Peter Hook Quotes
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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.
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Ten things you should always do when you form a group 1. Work with your friends 2. Find like-minded people 3. Have ultimate self-belief 4. Write great songs 5. Get a great manager 6. Live in Manchester 7. Support each other through thick and thin 8. Realise no one person is bigger than the group (thanks to Gene Simmons for that one) 9. Watch where the money goes 10. Always get separate legal advice for everything before you sign; failing that, ask your mam and dad.
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In my rules of a group: never let the singer do his own backing vocals. To me it sounds weird. When Ian was alive he made sure that the other members had a go because that’s what you do in a group. It’s a group. Not just a bunch of musicians backing the singer.
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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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Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very damaging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife; the laddish side; and the cerebral, literary side.
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I don’t think the Cure liked us. I think they resented us in some way, because we’d managed to stay cool, credible, and independent and they’d, well, sort of sold out a bit. The problem was on their side; it wasn’t on our side. But I think they thought, Wish we were Joy Division.
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The scary thing is when I did my set in Texas everyone was excited. The show was great. I was done and the next DJ put something on vinyl and the difference! The quality!!
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As a group of people, New Order acted like a divorcing husband and wife: we couldn’t even be bothered to hate one another any more. We’d simply stopped caring about each other. We played our guts out most nights – I like to think we didn’t let our band politics affect the performances – but as soon as we were offstage all our heart was lost again.
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Barney turned up the next day feeling better, and of course the tour went ahead, but if you ask me that was a revelatory moment for him. He must have thought, They need me. They can’t do it without me.
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The barrels were on a platform and to keep the platform level someone had shoved a quarter-inch tape box underneath it. I pulled it out. Covered in old beer and sweat and condensation, it was one of the master tapes of Joy Division's debut album, Unknown Pleasures. It made me smile. It was an absolutely perfect metaphor for the Haçienda. Joy Division had held the whole fucking thing up.
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The story of New Order is in some senses the story of a coup: how a band went from being a democracy to a dictatorship, and of course, it was a typically Barney, bloodless, passive-aggressive coup, in that it happened bit by bit, brick by brick, decision by decision.
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Barney told me he’d written ‘Liar’ about our manager. I was really shocked when I saw the lyrics. Poor Rob.
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There's a very fine line between being artistic and being a dickhead - it's like love and hate.
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There was the sudden realisation that maybe some of these people in charge – i.e. Rob and Tony – didn’t actually know what the fuck they were doing. But if it was a lesson, then it wasn’t a hard enough lesson, because we reacted to it by doing nothing.
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As we sat down, Barney late as usual, it came home to me how there were some things I didn’t miss about drinking, like choosing the wine. This now seemed like a right load of old bollocks. Hey, believe me, in the past I was just as guilty as everybody else. ‘Is it from the south side of the vineyard? Has it been trod by an Albanian virgin?’ All that crap! Basically just showing off, because believe you me, and you know I would not lie to you, a couple of glasses in, and I’m sure no one, not even Barney, could have told the difference between the finest Chablis and donkey piss.
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'Blue Monday’ went on to be our biggest-selling single ever, still is. Even so, it was never that special to us and, to be honest, I thought ‘Thieves Like Us’ was a much better song.
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Everything up to and including Unknown Pleasures really existed only when the four of us were in a room together playing it. Not written down, not recorded, just from memory.