Peter Hook & The Light Start Their Australian Tour This Week…

Peter Hook & The Light will be making a triumphant return to perform both New Order and Joy Division’s Substance compilations, sequentially and in their entirety in Australia starting in Adelaide at Hindley Street Music Hall on Tuesday night. Bassist and co-founder of Joy Division and New Order has carved a loyal and inimitable following globally, as he brings both the Joy Division and New Order canons to life.

Released in 1987 New Order’s Substance features the 12-inch mixes and B-sides of all their singles including Blue Monday, Bizarre Love Triangle, Temptation, Ceremony and True Faith. Factory Records’ 200th release it remains the bestselling New Order album. Released in 1988 Joy Division’s Substance features all the non album singles Transmission, Atmosphere (and B-Side She’s Lost Control) and Love Will Tear Us Apart. Factory Records’ 250th release, it also includes Warsaw, Digital and Dead Souls.

This will be the most total appreciation to date of the Joy Division and New Order catalogue and cannot be missed! The legendary Peter Hook talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Another Australian tour. It almost seems like we need to adopt you, there is plenty of love for Peter Hook in Australia?
Know what, mate? When we first came as New Order, you did adopt us and it was the most wonderful tour I think we’d ever had was the very first one we did in Australia. It was with Viv Lees and it went on to do Big Day Out. He was the promoter. We had such a fantastic time that it’s always been an absolute bloody pleasure to come back. Ironically, I did play in Australia as Peter Hook and The Light. We did our sixth gig ever in Australia on the start of the Australian tour, which was recorded by a friend of mine called Chris Carter, I still practice to that recording from when we were in Melbourne. I remember it very well. So yes, I do feel adopted and it’s always wonderful, wonderful to come back because I’ve always found the audiences are fantastic.

The Gov was absolutely full last tour are you continually blown away by the level of support by fans for your shows?
It’s the oddest thing really. When New Order split up in 2007, and I threw myself into DJing for a while, but realised that I missed playing so much and also throughout my career, most of the music I’d written and never got to play. It was coming up to thirty years of Ian Curtis’s death and my relationship even then, which is now, God, a long time ago with the others, was terrible, terrible relationship. I just thought that I want to celebrate Ian’s life and I was trying to figure out a way to do it. Bobby Gillespie was doing a tribute to Primal Scream by playing Screamadelica, and I thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to do that and play Unknown Pleasures in full.

That was where the idea came from. It wasn’t as easy as that. I couldn’t find a singer for love nor money. In the end it was Rowetta, God bless her soul from the Happy Mondays that said to me, okay, stop messing about you, you are going to have to do it. No one’s going to do it. They’re all too scared. Scared to stand in Ian Curtis’s shoes. I must admit, I was terrified for six, nine months or something like that. They were big shoes to fill. There’s a lot of expectation, but the thing was, is that if anything that’s shown through is that I love the music. I love the band, I love what I’m doing and I love having nice people to be able to play it too. Luckily, once that was shown that you were showing the right amount of passion and heart and soul, no pun intended, it was easy.

It’s all about me loving the music and just being with people who love the music. It’s as simple as that and try as I might, I couldn’t get Barney and Steve to love the music, once I started doing Unknown Pleasures and then moved into Closer, it just struck me that all the music from Movement, from Power, Corruption & Lies that I’d never played, we’d never played for years and years and years. I thought to myself, I wonder if I’d be able to do that and which I did. I’m not up to Get Ready at the moment from a New Order point of view. So, we’re actually putting some gigs together for probably the end of next year to premier Get Ready, which I’m looking forward to because there’s some great tracks on it that we never played. I was let loose. I was like a lunatic let out of the asylum!

I think that’s what come across in the performance last tour for me was the passion and intensity, and I think you are kind of going about it in the right spirit that it was intended.
That’s very nice. That’s very nice of you to say because that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I mean, it’s interesting that playing the music has actually made our relationship with my ex-band mates even worse, which is quite strange. I suppose maybe it’s the comparison that they don’t like, I don’t know. It seems such a waste to be this age and to be looking at many people around you disappearing and still to be at loggerheads with two people that you spent all your formative years with. It’s really weird. It’s such a shame. These things we can’t change. So, the thing is that by the time I got to play, having my son with me was primary, I definitely wanted to get along.

