http://www.alancross.ca/...793457&finalize=truePeter Hook is on the phone from a hotel room near JFK airport and has about half an hour to chat before he heads out to Long Island for another book signing on the tour promoting his newest book, Inside Joy Division. He's anxious to talk about the book, but he also has some things about New Order he would like cleared up.
Over the last couple of years, the Joy Division/New Order world has devolved into Team Hooky on one side and The Other Three on the other. And given some of the issues that divide the camps, I wouldn't expect detente anytime soon.
But more on that later. Let's start with the book.
Alan Cross: Why write this book? There's been so much myth and legend built up around Joy Division over the last thirty-plus years, what else is there left to tell?
Peter Hook: That's just it. I wanted to tell the other side of the myth. I was very careful and I did wonder about debunking the myth. But as an inspirational tale--and it was the Sex Pistols that inspired me--I thought that was the best thing to do. So whilst I revel in the wonderful mystery and myth that surrounds Joy Division, you do think, well, there is another side to it. And I think that was the bit that needed telling.
AC: How many people were at the Lesser Free Trade Hall that night? [The famous Sex Pistols show on June 4, 1976]
PH: Only about forty.
AC: And you were there with Bernard [Sumner] and who else?
PH: My great friend Terry [who became a Joy Division roadie] and Bernard's wife, Sue.
AC: I had heard that you went out the next day and rigged up an amplifier through an old tone arm?
PH: Yeah. What we did was...I went out and bought a bass the next day. It was quite an odd thing to walk into that concert as a 9-to-5 civil servant and to walk out an hour-and-a-half later as a fully-fledged punk in a group when you had no experience and no instrument. It was pretty radical. I bought a bass the next day and Bernard and I went along to his gran's because he already had a guitar that his parents had bought him for Christmas.
We wired up the two guitars to his gran's record player, an old-fashioned phonograph. We wired the jack leads into the needle. Bernard was always very good at things like that. And we played along and destroyed her stereogram. She was not happy with these two lunatics that she had acquired.
AC: Once of the things I find fascinating about Joy Division is the evolution of the bands' sound. Things got progressively darker. Why?
PH: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And to your ear, it got darker. The music did get better and within six months we were writing songs that did belie our age. They sounded like they should have been been written by much more mature--and dare we say, experience--musicians. And I think that's the problem Bernard and I had with Martin Hannett. When he did Unknown Pleasures, he did something wonderful and mature sounding and very, very classic. And Bernard and I wanted to sound like the fresh, young snappy Sex Pistols because it was only six months ago that we were inspired by them. I'm very glad that Martin got his own way on that one and I didn't because Bernard and I would have made a compete mess of it.
AC: Tell me a human story about Joy Division.
PH: Being in a group is a very difficult job and to witness the machinations behind it and to get something as well-known as Joy Division is these days and how hard it was for the people involved. You know, the holding down of a day job so that you could do Joy Division. The arduous stuggle that Ian had with his illness and then with his illness crumbling around him.It was just a difficult world. And I think that's what people forget. They look at the glamour of a group and they don't know what goes on behind the scenes and in many ways don't want to know because it destroys the glamour.
I found that with New Order and the fact that New Order and I are still fighting over their unauthorized use of the name. People do not like it. They just want to hear the music and have a good time. But life's not like that. You have to take the rough with the smooth.
AC: There must have been some massive legal tangle over who owned what with Joy Division.
PH: No. We've never had any problems with Joy Division.
AC: Really?
PH: Joy Division was a partnership that still functions today. And although Bernard, Stephen and I argue because they accuse me of stealing the music when in fact they played the music before me--which is another one of their delightful little contradictions that I find difficult to live with. That's supposedly why they took New Order away from me. It was because I was playing Joy Division music. But anyone is entitled to play anyone's music. And the fact that they played it before me in Bad Lieutenant doesn 't seem to come into the equation. But Joy Division functions quite well in its own way. We don't really milk it. We have thousands and thousands of people that milk via eBay and the Internet that milk it, so we just happily collect the royalties from the records that are out.
AC: It's kinda like the Sex Pistols. They put out just the one record but there are thousands of them out there. You put out the two records and...same thing. How many bootlegs do you think there are?
PH: Millions of bootlegs. I sign them every night and gaze in awe at the sheer volume of them. I do take it as a great compliment.
AC: What's the weirdest one you've found.
PH: It's amazing how, given that Joy Division had such a limited catalogue, the very clever ways they can reinvent them. Considering that the 7-inch of An Ideal for Living was limited to a thousand and the 12-inch limited to two thousand, I must have signed 20,000. God knows what's going on on that bloody Internet! It's magic!
Again, when you compare it to the illegal downloading of music from the Internet and the way it's affected record sales, you do begin to feel a little picked on, shall we say.
AC: Are you starting to feel that with the royalty cheques?
PH: Your royalties are diminishing greatly. And this is one of the problems I had with the others suddenly deciding to take away New Order from me. That's a big asset of a company. And I felt that that the way they did it was sly and underhanded and, in my opinion, illegal. Which is why I'm seeking a legal remedy to it at the moment. You do have to look after yourself in this day and age. Musicians have to be businessmen to survive. Those wonderful days of the 80s and 90s when the record companies used to do everything but change your nappy have gone. And you need to look at the human side. Behind running a group these days...well, it's not very glamorous because to survive is very difficult?
AC: One thing I love about the book is the timelines. How the hell did you assemble those with such precision?
PH: I have to say they weren't very clouded because there was no sex, drugs and rock'n'roll to take your memory away. There are also a lot of fan sites--and the fans sites are very good. Although there were some errors that I was delighted to rectify with the book. The one thing I would have loved to do was put the correct lyrics in the book because when you download the lyrics the vast majority have the wrong words in them which changes the connotations. But I wasn't able to do that.
AC: This so much more comprehensive with Deborah's book. [Deborah Curtis, Ian's widow, and her book, Touching from a Distance.]
PH: But Deborah's book was about her relationship with Ian. And to be honest with you, I don't think she could give a shite about the group.
AC: But for longest time, her book was the definitive account of Joy Division.
PH: I supposed it was because at the time, it was the only personal account. I did read Debbie's book and it did make me feel quite sodding guilty because there was a sexism on our part. We did keep it for the boys and exclude everyone else. But you do what you did at the time and you can't really change the past, can you?
AC: The track-by-track deconstruction of all the songs from the records is also really good because it gives you a personal viewpoint of what those songs are all about.
PH: It was quite odd doing that. I never thought that would be the one thing that people would pick up on so much. And yet people are really, really happy about that. I wish I had a dollar for every person that said "Yeah, I put the record on and listen to it while I read the descriptions." Wow! That's brilliant! As I go through the New Order book [Hooky's next project is a personal insider's account of that band] I'm going to have to write abotu the tracks like that because people really do seem to really like it.
AC: Let's follow up on this New Order book. That's going to be interesting.
PH: The interesting thing about Joy Division is that the band wasn't really sullied by sex, drugs or rock'n'roll in the cliched sense of the word. Whereas New Order--me, in particular--fell for all those dark sides of the music business. But we went through some great things. We were signed to Quincy Jones' label in America. We went through acid house. We went through Madchester. We saw Manchester change beyond belief. We ended up doing the World Cupt for the England World Cup song. I mean, we've got a lot of things we went through as a group beyond the grubby stuff. We headlined Glastonbury three times! New Order played a big role in music history itself, so I won't be doing just the naughty bits.
C'mon back for part two of this interview. I'll supply a link when it's ready.
