Session Transcript:
Peter Hook
Red Bull Music Academy, Melbourne 2006

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Few people can claim quite such a significant place in history as Peter Hook. First with Joy Division, then with New Order, the bearded bassist has influenced people across the globe. Then the club he financed, The Hacienda, helped kickstart the dance scene in Europe. In this session he talks about them all, as well as dodgy synths, dodgier deals and how he came to love the DJ.

RBMA: »Now, we have in the lecture hall with us today, Mr Peter Hook.«

Peter Hook: »Hello.«

(applause)

RBMA: »We’re lucky enough to have Peter here. He’s touring different parts of the world at the moment DJing. He’s just been in New Zealand and Brazil, Uruguay, and he’s here in Melbourne for a show or two. Of course, he needs not much of an introduction. He and his equally famous colleagues are a global music phenomenon coming out of Manchester, Joy Division transmorphing into New Order somewhere along the line and Peter was involved in a number of projects, too, as musician and bass stylist. It’s really good to have you here, Peter. Thanks for coming.«

Peter Hook: »Thank you.«

RBMA: »Being in a position like this, addressing a group of people about your music is probably not what you were imagining all those years ago when you were getting involved in music.«

Peter Hook: »Back in 1977, if you’d gone along and asked somebody if they wanted to learn music, they would have thought you were an idiot. I’m not too sure, as a self-taught musician, whether I could say it was good or bad, I don’t think I’m expert enough to say that, because I came up the other way, the backstairs route of learning to play music and be in a group. I think it’s quite odd that people teach people how to be in groups, it seems quite strange, maybe you can enlighten me as to whether it works or not.«

RBMA: »Seems to me like you just picked up an instrument, that you were inspired by a certain performance of what came to be known later as punk.«

Peter Hook: »Yeah, I’d never been interested in music before that point, apart from playing records. I’d played the recorder at school, I went to see the Sex Pistols at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, June 1976. I went out and bought a bass guitar the very next day. Don’t ask me why I did that because I don’t know. I think when I saw the Sex Pistols, which was at the end of my teenage years, when I was 20, I didn’t have a clue what the fuck I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I saw the answer. Why? Just saw the Sex Pistols spit at people on stage and thought I want to do that, I want to be able to spit at people on stage. As long as they don’t spit at you, you kind of got it right; you spit at them, but they can’t spit at you. I thought to be in a group you obviously need an instrument, so I spent £35 on a bass guitar, because my mate Bernard had a guitar, and you’re not allowed to have two guitars in a punk group, or you weren’t then. And that was it. We were a group. And then we thought, 'Shit, we’ve got no music'. (laughs) One little oversight. And then we started writing music and I’ve doing that for 30 years.«

RBMA: »The talent was coming from Manchester.«

Peter Hook: »Yeah, I’ve been very lucky. I don’t know why so many great groups have come from Manchester. I don’t know why, I wish I did. My friends The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Charlatans, Buzzcocks, even down to that ginger-haired twat Mick Hucknall (laughter), there’s still a lot of people who’ve done something in music, Inspiral Carpets. The list of people that came from Manchester is endless.«

RBMA: »You don’t have a theory of the culture of Manchester of what might have lead to that?«

Peter Hook: »Bernard’s theory was always that it was so fucking awful that people would want to get out of it, so you’d form a group for that reason, which is just as good a theory as any. I still live in Manchester and to me, ironically, it’s still as important – The Smiths, don’t forget The Smiths – now Badly Drawn Boy, I Am Kloot, Elbow, Doves, still a lot of groups coming from Manchester. We kick Liverpool’s arse, man, fucking great.«

RBMA: »So in the early days, the independent label, the freedom it offered, but also the restriction of not having any funding. How was that structured?«

