Legendary bassist Peter Hook was one quarter of Joy Division, and he played in New Order from the band's 1980 beginning until 2007, when he split bitterly with his longtime bandmate Bernard Sumner. Over the years, Hook and Sumner have sniped back and forth in the press, and Hook launched a 2015 lawsuit that's since been settled. These days, Hook is touring with his band Peter Hook And The Light, playing New Order's 2001 comeback album Get Ready in its entirety. He's also continuing to take shots at New Order in interviews.
Recently, Peter Hook spoke to The Paper and got some more bars off. On the current version of New Order, Hook says, "I don’t think they’re New Order. They don’t sound like anything like them. I’ve watched them play songs [online] recently, and they’ve dropped the basslines and play it like some weird, bad cover version of a New Order track. So the animosity is obviously still there now."
Hook says that fans hit him up online to complain about the sound at New Order shows: "They’re like, 'You can’t hear the bass!' Obviously, there is a certain smugness one could adopt. But I’m obviously way above all that." Obviously!
Hook also talks about how the members of New Order didn't properly mourn Joy Division leader Ian Curtis' suicide:
We didn’t grieve enough. I wish we’d have grieved him more. But we were allowed to sort of ignore it because we were so young.. Literally, all we did was gather as a group in a pub and sit there. Then we just threw ourselves into New Order and sort of erased before. It’s like getting rid of old pictures of your ex-girlfriend -- "No, never had anything to do with that!"
Hook says that he started to come to terms with his grief when New Order played two sets of Joy Division music in 2006: "Barney [Sumner] turned round and said, 'It’s miserable, that music; I’m not playing it again.' And I understood what he meant because we’d never cleared the decks with it. It put us back to where we were. Maybe he couldn’t handle it. I’m happy to sing them now."
New Order and Joy Division are currently nominated, as a single band, for induction to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. When asked about a prospective reunion if they make it in, Hook says, "I tell you, I’ll be there. But I think I might be on my own." Read the full story here.
In vaguely related news, Reebok and the clothing brand Pleasures recently launched a Joy Division collab, putting the Unknown Pleasures artwork on some shoes and a tie.
