September 16, 2025 • 26 mins
This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
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Some stories begin in triumph,but end in silence. A young man, too fragile for the weight he carried, tried to be everything at once—artist, husband, father, lover, worker. And when his own body turned against him,the stones became unbearable. His band was on the brink of conquering the world.
The future stretched wide before him. But the very success others called salvation
felt like a sentence. This is the story of innocence crushed, and a final transmission that still echoes today.
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some stories begin in triumph,but end in silence. A young man, too fragile for the weight he carried, tried to be everything at once—artist, husband, father, lover, worker. And when his own body turned against him,the stones became unbearable. His band was on the brink of conquering the world.
The future stretched wide before him. But the very success others called salvation
felt like a sentence. This is the story of innocence crushed, and a final transmission that still echoes today.
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's
Dead Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Some lives don't end,
They collapse, one responsibility at a time, one promise at
a time, one body at a time. A boy opens
a book and thinks he's found a friend, a gentle
(00:22):
soul who cannot survive in a brutal world. He doesn't
know it yet, but he's reading his own future. A
band opens a door and thinks they found an escape,
a way out of grace, guys and empty paychecks. And
they don't know it yet, but they invited the storm inside.
This is a story about weight, A weight of a career,
a weight of a marriage and fatherhood, a weight of
(00:44):
desire you can't silence, a weight of a disease that
doesn't ask for permission, and what happens when all of it.
Every stone is hung on a single thinning thread, a
single note not sung but transmitted, Low, heavy, unforgettable. This
is Script ten, the final transmission, Act one. The first stones.
(01:08):
The van rattles like it's held together with chewing gum
and desperation. A station wagon with more miles than money,
tires humming against the wet roadway. The smell inside is
of men's sweat, leather jackets, and spilled blogger. Inside four
young men are half buzzed, half broke, but fully alive.
The guitarist chain smokes, the drummer taps out rhythms on
(01:28):
his knees, the bassis snores in the back, and the singer,
he's hunched over the dome light a battered paperback open
on his knees. The guitarist snatches it. Ah, well is
this den drummer squinting at the cover, Ah, a ay, yeah,
well fuck me finally some truth? Is this about you? Dan?
The van erupts in laughter, singer flat but cutting. It's
(01:49):
dosed to. It's dosed of eski, guitarist mocking posh oh,
dost of escue lads look at him. A poet ayat
singer snatching it back. It innocence about being too pure
for the world to eat you alive. Prince Michigan too kind,
loves too much, has epilepsy. Oh it is about you? Well,
here's your book back, your majesty? Should I cutsy? The
(02:12):
laughter finally falters, the rain thickens, the book lies open again.
A prophecy disguised as a paperback. The band hadn't started
with books, It started with fire. June nineteen seventy six,
the Sex Pistols storm Manchester. Forty kids in a hall,
and half of them foreigned bands the very next day.
Among them these boys, they weren't musicians yet, they weren't artists.
(02:35):
They were just kids with hunger in their bellies and
rage in their bones. The Pistols proved you didn't need polish,
you didn't need permission, You only needed nerve. Noise could
be a weapon, and if you wielded it right, noise
could change everything. So they picked up secondhand instruments, cut
their fingers on guitar strings that didn't stay in tune.
They borrowed amps, played in basements, scribbled names on walls.
(02:57):
They called themselves Warsaw. The sound wasn't clean, it wasn't perfect,
but it was theirs. Their city wasn't doing them many
favors either. They played in Manchester, which was broken, factories closing,
men lining up for work that no longer existed, public housing,
crumbling street lamps flickering on streets that felt forgotten. The
music that surrounded them was bloated. Pompous, prog rock, dinosaurs,
(03:21):
glam stars, dripping with sequins, irrelevant to kids eating cold
beans in a dark kitchen while their parents fought in
the next room. Warsaw was an entertainment. It was survival
of the fittest, and it was a reflection of the
rock sharpened into sound, and the middle of it. The
singer stood apart, a boy that carried Dustovski's The Idiot,
the Russian novel with him everywhere, while others carried bottles.
(03:44):
This boy, he already felt the weight of the world
pressing down on him. Picture it a basement pub ceiling
too low, damp, soaking the walls, The amps buzz before
they play a single note. The crowd is half curious,
half hostile. Then then they start his jagged, relentless, minimal,
a machine just learning to breathe. And at the mic
(04:05):
there singer, eyes down, voice low, words spilling like confessions
torn from a diary. As he sung dance, Dance, Dance, Dance,
Dance to the radio, his body did the opposite. It
didn't dance, It convulsed. It convulsed in spasms. The crowd shifts, unsettled.
They've never heard anything like this. Later that night, the
(04:25):
singer sits at the kitchen table. The house is cold,
the wallpaper old and peeling. The kettle hisses but doesn't boil. Upstairs,
a baby stirs on the table. The Idiot open passages
underlined on the page. Prince Michigan caesars, his kindness mistaken
for weakness, his love punished by the world. The singer
whispers into the quiet, I'll carry it, all of it,
(04:48):
the music, words, family, the weight, all of it. The
city groans outside. The first stones have already been placed
on his shoulders. He doesn't yet feel how heavy they'll become.
Act too, how the sound found its voice. The Idiot
a Russian novel written a century earlier, but it could
have been written yesterday for this young man. Prince Michigan, epileptic,
(05:12):
kind too pure for the world he walked in. He
tries to love, he tries to forgive, He tries to
remain gentle in a society sharpened with knives. But the
world doesn't reward innocence. It devours it, It mocks it,
it punishes it until a good man crumbles. And now
another boy in another century, under another collapsing sky, read
those pages and seized prophecy, not just a story, a warning.
