Peter Hook
interview, April 1994
The thing about having someone, like Rob is, when you start getting lauded and successful, he could keep all that back. Very much so. He kept us out of that trap, where you can spiral through the superstardom bit. He knew that if you open yourself up to that, it is detrimental.
Was it his idea that you didn’t do many interviews?
Yeah, he felt that it was more important to let the music speak. He thought the music was such a beautiful notion, he didn’t want us daft bastards fucking it up for anyone. How many times have you heard a brilliant record and then hear someone talk about it, and gone, Oh my god, I do wish they hadn’t said that. Then you can’t listen to the music. Maybe he did it for purely selfish reasons, because he thought we were thick… but the artistic notion is still valid because it makes it romantic.
Did you feel in those days that when the four of you played together you came up with something that was bigger than you all?
I think its like that even now, when you listen to it. New Order has a totally different feel to Joy Division, sometimes it has the magic, sometimes it doesn’t. But you can hear how much Ian added, if you like. It’s very strange. It was Ian who used to spot all the riffs. We’d jam, he’d stop us and say, that was good, play it again, cos we didn’t have a tape recorder then. Imagine, Joy Division didn’t have a tape recorder. He spotted Twenty Four Hours, Insight, Lost Control, all of them.
They started with a bass riff?
Bass and drums, usually. Without him, it was really weird, if it hadn’t been for him and his ear, we might have played it that once and then never played it again, forgotten, we wouldn’t have had it. You didn’t even know you’d played it, half the time. Unless something sticks out so much, you don’t notice what you’re doing when you’re jamming. It’s unconscious. But he was conscious. When you think of a riff like Twenty Four Hours, which is one of my personal favourites, if he hadn’t been there, it would have just gone. Really.
It’s a funny thing about Joy Division – everywhere we go, we see people in Joy Division t-shirts, and in terms of publishing, we still get almost as much from Joy Division stuff as from New Order, and we only did three Joy Division albums.
Why do you think that is?
It’s the kind of music that lasts, and the kind of music that people want to pass on to other people.
Did you every feel when you were onstage, that you were producing something that you weren’t necessarily in control of?
I didn’t have a feeling like that. A lot of the time.. it was such hard work in those days to play live, that the fact that you had a great gig or whatever, was messed up by the fact that you had to drive back to Manchester afterwards, or something like that. I can remember some great gigs, but it seemed like very hard work. In New Order it’s much more relaxed, and we’re more able to enjoy the gig side of it. Then we’d do something like eight gigs a month in London, and going back, and it was really hard work.
Whose decision was it to stay with Factory, for the LP?
We’d done the EP, and we’d talked to Martin Rushent at Genetic, and the more we went into it, the more we realised it was going to be very difficult to work with these people. This is what we’ve found with London. The experience of doing the last LP with London has really made us wish Factory was back. So bad.
Anyway, Genetic were actually offering us quite a lot of money, like forty or fifty grand, which was very flattering, but so far out of our realms of comprehension, it didn’t really matter. Rob just decided that the to’ing and fro’ing with Tony was a) more interesting, and b) more frustrating but c) ultimately more rewarding. So it was worth it. We did some tracks for Martin Rushent, for the LP. I don’t know how hard he pushed you see. I think perhaps he was just trying to get us for himself. But I don’t know. I think Rob decided it was better to work with someone you could just walk down and get hold of. Factory, for all its failing, if you had a beef, you could just walk in there and yell.
Did you have a contract with them?
No. We had a little sheet of paper saying the masters would revert back to us after six months if either of us decided not to work with each other. That was it. The thing is, if you meet the right people, you shouldn’t have to… it was amazing that the agreement lasted so well.
Bernard said you were always called Joy Division, right from the beginning. Is that right?
We were never called Stiff Kittens, we were called Warsaw, and that group Warsaw Pakt came out and got so much publicity that we thought people would just think we were them. So we decided to look for another name. He’s slightly wrong there. The other name was the Slaves of Venus. The alternative to New Order was the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe! And Rob and Steve voted for it! No way, man. Blue Monday by the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe? As far as my memory serves me, Ian got it out of the book.
When do you think Joy Division really started to come together?
