, because I wasn’t in his head. Also, the other thing you ask is, ‘What could you have done about it?’ That’s the thing that never goes away. And that haunts you. It really haunts you.”

“Because one person taking their own life affects so many other people,” continues Morris. “I think in Debbie’s book, she said suicide is the most selfish thing and I didn’t get her the first time I read it, but I see it now. If you could see what it would do to other people, maybe you wouldn’t do it. I don’t know.”

So what can be done? How can we stop the next person from doing what Curtis did? Morris — and CALM — believe it is about talking, letting people know that there are experts available. It can be hard to lead a friend to help, but by speaking more about organisations like CALM, they might reach for it themselves.

“If help is there,” he says, “you’ve got to take it, because the other option is ridiculous. It’s not worth considering. If you stop one person, you’ve succeeded.” Prevention also has to start in schools, where, Morris says, people start to put up the front they have for the rest of their lives, and things are only getting harder. Social anxiety has gone through the roof. Morris has seen the pressures his two daughters face on social media, those impossible standards teenagers feel they have to live up to.

“They have problems that just didn’t exist when I was younger,” says Morris.“You thought we had problems? It was a walk in the park compared to now.”

As amicable as he may be, throughout our conversation, Morris cannot help but sound sad and even desperate. Behind him are shelves full of records and CDs — a life in pop music well lived — and he has enjoyed putting together a remaster of New Order’s superb 1985 album Low-Life. “It’s good to be reminded of that time in your life when you were young and foolish,” he says. The memory of Curtis, however, will linger and an abiding impression is that Morris still does not understand why he went.

It took New Order years to regularly play Joy Division songs live. They were not, Morris says, shutting the door on their past — rather, they thought that people would think they are just like Joy Division, but not as good. This year, on tour in the US with the Pet Shop Boys, they have tended to close with Joy Division songs in celebration more than commemoration. There is still a fascination with the band. Anton Corbijn’s film about Curtis, Control, came out in 2007 to huge acclaim, but it is a tough watch for Morris. The first time he saw it he would watch the bits that he was in and think, “That never happened! That’s not right!” Now, though, he says it has got harder, more harrowing to watch. “Particularly at the end”.

“Originally, we didn’t think Ian had a mental health problem — we thought he had a problem with epilepsy,” Sumner said at the Houses of Parliament this year, when he and Morris were on a panel called Suicide Prevention: Breaking the Silence with the Labour MPs Kerry McCarthy and Andy Burnham. “His lyrics were a bit on the dark side — to put it mildly — but when he was with us on a day-to-day basis and in rehearsals, he was a good laugh.”

Morris thinks of him in a similar way, when he is not imagining his friend as an old man standing outside that bookshop in the Netherlands. “How do I remember Ian?” Morris says. “I always remember him laughing and smiling.” That is not, of course, how most people think of him — most photos are of Curtis looking morose, and that hurts Morris. The singer has been frozen in time.

“I still get a bit upset when the only pictures you see of him are of him with his head in his hands because that was a second from a lifetime,” says Morris. “He wasn’t like that. I don’t remember him like that.”

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