(05:37):
The man is beginning to take shape, not just in songs,
but in sound. Where others filled every bar with noise,
they left silence. Where others rap songs in decoration, they
stripped them bare. Every note was purposeful, every gap deliberate.
It was minimal, mechanical, a sound like factory walls, breathing
like machinery that had learned sorrow. It was punk, yes,
(05:59):
but it was colder, sharper. It wasn't rebellion for fun.
It was rebellion for necessity. They found their accent, and
once you heard it, you couldn't mistake it for anyone else.
The Stones multiply. The sound is theirs, but sound alone
doesn't pay rent Stone one money shows pay in cash
that vanishes by morning, petrol cigarettes, a few pints, nothing
(06:22):
left for the family waiting at home by daylight. He
is no front man. He's just another face behind a
desk at the unemployment office, handing out forms, ticking boxes,
dealing with men older than him, bitter from factory closures,
staring at him like he's part of the machine that
ground them down. Stone two home at night, the baby
cries his wife paces the floor alone while he is
(06:44):
miles away in a van that smells like unshowered twenty
something men. After the show, the absence grows louder than
any guitar. Stone three Expectation. Fanzines write about them, Strangers
whisper their name in pubs. A promoter hands out of
contract talking about tours, singles, futures. Belief is flattering until
(07:05):
you realize belief is just another form of debt. Stone
four Division. The band rehearses every night. The music grows, tightens, sharpens,
But every chord struck in the rehearsal room is a
chord not struck at home. His two lives split wider,
the crack impossible to close the van again, Rain streaks
the windows, The road is endless. The drummer smacks rhythms
(07:28):
on the dashboard, the guitars hums, rifts into the dark
and in the corner. The singer writes in his notebook,
not jokes, not set lists, fragments of despair, images of death,
lines too heavy for his age. The pressure in the
van isn't just from the miles. It's from all the
stones being stacked one by one onto his shoulders. A
(07:49):
kitchen at midnight. A wife stands with her arms folded,
baby balanced on her hip. Her eyes are dark with exhaustion.
You'll never hear, she says, desperately. The singer stands in
the doorway, jacket, still smelling of cigarettes and beer. He
doesn't argue, he doesn't apologize. He just looks at the floor.
In another room, the idiot lies open. Prince Michigan, gentle
(08:12):
and Doom, stares back from the page. He knows the feeling.
The band had found its voice. But with each new note,
with every step forward, the stones grow heavier, and the
boy carrying them was already starting to stagger. Act three
the band gets a new name. Next Act three, the
(08:38):
band gets a new name. The name Warsaw was short lived.
They changed it not for vanity, not for fashion, simply
another band had claimed it first. They wanted something colder,
something that tasted of steel, something that captured the times,
both the cities collapse and their own sharp new sound.
Joy Division, a name torn from the darkest chapters of
(08:59):
history of Nazi concentration camps. It was controversial, disturbing, and deliberate.
They weren't here to be safe, They were here to unsettle,
to haunt to last. The lineup was set Bernard's Sumner
on guitar and keyboards, Peter Hook on bass, his instrument
pushed high onto his chest. It sounded cutting like machinery.
(09:19):
Stephen Morris on drums, precise, mechanical and relentless, and at
the center Ian Curtis frontman, poet prophet, awkward and angular, untrained.
But when he opened his mouth, when the band locked
in around him, rooms froze. They signed the Factory Records,
a local label with vision bigger than its budget. There
(09:41):
was no glamour, no champagne contracts. There was just freedom.
There was belief, and belief is gasoline for young men
with guitars. They recorded songs stripped to their bones. Basslines
that rattle like a machine gun, drums like a heartbeat,
pressed through steel. Lyrics like confessions scratched into concrete. Ian's voyie, dark,
smoky baritone, more chest than head voice, velvet at low volume,
(10:05):
turns grainy when he leans in, and it worked. Unknown
Pleasures arrived in nineteen seventy nine, a debut album dressed
in black, its cover an image of pulsar waves that
looked like a heart monitor flat lining. It didn't storm
the charts overnight. It wasn't built for radio gloss, but
it spread hand to hand, club the club, word of mouth,
whispering like gospel. The buzz was undeniable. Reviewers wrote of
(10:29):
a band unlike any other. Fans followed them from town
to town. Their shows became rituals. Not poe going and spitting,
but a strange, reverent silence. Audience hypnotized, almost afraid to
break the spell. Imagine you're there. The band takes the stage,
no fanfare, no chatter, just sound. Hook's bassline snarls, Sumner's
(10:50):
guitar slices, Morse's drums pound like pistons and Ian Curtis.
He grabs the mic, stand his body jerking like a
marionette caught in a storm. His v is low, commanding
and devastating. The crowd is silent, then erupting. You realize
you're not just at a gig, You're inside a moment
that will be remembered. The singles began to climb transmission.
(11:13):
She's lost control, Love will tear us apart, not just songs,
anthems for a generation drowning in uncertainty. The music press
took notice they put Ian's haunted stare on their covers.
They wrote about the band like they were not just
rising stars, but saviors of post punk. And behind the
ink and the photos, contracts, bigger venues, wider audiences, the
(11:35):
promise of money, tours in America. America the ultimate test
for a band from the UK, the land of opportunity,
where bands either broke big or broke apart. And for
the band, it was the dream, the next step, the
proof that their strange, icy sound could reach across oceans.
