The Peter Hook Interview
"When Carlos D left I applied, as a gag, for his job as bass player in Interpol. I didn’t even get a reply. I was out of a job at the time, so it was hilarious."
Industrial England in the 1970’s was a dark place: The polluted air, poor economy, and lingering affects of World War II casted a miserable cloud. In a sense, it was the ideal world for a writer like Edgar Allen Poe or Bram Stoker, but not for the hardworking family trying to make ends meet with a sense of well-being. It was a miserable place for children, many of whom believing life had no better version of itself. Though it coincided with the rise of punk rock—and that changed the mood. Germany had krautrock; America had disco; England had punk—or at least its beginnings. In 1972, Woking's the Jam formed, playing rambunctiously fast and dissimilar to those before them. What is more, they did this while dressed in suits. How punk.
Then it was 1976 and another band was on the rise. Featuring Ian Curtis on vocals, Bernard Sumner on guitar, Peter Hook on bass, and Stephen Morris on drums (joining in 1977), Joy Division began releasing music under the name Warsaw. Their lyrics dark, drums punchy, Joy Division separated themselves from the music that the Jam and XTC influenced and took the punk music a step further. Their name even derived from a nazi sexual slave rings featured in the 1955 novel House of Dolls. They released the EP An Ideal for Living and put their name on the map. It landed them a deal with Factory Records.
In 1979 the band released Unknown Pleasures, their debut full-length. Initially selling 10,000 copies, the band would eventually amass a cult-like following. Joy Division would go on to be rock royalty. As they toured the album in 1980, Ian Curtis, already diagnosed with epilepsy, suffered two major seizures. His health continued to deteriorate, though the band persisted. That March, Joy Division, now-prominent on the charts, released their second record Closer. The rock-and-roll world became too much for Curtis; on April 7th, 1980, the frontman attempted suicide by overdosing on his anti-seizure medication, phenobarbitone. After the blotched attempt, the band continued; they had a tour arranged in the United States. While the band was excited, certain they would make their big break across the band, there were doubts: How would Americans react to a frontman with severe epilepsy (and a signature dance to minimize it)? How would Curtis' life be affected on the road by his impending divorce from wife Deborah? The night before the band was scheduled to depart, Curtis was found dead in his home. His death was ruled as a suicide by hanging.
Hook, Morris, and Sumner were left with no plan; their friend and band's frontman had become a martyr and Joy Division could no longer be a thing. So they formed another band and pressed their luck. The result: New Order. The band recruited Gillian Gilbert on synthesizer and took an electronic approach that pioneered the electro-rock sounds that have since become commercial successes. New Order was unstoppable, too. When the money began raking in, the delved into ventures such as the club business, opening the Hacienda in Manchester, which became the stomping grounds for other bands to come from the area including the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Oasis, and the Smiths. From 1981–2001, Hook and the rest of the band released seven studio albums. They toured the world, made tons of music, and saw the world the way that they were on the cusps of doing so in Joy Division.
In 2007, though, the good times came to the end and brutal, petty lawsuits were flung at the various members by each other. Bassist Peter Hook would depart from the band and never rejoin. Their friendship, and way of celebrating Ian Curtis' life, would never be repaired. in 2010 Peter Hook went on to form a new band. Peter Hook and the Light sprung out of Hook's plan to play his discography in its entirety, doing sets of full albums. I spoke with Peter Hook about the days in the two bands, finding the good in the bad, and handling the legacy of his work
Yes, I was a founding member of Joy Division and New Order. What I do is celebrate the music of both groups by playing the LPs in full, live.
No, no. Good God, no. We aren’t organized, all that business-like. I was DJing, basically. I became an international DJ and went around the world playing records. Being paid to play your own music is great, but being paid to play other people’s music is pretty high up there, to be honest. I did a three year tour of the world. I wanted to celebrate Ian Curtis’ anniversary, which was May 18th, 2018. I wanted to play Joy Division, so I wanted to find a way to play it where I wasn’t pretending to be the group. I was celebrating the music. I had no contact with the other members of Joy Division. In fact, in 2007—and even up to the present day—I think our relationship has been, and still is, pretty bad. I decided to do the Light with some friends: half of my former band, Monaco, and the guitarist of Freebass, another band I was in before [Monaco].
We started celebrating the records. We didn’t want to sound like the group; we didn’t want to pretend to be Joy Division. The idea came to me by playing the records, because most people around the world have only heard the records, they’ve never seen or heard Joy Division live. There is very little footage of Joy Division. Joy Division was completely different live than they were on record, so I thought it was a good gimmick, really. That was the gimmick. I started playing the records in full. The thing about full records is that they are rather difficult to play, so that’s why most bands don’t do it; they only play a selection of songs which are, generally, the easier ones. I don’t have that luxury, so I have to play everything, regardless of how difficult it is. I must admit, as I said earlier, I find that quite challenging—and very satisfying when I pull it off.
Yes, it was. I mean, we had a couple of different names, we couldn’t find a decent name. We were called the Stiff Kittens when we started—a very punk name. We were also called Warsaw when we got a little more serious, but we were beaten by a band called the Warsaw Pact, so we changed our name to Joy Division. The rest, as they say, is history. We were semi-professional, as in we all held jobs while we were playing in the group for two-and-a-half years. That period was difficult, as we were fighting against all the odds to get ourselves heard and play gigs. Just as we managed to pull it together, Ian got ill with epilepsy. And the epilepsy got worse very quickly. We became fully professional for six months before Ian took his life.
Bernard [Sumner] was a graphic designer; Ian Curtis was an employment professional, he found people with disabilities jobs; I looked after the land on the canals in Manchester; Stephen Morris worked for his father, a plumber’s supplier.
