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Interview: Peter Hook

When people talk about the ‘Manchester music scene’, a handful of bands usually spring to mind- The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Oasis. One band in particular, formed in the hills of Macclesfield, helped carve the way so the rest could follow. The Mic’s Alice Beard sat down with Peter Hook to discuss all things Joy Division, New Order and the legacy of the music as he attempts to carry it forward with dignity and grace.


Peter Hook- a man who, alongside three young companions, paved a new way through the thickness and the grey of the British music scene. Catching him for an interview within his crowded schedule seemed a fleeting moment, therefore a moment I had to grab. This was a quick pitstop for a man who spends most of his time ‘in the office’- the office being the stage, that is. Having just played Rewind festival in Macclesfield roughly a week prior, it felt like a fitting point of reflection to quickly get the ball rolling.


“It's quite weird really because when we were together as New Order, we toured and then recorded. To be honest with you, I never stop touring. I play wherever and whenever. After all those years of being denied the opportunity to play, now I'm just happy to do anything. So I never stop playing.”


It seems Hook like to keep his manager on his toes, as he explains he’ll happily go from playing anything between thirty minutes to two and a half hours, as he had done  in Antwerp more recently. For a man with such a large back- catalogue of music you can hardly blame him for wanting to inject something new into every performance. If you’ve got the assets, you might as well dig deep.


“We’ll do bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, weddings anything you want!”


When it comes to playing material, Hooky has no preference- whether it’s Joy Division or New Order, anything goes. After all, when you’ve got Love Will Tear Us Apart and Blue Monday under your belt as mere starting points there isn’t much that could go wrong. World in Motion must also receive an extra little shoutout for all of its hard work in doing the rounds on Hook’s most recent festival runs which coincided with the Euros.


“I'm very lucky now that I get to play nearly all our songs, so I don't really have a favourite. I don't think there are any Joy Division songs that I actively dislike. There's a couple of New Order tracks I actively dislike.”


He gives me a sly grin at this point, this the first of what would become many not-so-subtle digs at his former New Order bandmates. A few songs missing off the catalogue doesn’t seem so bad though. Hook explains that his ambition with forming the Light was to play every song that Joy Division and New Order had ever written and recorded. Heading into next year, he plans on playing New Order’s seventh LP, Get Ready for the first time in approximately twenty years.

 


“I'm hoping the Light could probably play about one- hundred songs now. When I was in New Order we were lucky if we could play twenty, so we're playing a hell of a lot more. It’s very nice, very refreshing- which makes me very happy”


Besides trawling through all the best of the archives, Hook still enjoys engaging in solo projects. His most recent pursuit was with Rusty Egan, formerly of The Blitz Kids, in addition to two tracks in collaboration with Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür. He briefly mentions a recent performance in London in which Damon Albarn joined him onstage to perform Aries, the Gorillaz track he also worked on alongside Georgia. Beneath all of this excitement and the spectacle of performance, there is clear motivation and purpose residing within Peter Hook. He’s a vehicle fuelled by the desire to celebrate a history, a legacy. It might seem interesting to some, this desire to cling onto the past, but as Hooky went on to explain:


“I've heard the collective groan when The Rolling Stones play and Mick Jagger goes ‘We're gonna play a new song’. We just want satisfaction. As musicians we call it The Rolling Stones syndrome in that your new stuff seems to get ignored, whereas people love to focus on the old stuff. So I'm happy to do both.”


Underpinning Hook’s career, as it stands now, is this necessity to celebrate Joy Division’s successes- celebrations he felt perhaps fell short in the past.


“When we were together as New Order, focused on going forward and what we were doing, it was easy to ignore Joy Division. But once I was out and it was coming up to thirty years of Joy Division and we had more fans and sold more records than ever, I thought, why aren't we doing anything to celebrate? Ian, his life, his legacy. Ours, our legacy as well. And that was how it started.”


There is definitely a tough balancing act playing out here. The desire to keep the past alive whilst maintaining that onward motion and not getting bogged down in what was, and rather focussing on what could be and is presently. This is a sentiment which resides in Hook also, this ever forward- marching motion instilled in him since the early days of Joy Division.


“I'll always remember our manager always used to say to us ‘the only track you should be worried about is your next one.’ To get on with it. It's always your next track is the one that you should be working towards. As I said before, I'm very lucky that I get asked to play with a lot of people. But the one thing I do miss about not being in a band is having the urge and the need to make new music. I missed that, but it’s a small price to pay to get rid of them bastards!”


This burning desire to play the music he loved finally became reality after reading a Bobby Gillespie interview in which he explained his plans to play Screamadelica in full due to some of his most beloved tracks from the LP being missed out through years of live shows. It struck a chord and felt akin to how Joy Division had been left. In Hook’s mind, Joy Division sounded completely different live than on record, and he wanted to share this with as many people as possible. This was his way of celebrating the record, rather than the band.


