Suspicious Substance

Substance: Inside New Order, Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster, 2016)

I once had an uncle who was a big fan of New Order. He also dressed well, had a good job and effortlessly attracted beautiful women. In a word, he was cool. But I was suspicious of him and his cool. Was it more a case of surface than substance (as it were)? Well, yes. My suspicions were vindicated when he later became an equally big fan of Oasis.

If that uncle were still alive (he died young), I’m sure he would have enjoyed this book a lot. But I’m suspicious about this book too, as I was about Peter Hook’s two earlier books: The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club (2009) and Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (2012). All three are worth reading and have some very funny stories in them. But did Peter Hook actually write everything in them? Or anything in them? I spotted two “in terms of” in Substance and there were more in Unknown Pleasures and How Not to Run a Club. “In terms of” is a phrase used by pretentious Guardianistas, not by self-proclaimed thick scallies from Salford. Hook isn’t thick, of course, and he’s mixed with Guardianistas for decades now, so perhaps he’s picked up their bad habits. But I still wonder whether he used a ghost-writer. And what about this bit?:

Playing over a long period of time and the physical weight of the guitar accelerated degenerative spondylotic changes at the C5-C6 level in [my] neck, resulting in existing nerve roots being inflamed and trapped. This has caused a muscle weakness called paraesthesia, resulting in pins and needles and numbness in both arms. – “Ten Most Interesting Medical Problems I Got Working in a Band”, pg. 484

I can’t believe Hook can reel off medical terminology like that. There are also some very accomplished technical explanations of instruments and recording, written in the same style and with the same confidence. And when the book goes through New Order albums “track by track”, it sounds more like a fan of New Order writing than a member of New Order. So I’m suspicious, as I say. Maybe the main text is wholly or mostly by Hook, but I don’t think the entire book is. And maybe even the main text is ghostwritten or re-written, despite the “Copyright © 2016 by Peter Hook” at the beginning. If Hook’s books are collaborations with a friend of New Order, maybe that friend doesn’t want to be associated with Hook’s criticism of the three others in the band.

Well, who knows? It doesn’t stop the book being an entertaining and interesting read. But you’ll be disappointed if you trust a quote from the Sunday Express on the back cover: “There are stories here that make Ozzy Osbourne look like Mother Teresa.” There aren’t, you know. Hook got through a lot of drink, drugs and groupies, but he didn’t out-Ozz Ozzy. Most of the excess in Substance comes from “Barney”, or Bernard Sumner, the guitarist and lead singer in New Order. But it’s excess of egotism, arrogance and petulance, if Hook’s account is to be trusted.

I think it is, because it was backed up by the music journalist Sylvia Patterson in her memoir I’m Not With the Band (2016). In the 1980s Patterson was working for the mischievous pop-mag Smash Hits, which was famous for not taking musicians as seriously as they might sometimes want to be taken. So when she went to America to profile New Order on tour, Sumner told her that he’d “break her fucking legs” if she asked anything “horrible.” She then heard Sumner servicing (and thoroughly satisfying) two groupies in the hotel-room next to hers. Next morning she interviewed the “foxtresses” (as Smash Hits called them), who were photographed brandishing a pair of Sumner’s pants in celebration of the night before. The foxtresses also found $200 in a pocket. Not realizing that Sumner had a wife back in Britain, Patterson wrote up this episode of rumpy-pumpy and caused him a lot of trouble. When the relevant issue of Smash Hits came out, Hook says that Barney was “caught with his pants down. Or rather aloft.”

But the loss of the $200 would have hurt him most, Hook says. Like Jimmy Page before him, Sumner is very tightfisted. Or so Hook says. But he also praises Sumner highly as a musician and songwriter, and confesses to a lot of rock-star arrogance, petulance and misbehavior himself. And to being a battered husband, during his marriage to the comedienne Caroline Aherne. I don’t envy Hook his drink, drugs or groupies and, not being a fan of either Joy Division or New Order, I don’t admire him as a musician either. But whoever wrote this book did a good job. Plus, it’s got something that far too many rockmoirs neglect to supply: a good index. As those New-Order-loving-but-Tony-Wilson-hating scousers might have said to Peter Hook: “Ta, la!”

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Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity

• Hooky Here – a review of Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (2012)

• Clubbed to Deaf – a review of The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club (2009)

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Clubbed to Deaf

The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster 2009)

Well, I was wrong. This book isn’t funnier than the first part of Peter Hook’s autobiography. Nor is it as funny. In fact, it was a big disappointment. Not that I’m an ideal reader for a book about a legendary nightclub. Drugs, crowds, bright lights and deafening music. Who could ask for more? Me. Or not me. I’d ask for a lot less. I don’t find this kind of thing amusing:

That [PA] set-up lasted until 1988, when we splashed out for a huge system from Wigwam Acoustics […] that made everyone’s nose tingle because of the huge bottom end, and deafened audiences for a whole week. Eventually we had to turn it down from 140db to 130db because doctors were phoning up to complain – too many patients with Haçienda hearing problems. (“1984”, pg. 84)

But I do find this kind of thing amusing:

A fine example [of our incompetence] was Teardrop Explodes [sic] in May 1982. They were massive at the time and Rob [Gretton, New Order’s manager] paid them £3000 to do a ‘secret’ gig (nudge-nudge, wink-wink, but you’re supposed to let the word out so everyone will come).

We kept it so secret only eight people turned up. (“1982”, pg. 45)

This was amusing too:

We continued to make mistakes. For example, the place would be repainted every week, which cost a fortune. But, rather than wash out the paint tray and rollers, the staff would throw them in a pile then go to B&Q and buy new ones. I found that pile after we went bankrupt and it was like fucking Everest, had two Sherpas and a base camp on it. (“1984”, pg. 82)

And it’s also amusing that both the Haçienda and its cat received catalogue-numbers, Fac 51 and Fac 191, from Factory Records, the home of Joy Division and New Order. But there’s not enough amusing stuff here. For me, the best bits may have been the set-lists for two of the many bands who performed at the Haçienda. This was the Cocteau Twins on Thursday 8th December, 1983:

‘When Mama Was Moth’, ‘The Tinderbox’, ‘Glass Candle Grenades’, ‘In Our Angelhood’, ‘From the Flagstones’, ‘My Love Paramour’, ‘Sugar Hiccup’, ‘Hitherto’, ‘Musette and Drums’ (pg. 71)

And this was Einstürzende Neubaten on Thursday 28th January, 1985:

‘Seele Brennt’, ‘Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.’, ‘Meningitis’, ‘Armenia’, ‘Yü-Gung (Fütter Mein Ego)’, ‘Sehnsucht’, ‘Sand’, ‘Negativ Nein’, ‘Letztes Biest (Im Himmel)’, Hör mit Schmerzen’, ‘Tanz Debil’, ‘Die Genaue Zeit’, Abfackeln!’ (pg. 100)

Just from those song-titles you know that those were two bands who, in their very different ways, were doing something very strange and interesting. Or bloody interesting, in the case of Einstürzende Neubaten and their pneumatic drill: “The gig ended when the singer’s throat burst and he started screaming blood all over the mic. Our sound-guy Ozzie got onstage and knocked him out. ‘I’d warned him once,’ he said.” But Hook doesn’t write about the Cocteau Twins or talk much about gigs by anyone except Einstürzende Neubaten and The Jesus and Mary Chain. The Chainies blew through the Haçienda on their “17 Minutes of Feedback Tour” in 1985. Hook says: “I thought, ‘That sounds quite interesting’, so made sure I worked security that night.” (pg. 93)

Alas, the gig was “excruciating”, because “17 Minutes of Feedback” was exactly what the audience got. Having listened to this, Hook removed the human shield that was protecting the Chainies from the people they’d deliberately provoked: “I was so wound up after they’d finished, I pulled the bouncers off and let the punters at them.” They were quickly sent on their way. But that was in the mid-’80s and soon the gigs at “the Haç” got fewer and fewer as the DJs took over. I think bands and their gigs are much more interesting than DJs and their sets. Joy Division and New Order were interesting, for example, but Hook doesn’t write about them much here either. He refers to New Order mostly as the source of the money poured into the bottomless pit of the Haçienda. As Tony Wilson of Factory Records put it: “About three years after opening the Haçienda we realized that everybody in Manchester was getting free drinks – except for the people who actually owned it.” (pg. 108)

But Hook, Wilson & Co. weren’t content with one bottomless pit: they opened another in the form of a bar called Dry. That too fell victim to the gangs who began to poison Manchester’s night-life in the 1990s. The Haçienda tried to fight fire with fire by hiring thugs to police thugs. That’s why they brought in the Manchester-Irish crime family called the Noonans:

Dominic Noonan, who worked with his brother [Damien] for the club, later told documentary-maker Donal MacIntyre that the Haçienda was a ‘tough door’; that gangs from Moss Side, Cheetham Hill and Salford would turn up, all wanting to get in for free, so ‘me and some of the lads who ran the door said enough was enough, let’s take the trouble to them – and we did.’

