New Order held seance to contact Curtis

New Order. Photo / Supplied

British rockers New Order held a seance to contact the spirit of their late bandmate Ian Curtis in the hope he could tell them where to locate their stolen equipment.

The musicians first found fame as Joy Division in the late 1970s but changed their name and musical direction after Curtis' death in 1980.

During their first US trek just months after the tragedy, their tour bus and all their instruments and amps were stolen from outside a hotel in New York.

The band took drastic steps to recover their equipment when they realised they weren't insured, conducting a seance with a wine glass in a desperate attempt to get some answers from Curtis.

"We thought, Ian will tell us where the gear is. It didn't help us get the gear back. Everybody got bored with it, so there was just me left. It wasn't Ian, it was someone who wasn't speaking English, but the very fact that this thing seemed to be moving around on its own actually s**t me up (scared me) quite a bit," drummer Stephen Morris tells Mojo magazine.

-AAP