Peter Hook: »(laughs) Oh yeah, we had a very loose business structure. Business-wise, obviously now that I’m knocking 51, I’m quite good at business, but we did get ripped off, so I did learn the hard way. You spend your life going through things like that. I was very lucky, I got to the ripe old age of 40 before I signed a contract, the only contract I had was with London Records in 1996 or something. Before that I’d never had to sign a contract because we were punks and we didn’t sign one. Business-wise you do get taken advantage of, but as my mother used to say: “You’ll see the back of them, our Peter.” And very luckily, I have.«

RBMA: »That initial phase when you’d developed this popularity in and outside of Manchester and around the UK, taking that music to other places what was the...?«

Peter Hook: »That sounds easy, but it wasn’t that easy. I remember we used to play to nobody as Joy Division. We played a gig in Oldham, which is near Manchester, and there was nobody there. Two girls came in after about 20 minutes and they walked up to the front of the stage because there was nobody in and we stopped and they said: “Hey, are you the Frantic Elevators?” We said: “No, we’re Joy Division.” “Fucking hell, we’re in the wrong place.” And they left, so we played to no people. Doesn’t matter, does it? We were playing the same set, the Unknown Pleasures set that six months later we were playing to thousands of people. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I suppose, as a musician then every single time you play you’re tested. I was saying before when I was DJing at Parklife on Saturday, because I start with a slow tune and everyone else had been playing fast stuff, someone threw something at me, which was a crushed up Red Bull can (laughs). Which I thought was quite ironic, so I took the money with relish today. Sometimes you go down well, sometimes you go down crap. You don’t take your success everywhere you go with you, it can be really difficult. It attacks your heart and your soul every time, if someone throws something at you or says: “Get off you’re shit,” you’re like: “You cheeky bastard.” It gets you right in there (gestures to heart). When you’re in a group at least you’ve got your mates, but when you’re DJing, you’re like: “Where’s that big guy gone?” Performing attacks you every time, it’s easy to lose your bottle just by one guy going (makes dickhead sign). And I find it worse now that I’m sober – my name’s Peter and I’m an alcoholic – now that I’m sober I see everything. When I was drinking I didn’t see anything, so it’s funny it’s actually made it harder. The thing is I started off sober, so I don’t know when it changed.«

RBMA: »I’m not sure if you’re sick of talking about the whole situation when you not also found yourself in a band that was pretty busy, but also involved in various business enterprises, such as a certain place of entertainment called The Hacienda.«

Peter Hook: »Our record company and our manager decided, because we had nowhere to go in Manchester, we should open our own club. So we did. In all fairness, it changed the face of clubbing and, with acid house, created dance in England and Europe, gave it an outlet. And the whole ecstasy thing was going completely through the roof. It’s a very difficult thing because when we worked out how many people had been in the club during the 15 years it was open, we worked out each of them had cost the New Order and Joy Division about £10 each. So although it was great promotion and ‘dah-de-dah’, when things are going bad and you’re sat there a bit skint, you can think I could’ve done without that promotion. But we’re artists, aren’t we (laughs)?«

RBMA: »You bear the brunt of it, but it’s a very famous place and the whole scene with Factory Records..«

Peter Hook: »The film 24 Hour Party People resurrected it around the whole world. I mean, it was a very special place. Our manager did say to us: “You’ve done very well out of Manchester, you’ve done very well out of music, I think you should give something back.” We didn’t realise he meant everything (laughter). We thought he just meant a bit of it. Tenner maybe.«

