http://www.gq-magazine.c...-light-new-order-concertFlakes fall from a leaden sky and Britain is waking to a winter whiteout. Across the nation, head teachers are logging on to websites and typing "SCHOOL CLOSED, HEALTH & SAFETY" before taking their dogs for walks across frozen lakes. SWT trains, running out of London Waterloo, had already begun its special snow timetable before the weather had turned thin and parkie. SWT's revised service appears to equate to: run less trains, see how that works out. Rush hour is raw. Modern man should not have to wait ten minutes for a train. By midday, Pendolinos operating out of Euston are facing severe delays.
Former New Order bassist Peter Hook - AKA Hooky - and his band the Light, scheduled to perform at Manchester Cathedral tonight (bringing to a close a three-date tour playing New Order's first two albums Movement and Power, Corruption & Lies), had taken the sensible option and drove directly from their gig at London KOKO to the Northwest overnight. Some of Hooky's entourage didn't, and text to say they are now stamping their feet at Euston to keep warm, hoping, praying, pleading, that a train will depart soon. Far more sensible to travel by road - wouldn't you think?
The M1 is gridlocked. Norbert Dentressangle juggernauts crawl through black slush. There are brake lights stretching to the horizon. Wash-wipe is required every 200 yards to clear greasy tyre spray from misty windscreens. At 2.30pm, a text arrives saying there are no trains leaving Euston. It's a disaster unfolding. At 6pm, the GQ Land Rover pulls into Norton Canes services on the M6 toll with its yellow engine icon fully lit on the dashboard. The Freelander is slowing to 40mph on gradual inclines, making an arduous journey take a lifetime. The phone ding-dings. It's Hooky's travelling horde: "We've made it as far as Stoke. Trains running slowly, but we'll make it." The temperature dips to minus-three as the bonnet is lifted. There's no hissing, no flames, no imminent signs of explosion, so we re-join the carriageway. It'll be the intercooler hose or the fuel pump, the internet reveals. We battle on, slowly, gradually, towards Cottonopolis.
We reach the threshold of Manchester Cathedral at 9.15pm, tired, frazzled and in need of a strong drink. Manchester is deserted (cab driver from hotel: "Not seen it like this since the bomb") due to the cold. In town, it's like climbing into the icebox of your fridge and closing the door behind you, but bizarrely, MC Tunes' "dance capital of England" is snow-free tonight. Of course! They only do rain here! Onstage, Peter Hook and the Light are already powering through 1981's Movement, a dark, brooding and icy collection that is a sort of Joy Division third album but without Ian Curtis' elegiac vocals.
"Two glasses of red wine, please."
"Sorry, sold out."
"Already?"
"Yep."
The beer is warm, but then again, this is a house of worship, not a pub. Behind the ale table a slogan reads "Diversity a strength", which is apt tonight as New Order were at the forefront of the rock-disco convergence. Tonight, it's almost a full house. The snow means no one from Wales has made it over Offa's Dyke but even so, over a thousand have braved the conditions (apparently, touts were selling tickets for £100 earlier) and there's a mix of ages, not just the normal legion of 50-year-old, 6'7", bald monsters from Rochdale. This isn't a simple run-through of Movement, either. Tracks have been carefully and subtly updated. There's a lot of hard work gone into this set.
The voice of the estranged bassist is a couple of rungs lower in delivery than New Order's frontman Bernard Sumner, so on Movement, Hooky's Hugh Cornwell-like howls are ideally suited to the Joy Division key. The pumping drum machine of "Truth", locked in a cage for so many years, takes flight in the nave and thuds against the perpendicular gothic masonry and late-medieval wooden fittings. "Truth" still sounds fresh, confident and contemporary, although it feels somehow wrong to see Hooky blowing into a melodica - that's Sumner's job, surely! Hooky will later mention backstage that he believes Sumner should be playing these songs with him.