He’d learn to play bass at about fourteen, was a very accomplished bass player, different to me. He liked much heavier groups. He was in to Metallica, Screaming Trees, you know, these real heavy groups. I was quite surprised. He didn’t offer to play bass. I asked him, and we did it for a couple of Monaco charity gigs, which worked really well. He’s actually a better bass player than me in the way that he can pick songs up. I’m bit tone deaf, so if I hear a record I can’t play along with the record, but he can, he can do it wonderfully. He works so hard now with the Smashing Pumpkins and when I was watching him getting ready for this tour that he’s doing at the moment in America, Billy Corgan had sent a list of songs that he’d never played before and my son was just listening to the record and working it out and I was like, wow, how the hell does he do that? I can’t do that. Yeah. Weird.

Does the power of the legacy of these songs continually amaze you? Those songs mean a lot to so many people.
I know, I tell you one thing though, it’s not bloody easy. It’s a difficult album to play, but is immensely satisfying when we get it right because of, I’ve got Pottsy with me and they’ve actually played longer now with Pottsy than I did with the others, which is quite interesting. Pottsy is such a great guitarist and he’s full of enthusiasm for what we do and we have a really good time. We do have a really good time doing it. It’s been absolutely fantastic. There isn’t many of us when we play. We are not a big touring outfit. I went through all that with New Order. I’m not going through that again, with forty people on tour and all that crap because all you do is just leave your money everywhere. It’s just ridiculous and you lose yourself in it, which is what happened.

It’s been really nice to get down and dirty and the band are great. Paul Kehoe the drummer, he is been with me for so long now and oh my God, our relationship is like brothers. Then we’ve got a wonderful, my son obviously has moved on to better things, so we have a wonderful bass player called Paul who plays with The Coral in England. He’s a great guy. We’ve got Martin Rebelski, who is a fantastic keyboard player, sort of almost wasted with us, but he enjoys it and we have a great time. It’s a great unit to be honest. We are managed by the manager of Echo & The Bunnymen, so it’s all in with the scene if you like, which makes me happy. So yeah, it’s a cottage industry.

Do you ever think there will be a reunion or at least patch things up with the rest of the band or are things to far gone now?
No, the way that things have worked out and the actions that have happened have made that impossible, absolutely impossible. The way that they treated me has been absolutely disgusting from start and it just continues to this present day, I just cannot see it. I’m one of those people that will talk or me or do anything and I’m very good at compromising. When I got through bloody New Order for thirty-one years, if I haven’t been good at compromising, I can tell you that. So yeah, it is a waste and it is a shame, but no, I mean, because of what they did to me and what they do to me, I’ll never go on stage with them ever again. Never! I don’t even know what I would say to them to be honest.

Reflecting on the Substance album, what does that album mean to you?
Well, it means to me the fact that we made Tony Wilson very happy. I was just saying in another interview that Tony always used to ask me what car he should get. I told him, oh, there’s a really good two door Jag coming out, XJ6 six cylinder engine. I said, you should get that he’s mega and also Speed on The Avengers has got the same car. So, Tony got this Jag and it came with a newfangled dangled CD player and of course he had no CD’s, and he had great trouble sourcing CD’s because this was right at the start that there were very few pre-recorded CD’s. He came up with the idea saying that the thing he most wanted to listen to in this car was a CD because of the clarity of New Order’s singles, which had never been collected before.

It was as simple as that and then it grew from there. He came up with the idea of doing a new single, he was very enamoured with it, we did True Faith with Stephen Hague. The idea came up, we weren’t getting on very well at the time. We’d had a pretty bad time recording Shellshock and the remix of Sub-culture. We’d then fallen out increasingly when we got to True Faith, we were not getting on. So, it was a very difficult session, to say the least. I was glad to see the back of that session on True Faith. I did a big report on it in my book. The band’s attitude to me as an instrumentalist had cooled somewhat, I think.

It was a very difficult record for me. It turned out quite well for me in the end. I got loads of riffs, got the start, middle bit on the end, so I did very well. But it wasn’t a great time. Watching Tony Wilson’s face when he slipped that disc into the, CD player of his Jag , it was a great moment. He actually got what he wanted and I loved Tony, I loved the bones of him. He was such a crazy guy, such a mentor, such an inspiration in everything that he did. So, to make him happy was the best thing about it has to be said.

