HOOKS THAT KILL
“I’VE NEVER LIKED TO BE HIDDEN AND I DON’T LIKE TO BE PATRONIZED. I DON’T BUY INTO THE IDEA THAT THE BASS PLAYER IS THE QUIET ONE”
I guess I was just lucky with the riffs,” reckons Peter Hook, the founding member of Joy Division and New Order, who now heads up his own group, The Light. Seated across the table from him in an upmarket Italian restaurant on the outskirts of Manchester, UK, this thoughtful nugget feels like a front-runner for understatement of the year.
On Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), Joy Division’s two albums before the tragic death of their singer Ian Curtis, Hooky invented a style of bass playing that continues to register and inspire to this day, with his moody post-punk grit sitting at the very forefront of the mix. In New Order, he experimented even further, embracing the new technology of the 80s to mutate his acerbic low end into electro-pop, once again doing what had never been done. As readers of this magazine know perfectly well, it is no stretch at all to consider the man one of the most influential English players since Sir Paul McCartney himself.
“We went to a Sex Pistols gig and decided to form a band and the next day [guitarist] Bernard Sumner said ‘Go
