Touching From a Distance (14 page)

My parents didn’t mind looking after Natalie while I worked, but

one evening my mother decided that Ian’s parents should share some of the load for a change. We also thought it would give them a more realistic view of how Ian, Natalie and I were living. Considering I had not yet told anyone about Ian’s affair, this was quite perceptive of my mother.

They arrived just in time for me to put on my coat and Doreen noticed that I had taken my wedding ring off. We looked at each other. What could I do? Should I have told her that her son was in fact in London with his favourite groupie? I decided it wasn’t worth the effort or the expense of my energy had I vented my anger on her. Apart from that, I didn’t want to be late for work, so I went upstairs meekly and put the ring back on.

Naturally I began to take more notice of the men who were customers at Silklands. One of them was a friend of Gillian Gilbert’s sister Kim. Jeff was younger than me – still in his teens, in fact. He liked the disco scene and was generally having a good time until he met me! When word got around the small town that I had found out about Ian’s girlfriend, Jeff and I began to chat. A date would have boosted my confidence, but Jeff was reluctant to do anything which would interfere with my ailing marriage. Instead he became a friendly face I could talk to across the bar.

Money was extremely tight and when the red electricity bill came there was no money to pay for it. I told Ian about it but he didn’t really consider it his concern. I felt ashamed at not being able to manage the money better. Ian wanted to know what I had done with the allowance we had from the band. He would bring home new clothes that Rob Gretton had bought him to wear on stage and I felt very envious of his good fortune. It didn’t seem fair that he had the opportunity to travel – I loved travelling and Ian hated it. Yet I could not sympathize with him and his affluent appearance began to irritate me as our debts began to mount. I found myself keeping pathetic lists of housekeeping bills in order to prove to Ian that I wasn’t spending the money on myself.

Sadly our dog had become a costly
luxury. Owing to
our lack of funds, even Candy wasn’t getting proper food and her fur had begun
to fall out. As Ian was away so much I was faced with the dilemma of needing to walk her at night-time and not wanting to leave Natalie alone in the house while I did this. Sometimes my parents were able to help out, but eventually they offered to find somewhere else for Candy to live. Ian was very distressed at this suggestion, though it didn’t persuade him to come home any more often. My discovery that he carried photographs of Candy around, rather than photographs of his wife and child, made me realize how foolish I had been to carry on running his home. I knew Ian would be upset to hear that Candy had gone, but thought it cruel to keep an animal we could no longer afford to feed. Ian had ceased to make any contribution to her care and did not want to discuss or understand the problems I was having. A place was found for her on a farm in Rochdale and my parents drove her there so that I would not have to say goodbye.

Natalie was almost a year old and she constantly wanted to be cuddled and paid attention. One night, on one of the rare occasions that Ian was there at her bedtime, she refused to allow me to put her to bed. She screamed and kicked and held on to the living-room door. Determined not to let me get to the foot of the stairs, she reached out her arms towards Ian. I asked Ian if he would take her up but he said no. The screaming and crying continued, her whole body straining towards him. Eventually, I lost my temper and insisted he take her up himself. She went upstairs peacefully and fell asleep the moment Ian tucked her into her cot. I waited at the foot of the stairs for him. He returned so quickly with such an anguished look on his face that I ran up the stairs to check that Natalie was still breathing. I thought he had suffocated her. Ian’s self-imposed restrictions were beginning to affect us all.

As Ian’s personal life was disintegrating, his professional life was flourishing. His voice had improved. It had a powerful, enigmatic quality which would bring a poignancy to the slower songs in particular.

Closer
was recorded at Britannia Row Studios, London, in March 1980 and my prayers were answered in a roundabout way in the
form of a gesture from Rob Gretton. It was the only occasion I can recall when the girls were encouraged to be present. Ian grudgingly informed me that Rob had decided to send £20 to all the wives and girlfriends so that they could use it for the train fare to London to see the band during the making of
Closer.
‘I can’t afford to come, can I?’ I said to Ian ‘Where would I sleep? I’ve no money for a hotel.’ Ian shrugged his shoulders, omitting to tell me that two small flats had been booked for the band’s accommodation and the other girls were staying there. So I sighed with relief and used the £20 to pay the electricity bill.

