Sublime

There were four in Joy Division – Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – but Ian was their eyes and ears: it was he who propelled them into uncharted territory – songs like ‘Dead Souls’ which, cold as the grave, has the infinity of a Gustave Doré hell.

When you’re young, death often isn’t part of your world. When Ian Curtis committed suicide in May 1980, it was the first time that many of us had had to encounter death: the result was a shock so profound that it has become an unresolved trauma, a rupture in Manchester’s social history which has persisted through the city’s worldwide promotion as