6th November 2023
Listen
Listen
The word ‘icon’ is thrown around a lot, but in the case of Peter Hook it seems fitting. The former bassist of Joy Division and New Order spoke with me ahead of his gig at the Liverpool Olympia on the 13th of November. Peter Hook and the Light will be playing the New Order Album ‘Get Ready’ in full, followed by a set of Joy Division and New Order classics.
Next year, I will have been a musician for 50 years. So basically, I was in two very popular groups, Joy Division and New Order. I got rid of the other members of New Order because they were a pain in the arse in 2007. And since then, I did a bit of DJing for a few years, and then I decided to play my own music again. I ended up doing it on my own, because I couldn’t get on with the others that I’d started with. I’ve been playing it ever since and basically, I just do it whenever and how I fancy. There’s no rime or reason. I just gig until I drop if you like.
We have a long history with Liverpool, from when we started in 1976. I think the first gig we did in Liverpool was in 1976, a New Years Eve Gig at a little club called ‘The Swinging Apple’ and we thought all of our Christmases had come at once. Then we went on to play at Erics, which is of course a very very famous place, with Roger Eagle who used to promote in Manchester and then went over. Our punk history with Liverpool and our allegiances have been fantastic. It’s a shame we can’t say the same for football. I’ve been lost in the Birkenhead Tunnel hundreds and hundreds of times, so we have a very good rapport musically with Liverpool. It’s always a pleasure.
It’s nice to be in control of my music and my destiny. My dream and my aim, once I got rid of the other shall we say ‘dead weight’ was that I want to play every track that we ever wrote and recorded. This LP will be our 12th that we’re playing, and then we’ve only got two left. I’m enjoying this LP greatly, it was a milestone in New Order’s career. It was our comeback LP after our first break-up and me and the Guitarist, who went on to be the vocalist after Ian [Curtis] died were having a second honeymoon. This LP was very much me and him which didn’t really help matters when the band got together after, so a lot of the songs on this LP haven’t been played live before. So I’m just getting on with it. It’s certainly better than working for a living.
We tend to do an American Tour every year, and an Australia + New Zealand tour every year. It’s actually quite nice to have the freedom. Because I don’t write, I guest a lot on other people’s stuff, but I don’t actually write myself. I must admit I really do miss the discipline of it, but you really do have to be in a group to achieve that because of the time involved and the money involved. Of course, now you don’t earn anywhere near as much from it as you used to do. The thing that keeps me going, and the thing that I’ve always wanted to do since New Order was just play the music that I loved and be in the company of people that loved that music. And basically, from here to Timbuktu I will play.
We’ve been a regular in American since 1980, so the band has a very solid grounding there. We’re quite well known. At one point we were bigger than Oasis, but Oasis have beaten us now with their long-delayed comeback. It was a great source of pride for me that we were bigger than Robbie Williams who went over there to try and crack America, the Spice Girls, Oasis, none of them succeeded in America but New Order did. We split up straight after that. So I’m very lucky. I have a following there that’s strong enough to allow me there whenever I wish really which is wonderful. It’s every musician’s dream.
There is a respect that you have to show. I, whether I like it or not, have played a big part in people’s lives at different stages, and they are coming along to try and relive those moments just like I am. You can’t be playing mad, weird stuff that did nothing. You have to show healthy respect for the hits that got you where you are and it’s always nice to sprinkle in something like playing the LPs. Playing and listening to an LP live is quite an ask, and I appreciate that. The thing that it’s got going for it is that it’s a vinyl LP so it’s only 30 odd minutes long, so you are quite safe in that. We play it first, and then we do a collection of Joy Division hits and New Order hits. So really, people are very good at shall we say suffering through something out of the ordinary and I think on this LP we’ve done this one great justice, and I don’t think we’ll have any problems in indulging ourselves in that respect.
Do you know what, I remember the days where we couldn’t get gigs and it was the most heartbreaking thing in the world. To be a musician, and think that you were good, and to have songs that you couldn’t play to anybody. Literally, I still have that feeling. My smallest audience was when we played in Oldham Tower Club and nobody came to see us. Nobody. And then you look at the other end of your career when you’ve headlined Glastonbury 5 times. Glastonbury’s what, 150,000 people? And Oldham was none. If it’s anywhere, and any number in between then I am actually quite happy. I remember our erstwhile singer saying to me ‘you’d play in Beirut you’ as if it was an insult. I thought, you know what I’d love to play in Beirut. I’m sure the people in Beirut are just like us, and like a good time. Joy Division in particular never got anywhere. One very small tour of Europe. We never made it to America because Ian died the day before we were due to go. And yet, Ian Curtis is always the one who used to sit there and say how popular we were going to be in the future and where we were going to go. So everywhere I go playing Joy Division’s music, I always think the same thing. I think this is for you Ian. God bless you, you were right.