Sue Sumner was also unable to go to London. She always worked hard and Ian told me that she and Bernard kept their finances separate from each other. Consequently, Sue could afford to go
away on holiday and was independent enough to do just that. Iris Bates (Peter Hook’s girlfriend), Gillian Gilbert and Lesley Gilbert arrived at Euston Station at 9 p.m., but it was after midnight when Joy Division remembered to dispatch Steve Morris to collect them. The girls had been given the wrong telephone numbers and the whole episode resulted in none of the couples speaking to each other. Annik managed to remain concealed for the first day as one of the two flats were reserved for her and Ian, but eventually Ian made some embarrassed introductions. The next day the lads went back into the studio and the girls went window shopping because they were skint.

The rest of the band were not unduly worried by Annik’s presence as they had already endured her company for the entire European tour. When faced with the prospect of booking into a hotel which doubled as a brothel, she objected on the grounds that it was immoral. The lads pointed out that it was more immoral to be ‘knocking off a married bloke’. After a venomous exchange of words, she had more than earned her nickname of the ‘Belgian Boiler’.

Ian seemed to be in a trance for the whole of the time he was writing and recording the lyrics for
Closer.
Wound up and intense, he was in another world. I wonder if he needed the rivalry and passion of conflict in his life to help him write the words he did
.

The others carried on in the usual manner. They were so accustomed
to playing jokes on each other that every time they returned to their flat in Marylebone, each of them would check their stuff, their room, their corner of the refrigerator. When Tony Wilson prepared to drive a van back to Manchester, he was given the treatment. The door handles were covered with jam and he was pelted with flour and eggs, so he had no option but to get into the van and escape.

Back in Macclesfield, I was pacing the pavements. It was lonely without Ian again and I passed my time pushing the pram around or listening to the Durutti Column’s
Return
of
the
Durutti
Column.
The music was so mournful and emotional that it seemed like the only suitable thing to play. Then one day Ian rang me and in a very hushed voice said, ‘It’s OK, I’ve told her.’ I dreamed about us being reunited and the future we would have together. I played the Durutti Column’s sandpaper-clad album again. The nuances in the melody took a different mood and I actually danced around the house, ecstatic, believing I had somehow magically regained my husband.

Tony Wilson accompanied Annik on a train journey, during which she appeared depressed. She told Tony that she hated
Closer
because she believed Ian actually meant the lyrical content and that he was feeling the guilt as he sang. Unlike me, she had the advantage of hearing the lyrics on
Closer
before Ian’s death. Although she was sensitive enough to get a hint of what was going on in Ian’s mind, her warnings were ignored.

Ian came home with a cassette recording of
Closer.
Had I listened to it, maybe I too could have gained an insight into what was happening in his mind, but we didn’t have a cassette player. Despite his insistence that he had told Annik it was over, she still rang, using a male friend to make the initial call. Ian refused to speak to her. When I asked to speak to her myself, the caller rang off.

The gigs at the Moonlight in West Hampstead took their toll on Ian. For the evenings of the 2, 3 and 4 April 1980, fans were treated to ten different acts: Section 25, Crawling Chaos, John Dowie, A Certain Ratio, Kevin Hewick, Blurt, Durutti Column, X-O-Dus, Royal Family and Joy Division. Ian’s problem was that Joy Division had been billed to play every night, but at different times. On the first evening they received a rave review in
NME,
though the other acts were given the shameful label of ‘a loathsome display of self admiration’. The second gig was reviewed by a different journalist who was very impressed by A Certain Ratio, but found Joy Division dull and unchallenging.

Disaster struck on the third night when Joy Division had to play with the Stranglers at the Rainbow before dashing back across London to the Moonlight. Bernard Sumner remembers: ‘When I look back now, we did some gigs that we shouldn’t have fucking done. He had a fit and went on and we did the Moonlight and he was really ill and he did
the gig. That was really stupid.’ The routine Ian had tried so hard to adhere to was severely disrupted. Lack of sleep and unusual hours destabilized his epilepsy and the fits became almost uncontrollable again. Ian was helped off stage after the fifth number, though this did not deter Neil Norman from writing that they deserved to be framed within the same context as the Velvet Underground and the Doors.

Tony Wilson was fortunate to be able to make that kind of observation. I don’t remember ever seeing Ian have a fit while on stage. It was only after his death that I found out how frequently this happened or that it even happened at all. I still feel that it was only by eliminating my presence that he had the freedom to work himself up into giving such a public display of his illness. It was allowed to become an expected part of Joy Division’s act and the more sick he became, the more the band’s popularity grew.