He and another doorman paid a visit to a pub, his mate with a shotgun, Dominic wielding a machete. ‘One of the gang lad’s dogs was about [dog-lovers and vegetarians might want to look away now] so I just chopped its head off, carried the head inside the pub and put it on the pool table. I more or less told them, “Stay away from the Haçienda or the next time it’ll be a human head,” and they never came back. (“1993”, pg. 260)

That warning for “dog-lovers and vegetarians” is funny, but it might have been added by Hook to something written by someone else. That story about Dominic Noonan and his machete is from one of the mini-histories in italics that punctuate the text (and that appear in Hook’s Joy Division book too). And why do I think Hook wasn’t responsible for the mini-histories? Well, they don’t always read like him and at the beginning of this book, a mini-history describes a controversy over a record-sleeve for Joy Division. It was designed by Peter Saville with a photograph of “the Appiani family tomb” on it. The record came out shortly after Ian Curtis’s death and Factory Records were accused of making a “tasteless reference to the suicide”. The mini-history says: “A bemused Saville pointed out that the design had been finalized prior to Curtis’s death.” (pg. 15) I don’t think Hook wrote that line. Guardianistas use ugly and pretentious words like “finalized” and “prior to”. As I noted previously, he isn’t a Guardianista (so “bemused” isn’t his kind of word either).

If he were a Guardianista, perhaps he would have avoided making some definitely tasteless references like this:

When drum’n’bass and hip hop became popular in 1995, we ended up being unable to hold so-called ‘black-music’ nights because there was so much trouble. Even the police encouraged us not to promote these shows and our bouncers eventually refused to work at them too – and don’t forget that our bouncers were lunatics themselves (in the nicest possible way). But even they said these nights couldn’t be policed. (pg. 238)

As Barry Miles did in one of his autobiographies, Peter Hook is just feeding a stereotype of violence and disorder in the black community. First of all, there is no more violence and disorder in the black community than in any other community. Second, okay, although there is a lot more violence and disorder in the black community, this is caused by hegemonic white racism and the legacy of slavery. And the very violent Noonan family weren’t black, which proves it. So there.

Anyway, this book disappointed me, but I’m not an ideal reader for a book about a legendary night-club. Lots of other people have been and will be. And it’s got a good index. Plus, I learned that the cedilla in Haçienda was (maybe) there to make the “çi” look like the “51” of its catalogue number. Good arty idea, that.

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Hooky Here

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Peter Hook (Simon & Schuster 2012)

It’s not bad going to have been central to two of the biggest and most important bands in British musical history. This is the autobiography of a man who achieved exactly that: Peter Hook, who was bassist first in Joy Division and then in New Order. If I were a fan of either of those bands, I’d’ve liked the book even more. I’m not, but I can see their importance.

I can also see that Peter Hook was not one of the two “thick bastards” in Joy Division. That’s what he calls himself and Bernard Sumner, the guitarist who accompanied him into New Order. It’s not true. Hook doesn’t acknowledge a co-writer on this book and although it sometimes reads as though it’s transcribed from a session down the pub, it reads well too and is full of intelligent commentary on Joy Division’s music. Okay, the singer Ian Curtis might have been the most intelligent and creative member of Joy Division. He was certainly the best-looking, most charismatic and attention-grabbing, first because of his epilepsy and then because of his suicide.

But he was also the sort of person who would say “in terms of”. Peter Hook wasn’t and I hope he still isn’t.* He didn’t have the background for it or acquire the artistic pretensions when he was growing up. His background was rough: he was born Peter Woodhead in Salford in 1956. Then his parents divorced and he acquired a stepfather called William Hook, who took his new family off to Jamaica, where Hook Snr had found work as an engineer in a glass-works. Jamaica was quite a contrast with dour, drab, drizzly Manchester. As Peter Hook says: “You know how I said that life in Salford had been in black and white? Well in Jamaica it was definitely in colour.” (pg. 7)

That’s in chapter one, which is entitled: “For seventeen days that’s all we had, chicken and chips.” That’s a reference to what they ate on the boat over to Jamaica, because Hook’s mother, like many working-class Brits, was resolutely unadventurous in her gustatory habits: “She could hardly bear to eat anything that came from south of Salford.” (pg. 5) She passed that conservatism onto her son and he wouldn’t lose it until he was in his twenties and, inter alia, tried a curry being eaten by a member of Cabaret Voltaire (pg. 239). He’d probably have lost it sooner if he’d stayed in Jamaica. And who knows where he’d be today if he had?

