photo courtesy of Facebook/G’s Gig Shots

Former Joy Division/New Order member Peter Hook is chatting me with from his home in England about his fall 2024 tour with Peter Hook and the Light, during which he’ll be performing both the New Order and Joy Division Substance albums in full. But the legendary bassist is in a nostalgic state of mind in other ways, as he shuffles through vintage photographs of Joy Division’s late frontman, Ian Curtis, and opens up about another interview he just completed — a podcast that will be a must-listen, and probably at times a tough listen, for Joy Division fans.

Hook reveals that he recently recorded a “two-and-a-half-hour chat,” on video, with Kelvin Briggs, Curtis’s best friend from high school and the best man at Ian and Deborah Curtis’s 1975 wedding. Briggs (who joined Hook onstage this past April at a Manchester fundraiser for mental health support) and Hook became close after Curtis’s suicide, residing in the same suburb 11 miles outside of Manchester and “talking to each other for ages,” and this interview has been a long time coming.

“The thing that fascinated me was that when Ian died, his wife [Deborah] gave Kelvin, who was his best friend, his record collection. And I kept saying, ‘Wow, this is what podcasts were made for! We should do a podcast and an interview about his record collection,’ because Ian was very generous with his records,” explains Hook. “And Kelvin had his record collection — which included the record that he played when he left us, The Idiot by Iggy Pop.”

When the 23-year-old Ian Curtis took his own life on May 18, 1980, on the eve of what was supposed to be Joy Division’s first North American tour, he was famously listening to Iggy Pop’s landmark 1977 album, which features classics like “Nightclubbing,” “Funtime,” and the original “China Girl,” later popularized by David Bowie. “To hold that record in my hands was the strangest feeling I’ve had in a long time,” Hook says softly. “And it had never been out of its sleeve since the day it was put back in when the [Curtis] house was cleared. So, yeah, that was a real, for me, that was a moment.”

While Hook and Briggs’s podcast will obviously take some dark turns, “culminating at the end with the record that was playing when [Ian] sadly decided to leave us,” there will be funnier, lighter moments. “For instance, when everybody said we sounded like the Doors, and Barney [Bernard Sumner] and I had never heard the Doors, [Ian] went, ‘I’ll get you a record.’ And the next rehearsal, he brought a vinyl record of the Doors for me and Barney each, and we went away and listened to it and thought, ‘Oh my God, we do sound like the Doors!’” Hook chucklingly recalls. “So, we actually started playing ‘Riders on the Storm’ in our set as a laugh, and nobody noticed.”

Hook, 68, said he’s “been promising [himself] to do this interview” with Briggs “before either of us shake off this mortal coil,” but “life gets in the way of many, many things, doesn’t it? … It was wonderful to actually sit there with him and get really sort of intimate and detailed with what Ian was like growing up and what he was like as a teenager, because Ian wasn’t far out of being a teenager when we lost him. … We talked about him growing up, what a wacky character he was all through his life. We talked about what the future may have been like. It was wonderful to actually get it done.”

Hook says he and Briggs currently “don’t know what the hell we’re going to do” with their interview, but he’s “sure it’ll appear sooner or later.” However, Hook is a fantastic interview subject in all contexts, so in the meantime, read our Q&A about how he feels about Joy Division/New Order being passed over for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2023; if he’d ever consider reuniting with his ex-bandmates in “New Odor”; why he was unable to find someone to sing the Ian Curtis vocals in the Light, so he took on the daunting task himself; why he declined an offer to play bass for Killing Joke; how he almost ended up playing bass for the Rolling Stones; and much more.

So, please tell me more about this podcast about Ian Curtis’s record collection that you did with Kelvin Briggs. I’m getting chills just hearing about it.

I was so pleased when I watched it back, because literally we didn’t have to edit anything. It was just a chat between two old blokes that knew a great geezer. It was as simple as that. That was lovely. My life deals a lot with the past. It deals a lot with the present, and hopefully the future. And I always count the audience as people who are just like me, who love the music and want to appreciate it going forward. I feel I’m in great company.

