Peter Saville’s cover artwork for Joy Division’s landmark debut Unknown Pleasures depicts the stacked plot of radio waves emanating from the first known pulsar star. It could scarcely be more iconic.
It’s been filed under cultural shorthand, an image encountered on posters, T-shirts, beer mats and any other object imaginable that can physically hold a print. Reframed and reinterpreted in countless tributes, parodies and mash-ups, like the Ramones logo it has transcended even itself to become an emblem.
But emblems and icons are dusty things. They become codified, compartmentalised and divorced from their original vitality. The songs of Joy Division and New Order have a still beating heart and they demand to be played live. That heart sits firmly in the barrel-chested Mancunian frame of Peter Hook, and ‘Hooky’ will shortly be returning to Australia to do just that. Play the songs.
His third visit to Australia with his band The Light will be focusing on Joy Division’s Substance albums of singles and B-sides, with Hook’s performances underlining his ongoing passion for this music and ensuring its legacy. It promises to be an epic evening that plots the once uncharted course from punk rock via the Hacienda to the dancefloors of Ibiza.
New Order was always like a wonky table where you had to put a beer mat under one leg to get it right.
“I have an idea about how these songs should sound,” Hook begins. “New Order was always like a wonky table where you had to put a beer mat under one leg to get it right, and no matter what you did it was never totally balanced right from the start. And with The Light we don’t have that, ’cause the musicians that we have are shit hot. So we’re different. I think, if anything, we’re more faithful.”
In order for him to better accede to his new-found vocal demands, Hook is accompanied on bass at the shows by his son Jack Bates. It must surely be an interesting dynamic, and it prompts the question – is Bates a better bass player than his old man?
“Well, he thinks he is!” laughs Hook. “I think that he has a better ear than me ’cause I’m tone deaf. When I come to play other people’s music, I can’t do it, I just don’t hear any differentiation between the notes. When I was approached for the Rolling Stones job, Mick Jagger could have put a gun to my head and said, ‘Play ‘Satisfaction’’, and I would have just gone, ‘Mick? Shoot me.’ I couldn’t do it – it’s just a weird anomaly in me as a musician. It’s really weird. Now, [Jack’s] not like that, he can pick it up quite easily, so he’s got one up on me there – but he’s not got my writing history I suppose.”
In his recent book, also entitled Substance, Hook reveals that the New Order compilation came about because Factory Records founder Tony Wilson had gotten himself a flash new Jaguar and wanted a CD he could play in the car. One wonders what Wilson would have thought of The Light.
If Ian hadn’t died, God rest his soul, he would have been singing on ‘Blue Monday’, which I would give anything to hear.
“I think he’d be enjoying the music ’cause we play it to the best of our ability and with as much passion and enthusiasm as we can muster – but I think he’d be heartbroken by the state of affairs between the members of New Order,” Hook says. “I think that that probably would have finished him off if the cancer hadn’t, but my God, mate – wouldn’t I give my right arm for him to be there.”
In the shadow of another legacy, the shows will see Hook returning to Joy Division material after the 35th anniversary of Ian Curtis’ death in 2015, for which The Light strapped in to wade through the entire catalogue – surely a herculean task, and a deeply emotional undertaking.
“Yeah!” he laughs. “The weird bit about it is that you have to pace yourself like a marathon, so you couldn’t just burn through the set and go mental, you really did have to hold back. 48 songs! But it was great and I’m sort of madly looking forward to the 40th anniversary so we can do it all again. It was good to do it for Ian’s charity; to do it in the church that Ian used to go to when he was a kid was even better. It was very emotional actually, even going down to his grave that morning just to say hello. It was quite odd.”
The day the speaks with Hook is in fact the 34th birthday of New Order’s defining ‘Blue Monday’ single, and the change and evolution from the demise of Joy Division to that track – a mere two years later – is staggering.
“Well, the interesting thing about the change was that the technology available in 1982 was light years ahead of what was available in 1980. The DMX, Prophet sequencers and Prophet-5 synths that we were using were fantastic machines. You had two great operators in Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner who really took them to the extreme, and ‘Blue Monday’ was the culmination of the talent of those two and the wonderful innovation in the machines. So it was ready. The thing is, if Ian hadn’t died, God rest his soul, he would have been singing on ‘Blue Monday’, which I would give anything to hear.
“It is weird, though, to think that 34 years have passed. Jesus Christ! Where did those years go?”
[Peter Hook photo by William Ellis]
Peter Hook and The Light play the Metro Theatre on Saturday October 7.
