On the 70th Birthday of Ian Curtis and the Calendar of Saints

Today, July 15th, is the seventieth birthday of Ian Curtis. And the outpouring of remembrance by the post-punk world has been great. A young man who lived only to the age of twenty-three has unintentionally influenced many decades of music and subculture. His words, voice, and story have touched the hearts of millions. Curtis’s private, internal struggles and desires have been laid bare in film, video, and print. His immediate world has become a place of pilgrimage for fans around the world.

Most likely, he would have hated all of this.

Instead, his inner circle of family and friends, which include his bandmates, have shouldered (to various degrees) the public burden.

It is human to love saints, even if we don’t call them saints. They may not be “holy” in the religious sense, but we make them holy, we make them distinct from the profane, the every day. We make these individuals different and then we associate ourselves with them. In a strange way, we make ourselves the same as them. We don’t want to be them, but we want to emphasize ourselves that are like them, that aspire to be like them, these saints. Saints are kind of heroes.

For many devotees of Joy Division, Ian Curtis is a kind of hero. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike is the authority on this, having written two books about Curtis fandom. I think it’s wrong to see him as a savior, though his lyrics have saved more than a few people. He’s no martyr, though immediately after his death one music writer, seized by the moment, claimed he was. And it’s inaccurate and unfair to Curtis to consider him as one. He was no prophet. The irony is that Curtis, having a school-age encounter with Anglicanism, would have known well what it meant to be a savior, a martyr, a saint, a prophet. In fact, saviors would appear in Warsaw’s “Leaders of Men” and saints and martyrs in Joy Division’s “Wilderness”. The unknown martyrs “had tears in their eyes.” A prophet lay dead in “Interzone”. Now, it is devotees of Curtis who cry.

Religion is hard to define, technically. People may say that they despise religion or more specifically “organized” religion. But people organize themselves religiously in other ways. Identity markers, devotional practices and rituals, special gathering places, shrines and pilgrimages, ideals and aspirations. Hope, faith, and love. Prayers. Manchester City and United fans know all about this. There are plenty of saints to go around.

The natural enemy of a hagiographer is a saint’s mother, for she knows her child like no other.

Hagiographers and historians are different species entirely. The memoirists… well… They tell a different story.

Both Curtis’s wife and mother remark that Ian was born on St. Swithin’s Day, the feast day of a medieval English bishop. The day has cultural cache because it functions like the American Groundhog’s Day.

St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain.
St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain nae mare.

His mother recalled that it did not rain the day he was born.

St. Swithin’s Day means nothing to most people but Curtis’s birth means a lot. There is the axis of July 15th and May 18th, his birth and death, and in between, every significant Joy Division event. There is a kind of Joy Division calendar, whose dates shine brighter as we are reaching the half-century mark for the beginnings of punk and post-punk. Joy Division’s calendar is a function of the calendar of rock n’ roll. Each subculture has its own tradition that accounts for its luminaries.

In our secularizing world, saints don’t mean so much. But our rock stars do, especially as we age and tether ourselves to the formative soundtracks and mixtapes of our youth. The calendars are for us, not for them. We demarcate ourselves as such, discern and find our subcultures.

Youth is wasted on the young, of course. And then there are those, like Ian Curtis, who remain young eternally. Joy Division could not continue without Curtis and became New Order, which is now decades old, and has split, as families do. But Joy Division shall forever remain intact – even for those who were not there at the beginning.

Time becomes a flat circle that way, with the way that we listen to the bands that make us. The thing about a calendar is that it always start again, strange ouroboros that it is. And we are made young again forever.