But he didn’t. His mother got homesick and the family came back to the black-and-white of Salford. That was one of Hook’s early lessons in the what-might-have-beens of life. If he’d stayed in Jamaica, he might still have become a famous and successful musician. But he wouldn’t have been playing anything like the music of Joy Division. Maybe only Mancunians could have produced that and maybe only Mancunians born in the 1950s.

One thing is certain: they had to be intelligent Mancunians and Hook was intelligent enough to pass his Eleven Plus and win a place at Salford Grammar School. He gives the credit for that to his time in a more demanding Jamaican school and maybe that was part of it. But a school can demand and not get if the pupil isn’t bright enough. Hook was. So was Bernard Sumner, who was also born in 1956 in Salford and who also passed his Eleven Plus. That’s how he and Hook began their long but sometimes prickly friendship: “I met Barney in that first year at Salford Grammar. He still gets really annoyed when I call him Barney.” (pg. 10)

He is probably also annoyed by chapter headings like “Barney would always eat on his own or in the bath” and by the descriptions of his “infamous sleeping bag”. Hook is undoubtedly mythologizing, telling in-jokes and taking the piss at times, because a book like this has two audiences. Insiders and outsiders, or people who were there at the time and people who weren’t. Either way, they’ll interested to hear Hook’s side of the story. And he emphasizes that it is always his side of the story. Other people remember things differently. And they’re not necessarily wrong to do so: Hook says that Ian Curtis is remembered in very different ways because he was a “chameleon” could put on very different characters depending on who he was with. (pg. 235)

But that’s much later in the book. Before then, Hook had to live through his time as a lazy schoolboy who became a thieving Salford skinhead and scally, then his time as a local government clerk and chalet-worker. As for the working-class boys of Black Sabbath, music was his way out. And the Sex Pistols were the sign-post. Hook and Sumner were among the fifty or so who attended the now-legendary Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4th June 1976. Tickets were 50p, the support was Solstice, and the impact of the headliners was life-transforming. The Sex Pistols came, were seen, and conquered. Hook describes them like this:

What made them special, without a shadow of a doubt, was Johnny Rotten. The tunes were only part of the package – and probably the least important part of it, if I’m honest. Close your eyes and like I say you had a conventional pub-rock band with a soundman who either didn’t have a clue or was being very clever indeed. But who was going to close their eyes when he, Johnny Rotten, was standing there? (“Normal band, normal night, few people watching”, pg. 38)

Hook and Sumner were immediately inspired to form their own band. They had the usual trouble with finding and keeping a good drummer, then had the luck to pick up a singer who could rival Johnny Rotten for charisma and intelligence. But in a very different way: Ian Curtis was literary and “arty” in a way that John Lydon wasn’t. For example, he was a fan of William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, as Joy Division’s song-titles and lyrics would show. But writers like that meant nothing to Hook and he says he didn’t pay proper attention to Curtis’s lyrics until after the suicide.

That doesn’t mean he was a passenger on the S.S. Joy Division. His bass was central to their sound and his appearance was central to their gigs. I got the impression that he was very tall because he carried his bass very low. But he wasn’t. He says he was inspired to use a “long strap” by Paul Simonon of The Clash (pg. 111), but:

Sound-wise I was most influenced by Jean-Jacques Burnel of the Stranglers. I used to listen to his bass on “Peaches” and “Five Minutes” and think, That’s how I want to sound. When I went to see them at the Bingley Hall in Stafford I wrote down his equipment, a Vox 2×15 cab and Hi-Watt head, then went out and bought the lot, and it was magnificent, sounded wonderful. So, I got my sound from Jean-Jacques and my strap from Paul Simonon. I’m so pleased I never got into Level 42. (“We need to get rid of this Nazi artwork”, pg. 112)

I laughed at that last line, because I’m old enough to know about Level 42. But you won’t need to know about bands or anything else from that time and place to find this book very funny in places:

That was when we discovered that it was easier to give drink away than it was to get people to pay for it – an important lesson, that, and one we made great use of during the Haçienda years. (“Timeline Four: January-December 1979”, pg. 232)

Hook has a sly and sardonic wit. He and Barney enjoyed playing practical jokes on other band-members and on other bands (Barney “can’t take them, mind, as you’ll discover”). But he says that he wishes he’d spent less time doing that and more time paying attention to the problems Ian Curtis was having. Most readers won’t have heard of one of those problems before:

Having piles was a feature of being in Joy Division. Ian got them from sitting on the heater at T.J. Davidson’s [a cold rehearsal studio] and both Twinny [a roadie] and I got them from the van during the European tour in 1980. [JD’s manager] Terry Mason’s would regularly explode. But you know what? As far as I know, Bernard never had piles, just a sore arse. (“Timeline Two: June 1976-December 1977”, pg. 90)

