About The Song
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” is a song by English rock band Joy Division, released in June 1980 as a non-album single. Its lyrics were inspired by lead singer Ian Curtis’s marital problems and struggles with epilepsy. The single was released the month after his suicide.
The song was certified double platinum in the UK, selling and streaming over 1,200,000 units, and has an ongoing legacy as a defining song of the era. In 2002, NME named “Love Will Tear Us Apart” as the greatest single of all time, while Rolling Stone named it one of the 500 greatest songs ever in 2004, 2010, and 2021.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” was written about Ian Curtis’ troubled relationship with his wife, Deborah Woodruff, whom he married in August 1975. Additionally, it deals with his own struggles with epilepsy, which he was diagnosed with in 1979, and the overwhelming stress of holding down a day job and his growing career as a singer.
At a Joy Division gig in October 1979, Curtis met Belgian journalist and music promoter Annik Honoré and the two began a relationship, which caused further distress between Curtis and Woodruff.
Speaking about her relationship with Curtis in a 2010 interview with Belgian magazine supplement Focus, Honoré said:
It was a completely pure and platonic relationship, very childish, very chaste… I did not have a sexual relationship with Ian. He was on medication, which rendered it a nonphysical relationship. I am so fed up that people question my word or his. People can say whatever they want, but I am the only person to have his letters… One of his letters says that the relationship with his wife Deborah had already finished prior to us meeting each other.
The title to the song can read like an ironic response to “Love Will Keep Us Together”, a song whose version by Captain & Tennille was a hit in 1975. According to record producer Warren Huart, its intro was influenced directly by the Neu! song “Hero”.
The main riff in the song was borrowed (with permission) from an nearly unknown Mancunian band, “The Manchester Mekon”. The original riff used in a song called, “The Cake Shop Device.” Joy Division heard the track being played and asked founding member Frank Ewart permission to adapt. Permission was granted and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was born.
Video
Lyrics
When routine bites hard and ambitions are low
And resentment rides high, but emotions won’t grow
And we’re changing our ways, taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again
Why is the bedroom so cold? You’ve turned away on your side
Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry
Yet there’s still this appeal that we’ve kept through our lives
But love, love will tear us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again
You cry out in your sleep, all my failings exposed
There’s a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold
Just that something so good, just can’t function no more
Then love, love will tear us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again
Then love, love will tear it apart again
Love, love will tear it apart again