Ian Curtis & David Hockney – the story of a connection
From a well-lit boutique to the River Aire
This intrigued me when I got wind of it and began researching; ingenious, indirect connections between David Hockney and Ian Curtis which sheds light on many things including Manchester’s 1970s creative and retail ecosystem, the regeneration of Northern cities, and the power of an image.
The process of putting together jigsaw pieces and ending up creating a picture that I didn’t know even existed started when I was trying to pin down the location of some Kevin Cummins photographs taken in January 1979. January 6th to be precise. Including the photo above, scanned from my old copy of NME.
That was also the day photographer Kevin Cummins took the much celebrated photographs of Joy Division on a bridge in the snow, in Hulme, Manchester. The four musicians look almost like they’re lost in a grey, bleak environment. Kevin has called these photos “the images that define the band”.
The link to Hockney is real but maybe tenuous. Bear with me. Finding and bringing together the jigsaw pieces takes us back to a school magazine from 1962 and on to July 1971 and introduces us to a menswear retailer called Jonathan Silver. And then through miles of pure wool, a wedding, a club called the ‘Glory Hole’, a sculpture called Alice, and an old mill close to the River Aire.
For a decade or so, Jonathan Silver was a key figure in Manchester’s city’s art and fashion world. Silver grew up in Bradford and studied for a BA in Textile Design and Management from the University of Leeds, but it was over the Pennines where he opened his first menswear boutique, in July 1971; on the corner of South King St and Ridgefield in Manchester city centre, positioned close to some of the most aspirational brands of the 1970s, including Jaeger and Habitat.
Manchester residents trying to get a handle on where exactly this is - the basement beneath the shop has been home to a series of late-night venues, most recently South nightclub. In 1971 the premises were a venue called Simms, which described itself as a “Bistrotheque” (evening reservations from 7pm, an a la carte menu featuring steak, but specialising in fish, with a sweet talkin’ DJ on hand to entertain the crowd until 2am). In the 1980s the basement venue became was known as Bernard’s Bar, later the Stuffed Olive, a celebrated gay bar. For a brief period in the late ‘80s it was Precinct 13, then Bar Kay. In 1993, Paul Cons and Lucy Scher - the two characters behind the groundbreaking gay night ‘Flesh’ at the Haçienda - launched a weekly night at Bar Kay called ‘Glory Hole’. Hockney doesn’t enter the story at this point, just in case you were wondering…
Back in November 1971, on the groundfloor of the building, Jonathan Silver’s boutique had already doubled in size. At the end of that month, the Manchester Evening News covered the shop in an ‘Advertorial’ (a paid-for positive feature). Readers heard tell of elegant pure new wool suits in the latest top new fashion material for men, retailing at £17.90. And wonderment that the shop managed to provide clothes of such high quality at that price. The secret was that Silver could call on several great working class tailors in Leeds - his contacts came from his wife’s uncle BIll - and was sourcing fabrics from mills local to Bradford, including especially from Leigh Mills in Pudsey. In addition he had the flexibility to make small quantities of his garments with bespoke and unusual colours and patterns.
Jonathan Silver sold some suits in sober work colours, but plenty of patterned shirts, items like full-length coats, green suede jackets, or a tweed suit with a smart 24 inch flare (for only £17.50). We’re told by the Evening News that “the gear’s bang up to date”. This was the early 1970s, jackets and suits in “new colours like aubergine, damson or orange cashmere”. Lovely!
Silver’s PR strategies, as well as buying good coverage in Manchester Evening News, including hosting events in Manchester’s top nitespots; in February 1972, for example, in amongst frivolity and cocktails, male models showcased the most recent Jonathan Silver menswear collection at Tramps on Cross Street (Tramps went on to be Cloud 9).
His ambition was reflected in statements within a month of opening trading that he had plans to open other stores, ten or more; the Jonathan Silver chain duly expanded over the next few years, including, among others elsewhere, a second branch in Manchester (at 66 Market St, close to the underground market), one on Pinstone St in Sheffield, and a branch in Coventry where a young Paul ‘Love & Pride’ King worked for a while.
Silver brought more than a business brain to bear on his work. He approached his boutiques with a vision, to ensure his clothes contributed to a lifestyle; an aspirant and artistic lifestyle. For example - and a clear point of difference from other menswear shops - was the feel of the place; the decor consisting of antiques and unusual art objects from his own personal collection. These included an alabaster bust of a woman created by the Italian sculptor Angiolo Malavolti (nicknamed “Alice”, the work became the shop’s unofficial mascot), a comfortable rocking chair and a Georgian hat stand discovered abandoned in a Yorkshire barn, and paintings including works of surrealism.
Silver also took a lot of trouble over the lighting in the shop. Rather than moody lighting, he kept it bright at all times. The rationale was excellent; “At least here you don’t have to wait till you’re out on the street to know what colour your new jacket really is,” he said.
