Peter Hook & The Light @ Hindley Street Music Hall, Adelaide 13/7/2026
Peter Hook & The Light have carried the torch for Joy Division’s legacy for decades. Peter hasn’t forgotten his New Order days either, giving Adelaide fans a masterclass in both eras at a packed Hindley Street Music Hall.
The first half of the night celebrated the twenty fifth anniversary of New Order’s 2001 comeback album, Get Ready. “Or so Instagram tells me,” Peter Hook laughed to the crowd. “It also tells me how old I am.”
It can be a risky move for a band to play an album in full, but when the album is as strong as New Order’s, Get Ready, one doesn’t have to worry about sitting through “filler” songs. It’s all killer. As the band entered the stage, all dressed in black naturally, they immediately launched into the opening strains of Crystal. This was one hot song to start with and of course was the opening track of the album.
This is a seasoned, high-caliber band, not a thrown together touring group. The lineup features Hook’s son, Jack Bates, on bass, expertly handling the heavy lifting so his dad can focus on vocals. Alongside them are keyboardist Martin Rebelski, Monaco drummer Paul Kehoe, and guitarist David Potts, also of Revenge and Monaco fame, who regularly steps up to the microphone.
David Potts took lead vocal on 60 Miles an Hour and the following Turn my Way. Hook kept audience interaction to a bare minimum early on, offering a simple “Thank you” only three times during the entire first set. He let the music do the talking, and live, the album sounded heavier, punchier, and fresher than ever.
Slow Jam bought the tone down a bit, with the lyric “I can’t get enough of this” summing up the song perfectly. Some pre song guitar work out for Rock the Shack bought the energy back up and the run home of Someone Like You, Close Range and the exceptional Run Wild confirmed New Order were indeed, going from strength to strength at the turn of the century.
Closing out the first set were a couple of deep cut New Order songs not usually heard live. Brutal appeared on The Beach movie Soundtrack and the 2002 single Here to Stay, with its Blue Monday feel, originally slated for Get Ready, but dropped, closed the set.
During the interval we listened to some fine music from composer and arranger, David Axelrod spilling out of the P.A. The fuse of rock, R&B and jazz, strangely felt appropriate in the short break, and short it was, just ten minutes before the band were back on stage.
While the first set was set in stone for the tour, the second may as well have been written in crayon on paper and cast to the wind at the end of the night. Peter Hook is playing a different second set each night of the tour, keeping the fans on their toes.
The opening set may have been electric, but the second set is what the people came for. “I want to dedicate this set to Ian Curtis; God rest his soul” Peter Hook said humbly before the explosive Joy Division song No Love Lost was cast upon the audience. Had the P.A. been turned up? It sure sounded like it.
What followed was a masterclass in post-punk history. Days of the Lords, Warsaw, Digital, and Wilderness hit in quick succession, followed by a loud crowd roar for Isolation. After a brilliant She’s Lost Control, the band closed out the blistering ten-song Joy Division run with Shadowplay before a magnificent performance of Transmission.
Hook then dipped briefly into his Monaco catalog with a stellar version of What Do You Want from Me? before steering the crowd into a final run of New Order anthems. The hits came thick and fast: Regret, Ceremony and Vanishing Point. They even threw in World in Motion, New Order’s sole UK number-one single, which got a massive singalong, fueled by the energy of England’s current World Cup run.
“Adelaide, it’s been an eventual night. Not bad for a Monday” exclaimed Peter, but to a lot of people’s disappointment, it didn’t lead to Blue Monday, which sadly, being a Monday night, would have been great.
The syn-pop perfection of Bizarre Love Triangle had the people dancing, and with no letup, the anthemic, True Faith followed. This had to be the highlight of the night, with Peter stalking both sides of the stage, his bass guitar slung low.
Inevitably, Love Will Never Tear Us Apart closed the evening, showing once again how good Peter Hook was at delivering the sounds of Joy Division. He was after all, there in the band. It was a unifying moment that turned the floor into a swirling, singing mass of bodies. As the band exited, Peter Hook took off his t-shirt and handed it to a fan up the front.
No support act, no sing-a-longs (well except for World in Motion I guess), no encores: Peter Hook and band delivered two and a half hours of unbridled glorious music. Joy Division formed fifty years ago, in 1976, and the songs sound just as vital, urgent, and heavy today as they did back then.
Live Review by Geoff Jenke