For the fans, it was vindication, a band born from
(11:56):
the rubble of Manchester now ready to conquer the world.
But for Ian Curtis, it was just another stone. Success
is intoxicating for some, but for others it's suffocating. Every
new fan met another soul depending on him. Every new
contract meant another promise he wasn't sure he could keep.
Every page of praise was another reminder that expectations were
(12:18):
now higher than ever for the world. Joy Division's rise
was good news for Ian Curtis, like a page torn
from Dustowski. Good news meant tragedy was waiting on the
next page. Act four, The weight of the Stones. Next
(12:42):
Act four, the weight of the stones. The applause was
still echoing, the review still glowing, the contracts still drying
in fresh ink. From the outside, everything looked golden. Joy
Division were on the brink. Success had finally arrived. But
on the inside, Ian Curtis was breaking upon art Stone
One husband and father in the Idiot Prince Mishkin tries
(13:05):
to love purely. He offers his heart with innocence, but
innocence is no shield against reality. Ian had promised the
same marriage, fatherhood, devotion. But purity doesn't pay the bills.
Piety doesn't wake up at five am to go to
a dead end job. Innocence doesn't change diapers. Kindness doesn't
quite a crying child at three in the morning when
(13:26):
you're hundreds of miles away. Deborah, his wife, furious holding
the baby. Ian, You'll never hear. I'm raising her on
my own while you're playing fucking rockstar. Ian quiet, eyes
on the floor. But I'm doing this for us, Deba,
for us, for her. But every time he left, another
piece of him stayed behind. Michigan's tragedy was his love
(13:48):
destroyed the very women he wanted to save. Ian's tragedy
was beginning to rhyme. Stone two The Affair. Prince Mischkin
is torn between two women, one fragile, kind, the other
fiery and destructive. He tries to love them both, but
in doing so, he ruins them both. E meets Annik,
a Belgian journalist and music promoter, a woman who saw
(14:11):
his fragility, who listened like the world never had. She
became refuge, tenderness, an escape from the world of expectation.
But love is not refuge when it split in two.
What feels like salvation to one woman becomes betrayal to another.
Ian was no longer just divided between stage and home.
He was divided between two hearts, and just like Michigan,
(14:33):
he was doomed to hurt them both. Stone three, The Disease.
Prince Mischkan's innocence is marked by his seizures. His fits
terrify those around him, make him appear weak, turn his
kindness into a spectacle. Ian's epilepsy did the same on stage.
His body spasm, jerked, and collapsed. Fans thought it was
part of the performance until the convulsions didn't stop. The
(14:56):
medication dulled him, the exhaustion hollowed him. The disease mocked him.
Every seizure was another reminder his own body was his enemy,
and in the Idiot, Dustovsky had already written his fate,
a man destroyed not by evil, but by fragility. Stone four, America,
the band was buzzing. America was next. For some, it
(15:19):
was salvation. For Ian it was just another sentence. How
could he leave his wife and child? How could he
abandon Annik and his epilepsy Grandma? Seizures were coming more frequently,
two or three times a week. How could his body
survive the pace, the seizures, the glare of lights that
might kill him. For the band, the US tour was deliverance.
(15:40):
For Ian, it was exile. Prince Michigan's downfall came not
in one act, but in the endless tug of war
between what the world demanded and what his fragile soul
could give. Ian's path was tracing the same line. The
applause was still there. The fans still believed. The world
thought joy Division was unstoppable. But Ian Curtis wasn't unstoppable.
(16:03):
He was just a man, a husband, father, lover, a
fragile body in rebellion against itself, and just like Michigan,
He was carrying the impossible weight of being both too
human and too pure for the world that demanded everything
from him. The paradise was a cage, and the lock
was turning. To quote Ian's words from joy Division Song Decades.
(16:25):
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders.
Here are the young men? Well, where have they been?
We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber. Pushed
to the limit, we dragged ourselves in. At five decades
of Stones, Next, at five decades of Stones, Night falls
(16:52):
like a verdict. The suitcases open on the bed, half
packed and half accusing. Shirts folded with the care of
someone trying to control roll what can't be controlled. Paper
stacked like commandments. Tour America. Now the house is too
quiet for a house. Every tick of the clock is
a reminder that time isn't on your side. It's a
(17:14):
metronome for promises you can't keep. On the turntable, A
needle drops, Iggy pops, The Idiot rises from the speakers,
Iggy's debut from nineteen seventy seven, name for Dostoivsky's novel,
where the Rocker explores human vulnerability and disconnection. Cold skeletal hypnotic.
(17:34):
The selection is not random, deliberate, not catharsis not comfort.
A mirror with a pulse. He sits on the floor,
cross legged. The record spins, He flips it. It spins again.
The music doesn't soothe. It names things. It names dread,
It names fate, It names the corridor he's walking. The
(17:56):
stones array themselves around him like a jury. Stone one,
career joy division is no longer a rumor. It's a responsibility.