It’s great that you tour as Peter Hook and the Light, because you revisit all this classic material that so many fans want to hear you play live.

And also, because the other [New Order] band members wouldn’t play it! I mean, obviously they do now, because I think that they thought that I’d stolen it! So, I think this is their way of saying, “Oh, it’s ours as well,” even though they never played [Joy Division’s music] in New Order before.

There are various reasons I could speculate why New Order did not play Joy Division material previously. It could be because the two bands obviously sound very different, or because it was emotionally painful to revisit that music. What was the reasoning?

It was a little bit odder than that. We did play a Joy Division set once — when I threatened to play a Joy Division set with some friends. Suddenly the other members of New Order decided it’d be better if we did it as New Order, which we did for a cancer benefit. … Oh my God, it was wonderful again, to be able to play [those songs]. And then we repeated that when we did a New Order gig at Wembley… and then Barney decided he didn’t like it. He said, “It was miserable; I’d rather do New Order.” And I sort of get it. In the way that he’s singing it, maybe he prefers to sing his own words, words that we’d written as New Order, as opposed to harking back to Joy Division. So, that was the last time we ever played it.

When New Order split up in 2007, and it came to the 30th anniversary of Ian’s life, Joy Division was huge all around the world. And I just thought, “Oh my God, we’d never celebrated any anniversary of Joy Division, ever.” Nothing, never as us three. And I just thought, “I’m not letting this one go.” I had a chat with a few friends and tried to figure out a way. I didn’t want to pretend to be the band Joy Division, which live was so much different to what they were on record. I don’t like people who pretend to be the band, with hardly any members or with the wrong intentions or attitude — hence “New Odor.” I think it’s a crime to your fans. So, I thought, “How can I celebrate it?” And I read an interview with [Primal Scream’s] Bobby Gillespie and he was talking about Screamadelica, saying that he wanted to play all the songs on Screamadelica, because he felt that as a group they ignored what he thinks now are the best [tracks]. He said, “Now I’m going to play them all.” … It made sense to me to celebrate the [first Joy Division] record, which is what I did and what I do, and then what I went on to do with New Order. “New Odor,” in my opinion, don’t sound like New Order. And I’m happy about that, in a way! That makes me happy. It doesn’t make the fans happy, but it makes me happy. The thing is, is that you can’t pretend to be something that, you’re not. It’s wrong. So, the thing is, I’m able to celebrate the LPs in the way that we used to be, if you like, which is where I was happiest.

It’s the best of both worlds, to have you play material from both bands.

The fans [of Joy Division and New Order] are very different, but doing this tour of Substance Joy Division, which is such a different record to Substance New Order… the interesting thing is that when we play them together, as we are doing now, the Joy Division fans are subject to New Order, and the New Order fans are subject to Joy Division. And in some ways, as I say to the lads all the time, I sort of expect an “exodus,” because there are certain places where New Order are more popular than Joy Division. Us playing them together can be a bit challenging for certain fans. But I think we’ve opened up our audience, because we’ve made the New Order fans listen to Joy Division —  by choice, of course; we don’t lock ‘em in! — and the Joy Division fans listen to New Order. Now when we play them both, there’s not much movement in the audience. You don’t get half the audience going to the bar when you play New Order, or vice versa. I suppose in a funny way, we’ve actually helped an appreciation for both groups.

You’re talking about how Joy Division and New Order sound different and have different audiences, even if there’s some overlap. But when you were nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year, it was as both bands, together. In my opinion, both bands are worthy of being inducted separately, so it was a unique situation to put “Joy Division/New Order” as one entry on the ballot. How did you feel about that? I actually thought it was going to help your chances, because both fanbases would presumably consolidate to vote.

I think the interesting thing that I noticed was that New Odor didn’t do much promotion for it… because [they] didn’t want to have a row onstage accepting the award, the way that Blondie did. Which I thought was fabulous — if you’re going to wait for a beef to be aired, what a great place to do it! I have a sneaking suspicion that the others weren’t interested because they thought that we might have to meet…

…and play together? Was that ever on the table, even hypothetically, if you’d gotten inducted and attended the Rock Hall ceremony?

