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We listen to Bowie's Low, and little by little, everyone falls asleep, except Ian and me. They are very nice, very friendly, flattered that a foreign magazine would be interested in them. The musicians of Joy Division earn £5 each per concert, do not have any money to stay at hotels, and thus stay with acquaintances, just north of London. This happens, shortly after I land with my questions to Bert Bertrand (Belgian journalist) like "What is your favourite colour?" (she smiles). This is Rob Gretton, the manager, who says yes - next time. I am totally grabbed by it: after the concert, my friend Isabelle and I approach a guy near the console and ask for an interview. In August, I see Joy Division at the Nashville Rooms: I had listened to Unknown Pleasures which I found to have a violence and extreme intensity. Everything seems simple, accessible, inexpensive, the era is terribly exciting. The ritual of English fans, the British devotion, the "fabulous look", all of this DNA leaves its mark on the "sensible girl, clean across the board, who has always worked hard at school."Īfter a "crap job" at the Tour des Pensions in Brussels (.), Annik leaves for London in early summer 1979, where she tracks down a job as a secretary at the Belgian Embassy.Īnnik Honoré: There I was writing for En Attendant (Belgian cultural magazine) and I am going to concerts every night. The language student in Bournemouth was similarly thunderstruck when she saw her hero to this day, David Bowie, at Wembley Arena the same year. After the Stones at Forest in 1973, the first major impact came on at a Patti Smith and Stranglers concert at the Round House in London. One night in early June, I meet her at her home for pasta with vegetarian sauce and a marathon discussion lasting four hours.īorn 12 October 1957 into a middle-class family - her dad was a police inspector, her mother a land registrar - Annik is a child of rock music. Having known Annik since the glorious punk years, I approached her with a strong desire to become acquainted with the flip side of this saga. She would make an exception for the fine book Torn Apart by Lindsay Reade, wife of Tony Wilson, who received Annik immediately after the death of Curtis. Annik would rather see a shrink than a reporter, refusing to confide in the media who, especially in Britain, portray her as the evil mistress causing the fatal rupture between Ian and his wife Deborah. Corbijn's fiction would trigger a resurgence of questions about her role in the tragedy of Ian Curtis, who committed suicide two months short of his 24th birthday. Since the publication of the book Touching From A Distance by Deborah Curtis in 1995, which largely vilified Annik, and all the more so since the biopic Control by Anton Corbijn in autumn 2007, Annik has emerged from her private shell. I would like to tell her my side of what happened." Annik pauses for a moment and offers a smile that gives her face a look of both charm and melancholy. "I always expect that Natalie, Ian's daughter, will ring the doorbell of my house. Thirty years later, Annik Honoré, his Belgian girlfriend, is willing to talk for the first time in detail about her dazzling history with Ian, and a time which was extraordinary in all senses of the word. "On, Ian Curtis hanged himself at his home in Macclesfield, triggering the process of the mythification of Joy Division.