Peter Hook

TOBY LAING

We’re lucky enough to have Peter here. He’s touring different parts of the world at the moment, DJing. He’s just been over in New Zealand and Brazil and Uruguay. He’s here in Melbourne as well for our show too. Of course, he needs not really much of an introduction. He and his equally famous colleagues are phenomena of global music coming out of Manchester in the mid-’70s. Joy Division trends morphing into New Order somewhere along the line and involved in many other projects as well as producer and musician. The bass stylist, all of those things. It’s really good to have you here, Peter. Thanks for coming…

PETER HOOK

Thank you.

TOBY LAING

Being in a position like this, addressing a group of people about your music. It’s probably not the kind of thing that you were imagining all those years ago when you were just getting into music.

PETER HOOK

It all began in 1977. If you’d have gone along to somebody and said you wanted to learn music, then they would have thought you were an idiot. I think it’s quite interesting these days, and I’m not too sure as a self-taught musician whether I could say it was good or bad. I don’t think I’m expert enough to say that because I came up the other way. I came the back stairs route of learning to play music and being in a group. So, it seems quite odd to me that people teach people how to be in groups. It’s quite strange so maybe some of you could enlighten me to whether it works or not.

TOBY LAING

It seems like you just picked up an instrument at a certain point and you were inspired by a certain performance or by what came to be known later as punk.

PETER HOOK

Yeah, I’d never been interested in music apart from listening to records and stuff like that. I’d never played a musical instrument apart from the recorder at school. I went to see the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June of 1976. I went out and bought a bass guitar the next day. Don’t ask me why I did that because I don’t know. because I’d never even considered.

I think the thing was that when I saw the Sex Pistols, which was sort of at the end of my teenage years, obviously 20, I didn’t have a clue what the fuck I was going to do for the rest of my life. It was like, I saw the answer. I just saw the Sex Pistols spit at people on stage, and I thought “I want to do that. I want to be able to spit at people onstage.” As long as they don’t spit at me. You have got to get it right, you can spit them but they can’t spit at you.

I thought, “Right, to be in a group, you obviously need an instrument.” So, I went out and paid £35 for a bass guitar because my mate, Bernard [Sumner], had a guitar. You’re not allowed to have two guitars in a punk group. Or you weren’t then. That was it. We were a group. Then, we thought, “Shit, we’ve got no music.” [laughs] Sort of one little oversight. So, we started writing music and that was it. I’ve been doing that for 30 years.

TOBY LAING

So, you picked up a bass. You weren’t necessarily drawn to it. Within that punk idea. there’s a lot of freedom, but there are a couple of rules about a certain approach to music…

PETER HOOK

Yeah. We sort of broke that quite soon, really, because the first music we wrote was obviously punky as in the fact that you couldn’t play. I think that it was quite soon that your tastes are refined. My musical taste, as in the people I was listening to, I suppose you’d have to say was quite refined. I liked The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, all your heavy metal stuff that was big. I suppose you’re listening to a lot of different slow and fast music, whereas in punk it was all one pace [growls a punk singer]. Like that, you see.

We soon got bored with that. That didn’t get us. I know that bands still play like that today, but it didn’t get us, so we sort of moved off musically quite quickly. The rules of punk, which I still sort of hold dear, is that you don’t necessarily do what people say. The great thing about forming a group, I’ve found, was that you could tell everyone to fuck off because you were in a group, and somehow you got away with it because you were in a group. You went to television studios, you were drunk, you were obnoxious, you just did what you wanted, you fell over, you spewed up, and that was in a group. It was great.

It’s quite interesting now when you see things like Pop Idol and all this sort of reality thing because groups have to be completely different. They have to be nice to people. Well, the way that I was brought up was independently. We had an independent record label, which means we didn’t have really have anybody telling us what to do. The only drawback from that was that no one would lend you any money. As we all know in this world money is very important in learning, I suppose. The thing that we were always self-financed as a group on every concert we did, every tour we did, and every record we did which hasn’t changed. Nobody funded us. Nobody owned or told Joy Division or New Order what to do, which was very, very lucky position to be in, and I suppose that’s what made me whatever it is I am now.

TOBY LAING

I think that’s what I was getting at. It’s like taking that idea of being able to do what you want with your music, not being limited to a certain kind of instrumentation, you started to, early on, to utilize a whole bunch of things… electronic instruments.

PETER HOOK

Yeah, but I think the thing that you’d have to admit is that obviously, you had a talent. I’ve met a lot of people that, even though they’ve been great people, have not really had a talent, and talent comes from no one knows where, does it? Talent comes from God if you like.

TOBY LAING

It seems like, at one point, talent was coming from Manchester.

PETER HOOK

Yeah, again, I’ve been very lucky in that I live in Manchester. I don’t know why so many great groups come out of Manchester, I wish I did. I mean, when I think that my friends, The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, The Charlatans, Buzzcocks – Christ, even down to that ginger-haired twat Mick Hucknall [laughter]. There’s still a lot of people that have done something in music. Inspiral Carpets, the list is endless of people that came from Manchester.

TOBY LAING

You don’t have a theory about the culture of Manchester? What might lead to this?

PETER HOOK

Bernard, his thing was that it was so fucking awful that everybody would always want to get out of it. So, you form a group to get out of it which, I suppose is just as good a reason as any. I still live in Manchester. It’s still very important to me. Ironically, it’s still is important musically. The Smiths, don’t forget the Smiths. Now, Badly Drawn Boy, I Am Kloot, Elbow, Doves. Still, a lot of groups come from Manchester … I mean, we kick Liverpool’s ass, man… it’s fucking great.

TOBY LAING

The early days, the independent label … Kind of the freedom it offered, but also, obviously, the restriction of not having any funding or having to be self-funded … How did that loose business structure deal with the popularity of …

PETER HOOK

Well, I mean, business-wise, obviously, now that I’m knocking 51, I’m quite good at business, but I did learn the hard way and we got ripped off loads and loads of times. It was quite interesting signing Red Bull’s contract because it had a clause at the end that said I agreed that it was a reasonable and fair contract. I crossed it off because I didn’t think it was a reasonable and fair contract, but I still signed it. You spend your life going through things like that. I was very lucky in that I got to the ripe, old age of 40 before I signed a contract. The only contract we had was when we signed to London Records in 1996 or something. Before that, I’d never had to sign a contract. because we were punks and we didn’t sign contracts. It was quite interesting. So, business-wise, you do get taken advantage of, but the thing is, as my mother used to say “You’ll see the back of them all, Peter” and very luckily, I have.

The thing about doing it independently and being free is that things could happen very quickly. I remember writing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in an afternoon with Ian, and he went away and did the lyrics, and then we came back, and we didn’t even have the tape machine in those days, so for the record companies to hear it, they had to come hear us perform it, which was quite interesting because it’s quite interesting when you think that an LP like Unknown Pleasures, because we were poor, it only existed in our heads.

It didn’t exist anywhere on tape because we were too poor to record it. We didn’t have anything to record it on, so the only time it existed was when we played it together, which was quite a startling concept when you think how much you take for granted being able to listen to music these days and that the way that you write music in layers across a computer. You have an ultimate variety of doing whatever you want to it. It sometimes amazes me that, I think, that Unknown Pleasures only existed in our heads, and the only time we could play was when the four of us played it together.

Again, the thing was that, yeah, we played our manager “Love Will Tell Us Apart.” “That’s good, lads. I think that might do all right that. I’ll get Tony Wilson down,” and he got Tony Wilson down, and Tony Wilson heard it and went, “Yeah, that’s good. That could be good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll go and record that.” Phone Martin Hannett and we phoned Martin Hannett, and we went and recorded it, and that was “Love Will Tear Us Apart” done like in a week and out. Unfortunately, it coincided with Ian [Curtis]’s death. God rest his soul, but the point was that you could do things quickly in those days. Everything didn’t have to be planned like a military campaign. You can’t release a single until you finish your album, till you’ve got your video done, till this and that. All that bollocks.

