But when the music swelled, he’d fling his arms in quick upper cuts and scuttle to and from the microphone, appearing bewildered by his own movements. When Curtis delivered his poetry of powerlessness and confusion in that blocky, proletarian baritone, he transformed into something like a possessed everyman, a street-corner prophet.Ĭurtis would step onto the stage in a button-down tucked into pleated pants, as though arriving straight from the Macclesfield employment exchange, the day job he kept to support his wife and baby daughter.
The lyrics were the seat of his vision, which alchemized with sound to unmistakable effect. At some point he tried his hand at fiction as well, but it’s hard to imagine Curtis’s words as freestanding narrative, unanchored in music. Blue carpet, blue walls, and a blue sofa, upon which Curtis would sit with cigarette and notebook. When he and his wife moved into their home in Macclesfield, they immediately refurbished a room as his writing space. His lyrics reference Gogol (“Dead Souls”), Kafka (“Colony”), Burroughs (“Interzone”). Those who knew Curtis say that he would have been a writer if it weren’t for the band. This is antithetical to Curtis’s style - and partly why a book like So This Is Permanence, the most comprehensive collection of his writing to date, can be published in the year 2014 with reasonable expectation of meeting interest. This isn’t to say that “sods” is an inherently silly word, but rather that it’s slangy and casual, a Britishism that affixes the lyrics to a particular place. The words for “Novelty,” an early Joy Division track, were written by Peter Hook, the band’s bassist, and it’s funny to hear a line like “You’ll just fall behind like all the other sods” sung by Curtis. Notable extracts from his lyrical vocabulary: “life,” “time,” “feeling,” “sensation,” “isolation,” “control,” “failure,” “stranger,” “blood sport,” “obtained.” The language tends toward loaded ideas, clinical terminology. The three other members had their instruments Curtis had words, and they were notoriously dense.
What Curtis said is central to the Joy Division story. The austerity forces attention on what’s being said and the fact of it’s being said. In the lower registers, the young frontman sounds like a bad opera singer, and you can hear the effort it costs him to get the notes out. Personified, it would be a Freudian father figure or a mid-level bureaucrat. Should it have a color, it would be UPS brown. But Curtis’s voice is a blunt instrument. This sort of reflexive thinking is hard to come by when listening to, say, Whitney Houston, whose vocal gymnastics make “why” or “what for” seem beside the point. TO LISTEN to Ian Curtis sing is to wonder why we sing at all.
0 kommentar(er)