Setting out on his own new venture in 2010 with the Light must have been a frightening prospect, yet the one thing which has remained and proven unchallenged for years now is the impact and power of Joy Division and New Order’s music. It’s not something that I think could ever be scrubbed away lightly.


“I remember the first gig with the Light I was in an Ibis hotel across the road, literally peeking over the thing, wondering if anybody was going to come. I had no idea whether anybody would come or not. And I was terrified. Luckily for me, they did. And they came because they loved the music just as much as I do. It's easy for me to play wherever I play because of the love for the music.”


With time, the rocks might have fallen on Peter Hook and the remaining members of New Order. In fact, there is a unifying experience for all bands who have trickled down through the generations in a similar manner- a certain time-warp produced by the internet, creating a unique and very alien phenomenon never faced previously. What is now considered contemporary is almost an obsolete concept, musically. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether the music came out forty or so years ago because the accessibility is far wider and more complex than could even be imagined at the time of the music’s conception. This lending to a sense of timelessness has undoubtedly played a huge role in the success of keeping the legacy of Joy Division and New Order alive.



It’s an interesting concept to consider- playing live to both fans who may even have been present for Joy Division’s first gigs in grotty social clubs, along with the younger fans who are only just coming through the cracks.


“It is quite strange at my age to get asked by sixteen-year-old kids what Ian Curtis was like. It's actually quite a weird thing, and I'm like, wow, that is one hell of a question because he was just like you. I met him when he was nineteen and he died when he was twenty-three. So when these kids are asking me what he was like, I'm going ‘he was just like you’”.


Joy Division were of course entirely unaware of the significance their music would come to hold at the time they were playing around and producing it. With their debut Unknown Pleasures celebrating its 45th anniversary this year, along with Closer recently turning 44 in July, there is a lingering feeling of all that could have been, and what came to be. Something haunting yet equally beautiful in the way the band’s story came to play out. In reflecting upon whether Joy Division achieved in what they set out to do, the answer seems entirely simple and clear- they wanted to play music, and that is what they did.


The story is well known amongst fans in the form of fairytale whispers which might aswell be engraved on the paving slabs in the streets of Manchester- Hook and Sumner went to see the Sex Pistols at their infamous Lesser Free Trade Hall gig and thought ‘yeah, we could do that’.


“You had nothing in your mind. All you wanted to do was scream ‘fuck off’ at people and make a horrible racket, which I can assure you is what we did. We made a horrible racket for about a year and a half until we learned and trained our ears to pick up on the good things that we were doing and dump the bad things”.


After meeting Ian Curtis at a later Sex Pistols gig, everything came into alignment. All that was meant to be came to be- it was as simple as that. Ian was the force to set the big vision into stone, and from then on the songs got better and better.


“Then, once we found Steve Morris, it felt like the car was ready to travel. It had all the wheels. You had the opportunity to play the songs in Manchester. And then you had the opportunity to play them in Leeds, Nottingham, Scotland, Ireland. We could go to all of these places and then all of a sudden you go to Belgium and France and you're going ‘wow’. Until of course Joy Division then imploded with Ian's death.”


Going from being a smaller cult band to gaining a bigger following from the end of Joy Division into the birth of New Order was undoubtedly a remarkable but equally estranging experience. Such a rapid transition was never going to be easy, but coping with the loss of a frontman and friend holds no words to compare.


“I remember listening to the top twenty just after Ian had died and realising that Love Will Tear Us Apart had gone straight in at number thirteen. And you weren't celebrating that. Then of course you form New Order and a couple of years later you release Blue Monday and it was straight in at thirteen but this time you're celebrating it. It’s a very strange place to be at. The world opens up but there are many, many disappointments.”


But going back to what Joy Division set out to do, they never really set out to do anything. They didn’t want to be the biggest band in the world. They didn’t want to change the world either. They just wanted play- that’s what made them happy. And to this day it is still what continues to motivate Peter Hook.


Throughout the interview there is almost a feeling that Joy Division were simply at the right place at the right time. Even now, Hook seems overcome by a certain sense of good fortune being bestowed upon him.


“We’re very lucky as a group in the fact Joy Division's music has lasted throughout, and it wins fans even now. And every year you get new, younger fans who are hearing the music for the first time. It really was a gift, in that it goes across time and it goes across fashion.”


There is immeasurable gratitude in the fondness with which he speaks of his past, and in particular the opportunity he was presented with when the band met Tony Wilson. Once upon a time a young Peter Hook would accompany his mother as she bought her cigarettes from a shop in Salford. The man who sold them to her wore a “bright coloured Dickie bow and a wonderful suit”. This man, as it turns out, was Tony Wilson’s father. Who could ever have imagined that years later the pair would be carving their own deep groove in Manchester’s musical and historical landscape.


Factory really was something unique. Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Alan Erasmus- a wonderful concoction of individuals only the stars could have dreamt up. It really does all seem like a twist of fate. Joy Division have formed a part of England’s musical history, and Hook is aware of their part to play.