TOBY LAING

You just mentioned Martin Hannett and describing yourself as a self-taught musician. You picked up a base and just started playing it, almost luck of the draw.

PETER HOOK

Luck of the draw [laughs].

TOBY LAING

Did you… You’ve since worked a lot in the studio as a producer, self-produced albums and also your own projects. You’ve produced The Stone Roses.

PETER HOOK

It’s what I hated about producers, and what I hated about Martin Hannett, in particular, was that he didn’t do what the group wanted because I think that producers, while they may be right or they might be right – “Maybe the chorus is too long, or your vocal is slightly out of tune. That drum loop’s too busy, or da de da de da da” – the thing is that they finish the work, they get paid, and they’d go, and you’d have to live with it and talk about it ad infinitum. The thing is… is that my view of producing, which is probably why I never get asked to produce anybody any more is that the bands should always be the one that’s happy, not the producer, not the record company because the band have to live with it. Whenever I have produced… I produced The Stone Roses and people like that. I’ve always, if I did something the band didn’t like, we had to change it because I always felt, as a musician, that they have to live with it and not me. That’s my production ethic.

TOBY LAING

Are you going back into the studio to produce anything in the near [future]?

PETER HOOK

To be honest with you, production is one of the most difficult and time-consuming jobs, and even though you get paid for it, if you have a hit album then you can make a fortune. I find it so consuming and such hard work that I prefer playing in the group, really. My greatest love is playing in the group. I do DJing because the other members of the group don’t want to play, so I needed something to fill me time, so when Mani asked me to DJ on Primal Scream, I said yes.

TOBY LAING

That initial phase when you had developed this popularity in Manchester and outside of Manchester and around the UK. Taking that music then to other places, what was the…

PETER HOOK

You see, that sounds easy. It wasn’t that easy because we used to play to nobody as Joy Division. We played a gig in Oldham, which is near Manchester, and there was nobody there. No one.

I remember, two girls came in after about 20 minutes. They walked up to the front of the stage because there was nobody in there, we were playing, and we stopped. The girl went “Hey, are The Frantic Elevators”

We went “No, no. We’re Joy Division.”

They went “Fuck, we’re in the wrong place,” and they went.

When you play to no people, it doesn’t matter, does it. We were playing the same set, the Unknown Pleasures set that six months later, or a year later you’d be playing to thousands of people. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, at all. The thing is, I suppose as a performer and as a musician, every single time you play, you’re tested.

I was saying before, that when I DJed at Parklife [the Australian music festival] on Saturday, which was quite ironic, because when I walked home because I started off with a slow tune and everybody had been playing fast stuff, someone threw something at me, which was a crushed up Red Bull can… I took the money with relish today for that. It happens all the time. Sometimes you go down well, sometimes you go down crap. You don’t take your success anywhere with you. Everywhere you go can be really, really difficult because it attacks your heart and your soul if you’re up there playing and someone spits at you or throws something at you or shouts, “Get off, you’re shit,” or whatever. “You cheeky bastard,” you know, it gets you right “in there.” The good thing about being in a group is at least you’ve got your mates to [grumbles]. When you’re DJing, you haven’t got shit. [Pretends to be scared] “Where’s that big guy got… the one that was on the end,” you know?

I mean, performing attacks you every time. It’s very easy to lose your battle. Or to lose everything, just by one guy going [makes offensive hand gesture]. I actually find it worse now because I’m sober. “My name’s Peter, and I’m an alcoholic …” Now that I’m sober, I see everything. Whereas before, when I was drinking I didn’t see anything, I was just [growls]… It’s funny, it’s made it actually harder. The thing that puzzles me is, I started off sober, so I don’t know why that changed. Been sober for years, playing. Now it bugs the shit out me, when people are pissed.

TOBY LAING

There’s some unpleasant experiences. As a performer, something has been compelling you to continue writing songs with this group of people when, at times, it seems like it’s been a difficult relationship with your other colleagues in the bands.

PETER HOOK

The difficult thing for me is that it is the only thing I know is writing songs and playing them. It’s very difficult for me to sit there and say to my children, “Oh, you should do your exams because it’s very important.” He goes to me, “Well you’ve never got any exams, and look at you! You’re alright.” I’m like, “That’s not the point!” Sound like me dad.

It’s the only thing I’ve known is writing and performing music, and sometimes when I’m really, really pissed off with them all, and I think, “Shit, that’s it. I’ve had enough of that knobhead, he’s driving me mad. I’m going, I’ve had enough …”

Then I think, “Well, what you going to do?”

“Oh, OK, I’ll play …” It’s a strange world, isn’t it?

TOBY LAING

Obviously, you do get some form of… the expression of it obviously is something that…

PETER HOOK

The expression is… I couldn’t even explain. Somebody, when I played… this is name-dropping. Sorry. When we did Glastonbury last year, there was 120,000 people there, and they all sat there staring at you. It was an absolute bizarre situation to be in. People all caked in mud, off their tits on psychedelic mushrooms, chanting along to “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” how could you explain something like that? It’s pretty good. It’s great. It’s nice to be appreciated. It’s nice to have your ego massaged in one way or another. The thing is, is that when you sat somewhere in the four o’clock in the morning, trying to think of a word that rhymes with witch… We always used to call them “five o’clock in the morning” lyrics.

“Oh, fuck. Can you just put that in, and fucking let’s get out of here.” Then, you have that side of it, the really difficult side, the writing side and also dealing with the business side. Then the great bit is to walk out on stage and have them all scream at you, I suppose, and enjoy what you do. The satisfaction is amazing. It’s not real, though, you know. As you finish, you still have to clean up dog shit and all that.

TOBY LAING

I’m not sure if you’re sick of talking about the whole situation where you found yourself not only in a band that was pretty busy but also, in a band that was involved in various business enterprises such as, a certain place of entertainment called the Haçienda.

PETER HOOK

Our record company and our manager decided that because we had nowhere to go in Manchester, we should open our own club. So we did, and in all fairness, the club did change. If any of you went clubbing. He’s yawning, he must have been out there last night. It changed the face of clubbing and with acid house music. Sort of created dance in England and Europe. The whole ecstasy thing just went completely through the roof.

The club was … It was a very difficult thing because when you worked out how many people had been in the Haçienda in the fifteen years it was open, you reckon that each of them had probably cost New Order and Joy Division about ten quid each. So we’d lost that much money on the club. Even though your accountant kept saying to you it was great promotion and… When things are going bad and you sat there a bit skint thinking, “Hmm, I could have done without that promotion, really.” Would rather have had the money, you know. But we’re artists, aren’t we?

TOBY LAING

Yeah, the promotional value … obviously, you had to the brunt of it, but it’s a very famous place and the whole scene with Factory Records and the Haçienda and New Order.

PETER HOOK

Yeah, I mean thanks to 24 Hour Party People, the film, it sort of resurrected it around the world and made it… it was a very special place. The thing is, our manager did say to us, “I think we’ve done well out of Manchester, we’ve done well out of music, we should give something back.” We didn’t realize that he meant everything [laughs]. We thought he just meant a little bit of it. A tenner, maybe. Not everything.

So, but, yeah, mistakes you make. You sign a little bit of paper when you’re hungover, and then the next thing you know, it’s kicking you up the ass for 20 years, isn’t it? We have to say we’re still here and we haven’t done badly out of it. We’re still… I’m a very successful musician, and I’ve done well. It’s been hard work. I mean, I still have to work now. I work for a living. I work because I love it. That’s what my wife always says, “You fucking love it. Shut up moaning.” But I do love it, but I do still have to work for a living.