RBMA: »When you DJ it’s all kinds of stuff that you’re playing?«

Peter Hook: »I always found DJing absolutely ridiculous. I thought they were just a bunch of egotistical pricks. And I was right, now I’m an egotistical prick. Some people say I always have been. But I don’t understand it, to be honest. The only reason I began was because Mani, the bass player out of Primal Scream, said it’s a great way of getting pissed for nothing. So I thought that sounds interesting. I went to see him do a gig in Barcelona, which was hilarious because he was twatted, and I didn’t do anything; I just stood there answering questions about why New Order never plays in Spain. He was throwing records at people, he was scratching at one point, really into it, and I went over and said: “Mani, that’s not on that.” “Oh, fucking hell. Well, right.” So I thought this seems like a proper laugh, this DJing. That’s why I started, and I went through the drinking part of it, getting completely pissed and chasing girls around and stuff like that. Then I got into the musical side of it, and I started putting music together that I thought would be good. To be honest, after being in the studio with New Order for three years, the thing that pissed me off was that we weren’t doing any gigs, which I found very irksome. So I started DJing and then started thinking about music to play to people, and obviously got into the whole reason of why DJs DJ, you think about ways of putting music together and make it entertaining so it has an impact. People take it for granted. I can count on every hand here how many times I’ve been in a club and never even noticed the DJ, but if he wasn’t there we’d all be a bit bored. I was very scathing when I began, now I think they’re great.«

RBMA: »You wrote Love Will Tear Us Apart in an afternoon or an evening. How many forms does the songwriting process take?«

Peter Hook: »To me, it takes only two forms. Either it comes very quickly or it takes forever. If you look at a song like Blue Monday, that took a hell of a long time to write, because of the technology Bernard and Stephen were using. I found it boring as shit, I was quite happy just to play it on the guitars and not use it at all, I found it really dull and tiresome. But they persevered, went through all the control voltage and building their own drummachines, joining synths together, doing pulses. The drummachine came from an organ, you know like your granny has, playing bossa nova and waltz. We took it out and got this guy to rebuild it with separate outputs for different instruments. We did that in 1980. We used that on stage, which was a bizarre thing to use on stage from your granny’s room, to fire the drummachine. The guy converted it from control voltage so you could pulse a synth that Bernard built from a kit in England called the Transcendent 2000, which never fucking worked. We went through all that and it consumed you unbelievably, the amount of work that you had to put in. You’re very lucky now because you can buy a home studio, turn it on and you’ve got as many sounds as you want in half an hour. That’s why it was really nice watching that girl downstairs with the squeezebox because it was wonderful to hear an instrument. Normally, when I hear an instrument it’s just pressing a button. It’s nice some people actually play still, it’s fantastic. The technology to do Blue Monday was incredible. Wehen you think about a Prophet-5 in 1980 you’d pay £2.000. God knows how much that is today, probably £25-30.000. We had five of them because they were so unreliable. You couldn’t rely on only one to play. You had to have three set up on stage ready to switch them over when they went down and two in the back for when the other three went. It was literally like roulette whether any worked. When the Emulator came along – it was a sample player, you used to load the sample on a floppy disc and play it on a keyboard – and we got the first one and we thought it was amazing. Every song, “Yeah, wow, great.” Really overdid it. It was so unreliable that every time you used to go on stage… I remember we were playing this gig in Germany and it wouldn’t load up. We kept putting the disc in and it wouldn’t load, it was driving us mad. The sound guy watched it, and I saw him getting off the podium, stormed right up, got on the stage, picked up the Emulator, threw it on the floor, picked it back up and it loaded (laughter). The technology was that shit.«

RBMA: »It was definitely worth it in the case of Blue Monday, a record we’ve all heard in all kinds of different places, it’s one of the biggest selling 12” singles of all time.«

Peter Hook: »Yes, and we lost 10p on every copy because the sleeve was so expensive. When we designed it, because it had cut-outs it was really expensive, but nobody noticed that, so we were losing money on each sale.«

RBMA: »Do you think all of this is paying off on some kind of karma bank somewhere?«

Peter Hook: »Must be, yeah (laughs). That’s the great thing about being independent, you can make mistakes like that. If we’d been on Polydor, someone would’ve come along and gone: “Hang on.” It was a fantastic sleeve, the way it was based on the floppy disc, and it was absolutely revolutionary. Steve Morris’ great quote about it is, it was the bits you didn’t get that were expensive, the holes that were punched out were the bits that cost the money.«

RBMA: »It’s interesting to hear the discussions you have in a band about your mistakes.«

