In conversation with Peter Hook, on the pleasures of performing, divided fans, gloomy 1970’s Manchester and ‘cocktail’ bass playing.
Amidst Peter Hook and the Light’s 2024 ‘Substance’ tour, I was able to catch up with Peter Hook, squeezing into his jam-packed schedule. With Hook’s musical career spanning over forty years, established by the formation of Joy Division in 1976, Peter is no stranger to the rock star world of touring and smashing out hits. So, I was curious to know how the band’s current ‘Substance’ tour was going and what he was looking forward to as it progressed. When I posed this question, Hook chuckled and mentioned how he has been doing it for a while, after having recently toured around Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States in early 2024. So, it’s easy to assume that this kind of busy lifestyle can get pretty exhausting, however, Hook passionately assured me that being able to ‘play to anyone is a great pleasure’ and that it is ‘the greatest compliment ever’ to have such a large collective of fans still devotedly interested in New Order’s music. Hook expressed how performing his music is a way ‘to take people away from the realities of the world to a brief respite’, poising his music as a form of much-needed escapism that is just as important to have today, as it was forty years ago. As Hook’s fans revel in his musical medicine, Peter reflected how he has always ‘enjoyed and been immensely proud of the music that we [New Order] wrote, so to get any opportunity to play it is fantastic’, proving his music is just as sacred to him as it is to his fans.
The pursuit to musical fame is renowned to be a tricky one, and it’s not every-day that authentically talented musicians burst onto the scene. However, back in the late 1970’s, Hook emerged from the post-punk world and became one of Britain’s most legendary bassists, proving to be an integral figure to not one, but two bands that spearheaded two different genres of British music. Serving the post-punk of the 1970s and the alternative dance music of the 1980’s, it is clear that Hook’s mark on the music industry treads further than just these eras, as Peter Hook and The Light seamlessly bring the sounds of Joy Division and New Order to the same place, exciting a wide scope of old and new supporters. When The Light first formed, uniting fans of two different types of music perhaps seemed like an alien concept, as Hook recalled how ‘In the old days fourteen years ago, all the New Order fans would go to the bar when we played Joy Division, and all the Joy Division fans would go to the bar when we played New Order’. However, the band has found that ‘over the years that divide has grown less’. We discussed how powerful it is to be able to unify such a broad range of supporters, and speaking as a collective Peter expressed that ‘maybe we’ve all educated each other, and I think that The Light have a good way of translating both New Order and Joy Division songs to make them one entity’. It is undoubtable that Hook’s musical talent surpasses beyond his expert bass-playing, as he and The Light possess the ability to transpose the hits of two vastly different bands to a connected audience, that was once divided. The Light found joy in that previous division, as Hook summed it up perfectly by saying ‘we come together, everybody forgets about everything, we have a bop – I sweat like a pig – and I really enjoy myself with the audience’.
‘My mother brought me up to have manners and I always thought that you should show respect’. Hook’s dedication to his fans has been prominent over his whole career, as he has personally responded to fan-mail for decades. In our conversation, Hook recalled how ‘right from the old days when people would write to us, I would always respond because I felt you had a responsibility to respond. If someone’s written to you to ask you something or to tell you something about their life, I thought that it was manners to reply’. Hook’s down to earth nature not only shone through in this comment, but was prominent throughout our whole interview, and I admired the respect he has for his fans. He expressed how ‘You get a good insight from them [the letters] and some of my conversations developed and some of my fans became pen pals!’. From autograph requests and keep-sakes to enquiries about his eating habits before he goes on stage, Hook has always kept his fans posted.
Today, it is widely acclaimed that Manchester is the spiritual hub of guitar-based music, so I was intrigued to know what Hook’s Manchester was like in the late seventies and early eighties. Peter did not shy away from painting a rather gloomy scene as he exclaimed ‘Oh my god I mean the end of the seventies was quite a grim period, politically’. Manchester became a perfect backdrop for this unsavoury time as ‘the weather seemed to fit it perfectly, there was always smog and rain and greyness’, creating the kind of pathetic fallacy you’d find in a Dickensian novel. In this unlikely setting, Hook recalled how his discovery of Punk inspired his retaliation towards dreary 1970’s England, which was to tell everyone to ‘fuck off!’. In a time plagued by political turmoil and typically depressing British weather, ‘punk and Johnny Rotten and The Sex Pistols showed me how to handle it, and how to handle it was to rebel’, birthing the powerful and brooding music of Joy Division. Although the country appeared to lighten up in the eighties, as New Order surged to fame, Peter and I spoke about how his rebellion during the 70’s spurred him to pick up his bass guitar and drown out England’s bleak monotone.
When Hook stood amongst the sweaty, beer-soaked crowd at a Sex Pistols concert over fifty years ago, ‘what stood out to [him] was how awful they sounded’. Peter laughed at the irony as the band could clearly play but sounded awful on stage. What caught his attention the most, however, was how ‘Johnny Rotten didn’t seem to give a shit’. Transfixed by Rotten’s careless persona, Hook realised that he ‘could just tell everyone to fuck off and make a horrible racket!’. The ‘horrible racket’ that Hook was inspired to make was only short-lived as he affirmed how Joy Division’s ‘song writing prowess shall we say really came on and within six months of forming a group we were actually writing songs that very much defied our age. In a funny way we cracked it.’ Following his want to rebel, Hook’s bass technique almost rebelled against the typical conventions of the instrument as in his early days he abandoned the lower strings and become a pioneer of the higher ones. However, he informed me that this was stylistic technique was not entirely intentional as ‘it was mainly out of desperation because I couldn’t hear myself when I played low, so I was desperate to hear, and I then played on the high strings’. Hook expressed that ‘it was a cocktail of bass-playing’ that defined his style, as he was inspired by aspects of a variety of bassists with The Clash bassist, Paul Simonon, influencing Hook to play with a precariously low strap. So, through simply wanting to hear what he was playing and observing the craft of others, Hook accidentally stumbled upon his revolutionary style, which produced some of England’s most well-known and highly regarded basslines, such as those of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Disorder’.
Before I had to wrap up our interview, I couldn’t end our conversation without mentioning that as a bass player myself (very amateur at best), my favourite basslines to play and learn have always been his Joy Division basslines. Peter was enthusiastic to talk about the importance of inspirations and recommended a song for me to learn, joking that one day I’d be able to teach it to him. Throughout his career, Peter Hook has been part of two of the most influential British bands, however, has remained dedicated to his fans and those that are inspired by his work, greatly influencing not only the music industry, but the lives of ordinary people. So, if you’re anxious to pick up an instrument and give it a go, in the words of one of Britain’s most renowned bassists ‘you know what, there’s hope for us all’.
Words by Jemima Lake
Featured image courtesy of rahul_viswanath via Unsplash. No changes have been made to this image. Image license found here.