TOBY LAING

When I just think of the… when I think of your musical output and the various styles that it’s… You may not be conscious of it, being in the middle of it all, but you seem to be drawing from a lot of different places throughout the years. You obviously-

PETER HOOK

Yeah, we’ve been really lucky for being in the right place at the right time. You’d have to say that Joy Division, Factory, New Order, Haçienda had it. They were definitely in the right place at the right time. I think we write great music, which I think is the… you have to believe in yourself at some point. You have to be able to stand up and say, “This is great, fuck the lot of you.” Even when it bombs on its ass, you have to say, “Well I still think it was great.” I write music for myself. I don’t write it for, as much as I hate to say it, for you lot or anybody. I write it because I love it and because when I finish it, I think it’s fantastic. I don’t tailor-make my music for audiences.

I think that even as a DJ, there’s an aspect of tailoring your music. Like when I played in Wellington the other night, I was saying to you [points to interviewer], it was an indie crowd, and they were all moaning because I was playing dance music. The devil in me thinks, “Well fuck you then. Tough shit. Shouldn’t have come, should you?” [laughs] You know, it’s like that. Then the other side of me thinks, “Am I going to get beaten up? Well, maybe I should put some on.”

TOBY LAING

When you DJ, it’s all kinds of stuff that you’re playing?

PETER HOOK

Yeah. I always found DJing absolutely ridiculous. I thought they were a bunch of egotistical pricks. I was right. Now I’m an egotistical prick as well, it’s fucking great, isn’t it? I guess someone said I was being an egotistical prick. No, I didn’t understand it, to be honest. The only reason I began DJing was because Mani, the bass player of Primal Scream who was my friend, he said to me “It’s a great way of getting pissed for nothing.”

I thought “Well, that sounds interesting,” so I went to see him. We did a gig in Barcelona, which was absolutely hilarious because he was twatted and I didn’t do anything. I just stood there answering questions about why New Order don’t gig.

[Spanish accent] “Why you never play in Spain? Why you never come here?”

He was throwing the records at people when they were annoying him. He was spinning, he was scratching at one point. Really into it and I went over and said, “Mani, that’s not on, that.” [laughter] “Oh fucking alright, OK then.” I thought, “This seems like a proper good laugh, this DJing.” That was the reason why I started DJing and I went through the drinking part of it. Getting completely pissed and chasing girls around stuff like that. Which I’m not proud of.

Then I got into the musical side of it. Started putting music together that I thought would be good. To be honest, after being in the studio with New Order for three years… the thing that pissed me off most was that we hadn’t been playing. We had been in the studio for three years, we had done a record, but we weren’t doing any gigs, which I found very irksome. I started DJing and then started thinking about music to play to people and obviously got into the whole reason of why DJs DJ, because they put music together in a way that makes it entertaining, makes it have an impact and people take it for granted. I mean I can count on… I can count on everybody’s hands here [gestures to audience] however many times I have been into a club and never noticed the DJ. But if he wasn’t there, we’d all be a bit bored, wouldn’t we? It’s one of those funny things. I was very scathing when I began it, and now I think they’re great.

TOBY LAING

I mean, regardless of how incredibly out of it a lot of people must have been at the time, the club we were talking about before seems to be a bit of a landmark for DJs exposing crowds to music, which they may not otherwise have heard, putting it together in a way that they may not have experienced before, and it’s led to various different subcultures around the world.

PETER HOOK

We had the record in the Haçienda of paying a DJ the most that a DJ had ever been paid, which was Sasha for his first sold-out night in the Haçienda. He got paid £2,000 in 1988 or ’89, which was quite a lot of money then. So, I suppose in a way, that whole DJ-as-superstar culture came from acid house and… it’s funny as a musician when you’re not a DJ, you just think, “Well, all they do is play records. They’re playing our records. That’s all they’re doing.” I mean, obviously, there’s more to it than that, but to my mind, I still think the musician, I should have to say, is the most important person, because they wouldn’t have anything to play, would they? The reason most DJs get into writing their own stuff is because they get paid more for playing their own stuff than they get paid for playing your stuff or my stuff. That’s how they make money on publishing. That’s a step. It’s a career step, I suppose. Hope I haven’t disillusioned anybody there.

TOBY LAING

So, you came out of the studio last year after three years, did you say?

PETER HOOK

Well, yeah, I mean, off and on. When you get to our age, as daft as it sounds, you don’t do it the way that you did. I used to go in the studio and I’d do 18 hours. I’d just go back, sleep, go back to the studio. I did that for 20-odd years, you know. You’d lose a few girlfriends, wives. You miss a few children growing up, and then you think, “What the fuck am I doing?” So you do it in a different way now. I do it as a 10-to-6, as a job. I think it’s that interesting thing that when you start, you live for the group. As you get on through it, you do the group to live. It’s just… I’ve done the intensity, and I’ve done all that lot. I’m very lucky in that I have a bedrock that enables me to come on a jolly to Australia and play in front of a few people in a park in Melbourne or whatever. I’m sort of very lucky. I get paid for doing it. It’s great. But without the bedrock of the work that I put in, the intensity of that, that takes you to the edge in many ways, then you wouldn’t have that freedom to do it. I think I’ve paid my dues.

TOBY LAING

You just mentioned before writing, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in an afternoon or an evening. That actual songwriting process, how is it… How many different forms does that take?

PETER HOOK

To me, it only takes two forms. Either it comes really quickly or it takes forever. If you look at a song like “Blue Monday” that took a hell of a long time to write. because of the technology we were using, the way that Bernard and Stephen [Morris] approach the technology was fantastic because I often found it boring as shit, and I would have been happy just to play on the guitars, and not be music at all. I found it really dull and tiresome, but they persevered and went through all the controlled voltage and building their own drum machines and working your way through of joining synths together to do pulses, to split off.

We had a guy who built… We used a drum machine that came from an organ, like your granny has, playing bossa nova, waltz and all that. We took it out and got this guy to rebuild it and make it so you have separate outputs for each instrument. We did that in 1980. We used that on stage, which was actually a bizarre thing to use on stage from your granny’s room. To fire the drum machine, a guy converted it from controlled voltage so that you can pulse a synth that Bernard built from a kit in England called the Transcendent 2000 – which never fucking worked.

We went through all that, and basically, it consumed you, unbelievably, the amount of work you had to put in. Very lucky these days, you can just buy it and turn it on. You’ve got a complete home studio within about half an hour with as many sounds as you want. It’s incredible. That’s why it was really nice when I was watching the girl downstairs playing the squeeze box. It was absolutely wonderful to hear an instrument. It’s really nice. Normally whenever I hear an instrument, I press a button and an instrument comes. It’s really nice [that] some people actually play still. It’s fantastic.

But the technology to do “Blue Monday” was unbelievable. When we think that we’ve Prophet Five in 1980, we paid £2,000 for a Prophet Five. God knows how much that is today. Probably 25, 30 grand or something like that…

TOBY LAING

Yeah…

PETER HOOK

Believable. We had five of them because they were so unreliable that you couldn’t rely on one to play. You had to have three set up, ready to switch them over if they went down on stage, and two in the back for when the other three went. Literally like roulette. Whether any of the bleeding stuff worked. When the emulator came along, if you know the Emulator? It was a sample player. You used to load a sample on a floppy disk and play it on the keyboard. We got the first one and we thought it was just [inaudible], oh every song, “Hey wow, great.” Really overdid it. It was so unreliable that every time you used to go on stage… I remember we were playing a gig in Germany, and this thing wouldn’t load at all. Kept putting the disk in and it just wouldn’t fucking load …

Our sound guy was watching it. I saw him get off the podium at the back and walked, stormed all the way through, right up. Come up to the side of the stage, got on the stage, come on the stage, picks up the emulator, threw it on the floor, picked it up, put it on the stand, and it loaded. It was that… The technology was that shit [laughter]…

I remember we had a phone call at the venue in Bremen or something with this German guy. He came to see us, and we’d got into the habit then of banging the Emulator on one of the legs with a hammer. If you hit it on the right leg, which was the top right, it’d load. We had a phone call in the production office, and it was Erasure, [who] were playing somewhere in Germany. They’d heard that we’d figured out how to fix the Emulator. They said, “Which leg do you hit with the hammer to make the fucking thing load?”