There was a marked difference in the songs. We did a gig supporting Foreign Press at a place up Belle Vue, the Mayflower, and doing the sound check, and we played Transmission, cos we’d just written it. People had been moving around, like, doing things, and they all stopped, and listened. I was thinking, what’s the matter with that lot? That’s when I realised it was our first great song. Being a musician now is a lot easier than it was then. When we went in to do Unknown Pleasures, I’d never heard the vocals. Live, all I could ever hear was the drums and me, and I was really pleasantly surprised, when we recorded it. I’ve got an old tape, probably the only Warsaw tape, from a gig in Middlesborough, and basically its a completely different sound.
When we did the first EP was when it all changed. There was a learning period, then suddenly we all got good at it.
How important was Martin?
We wrote all the songs before we got to him. So not in the songs, but in a mood way… I still don’t like Unknown Pleasures as a production. I think he really down played it. I love Closer, it’s still one of my favourite records, he made a great job of that, but a rotten job of Unknown Pleasures. As a producer I would never do what he did, because to me it’s always more important that the group can live with what you’ve done. He made it lighter, I thought. On the other hand, you can’t argue with success.
Martin made a mood out of it…
The mood was there anyway… he did bring out our strengths, but they weren’t the strengths that we thought, if that makes any sense.
Dead Souls was only released on that [indistinct - look up], a thousand, and it’s such a waste. Thirteen fifty seven. The last time the French beat the English, that’s why they did thirteen hundred and fifty seven. I never knew that, some guy told me, last week. I was amazed. How subtle…
Have you got one?
Yeah, I think I’ve got two somewhere. We were all gutted when Ian died, because he had number six, and it disappeared. He had the lowest.
But the musical progression almost seemed to happen overnight. Once we’d written Leaders of Men, Warsaw, it all clicked really well. You just wanted to dump all the old ones because they were too punky, and move on.
A lot of people in Manchester didn’t like you at that time did they?
It was cos we were different. Most of the musicians in Manchester were very middle class, very educated, Howard Devotoes. Me and Barney were essentially working class oiks. Ian came somewhere in the middle, but primarily we had a different attitude. We had problems with Richard Boon and a lot of the groups. They’d go out of their way to make sure you didn’t play. It’s very vicious and back-biting, but it couldn’t happen these days cos there isn’t that punk circle, hierarchy. It’s opened up a lot more.
We did feel like outsiders a lot of the time, and it was only that you stuck it out, that won people over.
Did you ever think much about the lyrics?
When we heard them, we knew they were very, very good, but you never looked for… his lyrics were very open, weren’t they? He was telling a lot about himself, his fears and his doubts, and all that lot, but you were too young and caught up with the excitement of the success of it, it was like a snowball going down hill. It’s a great shame because you should have been able to just hear it and say Ian, can we have a chat with you… you know? What’s the matter? But it comes down to youth, when you’re young, you don’t tend to notice a lot of things.
And you don’t think about death, do you?
Not at all. The strangest thing about Ian was he used to work so hard, and the only thing he wanted in the world was for our group to be successful. It was such a shame that just at the point where we were going to make a success of it, he killed himself.
Did he lose his ambition towards the end, when he was in and out of hospital…?
It was the drugs. I don’t think they took his ambition away, cos he was always more ambitious than me and Bernard. He’d fight hard, and rant and roar about anything that we did. The pills just made him very depressed, he was like a different person. It must have been so frustrating. A permanent solution to a part-time problem.
Even when he made that cry for help, when he slashed himself, we still never noticed. We went through it, went to get him out of hospital and he was showing us the scars and stuff. If that happened now, you’d jump on somebody. You wouldn’t let it happen.
When Rob had his nervous breakdown, again, it was so gradual that we didn’t really notice. The things that were quite eccentric and quirky became ridiculous things that we let him get away with, and with Ian, it was also very gradual.
We always used to push him into things, and he knew that we really wanted to work, we wanted to play, to go for it, and I think he felt guilty about being ill. He used to actually fight his illness, which made him iller, basically. He went out of his way to be like us, to be wild, stay up all night, drinking, chasing women around… he’d do it even more because he couldn’t…
And he was into that Iggy Pop, Lou Reed self-destruction thing.
He was like a role model. He was a very nice bloke. A bit too nice, because it made him rather two-faced, cos he couldn’t say no to anybody. He’s tell people completely the opposite thing that he’d told you, because he was too nice. He used to let people walk all over him.
