Peter Hook & The Light are on tour performing the 2001 New Order album Get Ready in its entirety. A second set includes favorites from the Joy Division and New Order catalogs.
As the bassist and founding member of Joy Division and New Order, Peter Hook wields an incalculable influence on music across a variety of genres. Alternative rock bands like REM, Smashing Pumpkins, and Radiohead regularly cite albums and songs from both of his bands‘ repertoires as inspiration.
Then there’s the Mancunian dance-club scene, centered around The Haçienda. It was founded in 1982 by New Order, along with their manager, Rob Gretton, and Factory Records. Financed in part by the success of “Blue Monday” (the top-selling 12” single of all time), The Haçienda gave rise to the careers of DJs and musicians like the Chemical Brothers and Justin Robertson, among many others.
Hook and his compatriots Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, and Gillian Gilbert occupy the same rarified space as the Velvet Underground. Although their bands never achieved the household-name status of, say, U2 (who also cite them as an influence), what they created ripples through music to this day.
In The Light for a reason
All of which begs the question, why does Peter Hook keep going after 40-plus years in the business? After all, his status as a bona fide legend is undeniable. Joy Division/New Order are even 2025 nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He puts it like this: “My job is to sound like New Order, because that’s what I love. And my job is to sound like Joy Division, because that’s what I love.”
It’s obvious that, unlike his former bandmates, Hook hasn’t lost any of his regard for the entire body of work they produced. The decision to form The Light is the result of his former bandmates’ decision to leave much of their repertoire, and in particular, Joy Division, in the past.
“Get Ready was a honeymoon record. Looking back now it was very enjoyable to make, and I think is massively underrated. It did sort the wheat from the chaff and led to a New Order mk2, which played better but had lost a naivety whilst gaining a maturity. Barney and I became a ‘power couple’ in Manchester during the making of the record but, sadly, the old problems recurred when we came to play live. The writing was on the wall from then on. The two of us worked very hard to make this a great record and I think we succeeded. I am looking forward to playing all the tracks, many of which have never been played live before. The Light will shine through … Get Ready!”
—PETER HOOK
“It’s the ignoring of the early material that was really upsetting,” Hook says of the circumstances that led to the rift. “And whenever I tried to bring the old songs in like Age of Consent or can’t we play a bit of Joy Division, it was, ‘Oh, no, it’s too rocky.’ I go, ‘Oh, fucking hell, man.’”
The frustration continued to mount, and Hook says, “By the time we got to 2007, just before we split up, we were stuck in a rut playing the same 16 songs over and over again when we had literally 300 songs to choose from.”
He circles back to this later in our conversation when he describes the obsession with performing. “That’s why I was so frustrated in New Order because the other three stopped performing. And it seemed to me that I was the only one who wanted to do it. And it was so frustrating to get offer after offer after offer in all these wonderful places in the world and not be able to go.
“It absolutely broke your heart. And I couldn’t understand it. So, yeah, it was weird.”
A very normal existence …
Indeed, his enthusiasm for performing still comes through as if he were hitting the road for the first time. The Peter Hook of 2025 might be an older gent now, but the passion remains.
It was a Sex Pistols show at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on June 4, 1976, that lit the flame.
At the time, Hook lived a life he describes as “Very normal and very content. I was working at the municipal offices in Manchester, and I had evenings off, and weekends were my own.”
Hook was born Peter Woodhead on February 13, 1956, and raised in Salford, Lancashire. He didn’t give much thought to socio-economic factors putting the UK under strain in the mid-’70s.
“I didn’t judge it,” Hook says of his headspace at the time. “It was just where I lived. So whilst it may have been in an industrial decline, it was all I’d ever known. I’d never been anywhere, so I had nothing to compare it to. So the thing was, it was just home. And whilst I realized that the country was in a mess with the Thatcher economics and things like that, I was just getting on with it. I was a kid.
“I was 20 years old. You know, I didn’t give a fuck. All I was worried about was what was going to happen to me in the next few weeks.”
Nevertheless, the mundanity of his day job sparked curiosity. “Ironically, because my job was so boring, I used to devour the music press,” he says. “I started off being a heavy metal fan at school just because everybody else was. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple; went to see those bands and they were great. But, you know, they didn’t sort of speak to me on a base level.”
Reading about the Sex Pistols in the music press grabbed his attention, because “they seemed to have a fight at every gig. Now, that didn’t happen at a Led Zeppelin gig or a Carlos Santana gig.
“You know, they weren’t constantly fighting with the audience,” he continues. “I’ve never seen Jimmy Page come out and have a punch up with the audience. And yet the Sex Pistols were doing it all the time.”
In Hook’s case, the Sex Pistols represented art imitating life. His life. “So weirdly, you know, whenever I went out in Manchester, it always ended up in a punch-up,” he says. “So that seemed more real.”
“The best 50p I’d ever spent”
Ironically, Hook went to a Led Zeppelin concert in Manchester the same week he saw the ad for the Sex Pistols. What Lonnie Donegan did for Jimmy Page, the Pistols were about to do for Peter Hook. “It was like somebody opening a door in a darkened room and all of a sudden you just saw the light and that was where you headed,” Hook says of the show’s impact on him.