Terry Mason saw that Ian was suffering painful embarrassment at what was happening to him. The fit at the Moonlight was particularly violent, but even so the kids in the audience thought it was an integral part of the set. Later Ian sat slumped on the bottom of the staircase that led from the dressing room to the stage. Apparently his embarrassment was compounded when Annik was there.

The rest of the band came home for Easter, but Ian stayed in
London with Annik, returning on 7 April, Easter Monday. I had believed the story about staying down there to work on another project outside his Joy Division commitments and was slightly suspicious when he came home with his tail so obviously between his legs. We didn’t argue – I found his helplessness infuriating. He seemed able to surrender control of his life as if it was nothing to do with him at all.

That evening he came up to bed and announced that he had taken an overdose of Phenobarbitone. I called an ambulance and he was taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Again, I didn’t tell my family because I was afraid he would leave me for good. I decided that the best person to tell was Rob Gretton. I didn’t know how ill he had been over Easter and had no idea what prompted his suicide attempt. Whether it was a threat or a cry for help, I didn’t know how to help him. I thought maybe Rob could cancel some gigs and force Ian to stay at home and rest. He had left a suicide note. It said that there was ‘no need to fight now’ and to ‘give his love to Annik’.

Tony Wilson, his then wife Lindsay Reade and Alan Erasmus came to the house the next morning. Lindsay stayed to look after Natalie. I was too ignorant of the situation to be as distraught as I should have been. Lindsay says she noticed my strength at that time. I feel my detachment and state of shock was mistaken for stoicism, giving me an air of being too practical to comprehend the kind of suffering Ian was feeling. No one realized that, being left out in the cold, I was also very much in the dark. I hadn’t been allowed to gigs, so I hadn’t heard any of the songs written since
Unknown
Pleasures
– neither had I delved into Ian’s lyric sheets nor even been able to listen to a cassette tape. They may have pitied me for what I was going through, but they had no idea how it felt to suffer something and not know what it was.

Tony asked me if there was anything to drink. I thought it a strange request, but when Lindsay poured a small whisky it was handed to me. I felt too agitated to drink it, nobody seemed to be saying anything and although Tony took command, he seemed uneasy with the role. I watched him read Ian’s suicide note and put it in his 
pocket – perhaps for Annik, perhaps in order to remove any evidence.

Eventually Tony and Alan took me to the hospital to see Ian. I sat in the car with them while Tony explained to me that musicians were renowned for having a multitude of simultaneous relationships and it was something I would have to come to terms with. Tony even suggested that I look for someone else myself. I never understood why I was given that little lecture – it hadn’t been me who had just taken an overdose and as I discovered later it was Annik who Ian had been having problems with. I suppose Tony was guessing at events and reasons and trying to equate Ian’s problems with his own life. I thought that if I kept my head down and tried not to pressurize Ian he would come running back to me and our marriage. I hoped that what I thought was a deep friendship could revert to normal. Unwittingly, I was aiding the perpetuation of the myth that our marriage had been long over before the destructive policies of ‘the band’ began to erode and eat away into our relationship. The music business makes a jealous mistress and although Joy Division slipped easily into the role of family and friend, unfortunately for Ian none of the band could be his wife. Ian’s choice of Annik as concubine was disastrous as she was unable or unwilling to give him comfort after he’d had an epileptic fit. Her embarrassed rebuffs hurt him deeply.

Ian was seen by a psychiatrist during his overnight stay and was judged not to be suicidal. Lindsay drew a picture for Ian as he sat in the visiting room. Beneath it she quoted the words of David Hare: ‘There is no comfort. Our lives dismay us. We have dreams of leaving and it is the same for everyone I know.’

I’m sure we all have dreams of leaving at some time in our lives, but when we reach the bottom, most of us go running home. Where else is there when we need help? Yet Ian didn’t run to his friends or his family. At this stage, even his parents had no idea of his misery. I don’t possess enough fingers to count the number of hurt people who believe they could have helped if only he had approached them. He must have felt an acute sense of loneliness, a disabling inability to
communicate and surrender to treatment. How unhappy does one have to be before living seems worse than dying? It might have been useful if I had known that suicide was five times more common among epilepsy sufferers.

