and Martin had coloured it in for us. We resented it, but Rob loved it, Wilson loved it, and the press loved it, and the public loved it: we were just the poor stupid musicians who wrote it! We swallowed our pride and went with it”.    There were problems. “Ian was primarily a fun guy, a good laugh”, says Bernard Sumner; ‘But in a weird way. He wasn’t a straight person. Let me start with his moments of intensity, which was when he got frustrated. I remember him having this argument with Rob Gretton at our rehearsal room, TJ Davidson’s. He got so frustrated that he picked up the garbage bucket, stuck it over his head and started running up and down the room, screaming at Rob, and he was just completely mad. He had an explosive per- sonality, but most of the time he was cool. He really was.    “His performance was a manifestation of this frenzy. He was Ian, Mister Polite, Mister Nice, and then suddenly onstage, about the third song in, you’d notice he'd gone a bit weird, started pulling the stage apart, ripping up the floorboards and throwing them at the audience. Then by the end of the set he’d be completely and utterly manic. Then you’d come offstage and he’d be covered in blood. But no–one would talk about it, because that was our way: we didn’t think he knew why he got himself worked up that way.    "One day we were doing a gig at the Hope and Anchor. I was really ill with ‘flu, and they had to come and drag me out of bed. Every time Steve hit the cymbals the whole room turned upside down: literally, in my head, my eyes turned upside down. It was horrible. There were only about 20 people there. We were driving back home in Steve’s car: I was really ill, shivering, covered in a sleeping bag. Ian just grabbed the sleeping bag and pulled it off. He’d been moaning about the gig, the audience, the sound: he was in a really negative mood.    "So I grab the sleeping bag back, and he grabbed it back again and covered himself with it, and started growl- ing like a dog. It was scary. He suddenly started lashing out, punching the windscreen, and then he just went into a full overblown red state fit, in the car. We pulled over on to the hard shoulder, dragged him out of the car, held him down. Then we did about a hundred miles an hour to the nearest hospital, somewhere near Luton. We were in this horrible casualty ward and the doctor said, You've had a fit; you’d better go and see a doctor when you get back”.    This attack, which occurred in the early hours of December 29, 1978, marked the full onset of Ian Curtis's epilepsy. Throughout this demanding period for the group, Curtis was receiving medical treatment for what was becoming a serious condition: “With Ian it was the full blown grand mal”, says Stephen Morris; “They put him on heavy tranquillisers: the doctor told him the only way he could minimise the risk was by leading a normal regular life, which by that time wasn’t something he wanted to do. He liked to jump around onstage, and to get pissed: it was one of the reasons he got into the band in the first place”. The pressures were building up at home, as Deborah Curtis explains: ‘With Joy Division it all came together for him. I told myself at first that it as all part of the act, but it was all wrong. There wasn’t an Ian at home and an Ian in the world, it became like that all the time. The trouble started when my pregnancy began to show: he had that first fit. It sounds awful, but he liked to have the attention. One of the things he liked about me was that I did stand behind him, 100 per cent, whatever he did. When I got pregnant, everybody made a fuss of me, and I think he was a bit jealous”.    Natalie Curtis was born on April 16, 1979. Just over a month later, Ian had the most serious in a series of grand mal attacks, which involved hospitalisation. His solution to the pressures at home was, according to his wife, with- drawal, but there was no escape from the momentum of Joy Division’s success: ‘With being young, you think of yourself as being invulnerable”, says Peter Hook; "We were being driven by this thing called Joy Division, and basically you just did your damnedest to keep it going”.    ‘Unknown Pleasures' broke new ground in several ways. In staying with Factory, the group showed that a non– metropolitan, independent label sector was viable. There was Peter Saville’s brilliant, baffling sleeve design. Despite releasing a powerful record full of raging emotions, Joy Division refused to open themselves up any further in print: after a couple of mistakes, they did no interviews. “Rob thought the music was such a beautiful notion that