The Ian Curtis whose torch singing floats above the high bass and glistening synths of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is hardly recognizable as the guy who sang “She’s Lost Control” or “Dead Souls.” It makes sense that the song was a non-album single since it strikes out in such a different direction from the music the band had released on its first album, Unknown Pleasures, or that would characterize their next and last, Closer. Two decades after its release NME named it the greatest single of all time—a claim that’s somehow both preposterous and plausible. It’s also some of the last music that Joy Division ever made: by the time the single came out, Curtis was dead by his own hand and the remaining members, who had vowed to break up the band if any of the founders left, would shortly form a new one—New Order.
New Order was a terrific band—or are (as of this writing in 2025, they’re touring again). But Joy Division was simply transcendent. The difference is Ian Curtis.
And at the time he was writing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” his life was collapsing in on him. Punk and post-punk had an almost reflexive distrust of the pop love song. Joy Division’s first chart hit, however, wasn’t born out of belligerence, but heartbreak.
Yes, the song’s title is a bit of a piss take: squeaky-clean husband-and-wife team the Captain and Tennille had a #1 hit in 1975 with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and while that song, or at least the optimism it channeled, did keep its performers together for nearly four decades, Curtis seems to have had little time for its saccharine “just say no” prescription for the seven-year itch. Not that Curtis was philosophically opposed to the nuclear family: he married at age nineteen, and he and his wife, Deborah, had a child while the band was in the studio putting the finishing touches on Unknown Pleasures. But life on the road was hard on him, and he became emotionally involved with the Belgian journalist Annik Honoré. (Honoré always insisted that the relationship was platonic.) And that new love at least played a part in tearing Mr. and Mrs.
The touring life was difficult for other reasons, as well. One of the band’s best-known songs, “She’s Lost Control,” is based on Curtis’s experience working with an epileptic girl in his civil service job as a caregiver. About the time he wrote the song he discovered that he, too, suffered from the condition, and his seizures became progressively more frequent and more severe; his flailing stage dance started to seem more than just abstract, and grand mal seizures sometimes brought Joy Division shows to a premature close.
Curtis probably also suffered from bipolar disorder, which was only compounded by the rigors of touring on a shoestring budget. By the time he wrote “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” all these forces—depression, epilepsy, isolation, and romantic strain—were pressing in on him with intolerable urgency; Deborah had filed for divorce, though Curtis pleaded with her to reconsider. On May 18, 1980, on the eve of Joy Division’s first US tour, Curtis hanged himself; he was twenty-three.
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