A deeply evocative civil-service artifact: a four-page completed application-for-employment packet, Form JC/77/EMP, for fictitious Macclesfield applicant Kevin John Bradshaw, authorized and signed by Ian Curtis in his capacity as an Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer at the Macclesfield Employment Exchange / Job Centre. The official processing date is 4 October 1979, placing the document after the release of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and during the band’s rapid ascent, while Curtis was still working by day at the Exchange and reshaping post-punk by night. The packet is completed in manuscript in blue ballpoint, with Bradshaw’s personal particulars, education, employment record, references, general responses, applicant declaration, official interview remarks, approval decision, and Curtis’s authentic signature as presiding officer/interviewer.

The item consists of four pages on 5.5 × 8.5 in. Weston Bond 25% cotton watermarked paper, two-hole punched and housed in a contemporary marbled binder of Macclesfield origin. The paper stock, format, and binding are consistent with a hand-processed British civil-service packet of the period. The date is especially poignant: Curtis had been diagnosed with epilepsy in December 1978, and by October 1979 he was balancing his resettlement-officer duties with Joy Division’s accelerating career. Curtis was known to take genuine pride in his work helping people at the employment exchange, making this not merely a celebrity signature but a window into the full, human complexity of one of rock’s most mythologized figures. A plaque now marks the Old Labour Exchange building in Macclesfield where Curtis carried out this work, cementing its place in Joy Division lore.