Tony insisted on speaking to Ian alone. I don’t know what was said, but Ian came home only to collect his clothes. He told me that the doctor had suggested he stay somewhere quiet, where there were no children. Although Ian’s medical records show him as being discharged to go home, he was taken to Tony’s cottage in Charlesworth, near Glossop. I was instructed by someone at Factory not to telephone him as he needed rest. That was easily done – I had not been given a contact number. My husband, my child’s father, had effectively been removed from our lives and we had no way of getting in touch with him.

Ian told Peter Hook about the overdose: ‘I was fucking pissed, just fucking around.’

There was no respite from touring. Ian went straight from his suicide attempt to a gig at Derby Hall, Bury, on 8 April 1980. Rob Gretton insisted that the gig went ahead even without Ian, who stood in the wings unable to sing. He told Lindsay Reade that he had a sensation of looking down on the gig and the band, and that it was all carrying on without him, which it was.

The band were torn between going on stage and calling the gig off, but a decision had to be made quickly. I doubt whether the outcome would have been any different if they had just packed up and sneaked out of the back door – although it might have alleviated the stress Ian was feeling.

The fury of the audience began to build up as Factory performed in a sort of rota, swapping around band members, and Ian sang only two numbers. Disgruntled fans began throwing things at the elaborate glass ceiling lights. The fragments rained down on the band so they went off stage, leaving the road-crew to try to protect the equipment. After two pint pots hit the stage, Rob Gretton launched himself into the crowd. Five people needed hospital treatment, including Twinny, Joy Division’s roadie, who was smashed over the head with a castellated pot while attempting to rescue Rob Gretton. Ironically, Factory Records had paid Harry Demac to make a four-track recording of the whole sorry pageant. When the shouting was over, Tony Wilson found Ian sitting upstairs in the side bar, crying. Tony consoled him by reminding him of the riot at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, when Lou Reed had refused to do an encore.

Sadly, Tony Wilson was still oblivious to the depth and nature of Ian’s depression. The only way to cheer Ian up momentarily was to equate him with one of his heroes. Ian was living in fairyland and in our own way we all helped him to stay there.

Tony didn’t spend much time at home during that week, but
before he left for work he placed pieces of blue paper in a volume of W. B. Yeats, so that Ian could refer to certain poems. It was Lindsay who had the unenviable task of looking after Ian. He ate mechanically and paid little attention to anything until she began to tell him of her interest in hypnotism. He responded to this idea and wanted to try it. He went under very easily, but unfortunately Lindsay had not had any instruction as to what to do once he was in a trance. She asked him how he felt and he replied that he felt confused.

Ian had already been hypnotized a couple of times by Bernard Sumner, who also found Ian a compliant subject. Bernard had quite long conversations with Ian while he was in this hypnotic state and one of them was recorded on a cassette. Ian had brought it home for me to listen to on a borrowed cassette player. Although the words were mumbled and quiet, Ian insisted that each time he was hypnotized he had regressed to a previous life and for those few minutes, Ian believed he was an old man on his death bed.

On 11 April 1980, when Joy Division played the reopened Factory Club, it was the first time I had seen Ian since he had gone to live with Tony Wilson. The brawl in Bury had panicked Rob Gretton into arranging back-up protection for the entourage. His friends Korky and Robo, who were bouncers at Chequers Disco in Altrincham, were drafted in to help. (They eventually became the Haçienda’s first bouncers.) To Terry Mason Ian appeared unruffled, if a little apologetic, as it had been Terry and Twinnie who had suffered most at the previous gig.

The atmosphere was strained, but Ian did make an effort. He sat with me and bought me a few drinks. All the same, nothing was said about what had happened or how long he intended to stay at Tony’s. It was crowded in the bar and I had hoped for a more intimate meeting, but after a short while it was time for him to join the rest of the band.

When he left, I began to talk to the other girls. No one had rung me to see how I was – I suppose because they were embarrassed. Yet now they began to tell me what had happened in London while
Closer
was being recorded. It was then I found out that while Ian had
allowed me to worry about money and accommodation, two flats had been booked. The majority had been squashed in one flat, while Ian and Annik enjoyed the luxury of space for themselves. I was told he behaved in an obsequious manner towards her and she in turn ordered him about like an obedient little dog. I had a few more drinks and by the end of the set I was beside myself with jealousy, humiliation and anger. To say I was miserable is to put it mildly.