Rewind to
Autumn Fall 2005. It's Sunday night; I rock up to apartment 3a in the Lower East Side to hang out and pick up a camera (for a
photo project) I walk into what was then the living room to find myself staring at a huge
rasterised poster on
one wall. It's a striking - and familiar - image, and at some point during the evening it becomes clear that it's
Joy Division (if there's one thing I got from New York, it was a musical education; my knowledge was pretty limited before I moved there). Later on, I look up JD, listen to them, realise I actually know a bunch of their songs - just never realised who they were by. I listen again. And again. And slowly Joy Division become one of my favourite, most-listened to bands.
Fast forward to - well, now. The lyrics I've used to title this post couldn't feel more apt: London is grinding me down, the seemingly neverending job hunt is so depressing and dispiriting, the temp job I'm at is doing my head in. It's time for an escape.
Friday we drive up North, via the old
Alma Mater for a brief pit stop (quite odd going back there), then across to the
Peak District, where I'm visiting my oldest friend who now lives in Buxton. As we're eating dinner, she asks if there's anything in particular I'd like to do that weekend.
Well, I say,
now you mention it...Saturday comes and the driving rain of the night before has disappeared, though the wind tries to rip the car door off its hinges as I open it. We drive across the Peaks to the next big town over,
Macclesfield, hometown of
Ian Curtis, Joy Division's tortured lead singer, who committed suicide at the age of 23, in 1980.
As we drive through the cemetery gates, a part of me feels a bit odd about this. I'd talked to my friend Dan about the possibility of visiting the grave before I came, my doubts about it - but as he said, What else are pilgrimages? We park and look at the map of the graveyard as I'd read that Curtis's stone was the only one actually mentioned on the map. It isn't. His is a small kerbstone marker... one among very many. We walk around the cemetery for about half an hour - and of course it ends up being ten feet from where we'd parked (if only we'd circled the cemetery anti-clockwise..!)
I stand in front of it, not sure what to do or how to feel. Others have left small trinkets - some daffodils, a plastic windmill, even a box of cigarettes and a lighter. There's a tupperware tub there as well, which I'd read about on a memorial website; the author had opened it out of curiosity to find birthday cards to Ian, with the top one being from his mother. I don't touch it, it feels like it would be too intrusive. My kind friend, the non-Joy Division person, is starting to get cold and doesn't quite understand why I wanted to come here in the first place - and to be honest, I'm not sure I can even explain it myself.
There's a strange feeling, caught somewhere between my stomach and throat, as I stand there. That someone with that much potential has become a small stone marker, bedecked with plastic toys. We turn and head back to the car, and on the drive home I plug my ipod into her car stereo and play Joy Division to her ("Oh I know these songs", she says) and the feeling won't quite fade, but as the music fills the car and we drive through the old mining town and landscapes that formed the music, it morphs slowly into a sad kind of happiness and I realise that my friend Dan was right, that this was a pilgrimage of sorts, and that they don't always have to be religious. Sometimes they're just about a brilliant band that affects your life.
