‘The country is an embarrassment’: Peter Hook on Brexit, the Hacienda and Joy Division

The former New Order and Joy Division bassist explains how his musical career is far from over, why he can’t understand ‘our selfish government’ and why he doesn't care about past grievances. David Barnett reports

Joy Division: (left to right) Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Peter Hook (Rex)

Peter Hook looks better than he probably has a right to. Tanned and lean and with an infectious laugh, he’s 63 and has spent 43 of those years relentlessly embedded in the music industry, as first the bassist of Joy Division, then New Order, then with a raft of bands and projects culminating in his two current initiatives; performing the albums of his first two bands as Peter Hook and The Light, and DJing with the touring Hacienda Classical spectacle.

It’s a big year for fans of Joy Division and New Order. This summer marks 40 years since the former’s debut album Unknown Pleasures, their only LP released before the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, aged 23, in May 1980. The surviving members – bassist Hook, guitarist Bernard “Barney” Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris – transformed themselves into New Order that year, joined by Gillian Gilbert on keyboards, with Sumner taking over vocals. It’s 30 years since the band released Technique. It was their their fifth album, but the one that propelled them to the top of the charts and into proper stardom, influenced by the Balearic sound of house music.

Everybody, it seems, has a Joy Division or New Order story to tell, as evidenced by the books released this year. Jon Savage’s This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else is an “oral history” of Joy Division, published by Faber in April. Drummer Stephen Morris has his memoirs, Record Play Pause, out this month. Dave Haslam, one-time DJ at Manchester’s Hacienda club, the focal point of the so-called Madchester scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, mentions his love of both bands in his recent autobiography, Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor.