The awkward night Joy Division met William S Burroughs—and Ian Curtis was told to fuck off
When you consider all of the famous (and infamous) people that William Burroughs met in his lifetime, maybe the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game should be adapted for the late Beat author. I’d have a “Burroughs” of one, as I met him (briefly) in Los Angeles in 1996 at his big art opening at LACMA.
At the Reality Studio blog, there’s a fascinating tale, told in great detail, about the time Joy Division shared the same stage with Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Cabaret Voltaire in Belgium. Ian Curtis was an avid reader and favoured counterculture fare like JG Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Hermann Hesse. William Burroughs was one of his biggest heroes.
I mean, we know Burroughs had a knack for turning up in places you wouldn’t expect, and this one really takes the biscuit. Imagine Joy Division – barely out of their own backyards and riddled with insecurity – finding themselves on the same bill as the godfather of literary sleaze and paranoia. It was like stepping straight into a Burroughs cut-up, where the tape splices together two things that don’t belong, but suddenly make a mad kind of sense.
You’ve got to picture the timing to somehow make sense of he whole fucking thing. Late ’79, the carcass of punk was already being picked over, Thatcher was lurking round the corner like a fucking menace, and here’s Ian Curtis – a pale, intense lad from Macclesfield – about to meet the man whose books basically rewired his head. For a working-class band scraping their way out of post-industrial gloom, standing in the same room as Burroughs must’ve felt like shaking hands with destiny.
The best account of all this lives on Reality Studio, a blog that’s a bit of a sprawling Burroughs rabbit hole. They managed to piece together the night in forensic detail, right down to the French interviews nobody’s seen in decades. It reads half like a gig report, half like some mad dispatch from the frontline of culture, where literature, post-punk and avant-garde theatre all pile into the same broken-down Brussels sugar factory.
Read it below.
“Joy Division was given its first opportunity to play outside the United Kingdom on 16 October 1979. That alone would have distinguished the gig for the band, but of special interest to Curtis and his mates was the fact that they would be opening for Burroughs. The avant-garde theatre troupe Plan K, which had made a speciality of interpreting Burroughs’ work, were founding a performance space in a former sugar refinery in Brussels, Belgium.
“The opening was conceived as a multimedia spectacle. Films were to be screened — among others, Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (starring Mick Jagger) and Burroughs’ own experiments with Antony Balch. The Plan K theater troupe were to perform ’23 Skidoo’. Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire were to give ‘rock’ concerts. And Burroughs and Brion Gysin were to read from their recently published book, The Third Mind.
“Before the evening’s events, Burroughs and Joy Division gave separate interviews to the culture magazine En Attendant. Graciously provided to RealityStudio by the interviewer and the organizer of the Plan K opening, Michel Duval, these have been translated from the French and are reproduced here for the first time since their publication in November 1979. You can read the French original or the English translation of Duval’s interview with Joy Division, as well as the French original or the English translation of Duval’s interview with William Burroughs.
“After Burroughs’ reading brought the opening of Plan K to its climax, Curtis attempted to introduce himself to his literary idol. This meeting, like so many things about both Curtis and Burroughs, has already become legend — which is another way of saying that its factual basis may have receded into darkness. If you search around the internet, you’ll see sites describing the encounter in terms like this: ‘Unfortunately when Ian went up to talk to him the author told Ian to get lost’. And this: ‘Burroughs probably was tired and bored with the concerts and when Ian went up to talk with him the author told Ian to get lost. Ian got lost immediately, not a little hurt by the rebuff’. Chris Ott’s book Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures repeats the story, and Mark Johnson’s book An Ideal for Living asserts that Burroughs refused to speak to Curtis.
“To anyone familiar with Burroughs, the thought of him telling a fan to get lost is perplexing. Burroughs tended to be unfailingly courteous, even a touch ‘old world’ in his manners. Typically he was generous with fans and admirers, particularly with young men as handsome as Ian Curtis. What could have prompted such an exchange? Was Curtis insulting? Burroughs in a bad mood? Were there mitigating circumstances?”
And let’s be honest, if Burroughs really did tell Ian Curtis to sod off, that’s almost too perfect. The idea of this frail, awkward genius finally meeting his literary idol, only to be waved away like a stray dog… it’s brutal, but in a very Burroughs way. The kind of story that gets retold not because it’s tidy or noble, but because it’s ridiculous and faintly tragic.
But then you get another angle, don’t you? Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard Kirk pipes up years later with a memory that makes the whole thing sound less cruel and more like a cosmic cock-up. According to Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard Kirk, who told Reality Studio in 2008 email:
“My one enduring memory from Plan K was of sitting around a table with Ian, William and other band members of Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire. Ian asked William what he thought of Suicide (the band), William thought he meant the act of suicide, and I think said he disapproved. William was disturbed by the popping of champagne corks at the party, which he mistook for gunshots!”
It’s amusing to contemplate how that conversation might have gone: “No, I said ‘Do you like Suicide?’ You know, Suicide?”
It’s hard not to picture the fucking awkward scene in your mind, isn’t it? Curtis leans in, trying to talk shop, and asks Burroughs if he likes Suicide. Burroughs thinks he’s on about topping yourself. Cue confusion, awkward silence. The whole scene is tipping into farce. It’s the sort of mix-up you couldn’t script because it is too fucking daft to be real.
In the end, who cares if the story’s half true or pop culture whispers that got out of hand? The real point is that for one weird night in Brussels, Joy Division ended up tangled in Burroughs’ orbit. It wasn’t neat, it wasn’t heroic—it was awkward, funny, maybe a bit sad. But that’s exactly why it sticks. Legends are never about clean handshakes, they’re about the botched encounters you can’t quite explain away.