Hook isn’t a hagiographer and Curtis wasn’t hagiographable. Like Kurt Cobain’s, his suicide starts to look more and more inevitable in hindsight. And there were big similarities between Cobain and Curtis: both were highly intelligent and autodidactic, both had tortured, introspective psychologies and serious chronic illnesses, both had troubled relationships with their wives and friends. They left “young and good-looking corpses” by different means, Curtis with a rope and Cobain with a shot-gun, but that reflects the nations they lived in. Not that their corpses were good-looking, of course. It was the photographs and films taken before then that were good-looking.

Image is an essential part of rock music. But Joy Division had much more of a hinterland than Nirvana, I’d say. They were more innovative and original in their music, more intelligent in their lyrics, more eclectic in their influences. The “thick bastard” Peter Hook can claim a lot of credit for the musical innovation and originality. So can his fellow thickie Bernard Sumner, whose obsession with the Second World War influenced the image and designs that helped the band to fame. Those designs included the picture of a “Hitler Youth banging a drum” on their Ideal for Living EP.

But it was Ian Curtis who took the name “Joy Division” from the supposed Holocaust-memoir House of Dolls (1955), where it was given to women working as prostitutes in a concentration camp. Joy Division would have been a good sardonic name if it had been invented from nothing. Alas for Hooky and Co, it wasn’t. The source of their name and the drumming Hitler-Youth inspired the first of the “Are you Nazis?” questions that would haunt the band for the rest of their career. That’s why Hook ends his autobiography with these words, describing how the remaining members of Joy Division decided to carry on after Ian Curtis’s suicide:

Then there was the business of finding a new name. We sat down one day to come up with one, thinking that we were going to learn our lesson this time, and that whatever name we came up with wouldn’t be anything even vaguely Nazi-sounding.

No way, we thought. No fucking way were we going to make that mistake again. (“Epilogue”, pg. 274)

They did make that mistake again, of course. Only it can’t really have been a mistake. They were being sardonic again. And stubborn. It was northern bloody-mindedness. But although Hook often refers to the north and being northern, he doesn’t have the northern inferiority-complex you can see in his fellow Mancunian’s Anthony Burgess’s Little Wilson and Big God (1986). As a self-proclaimed “thick bastard”, he doesn’t mind being inferior.

Only Hook isn’t a Mancunian: he’s a Salfordian. The late great Tony Wilson introduced Joy Division’s first TV appearance like this: “They’re a Manchester band, with the exception of the guitarist, who comes from Salford – very important difference.” Hook reacted like this:

Fucking tosser – “the guitarist who comes from Salford”? Two of us came from Salford. I was really annoyed. I was proud of my roots, whereas Bernard always played them down. (“We need to get rid of this Nazi artwork”, pg. 110)

“Fucking tosser” is how many people reacted to Tony Wilson, but Wilson didn’t mind. Like Ian Curtis, he was the kind of person who would say “in terms of”; unlike Ian Curtis, the phrase suited him. He and his Factory label are central to the story of Joy Division and New Order, and he maybe doesn’t get the space he deserves here. He certainly wouldn’t think so and he was certainly an interesting character: flamboyant, narcissistic, publicity-hungry, and Svengali-esque. Or so he no doubt liked to think of himself. As Hook writes: “One of Tony’s favourite sayings was: ‘Always keep your bands poor. That way they make great music.’” (pg. 245)

Hook thinks he was right. Being poor and literally hungry has been responsible for a lot of great music. Joy Division are one example and if you’re a fan you should definitely read this book. It doesn’t have any hot groupie-action, but it has a lot more that you don’t usually find in a rock autobiography, like Hook’s encounter with some huge, home-invading Jamaican spiders and the time he was questioned by the police as a possible Yorkshire Ripper. That was because his van had been spotted regularly in the red-light districts of “Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds, Moss Side…” (pg. 118) He explained to the police that he was playing clubs there in a band called Joy Division. The police “had never heard of them.” Hook comments: “Probably Level 42 fans.”

A few years later, though, the same policemen might well have been New Order fans. Hook writes about New Order in a later autobiography and I’d definitely like to read that after finishing this. I’d also like to read Hook’s The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club (2010). If it’s funnier than this book, and it probably is, then it must be very funny.

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*Oh noes — I’ve spotted an ito in the book: “…looking at it in terms of the whole Joy Division story” (part 4, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, pg. 189). But it might not be by Hook.

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