He knew of the venue because of his job as a clerk at the municipality, which held Christmas parties there. “It was 50p to see the Sex Pistols,” Hook recalls. “So I phoned up Barney [Bernard Sumner], who was my only musical friend at the time, and said, ‘Oh, we should go and see these guys. They have a fight every gig.’ And he went, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting. Yeah, OK.’
“So me, him, my one of my great friends from Salford, Terry Mason, who became our tour manager as New Order, and Barney’s wife went to see the Sex Pistols. Now, there was only about 40 odd people there. I think it held about 300 maybe or something like that.”
And what was his first impression of the band that would forever change the course of his life? “They were awful … fucking awful. They were dreadful. The sound was dreadful. Everything was dreadful.”
But, as chance would have it, the opener — a heavy metal band called Solstice — provided the needed contrast.
“They played a 25-minute version of ‘Nantucket Slay Ride’ by Mountain,” Hook remembers. “It lulled us into a false sense of security because this was what we’d been seeing. People play heavy metal, you know, with no, you know, no fights, nothing. It was just normal. A normal band comes on, plays heavy metal, and then they go, and you go home.
“So the Sex Pistols then came on and oh, my God! The fact that they were bad, sounded awful and then told everyone to fuck off all the time. It was like, ‘Oh, my God. What the hell is this?’ And I thought at the end of it, ‘Fuck, I could tell everyone to fuck off.’”
And then the pebble was dropped in the water, creating a ripple through time. “I said to Barney, we should form a band. And he went, ‘Yeah, OK.’ He said, ‘I’ve got a guitar, you get a bass.’”
Peter Hook buys a bass
So the next morning, Hook borrowed some money from his mother and bought a bass. Oddly enough, for a guy whose singular bass playing inspired a generation, he didn’t even know what, exactly, a bass guitar was.
When the guy at the store handed him a bass, Hook said, “My mate’s bass has got six strings. And he said, ‘That’s because it’s not a bass, you knob head. It’s a guitar. This is a bass. A bass only has four strings.’ So my immediate thought was, ‘Oh, fucking brilliant!’
“It’ll be easier to play because it’s only got four strings, which is, I suppose, generally true. And that was it then. I mean, I never realized at that moment that that decision would become an all enveloping, 24 hour a day obsession that would last 49 years, so far.”
Now, whenever he runs into Glen Matlock — the Sex Pistols original bassist and who played the Lesser Free Hall gig — Hook says the same thing: “It’s your fucking fault, mate.
“This is your fault. And he goes, ‘Oh, fuck off, fucking fuck off.’ So, yeah, I mean, it was the most ridiculous decision based on the most ridiculous of premises that me and Barney could somehow succeed in a band when neither of us had hardly any musical knowledge and then go on to be in two of the most influential bands.”
“It was hard work”
And so it was that the two musical neophytes, armed with four and six strings and barely half a clue between them about what to do next, embarked on their journey.
“It was mental, you know, but that was what you were involved in, something that was very, very new,” Hook says of the time. “It was very, very insular in that you all helped each other. I mean, to be honest with you, without Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, Barney and I probably wouldn’t have persevered because we knew nothing, and we thought Pete Shelley knew everything.”
Inspired by Shelley to carry on, Hook says, “We had to find a singer and a drummer because we wanted a four line-up like the Sex Pistols for no musical reason, just because it was the same line-up.”
After what to them felt like ages, they recruited Stephan Morris on drums, and a mercurial singer named Ian Curtis.
“All of a sudden, we had to write songs, and we had no fucking idea how to write a song, none at all,” remembers Hook of the band’s earliest revelations. “So we had to learn everything. And it was so wonderful because it was all brand new, and you knew that the payoff, which was going to be the gig, because we never thought about records. To be able to stand on stage — and I suppose join your heroes, — not only Johnny Rotten being your hero and the Sex Pistols, but also Jimmy Page, David Bowie. Yeah, you were joining a very, very, yeah, very, very interesting club.
“We made every mistake under the sun. We really did. But every musician does because the carrot on the stick is performing.”
In less than a year, their dream of getting on stage came to pass. They performed as Warsaw at the Electric Circus on May 29, 1977, supporting the Buzzcocks, Penetration, and John Cooper Clarke. It happened to be the same month the Sex Pistols released their single, “God Save the Queen,” which debuted at number two on the UK singles chart.
Communing with fellow travelers in the revolution
The now-legendary Manchester music scene didn’t start that way. Rather, as Hook remembers, “It was a very small crowd.
“There was only one club in Manchester that allowed punks in because of the way they dressed. [It was owned] by a guy called Fufu Lamar, a club called The Ranch. And so there was only one place you could go to meet. And you saw the same people all the time.”
Howard Devoto (Magazine), Mark E. Smith, (The Fall), Mick Hucknall, (Simply Red), and Tony Wilson (the founder of Factory Records who was also a radio and television presenter, and journalist for Granada Television, the BBC and Channel 4) were a few of the people on the scene.