You went through all that equipment thing of people using you as the guinea pig, and your money to do it, so the thing is that the sound that you did create, and that Bernard and Stephen were the pioneers of it, was really, really difficult to do. It was really difficult in those days to make an electronic record. As you said before, the perseverance and the effort was worth it. You can dine out on it for years.

TOBY LAING

It’s definitely worth it in the case of “Blue Monday,” which is a record that, I’m sure we’ve all heard in all kinds of different places. It’s one of the biggest-selling records of all time, on the 12” format.

PETER HOOK

Yes, and we lost 10p on every copy because the sleeve was… When they designed the sleeve, because it had cutouts in it, it was really expensive to make, but nobody noticed that. So, when we sold, they were losing money on each sale.

TOBY LAING

Do you think all this is paying off in some kind of karma bank somewhere?

PETER HOOK

(Laughs) That’s the great thing about being independent; you can make mistakes like that. If you’d have been on Polydor, someone might have come along and gone [inaudible]. We did this. It was a fantastic sleeve, the way it was based on the floppy disk. It was absolutely revolutionary. Steve Morris’s great quote about it is, “It was the bits that you didn’t get that were expensive.” The holes that were punched out were the bits that cost the money. The nothing bit, which was quite interesting.

TOBY LAING

Well. It’s interesting discussing these tensions you had in the band.

PETER HOOK

All these mistakes (laughs).

TOBY LAING

And mistakes, and…

PETER HOOK

Maybe I should do a book of mistakes.

TOBY LAING

Problems along the way. Just listening from an outside perspective, it’s this ability to compromise. The flexibility you’ve each shown to the project, as well as the single-mindedness at other times that have led to this stream of creativity over the years.

PETER HOOK

The whole thing about being in a group, to my mind, is compromise because it’s all about chemistry. I don’t know whether you’re all solo artists, or whether you’re in groups. But speaking as a group member, you start off with your friends. Then within about six months, you can’t fucking stand the sight of each other. That last version was in my case for about 30 years. You get less for murder, don’t you?

It’s about chemistry. I appreciate when we all went off and did our solo projects. It didn’t have the chemistry that New Order and Joy Division had. But it was still great. I had a great time. It’s a difficult thing. Being in a group is difficult. Thing is, I’ve never met any group, ever, that ever got on. Ever. Primal Scream got on for a while, but even that didn’t last. Then you’re standing there with them [thinking], “Look at that twat… I’m going to kill him in a minute, if he fucking comes near me now I’m going to kill him.”

[Pretends to speak to the other person, smiling] “Alright mate, yeah.”

[Turns away] ”Fucking twat … bastard…”

It’s like that. Every single group is exactly the same. It’s fantastic [laughs].

PETER HOOK

That’s what I’m getting at really. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of all these different personalities and different approaches and what the different members of the group seem to find important at different times.

TOBY LAING

But I mean, in the case of, say, the electronics coming into the group, and suddenly, you’re the bass player, but you’re contending with these sequenced bass lines, but you find a way to contribute to the music in a whole new way by playing higher on the instrument, by actually turning the bass into…

PETER HOOK

Yeah, I started that in Joy Division, actually. It was Ian Curtis that spotted… I mean, Ian was the singer, so he’d just sit there while we played. When he heard something that he liked, he said, “That sounds good. Do that. And you put a guitar to that, Barney. Do that.” I mean, that’s why it was so difficult after he killed himself, selfish bastard. We had to record it then and figure it out ourselves.

You know the whole thing changed when you got to “New Order” because he was the one that listened and spotted it. It was him, I’d have to say, was the one that spotted that playing high upon the neck gave you an identity and made it unique if you wanted. The thing was, that transferred actually quite well to New Order. While Bernard sang, I could play around his singing because he can’t sing and play at the same time, in the same way that I can’t sing and play at the same time. I do one or the other. I’m not like Sting. That’s a funny one, that one.

I’m just thinking about a bass in Florida in this shop, semi-acoustic bass. It was really nice. The guy said to me: “Don’t buy that one!” He said, “we got a really, really special one coming in tomorrow.” And I went: “Oh well what’s special about it?” He went: “Come in tomorrow and you can have this really really special one. Leave that one. Buy this one tomorrow.” I went in and I said: “what’s special?” And he went, “Sting signed it.” Fuck off. I bought the other one. Oh, so anyway, where was I? I forgot.

TOBY LAING

It does work very well…

PETER HOOK

Oh right, I’m sorry…

TOBY LAING

You playing Sting’s bass on those tracks?

PETER HOOK

Yeah, it did. It fitted in quite well but I suppose you’d have to say it’s a mixture of talent and luck wouldn’t you? What else can you say? Didn’t plan it. I never planned anything. You can tell by all the mistakes.

I’m interested to know how the band, New Order, is at the moment. I know there’s been a fair amount of gigging lately and how that approach… Is the electronic gear behaving itself better these days?

PETER HOOK

Ironically, I was [inaudible]. Most of you know this but most of it’s on tape anyway. When bands play, they either use DAT, which we used to do in the old days. Now most people play on a CD or they use a hard drive.

We still use a multi-track. We use a 16-track player. We still use some pause, we still trigger keyboards from the tape. We try and keep as much of it live as we can these days. Funny thing is, we went around the world for 10, 15 years, giving all this gear a fantastic holiday. It’s not very appreciative gear, falls apart. Pick it up in Bangkok airport. It doesn’t travel well. So you do get to the point where you’re thinking, “Well fuck I can’t travel with this. It’s just falling apart all the time.” So we switched it, which was quite lucky really.

It’s still that thing. It’s all about performance. When you walk out on stage, or when you walk to go out to play or whatever, it’s about grabbing the moment and making it yours and sending whoever’s watching home thinking, fucking hell, yeah, he was good, or he was shit.

As long as you get some reaction, I think that’s what it’s about. Really, I don’t mind if people mind, or if people play to back your track, for the simple reason it still takes a lot of skill to pull it off. If somebody pulls it off to a backing track, then you’re going to appreciate it just as much as if you pull it off and you’ve got a thirty piece orchestra, all playing live. I’m not snobbish about that.

TOBY LAING

There’s some more of that compromising and flexibility that I was talking about before. Is that still very much a part of taking the stage show on the road nowadays? What’s the approach now to doing a big show at Glastonbury? Is it just like the old days?

PETER HOOK

I find it quite odd actually because we get loads of stick of our fans for playing the same set every night, which we don’t do. We do vary it a little. I think with the time constraints and the fact that you’re all doing all the things and you don’t live 100% for the band, you can’t do that. So our punters, our fans, are always complaining because we play the same set every night. I’m thinking, you’re not supposed to play to the same people every night. So our fans complaining about, “Oh you’re here again? I really don’t like you being here because you’re here every night. Why don’t you piss off?” You play to the people in Ireland, for the Irish people. You don’t want some geek to turn up from Manchester going: “Oh you’re playing the same set you did in Manchester.” And you’re like, “Fuck, what are you on about?”

