PETER Hook is a man making up for lost time. Denied the chance to keep performing the songs he helped create in seminal post-punk outfit Joy Division, first by the tragic suicide of friend and frontman Ian Curtis and latterly by the reluctance of his bandmates to revisit their musical past once they’d reconvened as New Order, the bassist has spent the past 14 years performing every single Joy Division song ever recorded with his band Peter Hook & The Light.
Joy Division released two studio albums, while New Order delivered eight when the bassist known to most as ‘Hooky’ was still a member. Having parted acrimoniously from the Bernard Sumner-fronted band he now refers to as “New Odour” back in 2007, the Salford man has simultaneously been resurrecting the New Order back catalogue in the same painstakingly chronological, album-by-album manner, bringing back to the stage many songs that were only ever performed on the original tour for the album they appeared on or, in some cases, never at all.
Having now made it all the way to the end of the band’s original run with 1993′s Republic - 2001′s ‘reunion’ album Get Ready is next in his sights - the bassist is currently touring the Substance compilation records for both bands: 1987′s round-up of New Order’s 12-inch singles output which also included a brand new single, True Faith, and 1988′s mop-up of non-album Joy Division tracks.
“Substance New Order was a CD collection for Tony Wilson [boss of Factory Records, New Order’s label] to listen to in his new Jaguar,” explains a tanned and topless Hooky (68) via Zoom from his holiday home in Majorca.
“Tony said, ‘Do you mind if I put all the singles on a CD?’. We didn’t really know what a CD was then, because there weren’t any: I think there was only about two music CDs commercially available, and they were both classical.
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“It was the cheapest LP we never made, because it was all already done, apart from True Faith - which wasn’t the easiest record to make, because we weren’t exactly getting along at that point.
“To be honest, it was an LP that we really didn’t want anything to do with, but as soon as our American label [Quincy Jones’s Quest label] saw this New Order CD, they were desperate to put it out in the US. They also released it as a double vinyl, which sold three million - an absolutely amazing achievement at that time.
“So really, it just shows you how you should never ask anybody in a group for any advice on what you should do, because they won’t have a bloody clue.”
Given Joy Division and New Order’s status as two of the most influential and revered bands in the alternative music universe, it’s little wonder that Hooky and co are currently kept extremely busy with shows all over the world performing shows featuring both Joy Division and New Order material.
To be honest, Substance was an LP that we really didn’t want anything to do with, but as soon as our American label, Quincy Jones’s Quest, saw this New Order CD, they were desperate to put it out in the US. They also released it as a double vinyl, which sold three million - an absolutely amazing achievement at that time
— Peter Hook
However, apparently this willingness to play whenever and wherever contrasts sharply with the bad old days of New Order, as the bassist recalls.
“One of the odd things about New Order which I never got quite to the bottom of was that Bernard always insisted that he would never work festival season, so we always had the summers off,” he tells me.
“That was frustrating, but the great thing about it was that we got a whole six weeks with the kids here in Majorca every year.”
Now, to be fair to Sumner, New Order did still manage to make a fair few memorable festival appearances in their day, notably at Glastonbury.
“We did a few, but it was always very, very difficult to get him to do any,” Hooky elaborates.
“We basically only did them when we ran out of money. So, yeah, we had the record up until this year for headlining Glastonbury. I think we headlined it four times, and Coldplay have now done it five times.”
As mentioned, the Joy Division-founder’s summers are rather busier these days, when you can catch Peter Hook & The Light at everything from retro 1980s-themed festivals like Rewind, which they played last week in Henley in England, to this weekend’s family-friendly Solfest music event in Cumbria and next week’s headline club show in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
New Order’s Substance was released on this day in 1987!
— Peter Hook (@peterhook) August 17, 2024
Don’t forget, we will be performing it in full every night - alongside its Joy Division counterpart & more - over the next few months in Brazil, Mexico, the US, Canada, the UK & Ireland…
Tickets: https://t.co/aRq5vk7N7r pic.twitter.com/YMR3c1rXQQ
And, as a veteran of outdoor shows in the pre-health and safety era, when wet weather would often turn festival stages into minefields of potential electrocution, Hooky definitely has a sobering perspective on how far such events have come over the ensuing decades.
“In those days, you were taking your life in your hands,” he says of a time when even a ‘normal’ indoor show was fraught with health hazards.
“I remember doing a festival in Germany, and it was pouring so hard my semi-acoustic bass literally filled up with water ‘til it came out of the F-hole.
“The guy who was running the festival was a friend of ours, Scumeck Sabottka, who managed Kraftwerk for a long time. So I went over to Scumeck and said ‘we can’t carry on’. Being a forthright German, he just went ‘Shut up, you whining English pig. Get back out there - they’ve paid a f***ing fortune to see you, you idiot’, and sent me straight back out.”
Having somehow survived such sketchy shenanigans, it seems that the last few years of playing Joy Division and New Order songs alongside each other has helped to amalgamate both fanbases, softening the opinions of punters who had perhaps previously seen themselves as diehard devotees of one act with little time for the other.
“I noticed when we first did this ‘togetherness’ thing that a lot of the Joy Division fans would take the New Order set as an opportunity to go to the bar, and vice versa,” says the bassist, who sings lead vocals during both sets.
“Interestingly, with the education that they’ve had with us over the past few years, that doesn’t happen any more.”
He adds: “One of the big frustrations I had before New Order split up in 2007 was that we wouldn’t play most of these songs. So it’s been really nice to get them back.”
