Peter Hook Quotes
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There was a lot of downtime sitting by Mike, so I read. I had a little table on which I had my pile of books and, by the end, they were nearly as high as the studio ceiling. I used to get all the song titles from them. Even the album titles, as it turned out, because ‘A startling tale of power, corruption and lies’ was a review quote from the Daily Telegraph on the back of 1984 by George Orwell. ‘Leave Me Alone’ came from Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and ‘Ultraviolence’ was from A Clockwork Orange, to name but a few.
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You reply to a fan, you get a fan for life, Rob would say. I should put that in my rules for a group, really.
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I think that you have to bear in mind that music is about escape, and it's not unreasonable to think the music business would be based around escapism.
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I think people expect mud at festivals, I think you'd be asking for your money back if you didn't get it.
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Yeah, I still feel as if I have things to do really. I'm not ready to stop.
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We had wanted to use a final sample to finish the twelve-inch track off, “That’s All Folks!” from the Warner Brothers cartoons. But we were quoted $30,000 for one use. And we were on their label. Just shows you . . . no favouritism.
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Before you go thinking I’m some kind of King Canute – it was my stance against programmed music that made our sound the way it was (even if I do say so myself), keeping it a hybrid of rock and dance: the sound of the future. Instead I decided to bury myself in the recording process, becoming the band’s recording engineer.
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I’ve read his book. I know he says the problem’s me and professes to be bemused by my antipathy towards him, and it’s true that I came out of rehab without that safety valve of drink and drugs, no ‘off’ button. I was more assertive than before. But he was behaving like the life of a rock star was the worst kind of life there was, and in my opinion he was taking it out on the group, the management, the technicians, and now the audience, and there was one person – one, me – who wasn’t prepared to let him get away with it.
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Sarcasm is a Manchester trait.
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It was only after we recorded Unknown Pleasures that I could hear and begin to take notice of the words, and it was quite startling then to see how they changed between that album, where they were still quite detached and aggressive, to Closer, which is even darker and not detached at all but really introspective and quite frightening—especially of course when you listen to it in light of what later happened.
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I suppose it was karma that Substance would then turn out to be our biggest-selling album ever; we gave away our biggest-selling record to the record company at a reduced cost – for no reason other than they couldn’t pay us for the other ones at the full rate because of bad management.
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Movement came out while we were away. The reviews were OK, and though I grew to like it more and more as the years went by, we weren’t especially happy with it at the time. When we listened to the finished product what we heard was the sound of a band whose producer had lost faith. You could hear it. The album had ended up sounding like a Joy Division album with New Order vocals.
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The fact is that you don't want to be away forever, but you want to lead a normal life.
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Like the time I threw out Pete Murphy of Bauhaus for saying those six immortal words to Slim when he'd forgotten his backstage pass: 'Don't you know who I am?
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Then came a rather surreal exchange about Joy Division T-shirts, with us proudly proclaiming we did not sell merchandise because we didn’t believe in self-promotion of any kind, preferring to let the music speak for itself. ‘Rubbish,’ boomed Scotty. ‘How come wherever I go I see Joy Division and New Order T-shirts, worn and for sale, eh?’ Now, we had no idea where he was going to see these things, but we were all speechless anyway. He continued, ‘I don’t believe you, and will be fining you accordingly.’ So we would get fined £10,000 for not doing our own T-shirts.
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On ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ we’d had one of our first arguments about the level of the bass guitar. Our engineer Mike Johnson had insisted to the others they were wrong to suggest turning it down. ‘It’s a great counterpoint,’ he’d said. ‘That’s what New Order is all about.
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Adidas produced a limited-edition pair of Haçienda trainers, designed by Yohji Yamamoto (Saville has worked with Yohji since the late 1980s, creating his catalogues and advertisements). They retailed for £345 but people queued up from midnight just to be first through the doors to buy a pair. The shoes disappeared in twenty minutes - all soled out.
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...if you're going to waste an opportunity, there are a few important things to remember. Do it in style. Do it in public. And, above all, do it in Manchester.
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We need to talk about what we are going to do and see and decide. We'll have to wait and see.
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Now I don't know why, but Morrissey had always hated Joy Division. Maybe Rob got it right when after a lively debate as the cameras were turned off he turned to Morrissey and said, 'The trouble with you, Morrissey, is that you've never had the guts to kill yourself like Ian. You're fucking jealous.' You should have seen his face as he stormed off. I laughed me bollocks off.
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We don't to be some kind of rock supergroup for the sake of being a supergroup. You want to change things and say something fresh and new so you appeal to people as a new group.
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But then I quite enjoy when something goes wrong, because when I watch DJs that take it very seriously, it's nice when you make a mistake and laugh about it.
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When a song is written, depending on who wrote what, the percentage split between the writers and performers must be agreed. In a democracy, e.g. New Order, it was all split into quarters, 25 per cent each, and the same for the performance royalties. This stayed the same up until Republic, when Barney decided he wanted more, and truth be told, he deserved it. He was doing two jobs.
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We were five gigs into a tour of more than thirty dates and Barney had had enough already. He was in the worst mood you could possibly imagine, not helped by the fact that Moby and, in particular, Outkast were going down a storm, while we were being met with young indifference and treated like dinosaurs.