Manchester and its groups were—and are—very competitive. Groups, because there is a group of you, ends up as a team. We all know that teams are, obviously, very competitive, so you were on “nodding terms,” shall we say, with the other bands. But you were never very close. You were always on the lookout, which had to be at the detriment of the other groups. Manchester has been very lucky over the years, because it’s churned out group after group after group. It’s only now in these recent years that it’s lost its grip on the world. It is about time the rest of the world world catches up, I suppose.
It’s interesting, really, because I know too many people that have worked with both of them. I think that, if you’re going to be discreet, you’re going to say both of them have their good points and both of them have their bad points. Oasis did play their first ever show with Noel on guitar supporting my band, Revenge, in 1990, I think it was. I do own a little piece of their history, shall we say. My brother videotaped it, by the way. He still tells me he has the footage somewhere at his house, but he hasn’t been able to find it. He just got a video camera at that point and came to Middleton, in Manchester, and recorded both groups. I keep begging him to get it, so I can sell it and retire. It’s interesting, you see.
In my opinion, Liam was always frustrated in Oasis, because he wasn’t the songwriter. Now that he’s a songwriter in his own right, I think he may have a different way of looking at what he has achieved. There’s no doubt that Liam benefited greatly from the Ariana Grande [arena bombing] benefit show with Coldplay. In Manchester, it brought him back to a massive audience because of his reaction to it, which was wonderful. Yeah, I think I would go team Liam, because I like groups, and I like groups being individuals that play together for pleasure and achieve something wonderful. When I listened to Beady Eye, I thought that they achieved what they set out to be, which was to enjoy playing together. Liam’s new album sounds, to me, very much like Beady Eye, so I’m happy to support him.
No. I mean, Interpol is the same in the way that, when you hear bands like the National, Editors, and others that sound like Joy Division—they sounded like us. I do hear it, too. I mean, Joy Division was the archetypal group lineup: bass, guitar, drums, vocals. Most groups would struggle not to sound like Joy Division. Probably the ones that don’t sound like the band sound like bloody New Order, anyway. I’m very lucky to have been in Joy Division from that perspective. Interpol is quite interesting; I quite like them. I think it was that one particular bass player, Carlos D, that got accused of emulating me. When left I applied, as a gag, for his job as bass player in Interpol. I didn’t even get a reply. I was out of a job at the time, so it was hilarious. They advertised it as, “Do you want to be the bassist for Interpol? Reply to this email with your resumé or whatever.” I sent mine, but they never got back to me. Maybe they thought I was taking the piss off someone? I did try and be, you know, honest.
They would riot because we didn’t do encores. When we started as New Order, actually, we had our scariest moments, because we played for such a short amount of time and because no one knew the material. It was the same with Joy Division in the start. We had no records out as New Order and everyone wanted us to play Joy Division. Really, the gigging from 1976 to 1986 was very difficult. In England, it was very male-oriented; there was a football fan attitude that came across the concerts, so you were fighting for your life, especially in the punk days. Every night. We had a massive run-in with skinheads once in Hamburg, Germany; we got bottled off by a skinhead audience as New Order. I remember, to annoy them, we went back on and played “Everything’s Gone Green” five times. We just beat them into submission. Then we went into the dressing room and found out that they stole all of our bags. Yeah, I literally had to fight for my life on stage, time after time again. It was just part of the game, it was what I grew up with. If you watch the film Control you’ll see one of Joy Division’s better riots, which was in Bury, England. I’m used to it.
Yeah, Ian was ill and needed the money from the show; it was after his first suicide attempt. It seems crazy now, that we would even consider it, but we were young and we were stupid. Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager] went to see Ian in the hospital and he said he’d do it. Rob said, “Let’s not push it by doing a whole gig, so just come on and do two songs. We’ll get the Factory Records to stand in for you.” We got a guy from the band Crispy Ambulance to stand in for Ian. He sounded very much like him; Crispy Ambulance imitated Joy Division. We also got guys from bands like A Certain Ratio. When they went on to do this, the audience was not amused. Then Ian came on and they were okay. Then when he went off, they started to smash the whole place up and attacked everyone on stage. We ended up having a massive fight to get out. In the film, it does actually portray the violence quite truthfully. A lot of our roadies ended up quite badly injured. It was just part of the course in England at the time. The punk gigs in America were the same.
I have my book about the Hacienda nightclub, which was the club New Order opened in Manchester, a book about Joy Division, and a book about New Order.
I am not included on any decision regarding any of those; they just do it. Sadly, I have no input. I’m not happy about that, but that’s just the way it is. Like the Doc Martens shoes that’s just come out—have you seen that one? I wasn’t involved with that in any way. Personally, I don’t think it’s right. I get part of the royalties, as the royalties are shared, but I don’t get any input into the decision, shall we say.
It’s a quite simple answer: no. Sadly, no.
No, you’re getting me confused with the others. That’s what the others do. What I do is, I play the albums from start to finish and play every track on it. I am chronologically going through my entire recorded career, every track that I’ve written and recorded with both Joy Division and New Order. At the moment, I’m up to the album Substance. I play every single track from 1977 that Joy Division ever recorded and wrote and I’m also working my way through the whole of New Order via the albums and EPs. I also play the rarities and B-sides in their entirety, too.
I was just saying to another interviewer that I’m only short two tracks—there are only two tracks I haven’t played to complete the whole set of New Order and Joy Division up to the end of Substance. One of the tracks is called “Turn the Heater On,” which New Order recorded as a tribute to Ian Curtis, because it was his favorite reggae song; the other is called “Too Late,” which we did as a John Peel session. Because Bernard never liked it, we didn’t record it. Those two tracks I will be playing in America this time around.