In the days before Ian Curtis was due to get married on August 23rd 1975 to Debbie Woodruff, he trekked into Manchester city centre and bought a suit from Jonathan Silver’s store in 1975. He chose a peach-coloured pinstripe, a slightly high-waisted trouser, baggy in the leg, with wide lapels on the jacket. I guess it was very of-the-moment, and something Teddy Pendergrass would carry off with aplomb, but as Debbie says in her book Touching From A Distance, it soon looked “terribly dated in the photographs”. She suggests he’d have been more comfortable in a black leather jacket.
As was becoming evident, as well as a sharp business sense, most of all, Jonathan loved beautiful things. Once he’d proved himself in the menswear trade, he found large new premises on Chapel Walks off Cross St in Manchester which he called Art & Furniture, where he started selling art and, er, furniture. The art included works by Hockney, Jim Dine, and R.B. Kitaj. It was an extremely high end undertaking – Art & Furniture was a big space, filled with objects of real elegance.
Even before he had left college, Silver had begun collecting and dealing antiques and art. He valued aesthetics and how to create an effervescent spirit in an empty space. At the end of November 1980, Silver hosted an exhibition of recent paintings and original drawings by Hockney at his Art & Furniture premises. The Hockneys included a preparatory sketch for one of his most famous works, ‘A Bigger Splash’.
Hockney and Jonathan Silver had both attended Bradford Grammar School, though many years apart. The school connection had helped them become friends, however.
In 1962, when Silver was thirteen, he took it upon himself to track Hockney down to ask a favour. In Hockney’s memory, they met at a Wimpy Bar in Bradford, although local newspaper reports indicate Bradford didn’t have a Wimpy until several years later; Davina Silver, though, recalls her grandfather (Jonathan’s father) had a Wimpy on Broadway in Bradford, opened in 1959. The favour was to ask Hockney if he would paint a cover for a magazine he was putting together at school. Hockney agreed.
Journalist Paul Morley’s first feature for the NME was printed in July 1977, a two page round-up of Manchester bands, which featured Buzzcocks and Magazine, plus several others less well-remembered now, and some sympathetic but low-key sentences about Warsaw (as Joy Division, in those early days, were called).
In January 1979, Morley was given an opportunity to update his survey of what was hot in Manchester. This time he chose to focus on just three local bands; Spherical Objects, Joy Division, and the Passage. Paul had decided to concentrate on Spherical Objects, believing them probably most deserving of the coverage.
Morley met Joy Division at the Brunswick pub just down Piccadilly Station. January 6th was a Saturday. Earlier in the day, the band had been with Kevin Cummins for a photo session to find an image or two to accompany the piece Paul was writing. Kevin remembers this was all happening on a Saturday at Joy Division’s request, because they didn’t want to take time off work to do it. It had been snowing, and although the plan remained to visit various locations in town, a few interior shots somewhere would be useful too.
Kevin met the band in the Mitre Hotel near Manchester Cathedral. “They had a few ideas they wanted to try, one of which was a photo by a curved building on the way to Victoria Station,” he later recalled. “We also took some in-and-around the Cathedral yard. I didn’t feel any of it was that satisfactory but these were the shots the band wanted. I suggested going out to Hulme. I thought I could get a shot of them over Princess Parkway.”
So they made their way to a bridge over the Princess Parkway in Hulme. During the afternoon, and at their request, Kevin also took shots of the band at a bus stop, messing about. But on the photos picked out by Kevin in the hours afterwards, the band don’t do much smiling. Ian Curtis liked his Marlboros, and Cummins shot a few frames of the singer in a trenchcoat, solo, drawing deeply on a cigarette.
Included in Kevin’s limited edition book Juvenes; the Joy Division Photographs of Kevin Cummins, there are a couple of mini-essays, among them one by Natalie Curtis, Ian’s daughter – she was a one year-old baby when her father died. She recalls how, when she was younger, photographs were a way of ‘catching sight’ of her father; “the smoker in a trenchcoat is the shot I recall seeing most often”.
One of Kevin’s motives for taking the band to the bridge was his success with an earlier shot he’d taken of Buzzcocks on a service station bridge just over a year earlier, which had ended-up on the front of NME (issue dated December 3rd 1977). Kevin says “the road out of Manchester was the idea behind the picture”. A further explication from Kevin about his approach to a shot; “I want the picture to be the kind of shot that builds the mythology of the band”.