Was Deborah kept out of the way, or did she keep out of the way?
Personally I thought she was a bit of a cow. He was so soft, she used to rail-road him really bad. She had a strange attitude. I remember when we all quit our jobs to do the group, and we were getting thirteen quid a week. She decided that she couldn’t live on thirteen quid a week, even though she was working, she’d just had a baby, and she made sure that Ian, through brow-beating, got more than the rest of us.
She said that Ian brow-beat her.
That might be true, and he just used her as an excuse. You don’t know. The weirdest thing, that really flummoxed us, was that she insisted that because Ian had worked a week in hand at work, he should get paid a week in advance.
Did you see much of her.
When we used to travel, none of them came. It was only ever Steve that took his girlfriend with him. The rest of us, and Rob, just took it for granted that they wouldn’t go. I remember driving over the Snake Pass umpteen times with Steve’s girlfriend perched on my knee…
So you wouldn’t know, really, what things were like?
No, you never used to see them together. Once you start working together, the social thing goes out of the window. Me and Barney had been inseparable, and once the group started, we wouldn’t go out drinking together anymore.
But you knew what it was. He had a mistress, and he was getting loads of shit.
When did that start with Anique?
Our first gig in Belgium. We were all after her, Ian, Barney and me, and Ian won. Or lost, as the case may be. God, she was a bitch. A hard woman. Very tall, very dominating, and she used to go fucking berserk. We were stopping at this whorehouse as a hotel one time in Paris, and we all checked in in the afternoon, and she was out having lunch with Ian or something, she didn’t know it was a whorehouse until we came back at night. You couldn’t check in until three in the morning, before that it went by the hour. We thought it was great, you know, staying in a whorehouse, everyone was dead chuffed. We went back to the gig and we told Ian, and he was going, oh, fucking great. Then we got there and she sussed out that it was a whorehouse, and he came in and said, we can’t stay here. It’s a brothel, I can’t stay here, it’s ridiculous. But you liked the idea when we told you before. It was her. We ended up having a row in the lobby, she was going this is a house of ill morals and ill repute. I said to her, you’re knocking off a fucking married man. With a kid. What are you going on about morals for? She fucking stormed out. Life’s like that.
Was that really one of the causes of what happened?
Yeah, well, I’ve been through it as well, having a mistress, and a wife and child, and you do get very confused, and its easy to lose your head, especially where kids are concerned. When I split with my missus we went through a million agonies, and the most wonderful thing that women have to hurt you with is the kids. They’ll kill you with the kids. Walking away, and dropping your kid off, with a brick in your chest is… they can hurt you so well, and I’m sure Debby’s just like any other woman who wants to get her own back on an unfaithful husband. I can imagine now what he went through, and really, at his age… I went through it at thirty five, and I still found it very difficult. To go through it at twenty three, twenty two, plus all the group shit…
The other thing is he’s laying himself right open. Both in the words and the performance.
People who watched him were usually so stupid – not all of them, but some – and for him to get up there, suffering from epilepsy, perform like that, and be exposed, must have been absolutely awful. I think we were to blame for rail-roading him into doing it, expected him to do it regardless of what was going on in his head. He really was in a no-win situation. He didn’t want to let us down, he didn’t want to let himself down, and yet it was making him ill. It’s the same thing that Bernard went through with the live gig in New York. He used to make himself ill, because of the situation. It’s our own weakness, we make ourselves ill. But to have the brains to realise that if you carry on doing it, one day you’re not going to wake up. That takes a lot of guts.
You felt with Ian onstage that he was wide open, that there was no barrier at all. Is that how he was?
I think he was driven to it. It was natural, even though it was a very strange and outlandish thing to do, it did seem very natural.
Did he get out of control onstage?
What used to happen was, he had a very bad temper. That Stiff-Chiswick night was one where he lost his temper, cos the other groups were fucking us around, and he went berserk. Smashed the place up, and cut himself with a broken bottle. But he felt like that, and that was why he did it. He had a terrible temper, but he was very amiable most of the time.
It’s always money that you end up arguing about. Some of his greatest temper losses. I can say now that the Hacienda would not be open if Ian was alive, he would have gone fucking berserk, and rightly so. He wouldn’t have let it happen because it was too much money.
When did you notice things first starting to wrong with Ian?
