The right hook

“One of Bernard Sumner’s comments to me in the past was, ‘You’d play in fucking Beirut, you, you bastard!’” recalls former Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, I would!’ But you could imagine the way that he meant it.”

It’s a long way from Beirut, in every sense, but Hook’s latest flight of fantasy is taking him to both the Dublin Acacdemy and Skibbereen’s Cork X South West festival this fortnight.
“The thing is, if you want to put it succinctly, we’re all whores. Basically wherever anybody will pay us, we’ll go. The weird thing about musicians that I’ve found over the years is that once you become a musician that loves to play then really every chance you get to play you’ll take – no matter where it is. Because I’ve been DJing for the past six years I’ve been to nearly every festival around the world. The interesting thing is the mix of people you get. As a musician obviously you’re always trying to convert the next person to like you. That’s how you win support. It’s just about carrying on doing what you do best, really. So I’m very happy more or less to play anywhere.”
Hooky won’t be DJing at Cork X South West. Rather, he and his new band The Light will be performing Joy Division’s seminal debut album Unknown Pleasures in its entirety. He first decided to do it when a planned 30th anniversary celebration of Ian Curtis’s life in Macclesfield fell through last year.
“They’d planned a big memorabilia exhibition and a live gig to celebrate Joy Division’s music and his life. And when it fell through it left me thinking that in all the years that we’d been in New Order, we’d never done anything to celebrate Ian’s life or Joy Division. And after 30 years I just thought it was long overdue really. So it was very disappointing not to be able to do it. So I just put two and two together: I’ve got me own club, I’ve got me own group, which used to open the club. So I thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll play some of Joy Division’s music to celebrate Ian’s life’. And then basically from that it’s grown.”
It certainly has grown. Hook and The Light have been performing Unknown Pleasures all around the globe ever since.
“I said I was only going to play it once, which I soon regretted because almost immediately people from all around the world started asking me to go and play it. It was as simple as that, really.”
Before the very first show, Hook paid a visit to his old bandmate’s final resting place.
“Yeah, myself and a friend – who’s a huge New Order/Joy Division fan – thought it was only apt that on May 18 we went and said ‘hello’. Which we did do. We went to the crematorium and said ‘hello’.”
Was that the first time you’d done that?
“No, I’ve done it a few times actually. I’m one of these people that believes it’s always nice to go and say ‘hello’. One of my biggest regrets in life is that, when he died, I didn’t go to see him. I didn’t feel able to handle it. Basically, it was a bit of a cop-out, not saying ‘goodbye’, and I’ve regretted that every year ever since.”
Following the success of the Unknown Pleasures project, Hook and The Light also performed the band’s sophomore album, 1980’s Closer, in its entirety on May 18 at The Factory in Manchester. While he hasn’t yet decided if they’ll tour it, the concert was recorded for a vinyl-only release that will come out later this year.
“I’m really been enjoying it,” he says. “It’s one of my favourite records, despite the fact that it’s by Joy Division. I always found myself unable to listen to Unknown Pleasures because I really didn’t agree with Martin Hamnett’s production. Listening back to it to do the gigs, though, I realised how wrong I was. What a strength and a beauty Martin brought to the record. I think I was being very immature in my reaction to it because Martin gave it a sense of wonder, a wonderful aura, an ethereal sound that lasts forever. I listen to it now and it sounds fantastic. And thank god me and Bernard didn’t get our wish to produce Unknown Pleasures. We’d have ruined it.”
Not content with performing his old band’s material live, Hook and The Light have also recorded their debut EP which will be released next month. The four-tracker is titled 11/02/2011 (because it was recorded on February 11), and features the ex-Happy Mondays vocalist Rowetta singing Joy Division’s ‘Insight’, ‘New Dawn Fades’ and ‘Atmosphere’.
Hooky himself handles lead vocals on ‘Pictures In My Mind’, an unfinished JD track that he completed for the recording.