No, no. To be honest with you, the way that those bastards have treated me, I would never, ever. I’d be loath to share a room with them, never mind a stage. Never.

I was actually shocked, given the fact that in recent years your peers the Cure, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, and Duran Duran have been inducted, that Joy Division/New Order didn’t get into the Hall. I thought you were a shoo-in.

In my opinion, it’s because the others didn’t get behind the vote. It was hardly pushed at all. I mean, we’ve got 3 million people on the Joy Division Facebook. We’ve got 2 million on the New Order Facebook. And it was hardly pushed. It really wasn’t. And I’m not in control of those [accounts], so I couldn’t push it. But I’ve been to the Hall of Fame [Museum in Cleveland] and there’s a full New Order section there, and that’s fine for me. I’m happy. I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I’m really happy that all I see around me [when playing with the Light] is a load of smiling faces. It’s as simple as that.

Well, you wouldn’t have been the first estranged band to have an awkward moment reuniting at the Hall, had it happened.

Yes, how many times have we seen this behavior? We see it nearly with every group. That wonderful match of chemistry, ego, money, and fame is a very, very toxic cocktail. And the thing is my problems with the other members when, in my opinion, they took the name without my blessing and without me knowing. They took it without asking me and valued it themselves. So, every time New Order earn a dollar, I get 1 cent, which I don’t think personally is enough. But that’s life, isn’t it? And we have to get on with it. One thing I noticed as I got older is that life is short. And to do things like this, there’s actually no need. You can get together. You can sort things out. You can do it. Everybody in law, they say everybody in a settlement has to be unhappy. It’s like a divorce of a marriage: If one side’s happy, then the other side’s guaranteed not to be. The way that lawyers always want a settlement is when both sides are unhappy. And on this occasion, [New Order] were very happy and I was very unhappy.

There’d be some people in your position, given all the stuff that’s gone on, who’d disavow the old material. But Peter Hook and the Light have done more than 800 gigs playing Joy Division and New Order material over the past 14 years.

It’s quite strange, actually. Me and the other three, we’ve actually played more in our fifties and sixties than we ever did in our twenties, thirties, and forties. Which is absolutely weird. As a band, New Order really stepped back from playing in the mid-‘90s. We actually split up in ‘93, got together again in ‘98. So yeah, it’s a weird one. But as my wife and my therapist keep telling me — and my wife is my best therapist — you’ve got to work with the hand you’ve got. That’s funny thing, isn’t it? I get such satisfaction from being free of them and being allowed to play all the back catalog. My aim when I started in 2010 was to play every song that Joy Division ever wrote and recorded, which I have done. My next aim is to play every song that New Order have written and recorded, and I’m very well up on that. Next year I will be playing Get Ready in its entirety, and Waiting for the Siren’s Call. I’m going to play those two together, which is great. I’m still on the way with doing these songs. I couldn’t believe it at the time; I didn’t understand why we wouldn’t play them.

We talked about how there are different audiences for Joy Division and New Order. Have you noticed there are different camps for what you call “New Odor” and Peter Hook and the Light, where fans take sides and will only go see one or the other in concert?

Yeah, that always makes me laugh, though. … People are critical, and were very critical. I mean, the reason I had to sing when playing Joy Division [songs with the Light] was because I had three vocalists lined up, and the internet, shall we say, scared them off. Trolling scared them off. And it was Rowetta out of the Happy Mondays that said to me, “OK, you’re not going to get anyone to do this. Ian’s shoes are too big. You are going to have to do it.” And I was like, “Oh, shit.” I must admit that for six months, eight months, I was absolutely terrified. But it’s been such a pleasure to sing [Ian’s] words and to get to know his words from a different place, is what I found. Wonderful.

Tell me more about that.