Peter Hook: »(laughs) All the mistakes, I should write a book of mistakes.«

RBMA: »From an outside perspective, it’s this ability to compromise, the flexibility that you each of you brought to the project. Maybe the single-mindedness came through in other ways?«

Peter Hook: »The whole thing about being in a group, to my mind, is compromise because it’s all about chemistry. I don’t know whether you’re all solo artists or in groups, but being a group member, you start off as friends and then within six months you can’t stand the sight of each other. That lasts in my case for about 30 years. You get less for murder, aren’t you? It is about chemistry. When we all went off and did our solo projects it didn’t have the chemistry that New Order and Joy Division had. It was still great, I had a great time. I’ve never met any group ever that got on, ever. Primal Scream got on for a while but even that didn’t last. Then you stand there going: “That fucking twat, he’s driving me fucking mad, I’m going to kill him in a minute.” Then he comes over: “Alright, mate?” “Fucking twat.”«

RBMA: »Every single fan wants to know what’s happening with New Order at the moment. I know there’s been a fair amount of gigging lately.«

Peter Hook: »Well, for us there’s been a lot of gigging. I think there’s been about 13 this year, which is a lot for New Order.«

RBMA: »Is the electronic gear behaving itself these days?«

Peter Hook: »I don’t know if most of you know this, but most of it is on tape anyway. In the old days it was DAT, now I take it most people play on CD and hard drive. We still use a multitrack, a 16-track player. We still use samples, we still trigger keyboards from the tape. We try to keep as much of it live as we can these days. The funny thing is we went ’round the world for ten years giving all this gear a fantastic holiday. It’s not very appreciate, gear, is it? It falls apart, you pick it up in Bangkok airport, it doesn’t travel well. So you do get to the point where you think, 'Fuck I can’t travel with this, it’s falling apart all the time'. So you switch, but it’s still about performance, when you walk out on stage it’s about grabbing the moment and making it yours and sending everyone home thinking he was great or he was shit, as long as you get some reaction. I think that’s what it’s about. Really, I don’t mind if people mime or if people play to backing track because it still takes a lot of skill to pull it off. If you can pull if off miming to a backing track then you’re going to appreciate it just as much as if they’ve got a 30-piece orchestra playing live. I’m not snobbish about that.«

RBMA: »Now, I would like to open this up to the floor and see if there’s anyone out there who has any queries, anything they were wondering about, that Peter Hook could fill them in on.«

Participant: »In the film 24 Hour Party People, Steve Coogan played a very interesting Tony Wilson. What’s the real Tony Wilson like?«

Peter Hook: »He’s like family to me. I hate him and love him in equal measures. There’s a lot of history involved with Tony Wilson; he was the head of our record company and when they went bankrupt he owed Joy Division and New Order about three million pounds. So three million pounds of our money just disappeared. With The Hacienda and the bar we opened we lost another six million pounds. People find it hard to believe why we have anything to do with him. We’ve just been unlucky. Our accountant always says – the dreaded accountant: “As long as you keep earning money the fact that you’ve lost some doesn’t hurt. It’s when you stop earning money that it really hurts.” So I suppose I’ve got that to look forward to. But I get on really well with Tony, his ideas and way of working are fantastically anarchic, but it gets to the point after 15 years you’re bored of anarchy. How many riots do you want to go to? You just want to sit at home with a cup of tea in front of the telly. You need to balance things out and with Factory there was no balance, you were just veering from one extreme to the other. They were using our records to fund all the other acts on the label and this dodgy nightclub, which I must admit I had some of the best nights of my life in without a shadow of a doubt. But you can’t do that, you can’t. They’d be going: “Come on, you’ve got to hurry up and finish the record, The Hacienda is running out of money.” Fucking hell!«

Participant: »I have seen the movie, of course, so I was wondering what you think about it, which bits are true and which bits are not true?«