Were there any moments from that time that you look on proudly?
We were achieving as New Order a hell of a lot, when I did the book Substance, I realised that we were a major part of the musical industry in the world for 1980 to 1990. We started from the death of our lead singer and finished with the England football team. At the end of that period with World Emotion, it was sort of the end of New Order mark one, and any new order that came after that was starting to look a little bit of a shell of its former self. I don’t even count New Order so-called to be in any way or have anything in common with the proper New Order. They literally, in my mind, do not, I think it’s a far so, it irritates me greatly. We did have a great time and looking back on it and there’s not much I regret to be honest.

Is there anything that you would, if you had your time over that you would do differently?
Uh, probably, yeah, not do, not get as into drugs and drink as I did because it made me a bit obnoxious. If I’m going to say make myself a better person, that that was what I would’ve done. I started very late and as Barney said, you spent all your bloody time catching up, I became an awful person sometimes. It’s just part of it and you learn to live with it and then you move on and hope that you become a better person, don’t you?

Absolutely, with the tour are, you’re looking to like present the songs in sort of like a chronological order with the backstory and the history?
Yeah, I’d love to talk to you all and talk you right through it . To be honest, it’d be wonderful. I might do it as a podcast actually. The thing is that it started with Unknown Pleasures and beginning the gig of Unknown Pleasures with An Ideal For Living, the first record Joy Division did. I’ve always been fascinated by that chronological aspect. I’ve also been fascinated by the art of playing a track that you’ve left off right there. There was a lot of New Order tracks that we wrote, put out on LPs and they were never played. It was wonderful to catch up with those. Pottsy said to me, we should do it like a jukebox and mix it up, shuffle it. I was like, oh God, I just can’t get my head around that concept, you know? I’m not too sure. I think that people are mainly like me and they’re like something that’s the same and comfortable and we know where it’s going and that to me is like the true enjoyment in it.

So we are, and I am going to try and feature some new tracks that we haven’t played before that we are catching up onto Get Ready. Uh, I’m also open to play Aries from the Gorillaz because I was so happy with the way that that track turned out. We’ve got a few gems because that keeps us interested as a band. It keeps us on our toes. It’s very difficult to get into a rut with the amount of songs that we play. It’s Joy Division version Substance versus New Order Substance. The thing is that we’re putting new tracks into that, and whilst it’s very difficult to play the CD because it’s so long, we would literally be there all night, which I’m sure I wouldn’t be that bothered about and maybe a lot of people wouldn’t be that bothered about. We stay true to the LP and then what we do is we try and just spice it up a little, either end on both LPs with some surprise tracks. So, tracks that we haven’t been playing a lot, there aren’t many that we haven’t played. I played every single Joy Division track ever written and recorded, including one that wasn’t finished, which was Pictures In My Mind, which I finished off.

We have played nearly every New Order track. There were a couple of b-sides that were impossible to play. I just couldn’t see how it could be played. We still played them in between. It’s about evoking the time and evoking the atmosphere. This was a great period in my life. It had its moments, ups and downs, but it was a great period in my life and I’d like to think that every single person there is celebrating great periods in their life. We’ve all had ups and downs, but we come together to do something positive and something nice. It’s almost like a cue for the sweet music though, isn’t it?

You’ve got incredible endurance to get through these marathon shows.
I honestly keep myself very fit, which has been good actually for this band of Covid that I stumbled into because I’m fit, it makes life a lot easier. I run three to ten kilometres a week mate. I do three hours of yoga and stretching. I do weight lifting twice a week. I eat very healthily. My wife looks after me wonderfully, and my daughter. I’m very, very lucky. I’m a very, very lucky man and as I come to this age that I am at and I look around me and watch my predecessors, to lose Andy Rourke , Paul Ryder, Sinead O’Connor, I’m looking at all these people that I’ve grown up with, all leaving us and it’s a weird thing to go through. My icons all my contemporaries, they’re fucking disappearing. It’s terrible.

Well we we’re going to be making the most of it when you are here in Adelaide.
Oh, yes. Let’s get back to that sweet music. Okay! That’s what we want. I’m delighted. I will be honoured to be there again. My wife and my daughter always come and join us, because you’re very lucky to have such a wonderful country and wonderful people. I am a convert mate. It’s a wonder I’ve not moved. I can’t believe it. You might get me yet!

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Peter Hook & The Light on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring…