Ian was for real – that much-maligned phrase. The music was “fantastically exciting, terrific right the way through” and also offers “emotional authenticity. So why have Joy Division had such longevity? Pop music at the time “allowed people who weren’t privileged to say something, make art, that’s what Joy Division were doing, they were making art,” says Savage. It’s likely that the book will only add to the cult of Curtis that has grown ever stronger over the past 34 years. The phrase “used to” recurs, a lament for a lost time: “I used to dream a lot”, he writes in one note, but “we grew up too soon and our fears took the place of our dreams”. “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? (a question scribbled over the question “WHERE IS YOUR PAST?”) WHERE ARE GOING” (sic). The notebooks are filled with questions: “WHAT ARE YOUR VALUES?”, he asks. In his notebooks, meanwhile, what is captured is Curtis’s perpetual search for “a better word to describe our state of mind”, one seemingly haunted, in his case, by a sense of life’s transience and uncertainty. The bag went everywhere with him, and he kept it in “the blue room”, the room in the Macclesfield home that he and Deborah bought in 1977 where he wrote and which he had carpeted and painted light blue. All he was able to express on a personal level was poured into his writing, and so his lyrics tell much more than a conversation with him ever could,” explains Deborah in her foreword to the book. “When Ian found his direction, the notebooks, the scraps of paper and the carrier bag became an extension of his body. Curtis used to carry his writings around in a plastic bag.

It is drawn from several sources, including an A4 ring binder, three notebooks and a large sheaf of A4 paper, as well as miscellaneous scraps. The project was initiated by Lee Brackstone, a commissioning editor at Faber, who called Deborah in early 2013 suggesting a book and wondering if, in fact, there might be any fragments of Ian’s original lyric drafts in fact, there was even more extant material than he had hoped for.

Ian curtis so this is permanence