Kevin and Joy Division then went back into town, to Art & Furniture and got the permission of Jonathan Silver to take a few photos in his shop. Kevin shot a roll of film there, including a photo of Ian Curtis at the far end of a long table, and in front on a large print of two faces. This shot shows all four of the band inside Art & Furniture…
This photo has none of the intensity of the ‘smoker in a trenchcoat’, or the bleakness of the Hulme bridge photos. The environment of the shot doesn’t fit the challenging sound of the band or the desolate post-industrial landscape their work in many deep ways seems to reflect. Ian Curtis, in amongst the luxury items in Jonathan Silver’s gallery looks to be embodying the spirit of an aspirant world rather than anguished one.
I’m reminded of seeing colour pictures of playwright Samuel Beckett on holiday in Morocco in the bright sun, wearing sandals, cream-coloured shorts, and a casual blue shirt, with a bag slung over his shoulder; relaxed rather than intense, carefree rather than burdened, and just not what you would expect of the writer of deep dramas and other intense, often pessimistic works. The dislocation is strange. Especially in contrast to black and white, glowering, wise, unsmiling photos of Beckett. But, at the same time, why wouldn’t Beckett be on holiday in Tangiers? And in a way, the existence of such photos liberates Beckett from the moodiness and the more familiar black and white images we’re used to seeing, it reminds us of likely disconnects between Beckett’s life and work.
Similarly, we know Joy Division had their moments sat around enjoying life; for example, eating dim sum at the Yang Sing, the band’s favourite Chinese restaurant in town. By passing only certain photos to the picture editor at NME, Kevin Cummins was very clearly shaping of the perception of the band. Just as other photographers, Anton Corbijn included, would do. Specifically with regards to the shot of the band sat round an expensive coffee table, Kevin points out “it’s not rock & roll”.
I’ve done my best to track down some of the paintings in Kevin’s photos of Joy Division in the Jonathan Silver gallery, hoping to spot a Hockney. The etching of a man in a flat cap behind Bernard’s right shoulder turns out not be a Hockney but a work by the American artist Jim Dine. In another photo from the session, Ian is sitting at the end of a long table, and the picture on the wall behind him is of Hockney not by Hockney (it’s by R.B. Kitaj). The picture in the photograph from NME at the beginning of this Substack post - Ian in front of two faces – I’m hazarding a guess might be by Richard Bernstein? Any ideas gratefully received.
From Art & Furniture, Kevin and the band then went to the interview location at The Brunswick. Kevin recalls talking to Ian in The Brunswick about subjects they had in common including Manchester City FC and Iggy Pop. Rob Gretton, Joy Division’s manager was also there; he usually sat in on the interviews. At this time, Joy Division had released the ‘Ideal For Living’ EP but had no label or future releases. Ian Curtis tells Paul Morley he’d love it if Tony Wilson and Factory Records got involved and helped make an album.
It was only weeks later that Factory did indeed schedule a Joy Division album. 1979 was going to be a year that Joy Division accelerated towards greatness, but in interviews Morley found them then, and always, wary, diffident, and different. Later, looking back he recalls; “Of the three groups I selected, they were the ones who couldn’t really talk about themselves and their ideas”. Paul, nevertheless, was intrigued and won over by Joy Division.
Morley talked with the NME’s editor about trailing the Manchester feature on the front cover alongside two other features about emerging music. When they fanned out the photographs of the three bands, the editor immediately picked out one of the photographs of Ian with his cigarette. Thus, says Morley, “the pure, indelible stare of Ian Curtis slipped onto the cover of the NME.”
In November 1983, there was another Jonathan Silver menswear fashion show, this time compered by Susie Mathis, at the Millionaire Club. But by 1984 Jonathan Silver had sold his chain of menswear shops, Art & Furniture was no more, and he’d relocated his passion to his native Yorkshire. In the early 1980s, he partnered Ernest Hall and bought a large redundant mill, Dean Clough in Halifax, once owned by Crossley Carpets.
Crossley Carpets, in the 1880s, had been the largest carpet manufacturers in the world, an exemplar of Victorian industry and prosperity (with a warehouse on Whitworth St, Manchester, and another in Kidderminster). But the textile industry that sustained Bradford, Manchester, and other towns and cities on the north, suffered changing market forces, and competition from abroad; the Crossley Mill fell into disuse by 1982
Under the ownership and stewardship of Ernest Hall, and Jonathan Silver, Dean Clough evolved into a thriving industrial park. By 1986 it housed over 160 companies and organisation employing more than 1,000 people.
Silver gave up his position as a director of the Dean Clough business in November 1984; sold out his share to his partner and took his family around the world. His two daughters seven and five, were taken out of school. The family visited all parts of the globe, before meeting-up with Hockney in LA. The two men had become firm friends; by this time, of course, Hockney was making an even bigger splash.
Returning to Yorkshire with his family, Jonathan Silver found a new project to test his passion and skills. Another old mill; Salts Mill, close to the River Aire, three miles out of Bradford.
