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In the mid-70s, there was a sense - reinforced by the vacant, derelict state of Britain’s inner cities - that the bomb had already dropped. With its casual brutality and black humour, Burroughs’s accelerated prose - what his biographer Ted Morgan called his ‘nuclear style’ - matched this apocalyptic mood. The lack of conventional narrative in his books plunged the reader into a maelstrom of malevolent, unseen forces and ever-present, unidentified dangers. Joy Division rarely did interviews. In January 1980, however, they gave an audience to the young writer and singer Alan Hempsall. This was to be the only time that Curtis talked about his reading, and he mentioned Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys as two of his favourite books.The group had recently encountered Burroughs at their Plan K show in October 1979, though when Curtis approached the author to get a free copy of The Third Mind, he was rebuffed. Curtis began writing in earnest during 1977, when he and his wife Deborah moved into their Barton Street home. In her memoir, Touching from a Distance, Deborah Curtis remembers that ‘most nights Ian would go into the blue room and shut the door behind him to write, interrupted only by cups of coffee handed through the swirls of Marlboro smoke. I didn’t mind the situation: we regarded it as a project, something that had to be done.’ His first attempts showed a writer struggling to establish a style. One of Joy Division’s most effective early recordings, No Love Lost, contains a spoken word section that lifts a complete paragraph from The House of Dolls. Songs such as Novelty, Leaders of Men and Warsaw were barely digested regurgitations of their sources: lumpy screeds of frustration, failure, and anger with militaristic and totalitarian overtones. ‘They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Michael Moorcock, which was promoting Burroughs and Ballard. My friendship with Ian started around 1979: we talked Burroughs, Burroughs, Burroughs. At the bookshops he would have been exposed to an extremely wide range of eclectic and weird writers and music.’
Like the group, Curtis worked hard to improve. His keynote early song for Joy Division, Shadowplay, explored for the first time the territory that he would make his own. Like a Burroughs cut-up, the lyrics shifted from a direct address to a description of a situation often horrific or unsettling: ‘the assassins all grouped in four lines’ sealed with a first-person confession of guilt or helplessness: ‘I did everything I wanted to / I let them use you, for their own ends.’
Dropping out of school at 17, Curtis was an autodidact who took his cues from the pop culture of the time. In 1974, David Bowie was interviewed with William Burroughs in Rolling Stone. The actual chat was fairly non-eventful, but it made the link explicit - especially when Bowie was seen fiddling with cut-ups in Alan Yentob’s Cracked Actor documentary - and Burroughs would cast a major shadow over British punk and post-punk.
By then, Curtis was exploring more than pulp horror. Deborah remembers him reading ‘Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse and JG Ballard. Photomontages of the Nazi Period was a book of anti-Nazi posters by John Heartfield, which documented graphically the spread of Hitler’s ideals. Crash by JG Ballard combined sex with the suffering of car accident victims.” Another favourite was Ballard’s 1975 High-Rise.