Rude, Confused and Obnoxious

Peter Hook talks about how the Sex Pistols inspired the formation of Joy Division

Earlier this month, in a post I wrote about Hot Butter’s early ‘70s Moog classic “Popcorn” (along with a couple of more obscure topics like disco and The Beatles), I credited “a mid-’90s epiphany experienced while listening to Gary Numan and The Tubeway Army’s ‘Down in the Park’” with belatedly showing me what I’d been missing when I’d mistakenly viewed synthesizers as the enemy of all that was true and good in modern music.

This statement, as I’ve since realized, isn’t entirely true. Yes, I did finally get hip to Gary Numan during the 1990s; but it was in the late summer of 1989 that my synth resistance first began to thaw, thanks to New Order’s Technique album, which was in steady “play bin” rotation at the record store where I’d just started working.

For nearly a decade, my idiotic “guitars good/synths bad” prejudice had blinded me to the brilliance of this groundbreaking British electronic band, even as I’d learned to appreciate the dark intensity of Joy Division, the band which morphed into New Order following the May 1980 suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. But try as I might, I ultimately couldn’t resist Bernard Sumner’s wistful melodies and Peter Hook’s driving bass lines, especially on the songs “All the Way” and “Guilty Partner”; I soon developed a grudging respect for New Order, which would eventually blossom into full-on appreciation.

So it was a real treat for me last year when I finally got a chance to interview “Hooky,” one of the funniest and most charismatic characters to emerge from the whole British post-punk scene. The occasion was a piece for Rolling Stone which asked various musicians about the time they first heard the Sex Pistols, an assignment which also involved this delightful conversation with Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods.

My Peter Hook interview, excerpts of which found their way into the Rolling Stone piece, can now be enjoyed in full by anyone with a paid Jagged Time Lapse subscription. Those of you who are new here (welcome aboard!) should be advised that about a quarter to a third of my JTL newsletters are exclusively for my paid subscribers — and they include everything from interviews that have never before been published in their entirety (like this one) to entries from my adolescent musical memoir-in-progress, to oddball stories like the late, great Bobby Womack’s fateful showdown with the dreaded “Gonga-Rea”.

In return for tossing a few bucks in the JTL tip jar each month, you will receive some entertaining and enlightening additional content that you won’t find anywhere else — not to mention full access to the already-voluminous JTL archives — along with my undying gratitude, since this little “side hustle” quite literally helps keep the lights on over here. But if you can’t swing a paid subscription, that’s cool too; I’m still immensely grateful that you’re out there reading my stuff. In any case, huge thanks to all my subscribers, free and paid, for being part of Jagged Time Lapse.

And nowww… heeeeeeeere’s Hooky!

My phone call with Peter Hook began inauspiciously; the Joy Division/New Order bassist and co-founder was in the car, driving to a rehearsal for his band The Light, and the GPS kept distracting him with its directions. “I’m sorry, mate,” he sighed. “Can you call me back in ten, once I’ve figured out where I’m going?”

Thankfully, this wasn’t just a handy excuse to blow me off. When I gave him another try ten minutes later, Hooky proved a friendly, loquacious and rather hilarious interview subject.

I wanted to talk about the Sex Pistols, since I understand that you attended a fairly life-changing show of theirs.

Yeah, well, it certainly was for me — maybe not so much for the Sex Pistols. [laughs] June the fourth, 1976: I was 20 years old and I went to see the Sex Pistols play for 50 pence in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester.

Wow. What motivated you to go to that show?

I’d been reading the music press as a diversion from my boring job. I was a heavy metal fan — Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin — though I’d started to get into Bowie, Cockney Rebel, things like that, becoming a little bit more alternative. And then I started to read in the Melody Maker and Sounds about this “punk” group, the Sex Pistols. They seemed to end up in a fight at every gig, which was pretty much more like my life than, say, Jimmy Page’s trials and tribulations with Led Zeppelin. [laughs]