There was a movement afoot. Then, on August 28, 1976, the Sex Pistols performed “Anarchy in the UK” live in-studio on Granada Television’s So It Goes series (presented by the Tony Wilson), followed on December 1 by the infamous interview with Bill Grundy during the early evening live broadcast of Thames Television’s Today program. The revolution has begun.
“When that kicked off, you know, and the reaction from the media and from the public, and the Sex Pistols just got cancelled, as did The Clash and a lot of the other bands, we fought harder and harder to keep going,” Hook says of the immediate aftermath. “And more people came over once they heard about punk.
“And, you know, you used to get attacked by being a punk walking about, you would, people would turn on you, you know, like it was this anarchy. It was revolution. And I suppose that’s what the Sex Pistols were preaching. They were preaching a change. We want change. We don’t know what we want, but we want it.”
Peter Hook & The Light
Brooklyn Bowl
May 31, 2025
Tickets available HERE
Joy Division takes shape
In the thick of this revolution — a once-in-a-generation shift in the cultural zeitgeist that affected music, fashion, and attitudes towards personal freedom, Joy Division began to take shape. Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner had the four-piece band in place and set themselves to work.
Hook says, “What happened was that we started very quickly writing songs that sounded very mature. And we don’t know why; all we did was we could only afford to practice twice a week. Yeah, as Joy Division, because we had to chip in the money for the practice place and none of us had any money.
“So the thing is, is that we practiced for two hours on a Wednesday, and then we practiced for three hours on a Sunday,” he continues. “And on that Wednesday, we would write a new track. And on that Sunday, we would finish off the new track we’d written on Wednesday, and we would write another song.
“We were so prolific. When you’ve got no songs, they’re dead easy to write. When you’ve got 300, they’re very, very difficult to sound the same. Every band has that problem. So the thing is, is that we had no idea. And all I could go by was the look on Ian Curtis’s face.
“Because when we’d write a great song like ‘Shadowplay’ or ‘24 Hours’ or ‘Insigne’ or ‘New Dawn Fades,’ the look on his face was magical. He was over the fucking moon, because he was very well schooled in music. He had a great encyclopedic knowledge of music.”
A fan of The Doors, Iggy Pop, and Velvet Underground, among others, Curtis’s musical depth helped shape the band’s perspective. They channeled the cultural energy surrounding them into musical alchemy.
“So the thing is, that he completed my education, and little did I know,” Hook continues. “I mean, with the first couple of reviews we got, they compared us to The Doors. And I’d never heard The Doors. … Barney had never heard The Doors either. And so what he did was he gave us a Doors record each.
“We went home, and I listened to The Doors, and I thought, fuck me, we do sound like The Doors. And I’d never heard them. It was absolutely incredible. And that’s why Ian was so happy. Because he was listening to us and going, fucking hell, brilliant. They sound like The Doors!”
Peter Hook & The Light carry the torch
Fast forward a few decades. Peter Hook has played far more shows with The Light than with Joy Division. It’s a family affair now. His son, Jack Bates, shares bass guitar duties. (He’s also the touring bass player for Smashing Pumpkins.) His band (Paul Kehoe on drums, David Potts on guitars, and Martin Rebelski on keyboards) is down with the mission.
“You have to make a success,” Hook says. “You have to take every opportunity and squeeze everything you can out of every opportunity. That’s what in a funny way, the Sex Pistols taught me, even if they weren’t able to do it. But that’s what I gleaned from it. This is it.
“I mean, I’ve had a great life, mate. I’ve had a wonderful time to be able to come to Nashville, which is like the epicenter of music in the world. … We’ve been to Nashville numerous times, and it’s always been great, and the music and the vibe is always wonderful. So how lucky am I to still be able to do this at my age? It’s incredible.”
Hook goes on to describe an experience from the previous night‘s show, which sums up his raison d’être. “There was a kid in front of me. … He had a Joy Division t-shirt on, he must have been about 10 years old. We were playing ‘New Dawn Fades,’ and I was watching him, and he was singing every word. I was like, wow, what a gift Ian Curtis gave us, if only he were here to be able to see that.
“I gave [the kid] my t-shirt. My wet t-shirt from playing, you know, and his face was just like, wow. I hope he looks at me and goes ‘fucking ’ell, if he can do it, I can do it.’ That’s what I hope for every moment.“
This story, any story, about Peter Hook, Joy Division, and New Order — and the worlds they created and of which they remain a part — is incomplete. The impetus driving this story is to convey his lasting devotion to the work and, more importantly, to get at the source of his childlike energy and enthusiasm towards performing.
I was granted 20 minutes for the interview, which lasted 40 minutes, and it felt like we were just getting started at the end of it. Not to worry, because Hook also happens to be the internationally acclaimed best-selling author of a three-part memoir. Full of Mancunian wit and candor, at times heartbreaking and painful, but full of insight, the collection provides readers with an unvarnished glimpse into a magical journey by the guy who lived it.
The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club (2009)
By Peter Hook
Read The Guardian’s review by Luke Bainbridge
Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (2012)
By Peter Hook
Read The Guardian’s review by Dorian Lynskey
Substance: Inside New Order (2016)
By Peter Hook
Read The Guardian’s review by Andy Beckett
