JOY DIVISION - WINTER GARDENS, BOURNEMOUTH, 2/11/79
His Joy Division bandmate Bernard Sumner says if Ian Curtis had not died, he would have become a successful author. A true postmodern, Curtis’ attraction towards dystopian and philosophically lugubrious subject matter encompassed art film makers (Coppola, Herzog, Scorsese) and literary figures (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Conrad, Hesse, Mishima) as well as SF writers like Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick. His widow Deborah informs us in Touching from a Distance that Saturday night horror films were a weekly television ritual for the young songwriter. Curtis may have read James Herbert’s flawed but prescient horror novel The Fog (1975), a major set piece of which takes place in the seaside town where this recording was made. The miasma of Herbert’s book is a possibly sentient mycoplasma and biowarfare agent - released from containment by seismic convulsion - that causes homicidal insanity in its victims. A scene in which an affected jumbo jet pilot