Stone two. Husband and father upstairs. There is a small
room where milk once warmed in a bottle at three
oh seven a m where a tiny hand gripped his
finger as if it could anchor the world. He promised devotion,
(18:18):
then traded weeks for shows. He knows this. Knowing isn't
the same as being there. Stone three The affair. Annex's
tenderness was his oxygen. But love doesn't duplicate cleanly. Two
truths can be true and still break each other. He
hates himself on Thursday and needs her on Fridays, and
calls that balance. Stone four. The disease. Light can bite,
(18:44):
sound can tilt the floor, mid song can become mid seizure,
pill slow the mind. He needs to write the words
the world now needs from him. He's twenty three and
negotiating with his own nervous system like it's a hostile state,
Stone five, America. The itinerary on the table is a
ladder with missing wrongs. To some, it's salvation. To him,
(19:07):
it's a test he can't pass without betraying someone. He loves,
his wife and child if he goes the band, if
he doesn't, his body, if he tries on the shelf
a battered paperback. Dostoyevsky's The Idiot Prince Mischkin tries to
love everyone and destroys himself in the attempt. His seizures
make him seem holly to some, broken to others, but
(19:30):
they don't make him less human. They make him more
fragile in a world that doesn't slow down for fragile.
May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, the night before the American tour,
He's in his home alone. The walls feel too close,
the silence pressing in outside. The street lamps glow weakly
(19:51):
through the dirty window. Upstairs, a suitcase waits, half packed,
as if he couldn't decide whether to finish it or
abandon it. Downstairs, the turntable spins Iggy pops the idiot.
The needle crackles before the music takes hold. Throbbing low
alien Ian pours a drink, takes a swallow, stares at
(20:14):
the glass like it might answer him. The pen moves
across the page, stops, moves again. The words aren't lyrics.
They're fragments of an apology, please for forgiveness, a confession
without an audience. He whispers them under his breath, reading
them back as though he's testing their weight. He stands, restless,
(20:37):
paces the room, runs his hand through his hair, sits again,
writes another line, crumples it, lights another cigarette. The astray
is already overflowing. He's in the kitchen now. The room
smells like dirty dishes and use baby bottles. The hum
of the refrigerator is the only sound between songs. He
(20:57):
leans against the counter, eyes close, mouthing words silently. His
body twitches slightly, the aftershock of another seizure. He steadies
himself on the counter, shaking his head as if to
scatter the thoughts, but they only return heavier. He climbs
the stairs slowly, as though each step weighs double. The
(21:18):
house groans with the sound of old wood under his feet.
At the top, he pauses, listening to the faint noises outside,
birds stirring, the world about to wake In the bedroom,
he stops again, looks at the photographs on the dresser,
his wife, his daughter. He touches the frame, fingers trembling,
(21:41):
then sets it back down. He slowly goes back down
the steps. Each step rings like a verdict, cold, heavy breath,
a borrowed coin, hard hammers, courage, splinters, names floodback, time thins,
silence presses, the inevitable is inescapable. Iggy Pop sings, Baby,
(22:02):
don't you cry, Baby, I'll sing you a lullaby. We
are walking down the street of chance, where the chance
is always slim or none, and the intentions unjust. Baby,
there's nothing to see. I've already been down the street
of chance. He fetches a length of rope. He chooses
(22:23):
the beam above the kitchen, ties it carefully, deliberately. There's
no rush. Each knot is precise, practiced, as if he's
rehearsed this moment in his head countless times. The record
player keeps spinning. The song ends, The needle clicks into silence. Click,
click click. He places the note within sight, takes one
(22:47):
last look around the room, walls that have held his secrets,
air that has carried his smoke, silence that has been
his only companion, and then steps forward. The house exhales
a long, final silence. There's no struggle, no outcry, just calm.
(23:12):
The kind of tranquility that feels permanent outside the street
remains ordinary. Milk bottles clink on porches, birds sing, a
car engine coughs, the life the world goes on indifferent
inside the needle. At the end of the idiot clicks again,
click click click. By morning he is gone. At only
(23:39):
twenty three, Ian Curtis has silenced himself forever. Act six,
Ian Curtis The Epilogue. Next Act six, The Epilogue of
Ian Curtis. By morning, the news has already spread. The
(24:02):
words roll through the city like thunder that doesn't stop.
He's gone. For the band, it's devastation. They've been just
days away from flying to America, from proving that their strange,
icy sound could hypnotize a continent. Now there's only absence,
only shock, only guilt that no one could put into words.
Not long after his death, their second album arrived, closer
(24:27):
even the name felt like prophecy. The cover a photograph
of a tomb shot ears earlier, chosen before Ian's final act,
and now it looked like fate had signed the artwork itself.
Every song sounded like a requem, every lyric like a farewell,
and it was not an album anymore. It was a
marble headstone with grooves carved into its surface. The remaining
(24:51):
members grieved and then reassembled. They renamed themselves new order.
They chose light where there had been shadows, movement where
there had been stillness, dance where there had been dirge.
They found success. But no matter how high their sins climbed,
the low pulse of joy Division's baseline still haunted the corners,
a ghost built into every note. And dous Stowsky's novel
(25:15):
Prince Michigan is undone, not by cruelty, but by his
own purity in the world that weaponized it. He's epileptic,
he's loving, he's kind, and he cannot survive. Ian Curtis
lived the same script. The seizures, the divided love, the
purity of words that carried too much weight, the innocence
mistaken for strength when in truth it was fragility. Both
(25:38):
men were consumed. Both left behind silence that spoke louder
than their presence. Ian Curtis was only twenty three when
the stones crushed him, but in the short span of
years he had he carved a sound that still echoes.
Every band that followed, every singer with words too heavy
for their age, every bassline that rattled like machinery, every
(25:59):
lyric that confessed more than a concealed owed a debt
to joy division. He became a myth, a frozen photograph.