It don’t make any sense. It’s just a weird thing. You sort of go through a moaning for ages, “You should play something different.” You might think, “Well if we leave something out, the Irish kid might be really upset that you’re not playing ‘Ceremony’ or ‘Blue Monday’ because we’ve put a different song in for you.” It comes to that thing of, how far do you go about pleasing people? How far do you bend over?

TOBY LAING

But it is very important to still be playing at this stage.

PETER HOOK

Yeah. My love is playing music. I love playing bass. I love it more than anything in the world. Most of my arguments within the group were when Bernard wanted to get modern. “Can’t you play some keyboards?” I’d say: “No I can’t. I don’t want to play keyboards. I just want to play bass.” We used to fight about it because he felt it was making it old-fashioned. Like you know, we should be like Depeche Mode or something like that.

TOBY LAING

We were discussing upstairs about the importance of playing live, which is something that maybe more studio-based musicians, producers, might like to hear about. Something that seems to be a bit of a change in the music industry over the last couple of years with transferring music through burning, downloading, whatnot. It seems like you can’t stop it. It’s how music gets around nowadays. It seems to be a very natural way for music to travel but it seems to impact a lot on album sales, if you produce a CD, a studio project …

PETER HOOK

Our LP got leaked by supposedly a trusted journalist and put on the internet, which as a musician can be quite… you’ll never know if that guy putting it on the internet has cost you 100,000 or cost you a million sales. It happened to the Chili Peppers this time with Stadium Arcadium. It happened to us. It’s life’s rich tapestry isn’t. You can’t stop people. I mean I used to do it. I’d record an LP on cassette and give it him. So I mean everybody does it, I do it.

TOBY LAING

It seems to have reached the point now where… In the past, maybe it did affect your market a little, but at the same time, the music would get further to people who wouldn’t even dream of even buying it. Now it seems to have reached the point where even the people who would’ve bought the album originally maybe are…

PETER HOOK

I still think the people who would buy your album would buy it because I would. I was on one of my jaunt, at an airport, and I bought the Primal Scream LP. I bought it because I love them. I was thinking: “Fuck it I’ll buy it.” I could ask Mani for it or I could ask Bobby Gillespie for it, but it was nice to buy it. So I still that think people are the same as me and if they like the record, they’re going to buy it. I think the thing that’s changed is kids really. Children when they get into, and they have the technology now, and the freedom to do what they want, so they don’t have to go out and buy a record. They can download it.

My children sort of don’t think that music exists in any other form than a download. Why would you want 12 songs? I only want the one that’s hit. I don’t want the other 11. It’s modern life. It’s the way it is. There’s so much choice. There’s so much freedom and flexibility. The thing is you can’t moan about that, can you? You can’t.

TOBY LAING

It seems to be modern, but at the same time, it’s going back to sort of an older model where the artists and the bands really do need to get out and reach the live audience.

PETER HOOK

Yeah. We were talking about this before. What we were saying was what that in record-company terms, there’s a point that groups reach that they call the “Rolling Stones moment,” which is when people want to see them live but they don’t want to buy their new record. As my accountant put it, it’s just the way of people re-living the glory days, when they were off the tits, 20 years ago. They just want to hear that stuff, not your current stuff. It’s becoming recognized in a lot of older groups with a big back catalog, that people like to hear the old stuff, which is probably logical really, more than the new stuff.

It affects you because, as an artist, your record company can’t justify lending you money or spending money on recording because they’re not earning back on your records. You earn it on the live performances. The record company doesn’t get anything from your live performances So they’re saying, “Why should we bankroll your record when we’re not earning anything and you’re getting all the money from… ” They don’t say that, but they mean that, I suppose. So I mean it’s just a different way in that, as we were saying before, that gigs are now very expensive but people will go and pay it.

It was $86 for that Parklife thing. Yet if people walked in Virgin, they go, “Fucking hell, $10 for that? Holy shit, man!” It’s just a different thing, isn’t it? People seem to be happy to pay to see you live which I’m not going to complain about but they sort of pull back a bit when they buy records.

TOBY LAING

I would like to open this up to the floor and see if there’s anyone out there who has any queries; any things that they are wondering about, that maybe Peter Hook could fill them in on?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

A lot of people just remember seeing 24 Hour Party People. Steve Coogan plays a very interesting Tony Wilson. What was the real Tony Wilson like?

PETER HOOK

He’s like family to me. I hate him and love him in equal measures. People considering… There’s a lot of history involved with Tony Wilson. He was the head of our record company. When the record company went bankrupt, he owed New Order, Joy Division, about £3 million. So £3 million of our money just disappeared. With the Haçienda and the bar that we opened in Manchester, we lost, we reckoned, about £6 million. We lost a lot of money, and people find it hard to believe why you have anything to do with him, but I suppose I’m lucky.

My accountant always says, because he’s a dreaded accountant, he always says to you that as long as you keep earning money, the fact that you’ve lost money doesn’t hurt. It’s when you stop earning money, then it will really hurt. So, I suppose I’ve got that to look forward to, really.

But I get on really well with Tony. I think his ideas and his way of working is fantastically anarchic. It just gets to the point where after fifteen years, you’re bored with anarchy. How many riots do you want to go to? You just want to sit home and have a beer, watch telly. It’s like you have to balance it out, don’t you? Whereas, with Factory and the Haçienda, there was no balance. You were always veering from one catastrophic thing to another. In the end, they were using our records, New Orders’ records, to fund all the other acts on the label, and run this dodgy nightclub, which I must admit, I had some of the best nights of my life in, without a shadow of a doubt. You can’t do it. You can’t… “Come on and hurry and finish the record. Haçienda’s running out of money.” You go, “Ah, fucking hell”.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

With what you were saying before, about Haçienda. The thing about people like Mike Pickering and all that. Were you guys around much during this period, when these guys were actually chasing out these American records.

PETER HOOK

Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

When all of a sudden there was this… Tell us a bit about, what was the vibe in the air like? Have you got any music as well?

PETER HOOK

If I could remember it, I’d tell you. No, it was great. It was a right laugh. It was rocking. How can you describe something like that? Everyone was off their tits. The funny thing was, everybody is construed as being like the drugs have a major part to play in it. But in all truth, I’d say in Haçienda, out of 2,000 people, maybe 10% were taking drugs. The others were having a great time, they were high on life. In some ways, the drug aspect of it gets pushed, because it’s on the edge, the way rock’n’roll is I suppose. But it simply wasn’t true that it was… I still think that it was about the music, not about the drugs. Yet everybody thinks that all that acid house, dance thing, is about ecstasy and drugs. I don’t think it is, I think it’s about people enjoying music and having a great time.

I had some of the best nights of my life, if I could only remember them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Hello. A lot of us have seen the movie, of course. So, I was wondering what you think about it. What’s true and what’s definitely not true?

PETER HOOK

Well, it depends on who you talk to about which bit’s true or not. We had the… I do love this thing, the way that filmmakers talk to you and get you to do their job for them. Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who wrote it, just did interviews with New Order, which we were happy to talk to him about, got the best bits of what you talked about, just put them all together and made it entertaining. Some of it was true and some of it wasn’t. Some of it was glamorized. Some of it wasn’t. Everybody’s memory of it is different.

I thought it was quite interesting that Tony Wilson’s book about it, he wrote his book about that time to the film and changed it so that it fitted it in with the film. And I was like, “Why have you done that? That isn’t true.” He says to me, “You’ve got to realize, Peter, that fiction is much more interesting than fact.” I don’t think it is, personally.