I heard his words when he was doing them, and I looked at him, but I didn’t really need to hear the words to know that he meant it. What he was saying was passionate. It was educated and it was intense. He meant every single syllable, every time he opened his mouth. So, the thing for me was to get that confidence and be able to learn to project, shall we say. I mean, I thought I was a bass player, and all of a sudden you’re putting somebody else’s shoes and you’re realizing, “Shit, this is a little bit on the difficult side.” It actually made me sympathetic towards lead singers, which I never thought I would believe! I never thought that that could possibly happen! And I must admit, when I moved on to New Order [material], I found Bernard’s shoes were a lot easier to fill than Ian’s, because Steve [Morris], Bernard, and I wrote the vocal lines and the words together, all the way up to and including Technique. So, I was a third of the way there before I’d even started. That was just as enjoyable. There were certain aspects of New Order’s music and certain songs that I hated, but then when I came to sing them, because I was playing the LPs in full, I found that in many ways I actually preferred them to others. And I was like, “Wow.”

Which was the material that you initially hated and then you changed your mind about?

Mainly Republic, because Republic was so fractured and such a toxic atmosphere while we were recording it that I really could not look at the music favorably. Stephen Hague, the producer, had a hell of a job to get us to finish it. He brought me in at the end to put the bass on when everything else had been recorded. Steve and Gillian [Gilbert’s] parts had all but disappeared along with my own, but Stephen Hague managed to bring me in at the end and redo it. They’d never been finished off by the group, so it was wonderful to be able to play the record, finish it off, and play it properly. And then I found a love for that record. … I’m excited about all these things that I’m doing. I’m also working on a lot of new music with people. I’ve got a lot of things coming up. It’s just a matter of fitting them in.

What can you tell me about the new music you’re working on?

I did two tracks with Wolfgang Flür from Kraftwerk. I did another thing with Rusty Egan, who used to be in Rich Kids with Glen Matlock; I’ve done a couple of tracks with him, which has been great. It’s different. I miss that aspect of being in a group. I miss that aspect of working towards your next thing, your next tour, LP. I also have an outfit called Man Ray with a very good friend of mine, Phil Murphy. We make a lot of music for that; we do a lot of charity stuff with that one and really wacky stuff. And I keep meaning to put it on Spotify. Some of it is on Spotify, but most of it isn’t. I’ve just employed my godson, who’s Oscar Boon and is now a bass player with the Inspiral Carpets with his dad, Clint, to get me a new Spotify page so I can put all this solo stuff up, so at least I can look at it! It’s very important as a musician. Rob Gretton, our manager, always used to say to us, “Your best song is your next one, so get on with it.” That was his mantra. And I still feel that, when I don’t write or play on anything new.

Last question: When you talk about how you miss being in a band, what is this story about how you almost joined the Rolling Stones once?

I was fifth in line for the Rolling Stones. Fifth! Is it Doug Wimbush who plays with them? [Editor’s note: No, but Wimbush was also in line to replace Bill Wyman in 1993, and he played on 1997’s album Bridges to Babylon. Darryl Jones ultimately got the job.] He told me he was fourth, and I was delighted. I’m tone-deaf, right? If Mick Jagger put a gun to my head and said, “Play ‘Satisfaction,’” I couldn’t play it. I’m tone-deaf. I can’t pick up other people’s music. I have enough trouble picking up my own when I’ve written it, so I couldn’t do that job. What my son [Jack] does [as a bassist] in the Smashing Pumpkins is completely alien to me, because I couldn’t play somebody else’s bass parts. I never have. I got invited to join Killing Joke, and I couldn’t do it. I said, “I can’t play those bass parts. It’s not in me. I can’t even pick them out.” It’s just as my mother said, “You couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, Peter,” and really, she was half-right. … I remember Jaz and Geordie [from Killing Joke] sitting me down and asking me to join when they fell out with Youth, and I said, “Lads, I love you to death, but I cannot do it.” And they thought I was being horrible and I didn’t like the music. I love the music! I love Killing Joke! Geordie’s my favorite guitarist ever. But yeah, it’s a weird thing that I’m just me.

And that’s all you need to be.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. Watch Hook’s full conversation in the spit-screen video above.