Peter Hook: »Well, it depends on who you talk to about which bits are true or not. I do love the way that film makers talk to you and get you to do their job for them. Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote the script, talked to New Order, took all the best bits and just put them all together and made it entertaining. Some of it was true, some of it wasn’t, some of it was glamorised, some wasn’t, everybody’s memory of it is different. I found it interesting that Tony Wilson wrote his book at that same time to the film, and changed it so it fitted in the film. I said: “Why have you done that?” He said: “You’ve got to realise, Peter, that fiction is much more interesting than fact.” I don’t think it is, personally. It was good. Obviously, when Ian died, I didn’t see it, I was only 22. I was just a kid and my world caved in, so I didn’t address anything like that. It was the first time I’d ever seen that aspect of it, which was a bit unsettling. All the stories about losing the money, to me, that’s fucking cataclysmic. That’s my kids being provided for, and to see everyone sit there laughing at it. “Ha, ha, they lost 10p on every copy.” You fuckers, what you’re fucking laughing at it, you cheeky bastards? But it was done in a light-hearted way, so once you got used to that aspect of it, it was alright. You have to measure it in its way. Everywhere you go in the world, people have seen 24 Hour Party People, featuring Peter Hook from New Order. It still keeps me going. It will be interesting to see whether the Joy Division film, which is called Control, has any impact like 24 Hour Party People, because it’s darker. But it’s not pretty good having a film made about you while you’re still alive. Two.«

Participant: »How does your creative process differ being in a band and working as a solo artist? Do you find being in a band more inspiring? I imagine it’s a combination of the love/hate scenario, but being in a band may be more inspirational.«

Peter Hook: »I prefer to start from jamming. When I start something nine times out of ten it will start from jamming. I started a group with Mani out of Primal Scream and Andy Rourke out of The Smiths, and everyone was taking the piss out of us because we’ve got three bass players. That made us all the more determined to do it, really, and it sounds really good, but we did it to get a reaction. Mani was pissed off because Bobby wouldn’t gig, I was pissed off because Bernard wouldn’t gig. We put something together and it started going well, so then they decided they wanted to gig (laughs). For me, I write from jams, that’s what I prefer. It’s quite an arduous process, because you jam for an hour and then you have to sit there listening to it (gestures listening intently). Maybe we could get something out of that. People go: “What are you going to get out of that?” Then you get Crystal. It’s just the way different people work. The way I like to work is from jamming, so something exists. When we split up back in 1990, I tried to do something on my own. I was: “I’m sick of them bastards, I’ll do it on my own, freedom, come on.” Got all the gear going, thought, 'That sounds good, doesn’t it?' But it was shit. I prefer to work with people. It can be inspiring, also when someone’s going: “Hang on, just got this bit, hang on….” Come on!«

Participant: »When you’re in a group and everyone is jamming and contributing to a song, how do you decide who has written the song?«

Peter Hook: »There you go, the reason why most groups split up: money. When you start off you’re mates, but when you’re mate wants a fiver more than you, he’s not your mate anymore, is he? My belief in publishing is that everyone should have the same.«

Participant: »Making a song, one person might come up with one very simple idea, but it might be the thing that makes the song.«

Peter Hook: »I don’t agree, because if you listen to The Stone Roses, where would they be without Reni and Mani? But they never got any songwriting credits, they never got any publishing, which I think is absolutely ridiculous. If you look at The Smiths, Morrissey and Marr said to Rourke and Joyce that it would be easier to collect the money for the publishing if they did it in two names. That's fair? Rourkey and Joycey, I think, are worthy of being included; maybe not as much as Morrissey and Marr, because they wrote the words and the melodies. But a lot of bands do do that. Beautiful South split publishing eight ways. How ever many people are in the band, that’s the way they split it. The singer does it because he thinks that’s fair, because those are people he’s living and working with, that’s how he sees it. But a lot of people don’t. It’s a simple matter of what you can live with. Everybody thinks they did it. “That was me that, I did that, na, na…” You just argue till you’re blue in the face. The thing that makes bands work is compromise, you just have to swallow it (laughs). Every group that I’ve worked with, I’ve always split it equally. Which is daft, so none of you come in a band with me, right?«