If he was depressed, I think he kept it from us, you never saw it. On the Friday night I drove him home to his mother’s and father’s, and we were in the car, laughing away, Yes! We’re going to America on Sunday! Screaming with excitement as we were driving along, so happy. So I think he was mood swinging because of the drugs. When he got out of that car, and I went home, I could barely contain myself, I was so excited. And on the Saturday night, he killed himself.
Does she mention the dog?
No.
This is probably off the record, but when Ian got home on Saturday, she was giving him loads of shit, had a massive argument, and he said, where’s the dog? Cos he loved the dog. She’d had the dog put down. Saturday morning. It was getting really vicious. It sounds ridiculous, but God Almighty, if he was feeling down anyway about his daughter and about Anique, maybe that was the final straw.
Do you think it was something that Ian always had in him, or was it something that was created by the circumstances?
It must be already in you. The drugs he was taking for the epilepsy… he used to have fits for like an hour. In Cambridge we were all sitting on him for an hour, his fits were getting longer and longer, and more frequent, and while we were touring, it was impossible to keep him well enough to get out of it. He was too physically demanding, it made you weak…
Did he have fits onstage?
Loads of times. In Cambridge we carried him off, stiff. He’d just stopped, frozen. The roadies had to carry him off. With the Stranglers, was it the Lyceum? He had a bad one there. We had to take him to hospital quite a few times.
That must have been really scary.
With being young, you think of yourselves as being invulnerable. It’s water off a duck’s back. It’s unbelievable now, because there’s no way you can do anything. We were being driven by this thing called Joy Division which was becoming very very successful, rewarding, satisfying, and basically you just did your damnedest to keep it all going.
[end of side one
We’d got all these other singers in, and Ian felt guilty that he wasn’t doing it, so he insisted on doing those two or three songs. He loved doing those songs, Decades, Heart & Soul, didn’t want to let us down. Eventually it turned out to be a complete fuck up it ended in a riot, and he was even more depressed after that. My girlfriend went mad at him: it’s your fault. I nearly slapped her. She was pissed, and we all nearly got killed, basically. It could have been really dangerous. She took it out on him, and the look on his face, he was crushed.
You couldn’t stop him, and when he was alright, he honestly wanted to do it. A lot of the time he’d tell you he was alright, and he wasn’t.
What is Macclesfield like?
I don’t like it, cos of the connotations. I never go, I don’t even like to see it on a signpost, cos it reminds me of something horrible.
There’s a lot of loonies there, they’ve got a big mental hospital out there. Ian worked there, and Steve was in it for a while, when he had his flip, before he joined the group, he had a minor nervous breakdown.
Again, off the record, Debby told us that he had another mistress, in Macclesfield, some forty three year old married woman he used to go and see, and none of us ever knew that. But she told Barney. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, but there’s an interesting facet, if that was somebody older that he felt he could talk to. Weird. To find that out ten years after he’d died…
Do you think he would have left Deborah for Anique?
I think so, yeah. He wasn’t having a very good time with Debby. They were married before the group thing came in, and they had a reasonably normal life until he got… the sad thing about most of your girlfriends, that you do tend to leave them behind. You tend to move on, and you’re subject to temptations, etcetera, la di da. Even having a girlfriend who worked in the industry, with me, that didn’t work either. It was even worse in some ways.
Ian was fascinated with Romans, classicism, Germany, Nazism…
He did yeah. Which he passed on to us. Wanting us all to have blond hair and stuff… things like that. I don’t think it was the ideals of it. Certainly not the mechanics of creating a super race. It’s the same thing you’d tell any journalist, but God we were only twenty one. It was just the fashion, and the fact that it was strong and bold and macho. It was more that for me. You certainly wouldn’t have caught me reading Mein Kampf , or joining the BNP or whatever…
I think he liked the strength of it. The impact, which when you’re in a group is a very macho, posturing thing. As far as I’m concerned, none of us were ever into the ideals of it.
Do you think Ian was into the occult, or psychic phenomena?
No… he was interested in the occult, obviously, but maybe that’s a very Macclesfield thing. The Beast stuff, every man and every woman is a star. You know it exists, and it’s very sexy, in a way, isn’t it? That whole Nazi thing was also very sexy. There was no grounding to it. For people to still say we’re Nazis after all this, when you’ve run Factory and the Hacienda like two charitable institutions for every drop-out in the world…
Blacks!
