Interview: Peter Hook (Joy Division + New Order)
You’ve probably heard the story. (Or maybe you’ve seen 24 Hour Party People.)
On June 4, 1976, The Sex Pistols played to a crowd of about 40 people at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. Among those in attendance were Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, a young Steven Patrick Morrissey, and Tony Wilson of what would become Factory Records. Also there that night: Ian Curtis, Bernard “Barney” Sumner, and Peter Hook.
The very next day, Hook walked into a local shop and bought his first bass guitar. He soon teamed up with his childhood friend Sumner to start playing music, and Curtis would later respond to their ad posted for a singer at the local Virgin Records shop. After a brief stint as Warsaw and a few subsequent lineup changes, the band solidified with drummer Stephen Morris, completing what would become Joy Division.
It’s hard to imagine the sound of modern music had Hook not made that purchase. Though Joy Division’s run was tragically cut short by Curtis’ suicide in 1980, their haunting, groundbreaking post-punk legacy has only grown with time. Incredibly, Hook, Sumner, and Morris — joined by keyboardist Gillian Gilbert — carried on as New Order, forging a bold new path that arguably eclipsed their initial group’s impact.
Still, despite being instrumental to two of the most influential bands of the last half-century, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has managed to overlook both Joy Division and New Order once again this year.
With or without such accolades, Hook’s melodic, driving bass lines remain unmistakable — a sonic signature that can be heard across generations from The Stone Roses and Pulp to Future Islands and Fontaines D.C. Since parting ways with New Order in 2007, he’s stayed active. After a brief run with the supergroup Freebass — alongside Andy Rourke (The Smiths), Gary "Mani" Mounfield (The Stone Roses; Primal Scream), and Gary Briggs (Haven) — he formed Peter Hook & The Light in 2010. The group has toured steadily ever since, honoring the enduring legacies of both Joy Division and New Order.
On Tuesday, June 3, Peter Hook & The Light return to The Orange Peel for the first time in nearly a decade. This go-round, they’ll perform New Order’s underrated 2001 comeback album Get Ready in full, followed by a set of Joy Division and New Order classics.
Ahead of the show, Asheville Stages caught up with Hook, who kindly answered a few questions via email. For this lifelong fan, it’s a bucket list moment — and one step closer to dying happy.
Jonny Leather: I just want to preface all this by saying that the music of Joy Division and New Order hold an especially deep place in my heart. It's hard to imagine myself surviving these past four decades without having your songs in my life.
Peter Hook: Thank you! That is truly wonderful to hear.
JL: The most recent Asheville performance I could find dates back to 2015. Do you have any standout memories from that show or your visit to the city?
PH: I think we have played in Asheville twice — 2015 and 2016, maybe. Both times have been at The Orange Peel, which is a great venue, I think. Wonderful people there.
I don’t think I had ever been to Asheville prior to that first show in 2015 and it’s always nice to visit new places this far into my career. I remember that the lads in the band actually told me that the Moog synthesizer factory was in Asheville, and so we went there to look at all their vintage synths. That probably sounds really nerdy, but we all loved it. I will have to go back there again on this next visit as we have a different keyboard player now and I don’t think he has ever been, so that will be nice to go again with him. [Author’s note: I unfortunately had to break the news that the Moog showroom has closed, but that the Moogseum has opened since his last visit.] I also remember that we actually had a great curry the last time we were in Asheville, so I will be trying to find that place again, too.
JL: This tour features a full performance of Get Ready. Have any of the songs taken on new meaning or revealed something fresh to you while revisiting them live?
PH: Yes. On this current tour, we play the Get Ready album in full, plus a couple of non-album singles, so about an hour for the first set. And then after a short break, we come back on and play about another 90 minutes of assorted Joy Division and New Order songs. We have only played the Get Ready album three times in the UK as I write this, so we are excited to get into the American dates and really kick off the tour.
Get Ready is quite an interesting album, really, because I remember the making of it very fondly. Me and Barney were sort of in our honeymoon phase still after having got back together after eight years. We were a bit of a power couple at that point, and it yielded some great songs — some of which were criminally overlooked by New Order at the time. There are a few songs on the album that were never actually played live, such as “Primitive Notion” or “Someone Like You” — even though the latter was the third single from the record. So it has felt particularly good to tick those off, as it were.