But myths are just men, and men carry weights. Ian
Curtis carried too many. Some souls are too pure for
the weight of the world. I hope you enjoyed Script ten,
(26:22):
the final transmission the story of Ian Curtis. This has
been Johnny's Dead Air podcast. I'm Johnny Hartwell, thank you
so much for listening.
And welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's
Dead Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Some lives don't end,
They collapse, one responsibility at a time, one promise at
a time, one body at a time. A boy opens
a book and thinks he's found a friend, a gentle
(00:22):
soul who cannot survive in a brutal world. He doesn't
know it yet, but he's reading his own future. A
band opens a door and thinks they found an escape,
a way out of grace, guys and empty paychecks. And
they don't know it yet, but they invited the storm inside.
This is a story about weight, A weight of a career,
a weight of a marriage and fatherhood, a weight of
(00:44):
desire you can't silence, a weight of a disease that
doesn't ask for permission, and what happens when all of it.
Every stone is hung on a single thinning thread, a
single note not sung but transmitted, Low, heavy, unforgettable. This
is Script ten, the final transmission, Act one. The first stones.
(01:08):
The van rattles like it's held together with chewing gum
and desperation. A station wagon with more miles than money,
tires humming against the wet roadway. The smell inside is
of men's sweat, leather jackets, and spilled blogger. Inside four
young men are half buzzed, half broke, but fully alive.
The guitarist chain smokes, the drummer taps out rhythms on
(01:28):
his knees, the bassis snores in the back, and the singer,
he's hunched over the dome light a battered paperback open
on his knees. The guitarist snatches it. Ah, well is
this den drummer squinting at the cover, Ah, a ay, yeah,
well fuck me finally some truth? Is this about you? Dan?
The van erupts in laughter, singer flat but cutting. It's
(01:49):
dosed to. It's dosed of eski, guitarist mocking posh oh,
dost of escue lads look at him. A poet ayat
singer snatching it back. It innocence about being too pure
for the world to eat you alive. Prince Michigan too kind,
loves too much, has epilepsy. Oh it is about you? Well,
here's your book back, your majesty? Should I cutsy? The
(02:12):
laughter finally falters, the rain thickens, the book lies open again.
A prophecy disguised as a paperback. The band hadn't started
with books, It started with fire. June nineteen seventy six,
the Sex Pistols storm Manchester. Forty kids in a hall,
and half of them foreigned bands the very next day.
Among them these boys, they weren't musicians yet, they weren't artists.
(02:35):
They were just kids with hunger in their bellies and
rage in their bones. The Pistols proved you didn't need polish,
you didn't need permission, You only needed nerve. Noise could
be a weapon, and if you wielded it right, noise
could change everything. So they picked up secondhand instruments, cut
their fingers on guitar strings that didn't stay in tune.
They borrowed amps, played in basements, scribbled names on walls.
(02:57):
They called themselves Warsaw. The sound wasn't clean, it wasn't perfect,
but it was theirs. Their city wasn't doing them many
favors either. They played in Manchester, which was broken, factories closing,
men lining up for work that no longer existed, public housing,
crumbling street lamps flickering on streets that felt forgotten. The
music that surrounded them was bloated. Pompous, prog rock, dinosaurs,
(03:21):
glam stars, dripping with sequins, irrelevant to kids eating cold
beans in a dark kitchen while their parents fought in
the next room. Warsaw was an entertainment. It was survival
of the fittest, and it was a reflection of the
rock sharpened into sound, and the middle of it. The
singer stood apart, a boy that carried Dustovski's The Idiot,
the Russian novel with him everywhere, while others carried bottles.
(03:44):
This boy, he already felt the weight of the world
pressing down on him. Picture it a basement pub ceiling
too low, damp, soaking the walls, The amps buzz before
they play a single note. The crowd is half curious,
half hostile. Then then they start his jagged, relentless, minimal,
a machine just learning to breathe. And at the mic
(04:05):
there singer, eyes down, voice low, words spilling like confessions
torn from a diary. As he sung dance, Dance, Dance, Dance,
Dance to the radio, his body did the opposite. It
didn't dance, It convulsed. It convulsed in spasms. The crowd shifts, unsettled.
They've never heard anything like this. Later that night, the
(04:25):
singer sits at the kitchen table. The house is cold,
the wallpaper old and peeling. The kettle hisses but doesn't boil. Upstairs,
a baby stirs on the table. The Idiot open passages
underlined on the page. Prince Michigan caesars, his kindness mistaken
for weakness, his love punished by the world. The singer
whispers into the quiet, I'll carry it, all of it,
(04:48):
the music, words, family, the weight, all of it. The
city groans outside. The first stones have already been placed
on his shoulders. He doesn't yet feel how heavy they'll become.
Act too, how the sound found its voice. The Idiot
a Russian novel written a century earlier, but it could
have been written yesterday for this young man. Prince Michigan, epileptic,
(05:12):
kind too pure for the world he walked in. He
tries to love, he tries to forgive, He tries to
remain gentle in a society sharpened with knives. But the
world doesn't reward innocence. It devours it, It mocks it,
it punishes it until a good man crumbles. And now
another boy in another century, under another collapsing sky, read
those pages and seized prophecy, not just a story, a warning.
(05:37):
The man is beginning to take shape, not just in songs,
but in sound. Where others filled every bar with noise,
they left silence. Where others rap songs in decoration, they
stripped them bare. Every note was purposeful, every gap deliberate.
