I first saw Sam Riley in the gloom of the Notting Hill Arts Club, where his band, 10,000 Things, were headlining one of Alan McGee’s Death Disco nights. He came on wearing a cowboy hat, strutting around to his band’s bare knuckle rock ‘n’ roll. His voice was grizzly, though not as parodically so as the chap from the Kings of Leon. I took some photos, but – as I said in my review — wasn’t particularly impressed. It was all so oppressively thick. Sam Riley was not the sort of person you could imagine playing Ian Curtis.
When I first heard Joy Division’s Love will tear us apart I knew I was listening to somebody who had greater insight into the human condition than the Britpop multitudes. His unearthly croon provoked awe. To a teenager, intelligence is intensity and stupidity is superficiality; Joy Division had depth, the depth of the void. As such, the banality of the human details were ignored and we focused on the romantic myth of the suffering artist.
Control, Anton Corbijn’s film of Deborah Curtis’s memoir of her husband, is all about the human details. Whether it is Peter Hook’s farts, Curtis’s amiability when working in the job centre, Rob Gretton’s pants, or the shabbiness of late-Seventies Northern towns. What prevents it from being banal is the cinematography, which invests every frame with the exquisite monochrome of Corbijn’s photography. It is visually mesmerizing with music that provides more spine-tingling moments than anything else I’ve seen all year.
The only thing that didn’t ring true was the sense of why he committed suicide. Sure, he watched Werner Herzog’s Strószek, which is depressing enough. But there wasn’t the real sense of desolation that suicides have. I wracked my brains, searching for reasons as to why someone would do it, and found nothing, nothing at all. 4 or 5 years ago, when I was the age Curtis was when he died, I could have given you a litany of reasons, but not anymore. Perhaps it is chemical, something intrinsically attached to being a young male.
As such, we could say that the difference between Ian Curtis and Sam Riley is that they grew up in completely different contexts. Curtis had Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed and J.G. Ballard, all of whose mid-to-late Seventies stuff was intellectually and emotionally challenging. Riley, on the other hand, most likely had Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene, Reef and Nick Hornsby, none of whom were very insightful.
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