Photo by Mark McNulty
JL: When playing classic New Order and Joy Division songs with The Light, do you approach them differently than you did when performing with the original bands?
PH: A little bit, yes — mainly down to the configuration of the band. We have two bass players in The Light — myself and my son [current Smashing Pumpkins bassist] Jack [Bates]— and so that means that when a song has multiple bass lines, as a lot of New Order songs do, we can do it all live, which automatically just makes things sound better than how New Order used to arrange them back in the day.
I also have to approach a lot of them differently, purely because I am now singing a lot of them, and so it takes a while to get used to that and to decide who is going to play what parts while I am singing. So, it is certainly different, but it has been an enjoyable process.
JL: With Low-Life turning 40 this year, are there any plans in the works to celebrate the album live?
PH: Wow, where does the time go? Yes, I did just a few days ago see that it was the 40th anniversary of that album. We did tour that album as The Light back in 2014-15, but unfortunately we never made it to Asheville on that run. If I had maybe realized a bit sooner that the 40th anniversary was coming up, we could have maybe arranged a special show performing the album again — as I think, since 2015, we have only actually done it again once in 2023 at a special Manchester show. So, that feels like a bit of a missed opportunity now. Never mind. We will have to wait for its 45th anniversary.
We are, however, playing quite a few Low-Life tracks on the current tour as part of the second set of songs, once we have played through the Get Ready part of the show. We have been playing “Love Vigilantes,” “The Perfect Kiss,” “Elegia,” and “Sunrise” fairly recently, so I will try to pull one of those out for you at The Orange Peel show.
JL: I’ve really enjoyed your recent collaborations with The Limiñanas and Gorillaz. How do you decide which projects or artists to work with? Is there a particular quality you look for?
PH: Yes, I really enjoyed working with both the Limiñanas and Gorillaz, and I think those sessions yielded some really great tracks. “Aries” in particular — the song I did with Damon [Albarn] for Gorillaz, went on to be quite a big hit from that album [2020’s Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez], which was wonderful. The most recent collaboration that I did was a couple of tracks on Wolfgang Flur’s new album, Times. Wolfgang is an ex-member of Kraftwerk, whom I love and who were, of course, a big influence on us, even down to us referring to “Your Silent Face” as KW1 — “the Kraftwerk one” — for years as New Order. I’m happy to play on anything that people ask me to, but it is particularly exciting to work with people who are your heroes, like Wolfgang, or who you respect so much on a musical level, like Damon.
JL: Lastly, there’s something deeply personal about “Age of Consent” for me. It’s been a kind of emotional lifeline — one I’ve returned to again and again during difficult times. The moment your opening bass line kicks in, the weight of the world feels less burdensome. Do you remember how you felt about the song when you first wrote it?
PH: I remember that it came together quite quickly, actually, as a song — compared to something like “The Perfect Kiss,” for example, which took about nine months. I knew it was a good bass line, and as soon as the drums went on it really felt like we were on to a winner. I love Barney’s guitar parts that weave around the vocals — because he could not sing and play at the same time back then — and because of that, it just sounds like classic New Order because a lot of our early material worked in that same way.
The synth line is very uplifting and was just the icing on the cake, really. It really frustrated me for many, many years that the rest of [New Order] simply would not play it live, no matter how hard I would try. I see that they do play it now without me — typical. However, their version is played to a click track at almost half tempo of the original, which personally I think means the track loses all its energy and urgency. Oh well! We play it live, too, as part of our tour and we go full pelt. It’s a fun one to play when it’s played properly.
JL: And is there a particular song — your own or someone else’s — that you’ve found yourself turning to in moments of struggle?
PH: I always find myself going back to “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers. That’s one of my all-time favourite songs and one I can adapt to any mood or situation, really.
See you soon.
IF YOU GO
Who: Peter Hook & The Light
When: Tuesday, June 3, 8 p.m.
Where: The Orange Peel, 110 Biltmore Ave., theorangepeel.net
Tickets: $32.50
(Photo by William Ellis)
