British Music Experience
Since 2024
The guitar's current home is the British Music Experience in Liverpool, a museum tracing every decade of British music. A few photographs from our visit, but it's worth seeing in person, and in good company.
Where the guitar is now
The Phantom joined the collection at the British Music Experience — the UK's museum of popular music, down on the Liverpool waterfront — on 14 November 2024, and that is still where it is. The museum marked its arrival with an evening screening of Control, the 2007 Ian Curtis biopic, with the guitar out on view for everyone who came.
Tickets, opening times and directions are all on the BME's own site. That side of it is theirs; we just supply the guitar.
Kevin McManus, a trustee of the museum and Liverpool's UNESCO Head of Music, saw Joy Division play live and spoke when the guitar arrived about wanting it to send people back to the records. That is close enough to our own reason for doing any of this that it felt like the right place for it to go.
A detail we like
The Phantom was not, strictly speaking, Ian's purchase. It was bought in September 1979 by Rob Gretton, Joy Division's manager, and it went straight into service: the 1980 European tour, the recording of "Heart and Soul", and the Love Will Tear Us Apart video. Curtis can be seen playing it at several stops on that last tour.
For an object with that much attached to it, it spent a long time in cupboards.
Our visit
We went, and the photographs on this page are from that visit. They are not much of a substitute for standing in front of it — the shape of a Phantom never quite survives a photograph, and it is bigger and stranger in person than most people expect.
If you are planning to go and would rather nothing was spoiled, this is the point to stop scrolling. The rest of the museum is worth the trip on its own account.
How long it stays there
We are not going to make promises about the long term, because we genuinely do not know. It is in the right place for now, and if that changes we will say so on the latest page before it happens.
What does not change is the reason all of this exists. We would far rather the guitar was in a case where people can see it than in storage. If you work with a museum, gallery or exhibition that might want it at some point, please get in touch.