Participant: »Did you always work with a manager early on?«

Peter Hook: »What happened early on was we decided, or maybe he decided, that our manager was as important as the rest of us. To my mind, we realised 30 years later we’d made a mistake because we gave him 20% of the publishing, which you shouldn’t do. You can give him the publishing without it coming out of your publishing, you can give it him as a commission. Because we were all in it together, and we did go through a lot together, the guy’s dead now, we gave him 20% publishing immediately. I don’t know any other band that’s ever done that.«

Participant: »Was it quite early on?«

Peter Hook: »It was very early on (laughs). You wouldn’t do it now, let’s put it that way. Not for any reason. With management and agents, the hardest thing to find in the world is a good manager. Experience will give you the ability to deal with people. When I go and do things like this or DJ in a club, I have the ability to deal with people. When you don’t have to do that, when you can concentrate on what you do best, the music, it’s a fantastic release. But finding a manager is the most difficult thing in the world. As a musician, I’ve bought more fucking sports cars for tossers than anyone I know. You get the advance, fuck off with their 20%: “See my new car? Wahey!” And you end up sacking them, I must have sacked loads and loads of managers. My view of management is, if you’ve got a great band, it’s very difficult to fuck up. If you’ve got a shit band, then you need a great manager.«

Participant: »If you’re trying to balance all those things at once it’s difficult because it takes away from your music.«

Peter Hook: »It’s impossible. As a group we tried managing ourselves and it’s impossible. It really does your head in because there’s only a certain amount of rejection you can take. The way I look at it - and you’ll have to decide for yourselves whether it’s worth thinking about - if some guy comes to you, he’s got passion, he’s got intensity, then it’s worth giving it a go. But you have to weigh it up on the other hand. What we need is a school for managers because musicians tend to make music quite naturally, quite easily - correct me if I’m wrong - whereas management is a real art. I’ve been in record company meetings, when I was on Polydor with Monaco. Monaco sacked all the bands that had shit managers. It wasn’t musical, they just sacked all the bands that had shit managers, which was nearly all of them as it happened, but they kept Ian Brown because his manager was good. It can be that important, but it’s like throwing darts at a dart board.«

Participant: »Since you first began, the whole booking side of things was done by the manager?«

Peter Hook: »It was done very much word of mouth when I started. A lot of punk gigs you did as favours. The second gig we ever did we supported The Adverts and Penetration in Newcastle. We got that gig because we’d supported Penetration the night before and they said: “We’ve got a gig tomorrow night. Why don’t you come down and play?” There was a lot of that. You had to put your hand in your pocket, pay for petrol, sleep in the van overnight. It was horrible, freezing, but that was the sort of thing you had to do to get in the position where you’re getting paid to do gigs. But it comes down to your music and your belief in that. If you think it’s good, then you’ll just carry on. The interesting thing about musicians is they will carry on. A lot of them are blatantly getting nowhere, but if you meet the guy, he’s still at it. If you look at someone like Babybird, who I was a great fan of, I was shocked to find out he’d put out eight LPs before he had a hit album. Someone like James Blunt even had done a few albums before he got anywhere. As a musician it’s in you, you need that doggedness, I suppose, to keep going, to think you’re right when everyone else thinks you’re shit. It’s a very difficult thing. We got an award in England from the publishing, the PRS, I don’t know what it’s called in Australia. But it was one of those ‘glad you’re still alive’ awards. "25 years, well done lads!" The guy, who was head of the PRS, was talking about musicians, and the amount of revenue they take in is unbelievable, with your Paul McCartney’s and so on, they collect it all and give it out. He was saying in the whole population of England there are only 2.000 musicians who make enough to make it their primary job. Now, if you see the queues for X-Factor and Pop Idol you’d think it was 20 million of us that were making enough money.«

