Peter Hook
“Split-and-get-back-to-record-together records are always a bit weird,” Peter Hook tells me on a recent video call, noting that fans and critics can be suspicious of a reunion. “When I came to start with the record, I ended up Googling it. And the first thing that came up on Google was this stinking review from America.”
He’s speaking about New Order’s 2001 LP Get Ready, an unlikely fan favorite as well as the group’s best-selling album to date in the States. It came eight years after New Order dissolved for the first time, and 20 years after the group rose from the ashes of its somewhat darker art-punk predecessor Joy Division. The two bands from Manchester, U.K., laid the foundation for the massively influential body of music we call post-punk, an achievement recognized this year by a joint nomination to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that sadly didn’t get enough votes.
The bassist of both Joy Division and New Order — who created a trademark style with melodies played on the high strings of his bass, often bouncing along through a chorus effect — Hook has led his own project Peter Hook & The Light for the past 15 years. The Light’s raison d’être is revisiting the JD and NO catalogs onstage, something fans are seldom able to do in the presence of one of the original architects; though New Order still exists, their appearance at the recent Cruel World festival in Los Angeles was a rare occasion. The Light’s U.S. tour highlighting Get Ready stops at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl on Saturday.
The mythos of Joy Division’s all-too-brief history has been well-documented in an array of books, films and other media, but here’s a refresher. What became Joy Division began when Hook and guitarist Bernard Sumner, Mancunian teenagers who were already longtime friends, went to a Sex Pistols concert in June 1976. Hooky and Barney, as they were known, were inspired to start a band, and over the next year crystallized a unit with singer-lyricist Ian Curtis and drummer Stephen Morris; singles, an EP and their 1979 debut LP Unknown Pleasures followed. But as their star rose, Curtis’ severe physical and mental health conditions worsened. He died by suicide at age 23 in May 1980, days before Joy Division was to start its first U.S. tour in advance of its second album Closer.
Joy Division left a long comet tail of influence that compares to almost no other band of the era. Sumner, Hook and Morris carried on as New Order, adding keyboardist and guitarist Gillian Gilbert. They adopted electronic dance sounds they heard in the avant-garde discos they frequented when they made their first trip to New York, and their debut Movement landed in late 1981. With their arguably more approachable sound, New Order became both influential and successful, and the band joined forces with Factory Records head Tony Wilson and others in opening famed Manchester nightclub and cultural hub The Haçienda. However, internal tensions, interest in other projects and the folding of Factory led New Order to call it quits after 1993’s Republic.
Fast-forward almost a decade to the reunited New Order’s Get Ready. Opener “Crystal” is an expansive history lesson in dance-floor-inspired rock that winds through the band’s legacy from their post-punk beginnings through the Madchester rave scene, breaking up the choruses with a signature Hooky solo as the bridge. The track sets expectations high, and the album delivers, with songs that celebrate threads of the players’ influences, from the Iggy Pop-esque “Rock the Shack” to the motorik buoyancy of “60 Miles an Hour” and beyond. Hook remembers being surprised that New Order would give it another go, but he has fond memories of making Get Ready.
“Steve and Gillian were very busy doing other things, so Barney and I had a wonderful honeymoon,” Hook recalls. His eyes widen and a smile emerges. “It was almost as magical, shall we say, as the first time we got together after the Sex Pistols concert. … It was just me and him. And it was a very special time, because everything that you did was like a new discovery. … So the two of us actually created something that was very much for ourselves on this record.”
Before long, the also-well-documented tensions between Hook and Sumner came back to the surface, and Hook left the group again. His current band, which includes his son Jack Bates on bass, will be playing many of the songs on the extremely complicated 2001 album onstage for the first time.
“I can see why on this LP in particular, New Order hardly played any of it,” Hook says. “I think we only played about four of the songs on the whole record.”
The Light also offers Hooky a chance to do something he felt New Order never did: give Ian Curtis and Joy Division a proper homage. The two-set show will start with Get Ready, followed by Joy Division classics and New Order hits. The group has also done full performances of Closer, which Joy Division did not get to tour extensively before Curtis’ death. Hook wishes Sumner and Morris could have that experience of connection with their fallen bandmate.
“Getting the [Closer] songs back and singing the songs is very new for me, and has put me on a completely different footing with Ian Curtis. … And it’s weird, because his lyrics and his melodies are so beautiful. I realize how much we took them for granted at the time. It’s made me — not understand him, because I think that the trouble with suicide is that unless you’re there, you cannot understand it. … But I’m very happy to have those gifts that he left us.”
