About A Joy

"What’s the weather like in Dublin? Shitty? Well, it’s sunny and 20 degrees here, mate.”

The last time Hot Press chinwagged with Peter Hook he was having his highlights done – I know, how very metrosexual! – in rainy old Manchester. Today he’s soaking up the rays in Majorca where he’s been doing most of his living recently in a villa with a pool and all the other trappings befitting of a British rock behemoth.
“Yeah, it’s a tough old fucking life!” Hooky chuckles. “I’m in a place near Palma called Port Andratx, which is really chilled. I know it’s a bit typical, Brit getting a Spanish holiday home. I need some sun on my old bones!”
From David Bowie and John Lydon to Mick Jones and Liam Gallagher, I’ve encountered many a rock star who’s reluctant to discuss their distant past. Not so Hooky who brings up Joy Division unprompted within 30 seconds.
“I’ve been kind of immersed in Joy Division recently,” he reflects. “There have been the live shows playing the various albums, and the book’s finished. I’m just agonising over the bits that I know are going to really annoy people. Not the band, but other people who should be afraid… very afraid! I started it in the same way I started the Hacienda book – I thought that everybody else was to blame but me. As I got stuck into it, I realised I was as guilty as they were – more so in some cases. I came to the Joy Division book thinking, ‘Who’s to blame for Ian’s suicide, ‘cos it sure as hell wasn’t me?’ I do the bloody thing and it’s, ‘Shit, I’m just as much to blame as everybody else’, because we all went along with him. The tough thing about Ian is he always told you he was alright – ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m fine, let’s just get on with it.’ That was the thing you wanted to hear, really. He was his own worst enemy in that respect.”
Why wait until 2012 to address a tragedy that happened 32 years, a lifetime, ago?
“Before New Order split – and we’ll get to that in a moment! – it actually felt okay not to celebrate anything to do with Joy Division because your mind was concentrating on something else. But when we went our separate ways the first thing that occurred to me was, ‘Hang on, why are we almost airbrushing Joy Division out of history?’ It actually seemed quite sad.
“The reason for me playing the first Joy Division record live was that the town Ian was born in, Macclesfield, belatedly decided in 2009 to celebrate him. When it fell through due to a lack of funding I thought, ‘Oh my god, after all this bloody time they balls it up. I’m not going to let it go’. And that’s why I did the Unknown Pleasures gig at The Factory – my own club – to celebrate Ian’s life. It’s just grown from there.”
I’ve always been intrigued as to whether Joy Division was a democracy or if some people were more equal than others?
“Musically it was really, really even,” the amiable 58-year-old responds. “Everybody did their bit to the proper degree and it was very, very balanced. Compared to any group I’ve been in since, Joy Division was the most straightforward, the least dictatorial and also the least cliquey. Sadly, that wasn’t to last…”
They may have dwarfed Joy Division in terms of both longevity and commercial success, but New Order must go down as one of the most dysfunctional British rock bands of all time.
“In the early days of New Order it was our manager Rob Gretton that held the reins and was the dictator,” Hooky reflects. “Then when Rob had his near-breakdown it became Bernard, Stephen and Gillian who were the dictators because they stopped you working. You had a band that were really popular and yet three of the people in it didn’t want to work. They were happy to go into the studio, but not to play, which was very frustrating because I enjoyed both.
“What makes a group work is the acceptance that it’s not just you – it’s the chemistry between all the members. You have to accept that you each bring something to the table. Rob Gretton always used to say to us, ‘If you put the same effort into fucking New Order that you put into your solo stuff, you’d be bigger than them bastards U2!’ He was absolutely right. You worked your balls off but when you got back to New Order all the petty little nuances and struggles for power all came to the fore. The truth is the group’s bigger than all of us. Bad Lieutenant has just been out for five years playing New Order and Joy Division music and got nowhere. Bernard changes the name to New Order and all of a sudden they’re headlining festivals again.”
Hook is to put it mildly peeved that Barney, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert have chosen to revive the New Order name without him. Is he trying to avoid being on the same bill as his former cohorts?
“No, I’ll have ‘em any where, any time, I’m not scared of them,” he says defiantly. “The thing is I’m still taking legal action against them because of their excluding of me and the business antics they’ve done to seize the New Order name. I think it’s despicable, I think it’s cowardly, I think it’s wrong and I will fight them to prove that.”
Clearly there are two sides to the story, with Sumner, Morris and Gilbert insisting on their right to use the name – and blaming Hooky for attempting to unilaterally decide the band had split up. Their former colleague is having none of it.
“Most people going to see them know they’re just pretending to be New Order,” he charges. “It’d be like me calling myself Joy Division – that’s the way I look at it. My opinion will never change on that. Gillian was not in the band from 1990 onwards; Steve took a real back seat. It was me and Bernard who did all of Get Ready, and most with the producer of Waiting For The Siren’s Call. When that songwriting partnership split I felt the band was over. It’s a difficult situation when you get into the legal nuances of what they’ve done – possession, I suppose you’d say is nine-tenths of the law but they won’t get away with it.”
That, of course, remains to be seen. And in the meantime, Irish fans will be able to decide for themselves on the musical merits of the situation when the new New Order play the much anticipated Forbidden Fruit, which is shaping up to be one of the gigs of the summer.
Looking back the other day through some old ticket stubs – once an anorak, always an anorak! – I realised that it’s coming up to ten years since New Order opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in The Venue Formerly Known As Lansdowne Road.
“Fucking hell, that long?” Hook sighs. “The Chilis are friends and such huge Joy Division fans. To find out that Flea and John Frusciante had a covers band in LA that used to play our stuff is actually quite humbling. The only person even more into Joy Division than them is Moby, who turned up at my gig in LA last year with Perry Farrell. That was a good night!”
Hooky said earlier that writing the Joy Division book taught him a lot about the relationships within the band. Is the same true of performing Unknown Pleasures, Closer and Still in their entirety?
“Obviously I had to listen to the albums in detail, which made me realise how different we were in the studio compared to live. The reason for that being our producer Martin Hannett. It’s taken me 30 bloody years to realise how much of a genius and proverbial ‘fifth member’ he was. He gave Joy Division the ability to last forever, which they will do. They’ll be remembered long after I’m gone.”
What’s the Joy Division equivalent of ‘Wild Thing’ or ‘Teenage Kicks’ – the copper-fastened classic that took 30 minutes to knock out?
“‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, mate,” he laughs. “It was done so quickly it’s amazing. All of them were, then. When you got to New Order and had lost a quarter of your songwriting – Gillian, god bless ‘er, never took that role over from Ian – it was much slower. Because of the technology being used, it took forever to finish off songs like ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Perfect Kiss’ and ‘Thieves Like Us’.”
As interesting as all this Joy Division/New Order chitter-chat is, the big Peter Hook news is his sponsorship of Ordsall Juniors who get to play all of their under-12s City of Salford Soccer League Division 2 games with ‘Fac 51 The Hacienda’ emblazoned across their chests.
“You know what? It’s the nicest thing in the world,” he enthuses. “What made me really, really unhappy was that kid getting shot in Ordsall at Christmas. I lived there until I was nearly 20 years old and I suppose, in a funny way, sat here in bloody Majorca I’m living proof that you don’t have to accept your lot in the world and that there’s many paths you can take in it. You can achieve whatever you want. It was such a relief to realise that people like Paul who runs the Ordsall Juniors are making an effort to change kids’ lives and show them that there is hope. That’s why we got involved as the Hacienda in sponsoring them. Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson always used to say to me, ‘Give a lot back because people have given a lot to you’ and I stick by that.”