Peter Hook

Peter Hook was a founding member of Joy Division and New Order. His new book is Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division.

From his Q & A with David Chiu at Rolling Stone:

There's the perception that Joy Division was a band that had a somber, melancholic aura. But your book shows that the band had a very humorous side as well.

That was one of my problems reading books about Joy Division – that while I recognize some of it, I always thought, "You did not get the right end of the stick." There is something, from my point of view, lacking, which was the humanity and the humor. I always felt that making Ian out to be this deep, dark genius was sort of committing the same sin as the musical dinosaurs used to commit – whereas Johnny Rotten and the punk movement were all about demystification and that anybody can do it.

I felt that the story that I had – that we went through – was much more entertaining than this sort of very, in a way, clichèd book. We really did have a laugh at the struggle. After being in New Order for as long as I have been, the fact that you were all very unified and very together in Joy Division, you were all literally going the same way. There was no fight, no tussle. You weren't in it for the money because we didn't get any. As soon as we lost Ian, it actually became very difficult.

You and Bernard saw the Sex Pistols perform at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976, and that led the two of you to form a band.

What I loved about the Pistols was the attitude, and the fact it seemed more human, and you could relate to it. I went to see Led Zeppelin just before the Sex Pistols, and I never looked at Led Zeppelin and thought, "I could do that." Yet, when I looked at Johnny Rotten, for some insane reason, which I still can't actually explain, I looked at him and thought "That's what I want to do." And all he was doing, basically, was screaming at everyone to......[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue