Fifty years after forming in Manchester, Joy Division has maintained a distinct sound, their pulsating bass lines, propulsive drums, high-fret guitar melodies, and baritone vocals continuing to reverberate throughout pop culture, post-punk music, and beyond. All the while, frontman Ian Curtis has lingered in his fans\u2019 memories as a 23-year-old with piercingly melancholic eyes and a tucked-in button-down shirt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a tragic story behind Ian Curtis, and that gets talked about a lot\u2014but he was also just a young man who was funny, personable, and communicated with fans,\u201d Mat Bancroft<\/a>, curator of the British Pop Archive<\/a> at the John Rylands Library\u2014part of the University of Manchester\u2014tells Vogue. Bancroft, of course, is referring to Curtis\u2019s death by suicide in 1980, just days before the band\u2019s first American tour, after a tumultuous battle with epilepsy amid the band\u2019s meteoric rise to fame. But a new exhibition in New York, \u201cIan Curtis: Insight\u201d at Voltz Clarke Gallery, is not about his untimely death; it centers instead on Curtis\u2019s creative process, gathering handwritten lyrics, letters, archival photographs, and band-related ephemera\u2014none of which have ever been exhibited stateside before. The show arrives just days after what would have been Curtis\u2019s 70th birthday.<\/p>\n \u201cInsight\u201d begins with a handwritten letter to Joy Division\u2019s manager, Rob Gretton, in which Curtis expresses his displeasure with Closer, the band\u2019s critically acclaimed second album (\u201cI decree that this LP is a disaster\u201d), along with other general frustrations. Across the room is an earnest response to a letter from a fan named Helen Wilson. In it, Curtis not only apologizes for his delayed reply but also updates her on the tracks the band was recording at the time and hints at new songs they would soon perform live.<\/p>\n But the true through line in the curation comes from pages of Curtis\u2019s handwritten lyrics for Unknown Pleasures and Closer\u2014displayed in tracklist order\u2014his block lettering painstakingly precise. \u201cWe\u2019ve got so much material in the archive where we don\u2019t know exactly what they\u2019re connected to\u2014are they unpublished songs, poems, or ideas? Are they stories, or is he just making notes?\u201d says Bancroft. \u201cSo what we\u2019ve tried to select in this exhibition are works where we definitely know it\u2019s the lyric or a working lyric.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifty years after forming in Manchester, Joy Division has maintained a distinct sound, their pulsating bass lines, propulsive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,65041,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-499202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-musician","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}