Peter Hook Discusses The Light, New Order, and More

Still Ready: Peter Hook & The Light Revisit New Order’s First Album of the 21st Century

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Peter Hook points to a pair of rails buried in the asphalt of a parking lot. We’re outside the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, England, a few hours before his band The Light plays, and he’s thinking of his childhood, as you often do in your hometown. Decades ago, when he was a boy, and when the Victoria Warehouse was an actual warehouse and not a concert venue, one of the companies that stored their products here was Cadbury’s, he remembers. They’d ship their candy bars into the warehouse on those rails, and if they were lucky Hook and his friends could climb into the open-air train car and steal some chocolate without anybody noticing.

It’s a one-off anecdote at the end of our interview, but it’s in line with what has become the dominant theme of Hook’s musical career over the last 15 years: revisiting his past. The co-founder and bassist of Joy Division and New Order, and the co-owner of the legendary Hacienda nightclub, Hook formed Peter Hook & The Light in 2010 with the express goal of revisiting every song he had ever played on and performing them live. The band has gone through the Joy Division and New Order catalogues one album at a time, playing one in its entirety on every tour, along with a selection of the bands’ most popular songs. They’re currently up to New Order’s 2001 album Get Ready; it’s what they played that night at the Victoria Warehouse, and it’s what they’re playing on the American tour that’s already under way. (You can catch them tonight in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, right outside of Pittsburgh.)

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Joy Division and New Order both sounded ahead of their times, with the latter in particular helping usher in the synth-pop of the ‘80s and playing a crucial role in merging rock and pop with electronic dance music. You can draw a straight line from New Order’s music in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and the musical melting pot of the Hacienda, which they co-owned, to the mainstream dance music that’s dominated the pop charts in the 21st century. It’s that forward-thinking legacy Hook aims to celebrate by looking back with The Light, which he formed after acrimoniously leaving New Order in 2007.

It’s clear Hook remains extremely proud of the music he made with his former bandmates, and justifiably so. “We started playing dancey music because we were influenced by Kraftwerk,” Hook says after The Light’s soundcheck at the Victoria Warehouse. “We were playing that and writing songs like [on] Power, Corruption & Lies before we went to Ibiza. When we got to Ibiza, we found another… Manchester, but in a completely different way. So what we did was we brought that ecstasy and the more hippie attitude to Manchester and acid house was born.”

The Ibiza influence on New Order ignited the rise of rave culture, and turned their Manchester nightclub the Hacienda into the white hot core of one of the hippest musical movements in the world at the time. Today Hook speaks of the Hacienda with a mixture of wonder and pragmatism, knowing he was at the center of a once-in-a-lifetime cultural moment, while acknowledging the venue’s flaws. “There were some really good gigs at the Hacienda,” he remembers, and not just the post-punk and house nights it was known for. “John Cale on a piano, William Burroughs, Jonathan Richman—just him and an acoustic guitar. He’s really good when he played in that way, just not [at the Hacienda], because the fucking sound was terrible. So cavernous and so bricky. It wasn’t… I mean, it’s a long story. When [the Hacienda] exploded, it was fantastic.”

Later that night Hook and his band, which features his son Jack Bates on bass (they both play bass, often doubling up on Hook’s distinctive chorus-tinged melodic basslines), rip through all 50 minutes (and change) of Get Ready to a large, appreciative audience. It’s a multigenerational crowd, from teenagers up to senior citizens, with parents dancing alongside their grown children. At one point a stranger walking past me grabs my shoulders, points to the guitarist David Potts as he plays a solo, and yells “that’s my brother!” (Or maybe he said brother-in-law—it was loud in there.) When Get Ready wraps, they quickly slide into a lengthy set of absolute classics from Hook’s previous two bands, starting with Joy Division’s “Transmission.” Over the next two hours they play most of the hits—“Disorder,” “Digital,” “She’s Lost Control,” “Ceremony,” “Love Vigilantes,” “Blue Monday,” “Temptation,” and more, before finishing with a rousing “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a warehouse full of Mancunians, several of whom have no doubt known these songs and Hook personally for decades, singing along.

If you ever think it seems cynical or uninspired for musicians to make a point of playing their older or more popular material, spending three hours with Peter Hook & The Light will make you feel silly for overthinking things. Sometimes you just want to hear your favorites, and few musicians have a claim to a body of absolute classics as strong as the members of Joy Division and New Order.

Peter Hook & The Light

Hook loves playing the hits. The Light has fully embraced nostalgia festivals like this past weekend’s Punk Rock Bowling and the ‘80s-themed Rewind Festival. At one point he was skeptical of such events, but he quickly became a believer after experiencing one in person. “Everyone has a great time. And, funny enough, it’s not druggy,” he says. “And because it’s not druggy, it’s actually better. There are no frightening bits. Everybody’s just on the level and having a great time. We did one, and when I looked at the audience, I thought, ‘oh my God.’ It was just such a wonderful atmosphere.”