Mark McNulty
If "Truth" lifts us from our winter despair, "Doubts Even Here" lowers us into the frozen January soil inside a coffin. This is New Order's bleakest musical moment, the threshold of everything going wrong: the telephone call that reveals a family death; closing the door as you leave your children after a marriage split; hearing that United have just let in a sixth goal at home to City. Movement isn't a party collection. It's an album made after the suicide of a singer [Curtis]. "It's not the greatest-hits package that the other lot play," Hooky later states, "These numbers are fast, slow, fast, slow - musically, it takes you out of your comfort zone."
Photographer Kevin Cummins, the legendary chronicler of Joy Division and New Order, appears in a full-on, bad-boy Stone Island parka with a hood as wide as a whale's tongue. You need a great deal of confidence to pull off a look like this. Lesser men would wither and wait for a rightful haranguing, but Cummins is a Manchester face and, as such, untouchable. He gives the gig the thumbs up so far.
The dual speed of Movement might have proved a stern test for Hook, but 1983's Power, Corruption & Lies, New Order's true first album, is an assault course for his voice. Sumner and Hook are completely different singers; Bernard's loftier timbre is better able to promote emotion and pain. Hooky's aware of this and instead of mimicking his former band mate, he powers up the baritone, delivering messages through force of strength. "I SAW YOU THIS MORNING, I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOOOOW," Hooky blasts on "Age Of Consent". Rather than sounding rubbish, we're offered a fresh perspective on old masterpieces. Hooky's ability to sing is no bolt out of the blue, anyway. He had chart hits with Monaco in the Nineties, sharing vocals with David Potts - who is present tonight.
Interestingly, Hooky's updating of disco-bomb "586" doesn't sound too dissimilar to Sumner's rendition from New Order's 2011 UK tour (which you can hear on New Order's Live At The London Troxy album). This shouldn't surprise: Hook and Sumner were in a band together for almost 30 years, so it's conceivable that they'd approach the updating of their music in a comparable manner. Veering from the album's content, we're also given bouncing reinterpretations of "Temptation" and "Blue Monday", sending the Cathedral's congregation into the Manchester night with a Ready Brek glow.
Backstage, Hooky is running about with his shirt off, like he's at the Montreux Rock Festival. Once he's settled down, he sits and sips water, but he's still oscillating with post-gig syndrome. "It's the scariest thing I've ever done in my life," he says. "I was so frightened. I must be mental. It was more scary than being at the Hacienda. At least at the Hacienda, I knew all the bouncers. When I got to 'Temptation', I actually relaxed a lot. It's weird, it's like taking it [the track] back. I've heard about them [New Order] doing it for a year, and it's really, really odd. I suppose for them it's been really odd, too. Again, like the Joy Division gigs, these are tracks that we never played. I've missed them. 'The Village', 'We All Stand', the ones that New Order won't play today.
"Considering that Movement was 32 years ago, you'd expect the audience to be from the Joy Division era, all fat b******s, like me. Then you look out and there are loads of youngsters. Watching their faces when we did 'The Village'… we were all so nervous. This lot [the Light] worked so hard. To me, it feels natural to put a lot of work in. It made me laugh when I heard Bernard say I'm doing it for the money. You wouldn't do this for the money, because it's so hard. You'd just do what they [New Order] do and play the greatest hits! This is the opposite.
"To be honest with you, I'd be happy to just book another date in a year and do Low-Life and Brotherhood. It doesn't bother me. It's just so nice that I'm with the band and they can play 70-odd songs. You've got a big, long list of songs, and I can shout to them, and we can do them all. One of the sad things about this, like playing '586', is realising how close you are [to New Order] and yet how far apart you are. If anything, it compounds that sadness, because you're all playing the same thing, you love the same music, you're getting off your rocks to the same music, like 'Temptation', and you're like, 'Why can't these tw*ts get together?"'
At this rate, we'll get to Waiting For The Sirens' Call by 2016 - we're informed that Hooky intends to go all the way.
Peter Hook and the Light's performance of Movement and Power, Corruption & Lies at Manchester Cathedral is to be released online by playconcert.com in mid-February.