I’ve played Mongolia, China, Russia. You name it, we’ve been there. It’s absolutely fantastic and a wonderful compliment that people come to see you. I don’t really have any favourites in all honesty. They’re all my favourite. I think the only way I could decide for them would be where it’s warm. I live in England, so whenever we do get to go somewhere warm it’s a real luxury. I don’t do it like normal bands where they do tour, album. I just get to go wherever will have me. The world these days is so bad and so frightening that us musicians have got a big job to do. To take people’s minds off it for an hour and a half (or three hours in our case), to take them back to where they felt safe, warm comfortable, and happy. That’s what we need.
We are so close to each other, Liverpool and Manchester. When we play in Manchester a lot of people come over, and the other way round so it’s great. I’ve always loved Liverpool. We’ve lived there. We’ve recorded there many, many times at Parr Street Studios. Again, it’s that wonderful thing of meeting people with something in common with you, which is great music. They’ll all come along, and I hope we can forget the rottenness of this world for a couple of hours.
The music I was listening to before this interview was Led Zepplin IV. That’s an old album and I still play it as much now because it gives me the same amount of pleasure as it did when I first heard it in 1973. For somebody hearing Led Zepplin IV for the first time, I would imagine they would be agog at how good it is as a record. The thing is, great music will last and still does last. Even if it’s written today, it still does last. The interesting thing with Joy Division is that we were 20 when we wrote Unknown Pleasures and 22 when we wrote Closer. So we were very very young. Ian’s message in his lyrics and our message in the music is the same feelings that people have at your age now. A bit of confusion, a bit of loneliness for no apparent reason. A bit of trepidation about the future. Wanting to be accepted, being on your guard all the time. Ian’s lyrics have a way of talking to people like that.
A lot of youngsters come up to me and they always want to know, because Ian died when he was 23, ‘what was he like’. I stand there and think ‘he was just like you’. He had the same fears, the same hang ups, he just got to express himself and share it with people and I think that’s the thing. The music is still capable of being shared with people. It resonates whether it’s musically, or lyrically, or vocally. I’m very lucky to have had the skill to be able to do it. Considering that I’d never played a musical instrument before I was 20, it was a pretty good guess after watching The Sex Pistols. For some insane reason, which I’ve never quite got to the bottom of, I could do it. Low and behold, for the first time in my life, I could do it. What an opportunity, what a chance. I didn’t even know whether it would work or not. And here I am 49 years later talking to your lovely self about music I wrote in 1977. It is absolutely incredible. I feel absolutely blessed. My mother used to say to me, literally until her dying day ‘I wish you got a proper job Peter’.
It was the Hacienda, the nightclub in Manchester. It was Acid House. We weren’t really thinking we were just doing and to be honest it was a very decadent and wild decade. The fact that I’m here now and able to tell the story is a bloody miracle. The 80s were wild and the hedonism was unbelievable. We were right in the middle of it. To be honest with you, it was just party today and party tomorrow and hang the consequences. It’s such a miracle any music got made.
It’s an obvious no. New Order for instance used to sell 4,000,000 per LP so you’d be in the region of £80,000,000 per LP. And now you don’t earn anything. It’s a big change in the way the industry works. Now if you get signed by a record company, it makes no difference. Every band has to be an amazing business as well. We didn’t. All we had to do was turn up with our trousers on and we were off. There was someone there to sort everything out for you. Now, bands have to do everything themselves. They have to be tech savvy, internet savvy, PR savvy because otherwise they make no money. It’s a really weird difference. For me and musicians in my ilk we sit there and have conversations about all that money we used to earn from records, ‘where did it go?’. These record companies now are always crying poverty, and you look at an artist like Michael Jackson who used to sell $300,000,000 worth of every LP. Where did that go? It’s like there’s a mountain of it somewhere. It is completely different now. It doesn’t stop people making music, becoming great artists, and it doesn’t stop us lot going out and having a great time so thank god for that.
The big, most important thing is still there. People are still creating and making great music, and we get to enjoy it. It’s just that we enjoy it in a different way. If I never had those days, I wouldn’t miss them, would I? We had something that was unique at that time. When you ask about the 80s and the 90s, that unique record company/band relationship with records, vinyls that you had in those days was unique to those decades and it changed.
The internet is great for some things, I use it every day if not every minute but for other things, especially for mental health and wellbeing in youngsters it has been terrible. It frightens me to death. On the one hand I’m delighted that my kids have reached the age that they’ve moved past it. I used to watch my daughter get bullied in her bedroom after school, which was hateful. It was an awful thing but you can’t change that. It’s the price you pay for the luxuries we enjoy. It’s very sad.
Tickets to see Peter on tour are onsale now:
https://pinkdot.seetickets.com/event/peter-hook-the-light/liverpool-olympia/3402534
For more music, please click here:
