Dear Ian,
Bloody awful isn't it?
Being a poet.
The reason I've sent this is because your work and performances touched me. Touched me? Bit soft and girly. But watching you on YouTube showed me what I've missed.
You're probably wondering what YouTube is. Unless of course wherever you are has internet connection. Anyway YouTube can be found on a computer it's a place where bloggers (don't even ask) like me find poets like you. Type in Joy Division and up you come. Click a mouse (!) and I'm watching you and your mates beat out Love Will Tear Us Apart.
But what brought about this search was 'Control' a bio-pic about YOU! (See amazing pic above) It was made with the help of Natalie and Deborah and showed me, the Neanderthal, what I'd missed.
I suppose at this juncture it would be best to explain that I have always been a black music lover. The only poet/rocker I listened to was Bowie, like you yourself did. I remember buying Hunky Dory and thinking I was a dangerous tea drinking rebel in a purple tie-dye t-shirt Oh God how right I was. Tea drinking part anyway. Rebel? Only in so far as how I dress. You should see the nonentities round here.
I wrote poetry even then, 16 in '72. Most of it being self-indulgent nonsense about loneliness and gods, the colour of souls and being different. Being different on a housing estate in 1970's London was not easy. So I drifted back from school listened to Bowie in my red and blue room and wrote wrote wrote. I was also fascinated by suicidee's.
You hit the scene a few years later. '76? Right?
Oh that reminds me I liked the thought of you as a bleary eyed, artistic miserablist working in the labour exchange. You obviously had a brain as well as an artists soul. Work scared the hell out of me, although I did do a bit in a glue factory. You too 'worked' in a factory where you daydreamed all day. :) Emoticom Ian
But I digress.
I must tell you more about the film...
The guy who portrayed you was a handsome young actor called Sam Riley. And handsome is an understatement, the really weird thing was his resemblance of you, separated at birth perhaps? But there's something much more spooky....tell you later....About you and the Belgian girl Annike.
Sam Riley had greasy flat hair, same stiff torso but with maniacal arm waving, same mic sucking and wet shirts. Good God man what was that all about?
I remember wondering what exactly you ate. Couldn't have been much because you were as thin as your mic stand. Why are creatives damaged and skeletal?
You may be wondering about the significant others.
Your wife Deborah was played by fabulous actress Samantha Morton whose depiction had me choking, so painful was it. I especially went to mush when you and her kissed on a grassy hillside overlooking Macclesfield or wherever it was. To be honest with you Ian, places and times and dates dissolved into nothingness because I was willingly held vice-like by Riley's depiction of you. You would have liked him I'm sure.
The others, the band members and Craig Parkinson's portrayal of Tony Wilson were all gilt on an already perfect film.
It's true to say the film makers loved you.
Let me bring you eerily up to date.
Your real life love affair with Annik Honore has taken on something of the supernatural...Because actor Sam Riley who played you and actress Alexandra Lara who played Annike are now MARRIED and living in Berlin. What do you think of that? When I read it I felt sick. Sick to death of what-should-have-beens...
But that is real life, I'm talking about the film and the impact you, as an artist, had on me.
Watching 'Control' had me in tears.
Can you see me smiling? Smiles of distress and you, being a damaged sort, will know what I mean.
Tears I was in. And not at the parts where you perhaps felt most alone. On stage. Walking round the block. Looking at your wife.
But when you looked at shitty nappies on the washing line. When you watched a busy tv screen with some foreign film showing. After all when you decided it was time to die, aloneness, subtitled films and nappies were mere extras in your act.
But Ian I could have killed you at that moment.
"WAIT WAIT this will pass darling". But it didn't.
Torment won.
And off you swung.
If I'd been a bit more hip I might have discovered your music earlier but I have 'Control' and YouTube.
Love
Angela
P.S. I've favourited Shadowplay x