It was minimal, mechanical, a sound like factory walls, breathing
like machinery that had learned sorrow. It was punk, yes,
(05:59):
but it was colder, sharper. It wasn't rebellion for fun.
It was rebellion for necessity. They found their accent, and
once you heard it, you couldn't mistake it for anyone else.
The Stones multiply. The sound is theirs, but sound alone
doesn't pay rent Stone one money shows pay in cash
that vanishes by morning, petrol cigarettes, a few pints, nothing
(06:22):
left for the family waiting at home by daylight. He
is no front man. He's just another face behind a
desk at the unemployment office, handing out forms, ticking boxes,
dealing with men older than him, bitter from factory closures,
staring at him like he's part of the machine that
ground them down. Stone two home at night, the baby
cries his wife paces the floor alone while he is
(06:44):
miles away in a van that smells like unshowered twenty
something men. After the show, the absence grows louder than
any guitar. Stone three Expectation. Fanzines write about them, Strangers
whisper their name in pubs. A promoter hands out of
contract talking about tours, singles, futures. Belief is flattering until
(07:05):
you realize belief is just another form of debt. Stone
four Division. The band rehearses every night. The music grows, tightens, sharpens,
But every chord struck in the rehearsal room is a
chord not struck at home. His two lives split wider,
the crack impossible to close the van again, Rain streaks
the windows, The road is endless. The drummer smacks rhythms
(07:28):
on the dashboard, the guitars hums, rifts into the dark
and in the corner. The singer writes in his notebook,
not jokes, not set lists, fragments of despair, images of death,
lines too heavy for his age. The pressure in the
van isn't just from the miles. It's from all the
stones being stacked one by one onto his shoulders. A
(07:49):
kitchen at midnight. A wife stands with her arms folded,
baby balanced on her hip. Her eyes are dark with exhaustion.
You'll never hear, she says, desperately. The singer stands in
the doorway, jacket, still smelling of cigarettes and beer. He
doesn't argue, he doesn't apologize. He just looks at the floor.
In another room, the idiot lies open. Prince Michigan, gentle
(08:12):
and Doom, stares back from the page. He knows the feeling.
The band had found its voice. But with each new note,
with every step forward, the stones grow heavier, and the
boy carrying them was already starting to stagger. Act three
the band gets a new name. Next Act three, the
(08:38):
band gets a new name. The name Warsaw was short lived.
They changed it not for vanity, not for fashion, simply
another band had claimed it first. They wanted something colder,
something that tasted of steel, something that captured the times,
both the cities collapse and their own sharp new sound.
Joy Division, a name torn from the darkest chapters of
(08:59):
history of Nazi concentration camps. It was controversial, disturbing, and deliberate.
They weren't here to be safe, They were here to unsettle,
to haunt to last. The lineup was set Bernard's Sumner
on guitar and keyboards, Peter Hook on bass, his instrument
pushed high onto his chest. It sounded cutting like machinery.
(09:19):
Stephen Morris on drums, precise, mechanical and relentless, and at
the center Ian Curtis frontman, poet prophet, awkward and angular, untrained.
But when he opened his mouth, when the band locked
in around him, rooms froze. They signed the Factory Records,
a local label with vision bigger than its budget. There
(09:41):
was no glamour, no champagne contracts. There was just freedom.
There was belief, and belief is gasoline for young men
with guitars. They recorded songs stripped to their bones. Basslines
that rattle like a machine gun, drums like a heartbeat,
pressed through steel. Lyrics like confessions scratched into concrete. Ian's voyie, dark,
smoky baritone, more chest than head voice, velvet at low volume,
(10:05):
turns grainy when he leans in, and it worked. Unknown
Pleasures arrived in nineteen seventy nine, a debut album dressed
in black, its cover an image of pulsar waves that
looked like a heart monitor flat lining. It didn't storm
the charts overnight. It wasn't built for radio gloss, but
it spread hand to hand, club the club, word of mouth,
whispering like gospel. The buzz was undeniable. Reviewers wrote of
(10:29):
a band unlike any other. Fans followed them from town
to town. Their shows became rituals. Not poe going and spitting,
but a strange, reverent silence. Audience hypnotized, almost afraid to
break the spell. Imagine you're there. The band takes the stage,
no fanfare, no chatter, just sound. Hook's bassline snarls, Sumner's
(10:50):
guitar slices, Morse's drums pound like pistons and Ian Curtis.
He grabs the mic, stand his body jerking like a
marionette caught in a storm. His v is low, commanding
and devastating. The crowd is silent, then erupting. You realize
you're not just at a gig, You're inside a moment
that will be remembered. The singles began to climb transmission.
(11:13):
She's lost control, Love will tear us apart, not just songs,
anthems for a generation drowning in uncertainty. The music press
took notice they put Ian's haunted stare on their covers.
They wrote about the band like they were not just
rising stars, but saviors of post punk. And behind the
ink and the photos, contracts, bigger venues, wider audiences, the
(11:35):
promise of money, tours in America. America the ultimate test
for a band from the UK, the land of opportunity,
where bands either broke big or broke apart. And for
the band, it was the dream, the next step, the
proof that their strange, icy sound could reach across oceans.
For the fans, it was vindication, a band born from
(11:56):
the rubble of Manchester now ready to conquer the world.
But for Ian Curtis, it was just another stone. Success
is intoxicating for some, but for others it's suffocating. Every
new fan met another soul depending on him. Every new
contract meant another promise he wasn't sure he could keep.