“Tony was a wonderful character, an absolutely wonderful character. I loved him. He was such a unique person. His attitude to us as a group was ‘Darlings, just carry on doing what you're doing. I'm not going to say anything just do it for me’ It was the opposite of any other record company I've ever come across.”



Wilson played a huge part in creating Manchester’s legacy. The city, along with the rest of the North has always possessed an undertone of something unique. Although Joy Division’s songs were never overtly political, for example, it has always seemed to me that the political and social context of the time left a lingering stain within the music produced. The strange combination of industrial and rural landscapes colliding to add something distinct onto the backdrop of the music scene of the late seventies and eighties.


“I miss Tony every day. I really do. I went to see him recently. I went to a funeral and went to visit him in Southern Cemetery because I've not been for a while and that was wonderful. There's too many of us in Southern. I keep wondering, should I go? I don't know whether to go or not, so we're all together”


With this sense of unity, sense of community, it is unsurprising that the music of joy Division and New Order has stood the test of time for this long. These were the people who helped string it all together in the first place.


“I mean Manchester is very unique place. It really is a very unique place and I've lived all my life here. We've achieved a lot and being able to go around the world and celebrate that is great. I mean even getting a taxi wherever, you know Brazil, Argentina, America, Canada, they’d say ‘Where are you from’, and I'd go 'Manchester' and they'd go ‘Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets?!’ Manchester United was the big one. Unfortunately, whenever you get in a taxi now it's Manchester bloody City. You can't win them all!”


Manchester now isn’t what it was in its heyday. Many would agree that it’s a shadow of its former self. That’s not to say the city hasn’t produced some great talent of recent years, but rather that it seems to now fade in and out, instead of providing a strongly lit beacon. It’s not easy though. With a new age comes new challenges. Financially there are constraints, then of course there’s the competition from other bands. Talent undercutting or overachieving. It’s a difficult arena to navigate. One minute a band could have both feet on the ladder and the next they could be knocked off just as quickly as they got themselves on. That’s not to say the conditions were easy for Joy Division, starting out in the seventies, but Hook agrees there are unparalleled hurdles to navigate now.


“In our day we had records to fall back on. Nowadays people don't have records. Bands have to be able to do everything themselves to build a following. They have to do their own PR. They are much more self-contained. And much more knowledgeable about what makes groups and music work than we were. Me and Mani (The Stone Roses) always talk about how all we had to do was turn up- and you didn't even have to turn up sober. Me and Mani sit there and go ‘where did all that money go?’ Records used to earn, and now what do we get? Spotify, where we get .00013 of a pound every time bloody Elephant Stone is played or Blue Monday is played.”


The contrast in how things have changed is stark. These new buildings blocks required to crawl your way through the industry appear so foreign. Hook takes a moment to recall the time the band were invited to Quincy Jones’ house after being signed to America, arriving to see a fifty times platinum record display spanning an entire wall of his home. How much money that would equate to doesn’t bear thinking about, let alone actually calculating- but for the band, the realisation of where they were and what they were really doing must have been inordinate.


“You know, four tossers from Salford all sat there in front of Quincy Jones! We were like my God! It was imposter syndrome, I'm telling you”.


To start out as a new band driven by the desire to simply be heard, it’s tough to navigate that line between crushing self- doubt and wild confidence. This was no different for Joy Division and Peter Hook.


“The hardest thing is having the belief in yourself to be able to negotiate the anti-you. Think of the Simon Cowells of the world. What would Simon Cowell say to Ian Curtis? What would he say to Ian Brown? What would he say to Shaun Ryder? He wouldn't say ‘you're gonna be a pop star, you're gonna be a rock star’. He’d say- ‘Give up your job. You're shit’. And yet here we are! Music is like acting. It's like modelling. The rejection is crushing and you have to rise above that and hopefully find a way that people will agree with you, which I've been very lucky with. Me and Mani, we always have a big hug and say we can't believe we got away with it.”


It goes without saying then, that Peter Hook can look back on his past and forward into the future with great satisfaction on what he has managed to achieve. And yet, with all of these great achievements, all of this pride in the music and the city of Manchester, one thing defeats all in what Peter Hook is most proud of- his family. As he talks me through his wife’s upcoming book about the Hacienda there is great adoration. After many words from Hook in the past discussing the gangs and the drugs and the money, Threads is to be a book celebrating the staff of the Hacienda and how it changed people for the better.


“It's a great view to have because those people are the quiet ones that didn't cause any harm but have actually looked after and enriched our culture. It’s wonderful to be able to celebrate the good side of it- which was the music and the companionship”.


So, as it goes, Peter Hook is most proud of:

His family

The Hacienda

Joy Division

New Order

 

Without much more from myself to add, I’ll leave it there. I wouldn’t want to spoil anything


Alice Beard


 

Edited by Alice Beard

Image 1 courtesy of Mark L Hill, image 2 courtesy of Kevin Cummins, video courtesy of Peter Hook and the Light on Youtube

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