We at New Manchester Walks have been honoured to have taken so many people around the city on the trail of Ian Curtis’s Manchester which we have been running during the Art Gallery’s summer Joy Division exhibition: “True Faith” (in collaboration with the Gallery).

The exhibition, which runs from 30 June-3 September, is being curated by Jon Savage with whom New Manchester Walks’ Ed Glinert worked on Mojo magazine in the 1990s.

Last date for the tours, starting at the Art Gallery entrance:
* Thu 24 August, 5.30pm. Book with eventbrite here.

We are honouring Ian Curtis, a tortured soul, a 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, the Afrique Club, Rare Records, the Lesser Free Trade Hall, the Hacienda, the Briton’s Protection – 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”.

* For more information about the exhibition, click True Faith.