Yeah!
Homosexuals!
It’s ridiculous!
Bohemians!
Exactly. A totally hedonistic way of working. It’s a complete load of bollocks, but I’m certain he wasn’t interested in creating a super race. It was the fashion side of it.
He was a Tory, though.
Yeah, he was a Tory, very much so. He was very money-minded, and quite clever. Very talented. If you look at his lyrics, even early on, it’s absolutely amazing.
Do you think Ian was, either in his life or in his own psyche, doing stuff that he actually couldn’t control?
You mean, his thoughts? Yeah, I think so. He was very right wing, once he got going. I remember going to an Indian restaurant with him, and him kicking off in this restaurant… maybe you shouldn’t print it. He and Debby had a house in Oldham, and he worked his balls off to get this house, then found in reduced in value because of the district, and that really pissed him off. He felt these guys were taking the piss. The big thing was, when they moved in, they took the toilets out of the houses and used it as another bedroom. The guy used to shit in newspaper and throw it over his back yard. It used to drive him potty.
Do you think he would have changed those attitudes as he grew older?
Yeah, you’ve got to be more easy-going. Obviously your neighbours are going to annoy you, no matter if they’re black, white, purple or green. I don’t think it was a racist thing.
His parents were really nice, I thought. It was horrible going to see them after he died. When he’s in the public eye, even now, it must be weird for his parents, his child, being reminded of it all the time.
Debby had a beef with us. She didn’t understand what we were doing or why we were doing it, and she had a lot of grounds for making our lives very difficult, which God bless her, she didn’t. She always used to call me up, she said she felt she could talk to me when she couldn’t talk to Rob. It was being put in the middle of a strange position. You get put where you just feel that she’s just after his money. Whether she should have his money, in my mind, is debatable. Very much so. I would prefer it went to his daughter. But it won’t, cos he didn’t leave a will.
When did you hear?
I was the first one who was told. The police told me. I’ll always remember, I was just about to sit down and have my dinner, and the phone rang and said, I’m sergeant so-and-so, I’m sorry to inform you that Ian Curtis committed suicide last night. I believe you were due to go to America. We were going to get on the plane at six o’clock. I went back in, and sat down, and I had my dinner. I didn’t say anything. What’s the matter? Oh, Ian killed himself. I didn’t say a word for about an hour. Shock. All we did, me and Twinny and Terry, for the next three or four days, was just be together. I couldn’t handle being alone. We all used to go round together, all the time. It was such a huge thing to cope with.
How long did it take you to come to terms with it?
I don’t think you ever really come to terms with it. You knew quite early on that we wanted to carry on. The first meeting we all had, which was the Sunday night, we agreed that. We couldn’t imagine not carrying on.
Were you able to express your grief, or did that take time?
It came out as anger at the start. We didn’t sit there crying. We didn’t cry at his funeral or anything. It just felt so strange, you couldn’t quantify it. We were devastated, absolutely. Not only had we lost someone we considered our friend, we’d lost the group. Our life, basically. This is something with New Order getting to the stage it is now. I’ve had this constant thread running through my life, which has been Joy Division, New Order, and anyone who had anything to do with me has had to run themselves around that. Now that we’ve stopped doing it as much as we used to, it’s very strange.
Have you ever felt Ian’s presence ever, since?
You do it all the time. He’s always there, he always will be. He isn’t somebody I’ll ever forget. In my studio at home, I sit writing, between two pictures of Ian. Massive ones, from the video.
It’s there because I’m so proud of what we did, so happy with it, and very impressed by it myself. And not being able to play those songs… Barney said, you know what really hurts is we’ll never be able to play them songs again, in the way that we used to play them. Then later in New Order he decided he didn’t want to play those songs again. It just shows how you change.
The whole point about this business is you should be able to do exactly what you want, that’s the be all and end all. Ian did basically what he wanted. I don’t think he was made to do anything he didn’t want to, but for his own reasons, he went ahead, and he did it. He fought through it, for us, and for himself.
I bought this Joy Division bootleg the other day, and the strange thing was, the first track on it was recorded at TJM practice studios. Shadowplay. I know for a fact we didn’t even own a tape recorder, so I don’t know how anybody else can have recorded it. When I listened, it wasn’t from there, so I took it back and the bloke knocked me a fiver off it cos the track list was wrong…