The right hook
Mani's accused him of "stuffing his walllet with Ian Curtis blood money", but Peter Hook is unrepentant about his decision to perform Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures live. Olaf Tyaransen meets the legendary Mancunian as he gears up for two Irish appearances.
Olaf Tyaransen, 15 Jun 2011
“One of Bernard Sumner’s comments to me in the past was, ‘You’d play in fucking Beirut, you, you bastard!’” recalls former Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, I would!’ But you could imagine the way that he meant it.”
It’s a long way from Beirut, in every sense, but Hook’s latest flight of fantasy is taking him to both the Dublin Acacdemy and Skibbereen’s Cork X South West festival this fortnight.
“The thing is, if you want to put it succinctly, we’re all whores. Basically wherever anybody will pay us, we’ll go. The weird thing about musicians that I’ve found over the years is that once you become a musician that loves to play then really every chance you get to play you’ll take – no matter where it is. Because I’ve been DJing for the past six years I’ve been to nearly every festival around the world. The interesting thing is the mix of people you get. As a musician obviously you’re always trying to convert the next person to like you. That’s how you win support. It’s just about carrying on doing what you do best, really. So I’m very happy more or less to play anywhere.”
Hooky won’t be DJing at Cork X South West. Rather, he and his new band The Light will be performing Joy Division’s seminal debut album Unknown Pleasures in its entirety. He first decided to do it when a planned 30th anniversary celebration of Ian Curtis’s life in Macclesfield fell through last year.
“They’d planned a big memorabilia exhibition and a live gig to celebrate Joy Division’s music and his life. And when it fell through it left me thinking that in all the years that we’d been in New Order, we’d never done anything to celebrate Ian’s life or Joy Division. And after 30 years I just thought it was long overdue really. So it was very disappointing not to be able to do it. So I just put two and two together: I’ve got me own club, I’ve got me own group, which used to open the club. So I thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll play some of Joy Division’s music to celebrate Ian’s life’. And then basically from that it’s grown.”
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