It was good. It was quite weird. I’d never seen, obviously, when Ian died, I didn’t see it. I was only 22. I was just a kid. Me world had caved in, so I didn’t address anything like that. It was the first time I’d ever seen that aspect of it, which was a bit unsettling. It was quite sad. Also, all the stories about all losing the money and all that lot. To me, that’s fucking cataclysmic.

I mean, it’s my kids… aren’t provided for or whatever, and yet to sit there and have everyone laughing at it, “Haha, they lost 10p on every copy.” “You fuckers, what are you fucking laughing at, you cheeky bastards?” But that’s the thing. It’s funny. It was done in a lighthearted way, you know, so I suppose once you got used to that aspect of it. It was alright.

I thought he did a good job, and the thing is that you have to measure it. Everywhere you go in the world, people have seen “24 Hour Party People.” When I DJ, it’s always “24 Hour Party People” featuring Peter Hook from New Order. So you know, it still keeps me going so I suppose… It would be interesting to see if the Joy Division film, which is called Control, that they’re doing at the moment, has any impact like “24 Hour Party People.” I don’t know, because it’s dark, whether it will or not, I don’t know. But if it does, it’s pretty good having a film made about you while you’re still alive. You know, two. Sorry, two.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

How does your creative process differ, say, between when you’ve been in a band and you’ve been working as a solo artist? Do you find that being in the band scenario is more inspiring or less inspiring than working by yourself? Or, I’d imagine it’s a combination of the love-hate-type relationship-type thing. But, being in the band may be a more inspirational scenario to be in certain situations.

PETER HOOK

As a musician, the way that I write, I prefer to write from jamming. It’s always, whenever I start something, nine times out of ten, I’ll start with me and somebody else jamming. I’ve started an offshoot. I’ve started a group with Mani out of Primal Scream and Andy Rourke out of The Smiths. Everyone was taking the piss out of us because it’s got three bass players and it sort of made us all the more determined to do it, really. And we did it and it actually sounds really good, but Mani and I did it as a reaction because Bobby wouldn’t gig. He was pissed off. because Bernard wouldn’t gig, I was pissed off. So, we decided to do something. We got something together, it started so well so then we decided to gig.

For me, writing, I write from jams. That’s what I prefer to write from, and it’s quite an arduous process because you jam for an hour and then you have to sit there listening to it and go, “Maybe we could get something out of that.” And people go, “What are you going to get out of that?” And you get a crystal. It’s just the way that different people work. The way that I like to work is from jamming so that something exists and then you hear something in it and you work on it.

When we split up in 1990 and I tried to do something on my own, and I thought, “Right, fuck it, I’m going to do it on my own. I’m sick of them bastards. I do enough for them.” He says, “Freedom, come on. We got all the gear going.” Started off listening to it and I thought, “Oh, that sounds good, doesn’t it? [inaudible] Shit.” So I prefer to work with people and I dunno…. It can be inspiring. Also, when someone’s like… “Come on! Argh!”

AUDIENCE MEMBER

When you’re a group and everyone is jamming, and everyone is contributing to a song, how do you decide which one has written the song?

PETER HOOK

There you go, the reason why most groups split up. Money. You start off with your mates and when your mate wants five quid more than you, he’s not your mate anymore, is he? My belief in publishing is that everybody should have the same.

If you’re in a band, it should be the same, regardless of who does what. I think the important thing is that you’re all together. I mean, I’m not talking about some idiot… My mates have just kicked a guy out of their group, who’s been in the group for 18 years. They’ve just kicked him out, and I was saying to them, “That must have been really tough,” and he went, “To be honest with you, it wasn’t, because out of the eight albums we’ve done, he was only there for two. The other six he was just off his head. Pissed up in the corner.” They got sick of his wife phoning up and saying to him, “Can I speak to him?” and he wasn’t there. He was in the pub around the corner, charlied off his nuts.

In a situation like that, you go, “Hang on, no”. It’s the most difficult thing in the world, and all you can do is try and reconcile it if you want to go on, because if you don’t reconcile it, then you won’t go on. Maybe you have to take more of a compromise because the future might be more important. It’s entirely down to how you can live with it. If the singer gets double, and you can live with it, then fine. If you can’t live with it, then you have to get out.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

So, if you’re making a song and one person comes up with a very simple idea, but it might be the thing that makes the song as good as it gets?

PETER HOOK

Well, I don’t agree, because if you listen to The Stone Roses, where would The Stone Roses be without Reni and Mani? And they never got any songwriting credits. They never got any publishing. Which I think is absolutely ridiculous. If you look at a band like The Smiths, Morrissey and Marr actually said to Rourke and Joyce that it’d be easier to collect the money for the publishing if they did it in two names. Is that fair?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

No, that’s what I’m saying.

PETER HOOK

Rourkey and Joycey had, I think, maybe not as much as Morrissey and Marr, because they wrote the melodies, the lyrics, and dah-dee-dah, but I still think they’re worthy of being included. But a lot of bands do do that. If you’ve got a band like the Beautiful South, Beautiful South split publishing eight ways. How many people are in the band, that’s the way they split it. And the singer does that because he thinks that that’s fair because you’re all living together and working together which I agree with, but other people don’t, you see. I think it’s a simple matter of what you can live with. Everybody thinks they did it, don’t they? “I did that, that was me. That was me. If it hadn’t been for that word. I did that.”

You just argue till you’re blue in the face, can’t you? I think the thing that makes bands work and makes it work is compromise. You have to swallow it. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it is down to you. But every group that I’ve worked with, I’ve always split it equally, which is just daft. So, none of you are coming in a band with me, right?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

It seems to me like you’ve followed the road less traveled. You’ve done all these very strange things. You’ve made these bizarre decisions, lost all this money. At the same time, created this amazing art. Achieved a degree of immortality, if you like. You’ve got some great stories. But, is it worth it?

PETER HOOK

Yeah, of course it is. I wouldn’t be here, would I? If it wasn’t worth it. It’s been fantastic, I’ve had a great time. It’s all about work, really. I love to work. I can’t get around that bit of staying at home. I can’t do it yet. Even though you feel guilty. It’s my son’s birthday next Wednesday, and I’m not there. He’s 17. He doesn’t give a fuck about it, he doesn’t talk to me anyway, you know what I mean? He’s a teenager for God’s sake, he doesn’t care. But it bugs me, that I’m not home for his birthday. I don’t even live with him, so the chances are, he’ll probably be out with his mates, getting pissed somewhere. So, he wouldn’t want me hanging around anyway, but it doesn’t stop you feeling bad about it. But part and parcel of what you do as a musician is play your music to people. What you do as a DJ is travel and play your music to people. That’s what it gives you.

Someone said to me, “Do you want to come to Brazil? Do you want to go to America? Do you want to go to Canada?” I went, “Fucking right I do, yeah. Come on.” That’s what I’ve done all my life, really. I’ve toured all my life. When I don’t do it, I get ratty.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Did you guys always work with a manager? Early on?

PETER HOOK

With a manager.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah, when you first started out.

PETER HOOK

Yeah, what happened with our manager was that we decided that our manager, or maybe he decided, I can’t remember now, was as important as the rest of us and, to my mind, 30 years later, we made a mistake and we gave our manager 20% of the publishing. Which you shouldn’t do, for the simple reason that you can give him the publishing without it coming out of your publishing. You can give it as a commission. So because we were all in it together, and we did go through a lot together, I mean, the guy’s dead now, so we gave him 20% of the publishing, the manager. I don’t know any other band that’s done that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

But was it quite early on that you started working…

PETER HOOK

It was very early on, yeah. You wouldn’t do it now, let’s put it that way. Not for any reason. With management and agents. The hardest thing to find in the world is a good manager, right? because when it comes down to it, experience will give you the ability to deal with people when you go and do things like this, or when you go and do things like when I go and DJ in a club. I have the ability to deal with people, but when you don’t have to do that bit, you can concentrate on the bit you do best.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah.