Salt’s Mill had a notable history and was being described in the mid-1980s as “one of the most important industrial buildings in the country”. As with other Northern towns, the rapid industrialisation and population growth of Bradford in the early 19th Century had caused calamitous living conditions for the urban poor. Starting in 1851, Titus Salt built a giant mill on a green field site out of town, and, in a pioneering and benevolent way, also built housing on the site; by 1871 more than 4,300 people lived there, enjoying cleaner air than in the city, schools, a hospital, a park, a church, and wash-houses.
As with Crossley Mill, Salts Mill struggled from the mid-20th Century onwards. The last owners of the working mill were the textile company Illingworth, Morris who’d bought the business in the 1960s, but only twenty years later, Illingworth, Morris closed its operations there and put the mill and a total area of 17 acres on the market.
In June 1987, Salts Mill was bought by Jonathan Silver, for a sum close to £1m. Silver told the local press he hoped to replicate the success of the old mill in Halifax: “Dean Clough has been a great success. It’s a great challenge to take on a disused place and breathe new life into it.”
Silver’s plans for Salts Mill was to create a place that mixed art, retail, and tourism. He offered the V&A in London space to exhibit its highly-regarded but rarely exhibited South Asian collection, knowing it would strike a chord with the area’s large ethnic community. But the centrepiece was always going to his Hockney collection. He’d already amassed one of the largest Hockney collections in private hands in the UK, and Hockney later lent dozens more drawings and paintings to Silver’s Salts Mill. Hockney had his roots in Bradford and would return frequently to visit his parents, but back in the mid-60s he had left the heavy skies and oppressively dark environs, in search of a new life, more light, and artistic and sympathetic communities. He discovered the gay bars of New York, and moved on to live among the gay-friendly art circles of Malibu Beach and the Hollywood Hills, his canvases lit by the California sun.
Loyalty to his locality, a desire to create a sense of place, his self-belief and ambition and a relentless powering ahead with his vision; all this reminds me of Tony Wilson. Alan Bennett once wrote about Silver; “I am normally immune to enthusiasm and even recoil from it, but Jonathan’s was irresistible”. That was Tony too.
There was a debate across the North about what to do with former industrial buildings falling derelict, becoming, in some cases, unsaveable. The “dark satanic mills” were turning to rubble, a reflection of the death of British manufacturing. Cultural entrepreneurs like Jonathan Silver and Tony Wilson created spaces that developed into sites of local but also national significance. They each were given an opportunity to nurture their visions with the help of absent friends. Hockney had left Bradford, Ian Curtis had left the world.
In Manchester, the Haçienda had opened in 1982, with funds largely accrued from sale of Joy Division records. Without the life and work of Ian Curtis, Factory and New Order would never have been able to create a venue in a cavernous former industrial warehouse on Whitworth Street on the banks of the canal. They too had taken on a disused place to breathe new life into it.
Three hundred yards from the Haçienda, the Cornerhouse cinema and arts complex opened in 1985 in the empty premises of J.J Shaw, a carpet and furniture shop. The Tate took on an old warehouse on Albert Dock in Liverpool. In 1985, James Stirling was commissioned to design a new Tate Gallery; a ‘Tate of the North’, as the project was dubbed.
Hockney’s friendship with, and generosity to Silver, gave a big lift to the Salts Mill project. In its early months, the Mill hosted a retrospective exhibition containing 104 of his works, over a dozen of which had never been seen before. One or two commentators did wonder just what old Titus Salt, the great Victorian paternalist, would have made of the paintings of young hard-bodied Californian guys lounging around swimming pools that were adorning the walls and hanging from his steam pipes more than half a world away.
One way of looking at the trajectory of New Order is that slowly, psychologically and musically, they began to allow light into the darkness. For example, full colour album covers, not the austere monochromes of Joy Division’s records. In addition, some of the photographs helped nurture an image very distinct from how we’d all conceived of Joy Division; and, once again, Kevin Cummins played a part. There’s a photo shoot of his from July 1983, pictures of the band in America lying by a bright blue swimming pool in the hot sun. “I thought it would be really nice to do some pictures that echoed David Hockney,” said Kevin several years later. “We weren’t going to LA, so I used the Holiday Inn pool in Washington, DC.”
Hockney and Silver stayed in touch over the years; when Jonathan Silver was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, Hockney flew to Yorkshire as soon as he heard the news. The Mill’s Hockney collection has since grown from 56 paintings in 1987 to over 400 pieces, the largest holding of Hockney’s works in the world. Tens of thousands of people visit Salts Mill every year, for the art, the shop, the exhibitions, and the antiques dealers.
Jonathan Silver died in 1997, aged just 47. The man who sold Ian Curtis his suit, welcomed Joy Division into his shop, brought a huge old derelict mill back to life, and collected hundreds of Hockneys left quite a legacy.
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This is exactly why I love substack so much - I just wouldn't get to discover this magic anywhere else. Thank you, fascinating
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