Next public tour: Wednesday 18 May 2022.
Meet: Outside Mercure Hotel, Portland St/Piccadilly Gdns, 5.30pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Private Tours: Please e-mail info@newmanchesterwalks.com.
We’re honouring Ian Curtis: tortured soul and visceral, troubled mind with a voice that echoed Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and Matt Monro.
Curtis briefly led Joy Division, the finest flower of the early days at Manchester’s Factory Records, shaking sensibilities and sending shivers down the spine on an all too brief catalogue of classic works, epitomised by the Gogol-influenced “Dead Souls” and the harrowing “Shadowplay” in which he prefigured his own sad suicide.
This tour of Curtis’s Manchester haunts – Rafter’s, Pip’s, the Afrique Club, Arrow Studios, Rare Records, the Briton’s Protection, the Beach Club, a forgotten, almost pre-historic Manchester – is one of the more tragic tours in the NMW roster, but also one of the most powerful, heading into the very “centre of the city where all roads meet waiting for you”.