The town in Northern England where late Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis grew up will host the first ever ‘Joy Division Day’ next month.
On September 7, Macclesfield in Chesire will celebrate the town’s links to the iconic band with tours of important locations and a performance by Joy Division tribute band Transmission at the Cinemac cinema.
The celebration is the brainchild of local man Trevor Stokes, 57, a fan of the band and their late singer, who died by suicide in May of 1980.
Stokes tells the Guardian: “I want the young to embrace Joy Division. The old fan will come, because they’re hardcore, but the young fan is the one I really want to embrace Ian’s memory, and his music and his lyrics, and I hope that’s what Joy Division Day will help them to do.”
Stokes leads regular tours around his hometown and says “up until now, nowhere near enough” had been done to recognise the town’s contribution to the arts, adding Macclesfield “has never got behind Ian in the right way, and never got behind Joy Division in the right way, and our music heritage and our youth culture in the right way”.
The tours will feature 12 stops, including the singer’s grave and a famous mural in his honour.
Curtis’ bandmates knew that their friend was battling depression in the months before his death. One month earlier, on April 7, he had overdosed after taking a quantity of the phenobarbitone pills that he’d been taking to attempt to manage his epilepsy.
Curtis was found dead in the kitchen of his marital home by his wife Deborah around mid-day on May 18.
He was 23-years-old.