Peter Hook

Music and all that bit, it’s a fantastic release, but I would have to say that finding a manager is the most difficult thing in the world, I find, as a musician.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah.

PETER HOOK

I’ve bought more fucking sports cars for tossers than anybody I know. And they get the advance, walk off with their 20%. “See my new car?” And they do naff all for you and you end up sacking them. I must have sacked loads and loads of managers. My view of management is, if you’ve got a great band, it’s very, very difficult to fuck up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah.

PETER HOOK

If you’ve got a shit band, then you need a fucking great manager.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

But it’s that point where, like you were saying, if you’re trying to balance all those things at once, it becomes difficult because it starts to take away from the music…

PETER HOOK

It’s impossible. As a group, we try to manage ourselves and it’s impossible. It really does your head in because there’s only a certain amount of rejection you can take. It just does your head in… the way I look at it, you’d have to decide for yourselves if it was even worth thinking about. If some guy comes to you, he’s got passion, he’s got intensity, then it’s worth giving it a go. But you’ve got a way up on the other hand. What we need, really, is a school for managers, because musicians tend to make music quite naturally, correct me if I’m wrong, quite easily, and management is a real art.

I’ve been in record companies when I was on Polydor with Monaco. Monaco sacked all the bands that had shit managers. Not musical. They just simply sacked the bands that had shit managers. Which was nearly all of them, as it happened. They kept Ian Brown because his manager was good. It can be that important that you’ve a good manager, but it is like throwing a dart at a dart board.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

So generally, since you first began, the whole booking side of things, all that, was generally… you had someone that was taking care of that? Or you did a lot of that when you first started?

PETER HOOK

It was done very much by word of mouth when I started, you know? A lot of the punk gigs you did as favors. The second gig we ever did, we supported The Adverts and Penetration in Newcastle, and the reason we got that gig was because we’d done a gig with Penetration the night before and they said, “We’re doing a gig tomorrow, why don’t you come down and play?” And you did a lot of that. You had to put your hand in your pocket. You had to pay for petrol. We slept in the van overnight, it was fucking hell. It was terrible. Freezing. But that’s what you had to do to get to the position where you’re getting paid to do gigs.

It does come down to your music, doesn’t it? If you’re music’s good and you believe in it, then you just carry on. The interesting thing about musicians is that they will carry on – a lot of them, blatantly, when they’re getting nowhere, but if you meet the guy, he’s still at it. You look at somebody like Baby Bird, I was a great fan of, and I was really shocked to discover that Baby Bird had put out eight LPs before he had a hit album. It does always surprise you. Someone like James Blunt even had done… he’s done a few albums that got nowhere before he had it.

As a musician, it’s in you, that doggedness, I suppose, to keep going, thinking that you’re all right when everybody else thinks you’re shit. It’s like that, innit? It’s a very, very difficult thing. We got an award in England from the publishing, PRS, don’t know what it is in Australia, what it’s called, but it’s one of those, “We’re glad you’re still alive” awards. “Twenty-five years on, well done, lads.” And the guy who was head of the PRS was talking about musicians and he was talking about the amount of revenue that the PRS take in. It’s an unbelievable amount of money, your Paul McCartneys and everybody, they collect it all and give it out. And he was saying that in England, out of the whole population of England, there was only 2,000 musicians that earn enough to make it their primary job.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Wow…

PETER HOOK

When you see the queues for [X Factor] and [Pop Idol], you’d think it was 20 million of us that were earning enough money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

That’s good to know.

PETER HOOK

Well, I hope it doesn’t depress you, but you could be 2,001, couldn’t you? I was shocked at that. I thought, “Fucking hell, it’s so few of us that make a living out of it.” It really surprised me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I’m a DJ so I was not really offended by your [comments], but I wanted to ask you about DJing because you talked about the compromising within the band. What do you feel like when you stand in front of an audience playing records? Do you think that you should compromise with your audience?

PETER HOOK

I’m a little different as a DJ because I’m what’s termed a celebrity DJ which in England a lot of the time, considering there’s me, Sean Ryder, Bez, Mani that do it, it’s a lot of people come along to have a look at the old geezer that was in a band. “Oh, he was in the Stone Roses, let’s go and see what he does” or whatever. Do you know what mean? There’s that aspect to it. When you get there and play, that’s when you either stand or fall, don’t you? Either people enjoy what you do or they don’t enjoy what you do. That is the art of it. So I come in it and saw a different thing as a DJ.

I don’t think you should compromise because I was saying to my learned friend here earlier that it makes you make mistakes. I have things that I do, parameters that I work with and I know what makes me happy, what I think keeps the intensity up, what I think is a good song, but I’ve fallen on my arse many a time. You can’t… one of the great things, I suppose, about what you do is that it’s always exciting like being hit with a crushed up Red Bull can when I walked on and played my first song at Parklife on Saturday. I was like, “This could be interesting,” and then you carry on and play. You pick yourself up and you have to get on with it, don’t you?

I find when I compromise, I make balls of it, and they’re not happy and I’m not happy. So, what I’d rather have at the end of a night is, as much as I hate to say it, I’d rather have me happy than anybody else because it’s me that has to do the traveling. My mate was telling me that Armand Van Helden was telling him that he DJs for free, he said. He said, “They pay me to travel and hang around in airports and sit on planes and stuff like that,” which I suppose it’s hard and you’ve got to be true to yourself.

Maybe it comes to the point where you sort of do it subconsciously. I was telling him that I played in Wellington, and I play a lot of dance remixes and New Order stuff and I play a bit of punk and stuff, two halves, and people hated the dance bit because it was an indie club. Nobody told me they just booked me and I tell them what I play and you just go and do it. The promoter panicked because they were leaving because they weren’t drinking. He said to my guy who booked me to take me off. “Bring him off. Get him off.” The guy really upset me because I’m playing, and he’s like “You’ve got to get off now” and I’m going, “Fuck, you told me two-and-half hours, what are you fucking talking about?” And he’s going “no, no” and I’m going “what are you talking about?” and all the punters are screaming at me “Play ‘Blue Monday,’ play ‘Blue Monday’!” Fuck you. Ruined it. I said, “What the fuck’s going on now?”

Anyway, I just went into the indie part then with my set and the promoter must have thought, “Oh that’s all right, he’s playing indie now, we’ll forget him,” so the guy never came back. So, I’m like, “Where’s that fucker gone? Where’s he gone? What’s going on here? What’s going on?” I finished my set, went backstage, he was asleep on the couch. I said, “What the fuck are you doing winding me up like that?” It’s going to happen, isn’t it?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Well, that’s a very good explanation, I think. I wanted to ask you as well about “Blue Monday,” because it’s turned up in so many places, like you said. All different genres of…

PETER HOOK

Remixes…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah, but as well, the original, like in different regions in hip-hop DJ sets, all over the world. When you made it, did you intend to do a danceable record or was it just out of inspiration?

PETER HOOK

We started off with… the inspiration for “Blue Monday” came from a bass drum riff that Bernard had heard on a Donna Summer B-side. And we used that and created the track around that. Then he wanted to do and oom-pah-oom-pah-oom-pah that he’d heard on a Sylvester record. And we put that together with the drum riff using a DMX Mark II. We used a Transcendent Sequencer that he’d built himself, firing at Prophet Five, and you used to have to do it in the old binary code, you know, with the off and ons, so if you made a mistake, you had to go right back to the start and start the whole thing again. And “Blue Monday” was 10 minutes long. It drove us absolutely insane because if you made a mistake eight minutes you had to go back to the top and program off, on, off, on, on, off, off, on, on for every single thing right to the end. It was absolutely mind-boggling the way you did it.

The interesting thing about “Blue Monday” was we’d written it and we were over the moon with it. We thought it was great which is quite unusual really because a lot of the time you have self-doubt and Steve, our drummer, is quite a weird character. He’s very eccentric, very English. He always likes to program in the most inaccessible spots, and in this case, it was using a kettle lead that was about that long, so the DMX was under a chair and he was on the floor programming it. And we were going, “Fucking bring it up!” “No, no, it’s all right. I’m fine here.” And he’s programming away. And we’d done it, we’d done this drum track, we had the sequence tracked on it, and he got up and he went to the toilet and he pulled the kettle lead out and dumped the whole drum program. And then we had to plug the lead back in and start programming it while we remembered the riffs. And it was never the same. It was always the one that got away. You know when the one that dumps, it’s always the one that got away. The mix that you’ve not got is the one. It was like that.

For us, it was ruined right from the word go because we’d lost the one and we had to put up with this rewritten drum track. But no, you never do, do you? I’m fucking sick to death of “Blue Monday,” to be honest. Every time it starts off I go, “Aw, fuck.” It’s like “Wild Thing” from The Troggs. And yet, people love it. I always say to Bernard when we play, “Why don’t we leave it off?” And he’s always, “I’m fucking sick of doing it.” Well, leave it out then? “Can’t do that, people won’t like it.” Which is about the only time he thinks of the people, mind.

You get in that position. When I play, I use a remix of “Blue Monday…” if you want to hear it… that I like. For obvious reasons, it’s a lot different.

(music: New Order – “Blue Monday” (unknown remix)

PETER HOOK

Yeah, so a kid did that as a remix. Sent it to us to OK and it didn’t come out. It’s never come out so I’m the only one that’s got it and it makes me really happy, and he says “Oh give me that dead fast one” and I’m like, “No. It’s just mine.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Bit of a fan question. I used to buy your 12-inch releases in the 80s and I loved your bass sound. I’d buy True Faith or Bizarre Love Triangle because I wanted to hear more of the song and, in particular, your bass. So I’d race out, get the 12 inch, bring it home, throw it on, listen, wait, wait, wait. No bass.

PETER HOOK

So was I…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was this the compromise that you were talking about earlier?

PETER HOOK

No, I used to go fucking mad about it. Call them every… Shep Pettibone was a complete, absolute tosser. In my eyes, everybody else was. In that, as I was saying before, there was a swing towards electric instruments. They didn’t want any acoustic instruments so, when they did a remix, it was electronic. And of course, I, as a bass player, I hated it. And I used to say to Bernard, “Well how would you feel if they left your vocal off?” And he’d go, “Well, they don’t, though, do they?” [laughs]

AUDIENCE MEMBER

OK. That was a real disappointment to me, and I’ve wanted to ask you that question for 20 years.

PETER HOOK

As much as a disappointment as it was to me. But it’s funny now, because it’s now changed that now they use the bass loads. Sometimes in a remix, they’ll use a lot of bass that we didn’t use on the track, which is one of the nice things about the remix these days. With all the tracks you get on computers. I sound so old, but in the old days, 24 tracks, you really had to compromise what you put down, so when you did a remix, it was limited things. Nowadays, because you’ve got limitless tracks, your remixes have got a lot more to play with, which is quite interesting. But you still make mistakes. I hated what Stuart Price did on the last record of New Order’s. I hated the mixes that he did for us, and I was really looking forward to the remixes. When they did the remixes, it came back with no bass on it. Really, really limited amount of bass. So what I did was, I went down, when I found out what they’d done, the record company had sent the parts of Stuart Price’s mix to be remixed and not the parts of New Order’s. I went fucking berserk, and then fucking blow me down, they do it on the next record as well…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

That’s peculiar, because to my mind, anyways, the really unique being about the sound of the music over.

PETER HOOK

I agree with you. You’re preaching to the converted here, mate…

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Can I ask you a second question in relation to that, though? because it happens to me a lot, if I play the music and someone goes like, “Oh yeah, it sounds like The Cure basslines.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Ironically, the people ripping you off never really bothered me. What really bothered me about The Cure is when I saw the guy, and he was playing like me, which actually annoyed me more than him sounding like me, if that makes any sense. “You bastard!”

I don’t mind people ripping you off because when I start writing, or when we start writing, we generally try and rip someone off. “Oh, let’s do a Kraftwerk one. Let’s rip Kraftwerk off.” And I think the skill in it, and the art in it is when you finish, and it doesn’t sound like Kraftwerk. But you’ve used it as a step. We got sued by John Denver for a track called “Run” that he said sounded like “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” And I have yet to be… if anyone can play me that track and then play me… and I’ve done it. It does not sound, to me like “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” But they have these people called musicologists that analyze it and then decide whether it’s there, and that’s a legal decision. So we had an American musicologist for John, it seems John Denver employs somebody to listen to all music, to see if anyone’s ripping him off, like he’s not got enough money, or didn’t have enough money at that point anyway. And they found us.

And the musicologist said, “It sounds like John Denver, eight notes out of 12.” Somehow, they use it to do it. So we thought, “Ha ha, we’ll get an English musicologist and he’ll prove that it doesn’t sound like it.” And he did it as well, and he said, “Yeah, it does,” and we had to give John Denver 20%.

It does happen but we don’t do it. You all do it as a band. Our stand is that if people rip you off, there’ve been bands like The Cure, where my mother has even said to me, “That sounds like you, Peter.” You know, “The Walk” and “In Between Days” and stuff like that. But I take it as a compliment. Maybe it’s something you save for your retirement.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Are you actually, you are involved in the soundtrack for the new film?

PETER HOOK

Yeah, we got the footage last week actually, yeah. So we are doing it, yeah. There’s not a lot of time in it because of the film to set the period uses a lot of period music from ’76, ’77, ’78 so they don’t need… so it’s not going to be like a soundtrack album. There’s going to be some of it, but not a great deal.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

G’day. I was just wondering how many basses you’ve got and if you’ve got like a favorite or anything?

PETER HOOK

I don’t really… I never really got into collecting guitars, and I never really… to me, it was just a means to an end. I used one bass guitar on every New Order LP, which is a BB 1200-S Yamaha, and I’ve never found anything that for me sounds better than that. So, I have one of those. I waited six years to get another, and I had two then, so I had the spare and about six months ago… I’d never seen another one ever… and about six months ago I was doing a gig in Toronto and this kid brought one up for me to sign that he just bought, and I took it off him and wouldn’t give him back. Gave him $1,000 for it. Got the guy to show him the door. No, I didn’t. Swapped him one, actually. I use the BB 1200-S for studio. Live, I saw, I can’t remember what group it was, I think it was The Alarm and they used a Gibson EB-O 2, which is a semi-acoustic bass and I really liked the look of it. It’s one of the only guitars I’ve actually liked the look of, so I thought, “Oh, I like that,” and I got one and it was terrible because it was medium scale. It was impossible to tune. It was really unreliable. It was just a crap guitar.

I got a guy in Cornwall called Chris Eccleshall to build me a copy using Yamaha electrics and a Yamaha… because I’ve got very small hands… I prefer a small neck. A narrow neck so I can’t use Fenders or anything like that. Rickenbackers. I like a Yamaha neck so he rips off a Yamaha neck, straight through long scale with Yamaha electrics done as a semi-acoustic, which is the one that I play hot, ones that I play live. And he sold a lot of them I was quite surprised. He sold 276 of those old guitars which he calls the Peter Hook Bass Guitar which I was quite pleased about that. I like that. Don’t get any money off it. Anybody else? Can I go home now?

TOBY LAING

Maybe that is enough for now. Thank you very much, Peter.

[applause]