Music, musings and miscellanea

What do you do when your highly influential band splits up? If you’re Peter Hook, former bass player for English electro-pop pioneers New Order, you turn your attention back to your previous, even more influential group. Since last year, Hook and his band The Light have been performing Unknown Pleasures—the debut album from Joy Division, the band whose career was cut short by lead singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in 1980. New Order rose out of the ashes a couple of months later. “We locked Joy Division in a box and put it away in the attic,” he says. “It was wonderful to open that box and find how fresh everything sounded and felt.” As New Order forged ahead, Joy Division’s legend grew. By the turn of the century, the number of bands using Joy Division’s brooding minimalism as a template had exploded. “You do have to take it as a compliment,” he says. “It’s all about inspiration. I was inspired by the Sex Pistols to create Joy Division. And then you inspire other people. It’s perpetuating that circle of life, really.”

2. Nothing ruins a good thing like grumpy old men.

The other members of New Order recently announced they were getting back together—without Hook. This was just the latest in a long line of public spats between Hook and the rest of the band since New Order’s dissolution in 2007; Hook maintains the group split up altogether, while lead singer Bernard Sumner says Hook left. “They may reform and call themselves New Order, but in my heart they’re not New Order,” he says. “They’re as much New Order as I am Joy Division.” For his part, Hook just wishes things could have gone down in a more civilized manner. “As you get older you get very set in your ways,” he says. “Men get very stubborn, very cranky, very obstreperous. And when you’ve got a load of them together you’re gonna have trouble. Groups act like children all the time.”

3. You will always be remembered for your most gimmicky song.

New Order had staggering success, especially in the late 1980s. Yet their biggest chart hit in England was “World in Motion,” commissioned as the theme song for England’s 1990 World Cup soccer team. “The guy who was working at the Football Association said to [Factory Records head] Tony Wilson one day, ‘I’d love to get a great band to do the football song instead of these rubbish ones.’ And Tony said, ‘Well, who’s your favourite band?’ And, funnily enough, he said, ‘New Order.’ That’s one of the great things about being in a group like New Order, who always do things in a really wacky way. You get to do some really wacky shit. And that was one of them.”

4. It’s not so weird to see your life story in a movie.

Fictionalized versions of Hook have appeared on screen twice: in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People—where he was played by Ralf Little—and in Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Hook was depicted by Joe Anderson). Watching someone else pretending to be you should be an unnerving experience, but Hook took it in stride. “Life has been quite surreal,” he says. “So watching the film and watching someone play you fit in quite well, really. With 24 Hour Party People, Michael did it very much as a comedy. When I saw it I didn’t recognize myself in it.” Control was a different story. “Anton Corbijn is such a perfectionist,” says Hook. “I knew that the guy playing me would reflect me and I was a little bit worried about that. When I saw the film it was like looking into the mirror.”

New Order – “Ceremony”