“What happened was there’s a bunch of Joy Division superfans, who have several stolen tapes – actually they were stolen from (manager) Rob Gretton. Because none of us at Joy Division or New Order have ever done anything with any old tapes or materials. There’s never been the incentive or any impetus to do anything. But this one particular kid got in touch with me and said he had a tape with an unfinished song on it, which we’d never played and he’d never heard of before.
“He said, ‘What do you think about it?’ I said, ‘I’ve never heard it’. So anyway the kid got me the tape and I heard this unfinished song. And I thought, ‘Wow! It wouldn’t take much to finish this song off’. And Ian Curtis was always a great believer in if you have an idea, you should always finish it because somebody always loves it. Those were his exact words. So I thought to celebrate this Joy Division thing, to celebrate the past and the future, and tie up a few loose ends, I’d finish off ‘Pictures In My Mind’. And we did that.”
Not everybody is happy with Hook’s activities. Several critics have accused him of milking the past for profit. Not that he’s unduly concerned...
“Well, I’d like them all to put their suggestions about what I should do on a piece of paper and send them to me and then they could work out the rest of my life,” he says, sarcastically. “The thing is, to my knowledge nobody says to Neil Young when he plays ‘The Needle And The Damage Done’ that he’s milking his past. Life is for living, you have to get on with it. Whilst the criticism hurts, most of it is English. What convinced me is when I play, when I see the way people respond, and I see the way people talk to me and the way people respond to me personally for playing it... that makes all those little people complaining pale into insignificance.”
One of his most vocal critics was none other than Mani, who posted some less than kind words about Hook’s musical abilities on his Twitter page. They had been playing together in the ill-fated ‘super-group’ Freebass, when the former member of the Stone Roses tweeted: “3 things visible from space, great wall of china, peter hooks wallet stuffed with ian Curtis blood money, man citys empty trophy cabinet!”
Although further offensive tweets followed (“we were all laughing behind his back watching the stupid wank struggle to do the same old shit he’s done for the last 30 years!!”), Hook claims that the pair have since kissed and made-up – though Freebass disbanded soon afterwards.
“Mani was a huge contradiction in terms. Mani’s rant was really about the failure of Freebass. Because he knows that he’s doing Screamadelica so he hasn’t got a leg to stand on, do you know what I mean? Actually, I went to see Screamadelica with him on Sunday. I watched it from the wings and it was absolutely fantastic.
“Funnily enough, it was Bobby (Gillespie) that gave me the idea to do Unknown Pleasures. Because I knew that I wanted to celebrate Ian’s life, but I didn’t really know how. And then I read an interview with Bobby talking about Screamadelica and he said that a lot of the songs had never been played live. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s like Unknown Pleasures. A lot of the songs on that album we never really played live’. And it was like a light bulb went on over me head. I went, ‘Fuck it, that’s what I’ll do’.”
Speaking of light bulb moments, he’s just had another one.
“Actually, I don’t know why someone doesn’t put a festival together of all these bands playing their LPs, and then you could have a ‘Favourite LP Festival’. You’d have Iggy and the Stooges doing Raw Power, Blondie doing Parallel Lines, and so on. You could just sit there all day and listen to your favourite LPs. It’d be brilliant!”
Before he gets around to organising his own music festival, there’s yet another project to be getting on with. Following the phenomenal success of 2009’s bestselling The Hacienda: How Not To Run A Club, he’s now writing another book, about his time with Joy Division.
“Yeah, I’m doing a Joy Division book at the moment,” he says. “Which is very odd. I’m actually finding it harder to remember all the details about Joy Division when I was sober than I did about the Hacienda when I was completely leathered!
“It’s gonna be called Inside Joy Division, and I decided to write it because I got sick of reading books about Joy Division by people that were never there. So I thought I’d do my own and, following the success of How Not To Run A Club, I was well placed to do it. But I must admit, it’s not enjoyable going through all the details of Joy Division. I’m finding it tough going to say the least.”

Peter Hook & The Lights plays Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures at The Academy, Dublin (June 3) and Cork X South West, Skibbereen (4)