The Idiots Really Were Running the Asylum

An audience with Peter Hook.

- Michael Bonner

A conversation with Peter Hook covers a lot of ground. in a space of just a few moments, he takes us from new order’s old rehearsal rooms in cheetham Hill (“in a graveyard; the place was sunk about six to eight feet so when you were practising you were on a line with the corpses”), to a chili Peppers’ dressing room in Ireland (“like the set of M*A*S*H, they had clean underpants and socks laid out for each of them in four piles”).

Hook himself is currently in France, returning home from a family holiday. it is a brief period of calm before an extensive tour with his band, the Light, and the publication of his third memoir, Substance, about his time with new order. the book, he explains, stops when Hook left the band in 2007. “Do i ever see them? the last time we met was December 2011. i bumped into Bernard, twice. i saw Gillian last week, actually, she drove past me. But it’s really sad. We did so much together, it’s stupid. it breaks my heart every day.”

Tell us a funny story about Ian Curtis. Neil Brodie, London 

The best funny story was the one his wife tells in her book which was when he used to borrow her pink teddy bear fun fur and ride pigs in Macclesfield. i just thought that was the funniest story about Ian Curtis that i ever heard. He never mentioned it to us, strangely enough, that he use to wear this pink fun fur and ride on the backs of pigs. i just loved it ’cos it’s such a contradiction to his public image. Ian was a very generous man. His only interest in the group was to make everyone happy and now, i don’t know if you’ve noticed, with most groups they tend to go out of their way to make each other unhappy. Yet Ian Curtis was different. i always remember being very humbled by an attitude like that.