Every page of praise was another reminder that expectations were
(12:18):
now higher than ever for the world. Joy Division's rise
was good news for Ian Curtis, like a page torn
from Dustowski. Good news meant tragedy was waiting on the
next page. Act four, The weight of the Stones. Next
(12:42):
Act four, the weight of the stones. The applause was
still echoing, the review still glowing, the contracts still drying
in fresh ink. From the outside, everything looked golden. Joy
Division were on the brink. Success had finally arrived. But
on the inside, Ian Curtis was breaking upon art Stone
One husband and father in the Idiot Prince Mishkin tries
(13:05):
to love purely. He offers his heart with innocence, but
innocence is no shield against reality. Ian had promised the
same marriage, fatherhood, devotion. But purity doesn't pay the bills.
Piety doesn't wake up at five am to go to
a dead end job. Innocence doesn't change diapers. Kindness doesn't
quite a crying child at three in the morning when
(13:26):
you're hundreds of miles away. Deborah, his wife, furious holding
the baby. Ian, You'll never hear. I'm raising her on
my own while you're playing fucking rockstar. Ian quiet, eyes
on the floor. But I'm doing this for us, Deba,
for us, for her. But every time he left, another
piece of him stayed behind. Michigan's tragedy was his love
(13:48):
destroyed the very women he wanted to save. Ian's tragedy
was beginning to rhyme. Stone two The Affair. Prince Mischkin
is torn between two women, one fragile, kind, the other
fiery and destructive. He tries to love them both, but
in doing so, he ruins them both. E meets Annik,
a Belgian journalist and music promoter, a woman who saw
(14:11):
his fragility, who listened like the world never had. She
became refuge, tenderness, an escape from the world of expectation.
But love is not refuge when it split in two.
What feels like salvation to one woman becomes betrayal to another.
Ian was no longer just divided between stage and home.
He was divided between two hearts, and just like Michigan,
(14:33):
he was doomed to hurt them both. Stone three, The Disease.
Prince Mischkan's innocence is marked by his seizures. His fits
terrify those around him, make him appear weak, turn his
kindness into a spectacle. Ian's epilepsy did the same on stage.
His body spasm, jerked, and collapsed. Fans thought it was
part of the performance until the convulsions didn't stop. The
(14:56):
medication dulled him, the exhaustion hollowed him. The disease mocked him.
Every seizure was another reminder his own body was his enemy,
and in the Idiot, Dustovsky had already written his fate,
a man destroyed not by evil, but by fragility. Stone four, America,
the band was buzzing. America was next. For some, it
(15:19):
was salvation. For Ian it was just another sentence. How
could he leave his wife and child? How could he
abandon Annik and his epilepsy Grandma? Seizures were coming more frequently,
two or three times a week. How could his body
survive the pace, the seizures, the glare of lights that
might kill him. For the band, the US tour was deliverance.
(15:40):
For Ian, it was exile. Prince Michigan's downfall came not
in one act, but in the endless tug of war
between what the world demanded and what his fragile soul
could give. Ian's path was tracing the same line. The
applause was still there. The fans still believed. The world
thought joy Division was unstoppable. But Ian Curtis wasn't unstoppable.
(16:03):
He was just a man, a husband, father, lover, a
fragile body in rebellion against itself, and just like Michigan,
He was carrying the impossible weight of being both too
human and too pure for the world that demanded everything
from him. The paradise was a cage, and the lock
was turning. To quote Ian's words from joy Division Song Decades.
(16:25):
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders.
Here are the young men? Well, where have they been?
We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber. Pushed
to the limit, we dragged ourselves in. At five decades
of Stones, Next, at five decades of Stones, Night falls
(16:52):
like a verdict. The suitcases open on the bed, half
packed and half accusing. Shirts folded with the care of
someone trying to control roll what can't be controlled. Paper
stacked like commandments. Tour America. Now the house is too
quiet for a house. Every tick of the clock is
a reminder that time isn't on your side. It's a
(17:14):
metronome for promises you can't keep. On the turntable, A
needle drops, Iggy pops, The Idiot rises from the speakers,
Iggy's debut from nineteen seventy seven, name for Dostoivsky's novel,
where the Rocker explores human vulnerability and disconnection. Cold skeletal hypnotic.
(17:34):
The selection is not random, deliberate, not catharsis not comfort.
A mirror with a pulse. He sits on the floor,
cross legged. The record spins, He flips it. It spins again.
The music doesn't soothe. It names things. It names dread,
It names fate, It names the corridor he's walking. The
(17:56):
stones array themselves around him like a jury. Stone one,
career joy division is no longer a rumor. It's a responsibility.
Stone two. Husband and father upstairs. There is a small
room where milk once warmed in a bottle at three
oh seven a m where a tiny hand gripped his
finger as if it could anchor the world. He promised devotion,
(18:18):
then traded weeks for shows. He knows this. Knowing isn't
the same as being there. Stone three The affair. Annex's
tenderness was his oxygen. But love doesn't duplicate cleanly. Two
truths can be true and still break each other. He
hates himself on Thursday and needs her on Fridays, and
calls that balance. Stone four. The disease. Light can bite,
(18:44):
sound can tilt the floor, mid song can become mid seizure,
pill slow the mind. He needs to write the words
the world now needs from him. He's twenty three and
negotiating with his own nervous system like it's a hostile state,
Stone five, America. The itinerary on the table is a
ladder with missing wrongs. To some, it's salvation. To him,
(19:07):
it's a test he can't pass without betraying someone. He loves,
his wife and child if he goes the band, if
he doesn't, his body, if he tries on the shelf
a battered paperback. Dostoyevsky's The Idiot Prince Mischkin tries to
love everyone and destroys himself in the attempt. His seizures
make him seem holly to some, broken to others, but
(19:30):
they don't make him less human. They make him more
fragile in a world that doesn't slow down for fragile.
May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, the night before the American tour,
He's in his home alone. The walls feel too close,
the silence pressing in outside. The street lamps glow weakly
(19:51):
through the dirty window. Upstairs, a suitcase waits, half packed,
as if he couldn't decide whether to finish it or
abandon it. Downstairs, the turntable spins Iggy pops the idiot.
The needle crackles before the music takes hold. Throbbing low
alien Ian pours a drink, takes a swallow, stares at
(20:14):
the glass like it might answer him. The pen moves
across the page, stops, moves again. The words aren't lyrics.
They're fragments of an apology, please for forgiveness, a confession
without an audience. He whispers them under his breath, reading
them back as though he's testing their weight. He stands, restless,
(20:37):
paces the room, runs his hand through his hair, sits again,
writes another line, crumples it, lights another cigarette. The astray
is already overflowing. He's in the kitchen now. The room
smells like dirty dishes and use baby bottles. The hum
of the refrigerator is the only sound between songs. He
(20:57):
leans against the counter, eyes close, mouthing words silently. His
body twitches slightly, the aftershock of another seizure. He steadies
himself on the counter, shaking his head as if to
scatter the thoughts, but they only return heavier. He climbs
the stairs slowly, as though each step weighs double. The
(21:18):
house groans with the sound of old wood under his feet.
At the top, he pauses, listening to the faint noises outside,
birds stirring, the world about to wake In the bedroom,
he stops again, looks at the photographs on the dresser,
his wife, his daughter. He touches the frame, fingers trembling,
(21:41):
then sets it back down. He slowly goes back down
the steps. Each step rings like a verdict, cold, heavy breath,
a borrowed coin, hard hammers, courage, splinters, names floodback, time thins,
silence presses, the inevitable is inescapable. Iggy Pop sings, Baby,
(22:02):
don't you cry, Baby, I'll sing you a lullaby. We
are walking down the street of chance, where the chance
is always slim or none, and the intentions unjust. Baby,
there's nothing to see. I've already been down the street
of chance. He fetches a length of rope. He chooses
(22:23):
the beam above the kitchen, ties it carefully, deliberately. There's
no rush. Each knot is precise, practiced, as if he's
rehearsed this moment in his head countless times. The record
player keeps spinning. The song ends, The needle clicks into silence. Click,
click click. He places the note within sight, takes one
(22:47):
last look around the room, walls that have held his secrets,
air that has carried his smoke, silence that has been
his only companion, and then steps forward. The house exhales
a long, final silence. There's no struggle, no outcry, just calm.
(23:12):
The kind of tranquility that feels permanent outside the street
remains ordinary. Milk bottles clink on porches, birds sing, a
car engine coughs, the life the world goes on indifferent
inside the needle. At the end of the idiot clicks again,
click click click. By morning he is gone. At only
(23:39):
twenty three, Ian Curtis has silenced himself forever. Act six,
Ian Curtis The Epilogue. Next Act six, The Epilogue of
Ian Curtis. By morning, the news has already spread. The
(24:02):
words roll through the city like thunder that doesn't stop.
He's gone. For the band, it's devastation. They've been just
days away from flying to America, from proving that their strange,
icy sound could hypnotize a continent. Now there's only absence,
only shock, only guilt that no one could put into words.
Not long after his death, their second album arrived, closer
(24:27):
even the name felt like prophecy. The cover a photograph
of a tomb shot ears earlier, chosen before Ian's final act,
and now it looked like fate had signed the artwork itself.
Every song sounded like a requem, every lyric like a farewell,
and it was not an album anymore. It was a
marble headstone with grooves carved into its surface. The remaining
(24:51):
members grieved and then reassembled. They renamed themselves new order.
They chose light where there had been shadows, movement where
there had been stillness, dance where there had been dirge.
They found success. But no matter how high their sins climbed,
the low pulse of joy Division's baseline still haunted the corners,
a ghost built into every note. And dous Stowsky's novel
(25:15):
Prince Michigan is undone, not by cruelty, but by his
own purity in the world that weaponized it. He's epileptic,
he's loving, he's kind, and he cannot survive. Ian Curtis
lived the same script. The seizures, the divided love, the
purity of words that carried too much weight, the innocence
mistaken for strength when in truth it was fragility. Both
(25:38):
men were consumed. Both left behind silence that spoke louder
than their presence. Ian Curtis was only twenty three when
the stones crushed him, but in the short span of
years he had he carved a sound that still echoes.
Every band that followed, every singer with words too heavy
for their age, every bassline that rattled like machinery, every
(25:59):
lyric that confessed more than a concealed owed a debt
to joy division. He became a myth, a frozen photograph.
But myths are just men, and men carry weights. Ian
Curtis carried too many. Some souls are too pure for
the weight of the world. I hope you enjoyed Script ten,
(26:22):
the final transmission the story of Ian Curtis. This has
been Johnny's Dead Air podcast. I'm Johnny Hartwell, thank you
so much for listening.
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