Peter Hook on his battles with Bernard and revisiting New Order's 1980s output

PETER Hook is contemplating the new release by the band he now christens New Odour.

“I saw them promoting their new LP in a very safe and normal fashion,” he says. “It was quite sad – I was thinking we used to be so revolutionary, and now they’re boring old men.”

Both the bands Hooky rose to fame with – Joy Division and New Order – could be said to have revolutionised the UK music industry.

A recent Mark Radcliffe-fronted documentary on BBC Four about the rise of indie music took the launch of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures on the Factory label in 1979 as its year zero.

And with singles like Confusion and Blue Monday, and The Haçienda, the seminal Manchester nightclub the band and label co-founded, New Order were instrumental in taking the dance rhythms of New York and Chicago into the UK mainstream.

Following the release of their eighth album Waiting For The Siren’s Call in 2007 Hook announced the band had split.

He moved on to new projects both as a successful memoirist and with his new band The Light, where he started to reinvestigate and reinterpret the music of Joy Division on the live stage.

But having reconvened initially as the band Bad Lieutenant, in 2011 the remaining members of New Order - Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert - resurrected the name and recruited bassist Tom Chapman to take Hooky’s place.

They released their first post-Hook album Music Complete earlier this year.

And, as Hook puts it, since then it has got worse and worse.

“Bernard always says ‘You left, we didn’t split, you left’,” says Hook in a voice that seems more amused today than bitter – although he admits he can’t see any way the band would ever work together again now.

“The legal fight is still on-going. We split in 2007, so it’s absolutely insane that we are all embroiled in this playground fashion, with no adults along to sort it out. The lawyers are happy to take the work on. It’s so sad we have ended up in this position.”

He sees The Light’s revisiting of the Joy Division and New Order back catalogue – which has now taken him up to classic mid-1980s albums Low-Life and Brotherhood – as an odyssey.

And it is making things a little easier for him.

“While it’s horrible at the moment you remember those times with more fondness,” he says.

“You realise there was a time when we were okay.”

In remaking 1986’s Brotherhood for the live stage he has identified where the cracks may have started to show.

“Bernard wanted to go fully electronic,” he says. “Stephen did his thing of sitting firmly on the fence, and I was more interested in the rocky side.

“The album had a split – on one side was rock and the other side was electronic.

“The electronic side sounds quite dated now because of the synthesisers – but they are the songs I prefer playing. It shows how your tastes can change as you get older.”

Something which struck him was how little New Order had played the music from this period live.

“One of my great frustrations with Bernard and Stephen was they didn’t seem interested in putting much work into playing the old stuff,” he says. “It was always greatest hits.

“When they started playing again in 2011 it was the same set we did in 2000. My wife says now it would have driven me mad!

“In a funny way while you have two outfits playing the ‘same music’ the fans can only win!”

By going deep into the albums – with the 2013 double-bill of early New Order albums Movement and Power, Corruption And Lies following up his initial 2010 Joy Division shows - cuts like Age Of Consent, Way Of Life and Broken Promise have become highlights of his set.

“Every time I play Broken Promise to crowds of 500 to 1,000 people everyone is singing along,” he says.

“I didn’t think that song was well-known or liked. Even something like Weirdo [from Brotherhood] this unusual short and snappy song goes down really well.

“I suppose in a funny way as a fan of the group you can’t get a band like New Order to play all their material as we’d be on stage for four days or something.

“So you get The Light playing all the old stuff and New Odour playing the new stuff – it’s worked out for everyone apart from the ones in the band!”

For Concorde 2 fans there is extra incentive to head down early, as the Low-Life/Brotherhood double bill will be preceded by The Light playing a Joy Division set as support.

Hook sees his self-imposed odyssey as a way of not letting the bands and the music go.

“I’m determined to play every song we have written and recorded,” he says, adding the next step will be the New Order and Joy Division singles collections Substance, which is already billed on his website for September 2016.

“Then I’ll do Technique, Republic, Get Ready, Waiting For The Siren’s Call, then Music Complete – show that ****ing bass player how to play bass!”

For his shows with The Light he has already been playing the accompanying singles in a chronological order. Like The Beatles before them, Joy Division and New Order rarely put singles like Love Will Tear Us Apart, Transmission, Blue Monday, Temptation or Everything’s Gone Green on their albums.

“It’s nice, it gives you an ending,” he says.

“Substance was Tony [Wilson, Factory Records boss]’s idea to put all the singles together on one CD so he could play them in his car. It became our best-selling album. By leaving the singles off the albums we got an album for free! I’m looking forward to doing that next.

“Tony had a lot of vision – he was a revolutionary in his way of thinking.

“The Haçienda changed the world in a completely different way, as did Factory Records acting in its own unique mad function. If only he had concentrated on one thing...

“Saying that, the mix of those three [the band, The Haçienda and Factory Records] is fantastic. When I moaned about the money we lost in The Haçienda he would say ‘money can’t buy what you got out of building The Haçienda’. It took Manchester’s name across the world.

“The myth of New Order, Joy Division and Factory Records is still with us, and still very important.”

As a writer Hook has been revisiting those times.

His hilarious 2009 memoir of The Haçienda – titled How Not To Run A Club – was packed with stories of Manchester in the 1980s alongside the unfolding, and perhaps inevitable, tragedy of the club’s demise.

Among the anecdotes are the activities of the gangs who sped up the club’s downfall, to Hook’s own novel way of avoiding The Haçienda’s notoriously bad toilets.

He followed it up in 2012 with Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, which gave an insider view of the seminal band which did so much for the independent music industry, but whose rise was tragically cut short by the suicide of frontman Ian Curtis in 1980.

He has now just finished a third volume focusing on the story of New Order – which he sees as partly a response to former bandmate Sumner’s own 2014 memoir Chapter And Verse – New Order, Joy Division And Me.

“I finished my New Order book – it came to 300,000 words which was a nice contrast to Bernard’s 100 pages for 30 years of New Order,” laughs Hook.

“Most of the time he spent slagging me off! When I showed my book to the legal team it was cut down to 100,000 words...

“What actually quite surprised me was Bernard is such a fantastic songwriter in the way he approaches a song and builds it. But he never wrote about any of that. He was too busy telling the world what a t*** I was!

“What I have done is go into the mechanics – looking at the equipment we used – how New Order wrote the songs from a very technical point of view. I had to relearn and revisit it in some depth.

“We made so many mistakes, but that is what made it so exciting, fresh and unique – it was quite radical. When you’re that young you don’t see you’re changing the world – you’re just doing what you want to do.

“Even a song like True Faith was a cutting edge song. It was quite an achievement to come out of the ashes of Joy Division, when it looked like everything was over and we were finished.

“To achieve as much as we did, only to end it all with a stupid playground screaming match, is quite sad.”

He is proud of the three books he has penned, giving his own take on the myths surrounding New Order, Joy Division and The Haçienda which have only grown with the release of movies including Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People and Anton Corbijn’s Control.

“I suppose a fourth book should be about Factory Records,” he says. “There were some fantastic groups – Tony Wilson even started a classical label. It was so ahead of its time.”

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