In general his lines lose the will to connect. He couldn’t confront or escape himself: ‘It was me, waiting for me/Hoping for something more/Me, seeing me this time, hoping for something else.’ This is unusually coherent. The most troubling aspect of Curtis’s writing is the failure of his agony. His lyrics read like the single continuous expression of someone struggling to be present, and prone to shock. Curtis was diagnosed with epilepsy two years before he died but seems to have experienced seizures or absences from an early age. This book gives us deletions, revisions and variants that make clear the extent to which he felt unsecured. We already had the words to his songs, which tend to be read as details in the narrative of his suicide. Sometimes the original lyric gets completely changed.’ Sometimes it’s a line from one song mixed with a line from another. I just pull it out and see if I can fit something in … I’ll use them when the right tune comes along. Curtis explained his method in an early interview: ‘I have got this little book here.
These were words corralled for later use, not poems. Some of the pages look more like angry shopping lists than manuscripts. His drafts are reproduced here in facsimile opposite the finished lyrics of each song. Ian Curtis wrote mostly in small ruled notebooks, almost always in capital letters. Last Christmas you could buy Joy Division oven gloves. They are now part of the global adolescent ether as well as a staple of middle age. Joy Division belonged to the scene that emerged into the space left behind by punk. The book collects the words of Ian Curtis, the singer in Joy Division, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. So This Is Permanence reminds us that lyrics can reward close attention without being recast. W hen people equate pop lyrics with poetry, they expect pop to feel flattered and sometimes it is.
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