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call 911 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-8255, or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

New Order’s 1983 synth classic “Blue Monday” is one of the most important and beloved songs of the new wave era. The nine-minute alt-dance opus influenced and inspired everyone from the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart to electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk, and to this day it holds the record as the top-selling 12-inch single in recording history, shifting more than a million units in the band’s native U.K. alone. So how exactly did “Blue Monday” manage not only to make no profit but to actually lose a whopping $100,000?

The Manchester group’s iconic founding bassist, Peter “Hooky” Hook, explains that it all came down to indie label Factory Records’ decision regarding the single’s very famous — but very expensive — packaging.

The die-cut packaging for New Order’s “Blue Monday” 12-inch single.

“[Graphic designer] Peter [Saville] came to the practice place, and he saw a floppy disk and he loved it,” Hook recalls, as he sat with Yahoo Music reflecting on his illustrious discography with both New Order and the band from which New Order sprang, the equally influential Joy Division. “And he felt we should do the sleeve [to look] like this. … Unbeknownst to him, it had to be die-cut three times, which made the sleeve ridiculously expensive — which [New Order bandmate] Stephen Morris thought was hilarious, because you were paying for the bits that you didn’t get, the hole, where the card had gone!

“But, yeah, the sleeve unfortunately cost 10p [approximately 20 cents] more than the record could earn, so every time we sold a copy of ‘Blue Monday,’ we were losing 10p,” Hook elaborates with a rueful chuckle: “It then went on to be the biggest-selling 12-inch of all time! I remember [Factory Records label head] Tony [Wilson] going to great trouble to cast a brass Factory symbol that said, ‘Well Done, Hooky!’ celebrating a loss of 50,000 pounds. … I suppose it really seals its place in history as a mythical being for that reason.”

The financial failure of what should have been New Order’s commercial career breakthrough was just one in a long line of both comedic and tragic errors for the beleaguered band. The most tragic of all, of course, transpired when it was known as the legendary postpunk outfit Joy Division, fronted by the charismatic but deeply troubled Ian Curtis. Struggling with the dissolution of his young marriage, new fatherhood, an extramarital emotional affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, and, most of all, his increasingly uncontrollable epilepsy, the 23-year-old Curtis committed suicide in May 1980, on the eve of what was supposed to be Joy Division’s first North American tour — leaving his guilt-ridden bandmates behind to pick up the pieces and always wonder what might have been.

“With the making of [Joy Division’s sophomore album] Closer, Ian’s illness was degenerative, and it was getting worse,” says Hook. “The big problem with Ian was … he was very empathic to other people. He would go out of his way to make sure you felt all right about what he was suffering. … Ian worked very, very hard and was still suffering grand mals right the way through [the recording sessions for Closer]. He managed to hide it from his parents, from the doctors that he was being treated by. The guy wanted success. He wanted to achieve what he felt we deserved. And he hid [his epilepsy]. That was the problem. He would never let you know how poorly he was, so you were in ignorance. Even when you were picking him up off the floor when he smashed his head open on the sink or the toilet, he’d just get up. He’d never stop.

“Suicide of a very close friend or family member always leaves you with the guilt,” Hook continues solemnly. “And that’s the beauty of suicide, isn’t it? It’s not them worrying afterwards. It’s everybody else saying who, when, or why, or ‘Did I do enough?’ I’ve had enough of that in my life to realize that people who are left behind are the ones that suffer. But it was a great LP, and I think one of my greatest regrets when we finished with Joy Division and moved on to New Order was that we never got to play Closer. … It was heartbreaking to put it all away and never promote Closer, never promote [the single] ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’ put it in a box, put it in the back of the cupboard. And we went off to New Order.”

Incredibly, the surviving members of Joy Division immediately decided to reform as New Order. (“I think the great thing about being young is you can carry on, regardless. The great thing about being a musician is people will coddle you and pamper you, and pander to you, so we didn’t have to do much grieving. We just buried our heads and stuck together and ignored it, basically.”) Reconvening in their Salford rehearsal space the Monday after Curtis’s inquest, they went right to work on a prophetically titled new song Hook had written the previous weekend in tribute to Curtis, “Dreams Never End.”