The desire to play older music sounds like part of the reason he split with the rest of New Order, he explains. “New Order… couldn’t play any of the [Joy Division] songs. It was just so boring. It was so frustrating. So when we split up in 2007, to actually get out of that and be able to play these songs again after 30 years, Joy Division in particular, was fucking amazing. And basically I would play anywhere to anyone.

“I have a very simple theory. One of the first gigs we ever did as Joy Division was in a club in Oldham called the Tower Club. And nobody came, no one. So we had naught, and then we end up playing Glastonbury five times to 175,000 people, right? So as long as [the audience] is somewhere between naught and 175,000, I’m happy, yeah?”

The Light’s current tour is hitting American cities it missed on last year’s tour, largely in the South. From McKees Rock it swings down to Nashville, through two dates in North Carolina, down to Atlanta, St. Louis, and New Orleans, before ending with a run of shows in Florida in the middle of June. It’s an interesting schedule, a group of major cities that aren’t always a priority for international acts, mixed with two smaller markets in Carrboro and Asheville. As a Southerner myself, I’m fascinated to hear what Hook thinks about the region he’ll be touring through—one that’s often misunderstood, although sadly not quite as misunderstood as some of its residents would hope. (The South really do be like that, a lot of the time.)

“The most interesting experience I had was in Alabama,” he answers. “We went into a big supermarket, and I went up to the woman, and I said, ‘excuse me, where’s the beer?’ And she went [makes a shocked expression]. I’m like, ‘the alcohol, the beer,’ and she’s reaching for the phone. I asked for some beers, and she went fucking madness. Said ‘I’m gonna phone the police.’ And I was like, what the fuck?”

I didn’t ask Hook when that took place, but hopefully it was long ago. Many parts of the South have updated or outright repealed their blue laws over the last few decades. You can even buy beer and liquor on Sundays now, in lots of places. Hopefully he can get himself a drink without any calls to the fuzz.

If you’ve never seen Peter Hook & The Light, and you’re a fan of Joy Division and New Order, you might want to make a point of catching this tour. After Get Ready there’s only two more New Order albums that Hook played on—and thus only two more New Order albums that he considers to be real New Order albums. (He understandably has little time for the band’s most recent album, 2015’s Music Complete, their only one without him.) “This [tour] is our 12th LP that we’ve played in full,” he says. “I’ve only got two left after this. Then I’ll achieve my ambition and play every track Joy Division and New Order ever recorded.”

Does that mean he retires after the Lost Sirens tour, whenever that happens? “I don’t know,” he admits. “I mean, it’s weird. When you play… I was thinking about it the other day. When I hit 69 I had a bit of a [nervous voice] ‘oh 69, 70, oh my God’ type thing. And then the other day, we were practicing for this tour, which has been really hard work. It’s a very unusual LP to transcribe because it was done with a producer, the only time other than Martin Hannett at the start. I realize now that [producer] Steve Osbourne actually put a lot of work in that we never really credited. [New Order] never played the songs [live]. Six songs on this album have never been played live [until this tour]. When we started doing [those six songs] I thought, ‘fuck, I remember this now. It’s too hard.’ But the boys have done a great job. But yeah, it has been a very difficult thing to do. But I was playing the other day, and I thought, fuck, I feel the same as I did when I was fucking 39. Feel the same, no different.”

And 15 years into The Light, he still loves revisiting his earlier work—and still feels very raw about how his tenure in New Order ended. Ultimately that seems to drive, to some extent, Hook’s desire to play as The Light, both for his own sake, and for that of New Order’s fans, who he believes aren’t being treated with respect by the current version of that band. “Playing the LPs is the thing, and it’s been wonderful, and they’ve been wonderful to do,” he says. “I was thinking [during the previous night’s show in London], I thought, I can’t thank you fuckers enough for letting me do this. Because every time I do it, I get all the songs back. Because the way that New Order ended and the way that they began again, which was disgusting, felt like I’d lost something. So it’s really important for me as a person to be able to go, ‘I’ve fucking got that back, bastard.’ Waiting for the Sirens’ Call next, I’m going to get all that back. And I must admit, if [New Order] carries on playing as badly as they do, it’ll just get better. My gimmick is to sound exactly like New Order, and that’s what I love, and that’s what I’ve always loved. And to sound just like Joy Division. I know I can’t be Joy Division. Never in a million years. I can’t be New Order. And for me, I think it’s a disservice to the fans that they call themselves New Order because they don’t even sound like New Order.”

Based on the show I see in Manchester a few hours later, Peter Hook & The Light do sound a lot like New Order, and even more like Joy Division. Even with Hook on vocals—something he only did on a small handful of songs by the two bands—The Light captures enough of what makes both bands so beloved to ensure a good night out. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than good enough—and Hook’s loving every note of it.

Peter Hook & The Light tour America through June 14; you can find tour dates here.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

Still Ready: Peter Hook & The Light Revisit New Order’s First Album of the 21st Century