But while New Order — pesky 50,000-pound loss aside — went on to greater success than the short-lived Joy Division had ever known, all was not dreamy in their world. At first, Joy Division fans were still in mourning, and they weren’t quick to accept this new phase in the band’s career. (“We got a lot of letters written in blood, things like that. People phoning you up. Being a ‘man of the people,’ I put my number in the phone book, and then I had every Joy Division loony phoning me up and being weird on the phone. That taught me a lesson,” says Hook.) Then, when New Order went to America to play the tour that had been originally booked for Joy Division, “fans weren’t supportive. They used to spend the whole gig shouting for Joy Division titles,” Hook recalls. “I didn’t expect them to be supportive, to be honest. … We actually lost a lot of our confidence. … The audiences were openly hostile. They wanted Joy Division.”

To make matters worse, on the very first night of New Order’s maiden U.S. tour, all their gear was stolen from their van. “And it wasn’t insured!” exclaims Hook. “In the space of two months, we’d managed to lose our lead singer [Curtis], our group [Joy Division], and our equipment. … It really was being at the bottom of a very long ladder. It was a hell of an education, that trip to America.”

New Order went on to moderate American success with perennial alternative radio staples like “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “True Faith,” “Shellshock” (which was included on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack), and a 1988 rerelease of “Blue Monday.” But over the years, friction between Hook and lead singer Bernard Sumner continued to grow, and in 2007, Hook left the band for good. Fans may hold out hope for a real New Order reunion (the band continues to tour and record sans Hook), but according to the grizzled bassist, who’s been battling his ex-bandmates in court for years, those fans probably shouldn’t hold their breath.

“Literally, [we’re] at that point in the relationship where you hate each other’s stinking guts,” he reveals. “It’s a tragic end to a wonderful, wonderful group. You know, I long for Tony Wilson [who passed away in 2007] to appear and bang our heads together. For [late band manager] Rob Gretton to appear and bang our heads together. For Ian Curtis to appear and bang our heads together! I really do wish with all my heart that we could stop and just respect each other. I think that’s what we should be working on.”

Says Hook: “We shouldn’t be working on getting one over each other. We should be sitting down and going, ‘Listen, we’re all different people, we all share this same heritage, and it’s important to all of us. So what we should do is share it, learn to live together, learn to show respect, because we created it together.’ Whether you like it or not, that’s the truth — it’s all of ours. You can’t take it off one person, and you can’t say one person’s wrong and shouldn’t have it. Because we should all have it. And until somebody wises up and says, ‘What are you doing?’ and that respect is shown, and you can’t even contemplate anything else.”

While a Hook-less New Order carries on, Hook is still out there on his own. He has penned three memoirs (including his juicy, 724-page latest, Substance: Inside New Order), and he regularly revisits the Joy Division and New Order discographies on tour with his band the Light, showcasing his distinctive bass style (which once even attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, when they were looking to hire a replacement for Bill Wyman).

“The great bit for me is that in 2011, I got to play Closer [in its entirety for the first time], and it was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Hook says happily. “To sit there and have my son, who was exactly the same age I was when I did Closer [22 years old], playing the bass lines, and me doing my best to do Ian justice … the chills down your spine from hearing Closer live was a wonderful, wonderful moment. I do think really Barney [Sumner] and Steve [Morris] missed out on that.”

And as for what might have happened if Curtis hadn’t killed himself, Hook confesses that he wonders about that sometimes. “Do I think we’d still be together if Ian had lived? I would hope so,” he muses. “You know, one of the things about a song like ‘Blue Monday’ being as popular as it is, even now throughout the world, is that you’d have loved to hear Ian Curtis sing on it.

“But the important thing you realize, as you get older, is that the fact that [Joy Division] didn’t carry on wasn’t the most important thing for Ian. The most important thing was a daughter lost her father. Parents lost a son. A wife lost a husband. A lover lost a lover. That is really the important thing — because let’s face it, there’s lots of groups. There’ll be another along in a minute.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.