Participant: »That’s good to know.«

Peter Hook: »Well, I was shocked at that. There’s so few of us that make a living out of it, it really surprised me.«

Participant: »I want to ask about Blue Monday because it has turned up in so many places, all different genres.«

Peter Hook: »You mean remixes?«

Participant: »Yeah, but as well the original in different regions, in hip hop DJ sets or whatever, all over the world. When you made it was it intended as a dance record?«

Peter Hook: »The inspiration for Blue Monday came from a bass drum riff that Bernard had heard on a Donna Summer record, a b-side. We used that and created the track around that. Than he wanted to do an ‘oompah, oompah, oompah’ from a Sylvester record, so we put that together with the drum riff using a DMX II. We used a Transcendent sequencer that he’d built himself, firing a Prophet-5, and you used to have to it in the old binary code, with the off and on's, so if you made a mistake you had to go right back to the start and start the whole thing again. Blue Monday was ten minutes long, it drove us insane. And in this case, he was using a kettle lead. The DMX was under a chair and he was on the floor programming it. We were like: “Why don’t you bring it up?” “No, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s fine here.” And he’s programming away. We’d done it, we’d done the drum track, we had the sequence track done, he got up to go the toilet and he pulled the kettle lead out, dumped the whole drum programme. Then we had to plug the bleeder back in and start programming the drum track while we remembered the riffs and it was never the same again. It was always the one that got away, the one that dumps is always the one that got away. The mix that you not got is the one. For us, it was ruined from the word go because we lost the one and had to put up with the rewritten drum track. But you never do, do you? I’m fucking sick to death of Blue Monday, to be honest. Every time it starts up I go (holds head in hands). It’s like Wild Thing for The Troggs. And yet people love it. Whenever we play I say to Bernard: “Why don’t we leave it off? I’m sick of it.” “Let’s leave it out then.” “You can’t do it, people like it.” It’s about the only time he thinks of the people in mind (laughs). You get in that position. When I play I use a remix of Blue Monday that I like. For obvious reasons it’s a lot different. Takes a while to load, scares you.«

(music: New Order - Blue Monday (remix))

Participant: »Bit of a sad question. I used to buy your 12” releases in the '80s and I loved your bass sound. I’d buy True Faith and Bizarre Love Triangle because I wanted to hear more of them and in particular your bass. So I’d get it on, listen, wait, wait, no bass.«

Peter Hook: »So was I.«

Participant: »Was this the compromise you were talking about earlier?«

Peter Hook: »No, I used to go mad about it. Shep Pettibone was a complete tosser in my eyes, and everybody else was too. I think there was a swing towards electric instruments, they didn’t want any acoustic instruments, so when there was a remix it was electronic, and as a bass player I hated it. I used to say to Bernard: “How would you feel if they left your vocal off?” And he’d say: “They don’t though, do they?” (laughter)«

Participant: »That was a real disappointment to me, but I’ve been waiting to ask you that question for the last 20 years.«

Peter Hook: »Not as much of a disappointment as it was to me. It’s funny though, because they’ve now changed, they use the bass loads. Sometimes in a remix they use a lot of bass they didn’t use in the track, which is one of the nice things about remixes these days, with all the tracks you get in computers. In the old days – I sound so old, don’t I? – 24-tracks, you really had to compromise with what you put down, so when they did a remix there were limited things. Nowadays, you’ve got limitless tracks, remixes have a lot more to play with, which is quite intersting. But you still make mistakes. I hated the remixes Stuart Price did on the last New Order record, hated them. I was really looking forward to the remixes, but when they did them they came back with no bass on; really, really limited amount of bass. So what I did was, I went down and found out the record company had sent the parts from Stuart Price’s mix out to be remixed and not the parts of New Order’s. I went fucking berserk, and blow me if it didn’t happen on the next record as well.«

Participant: »That’s so peculiar, because it obviously, to my mind anyway, is the really unique thing about the sound of the music.«

Peter Hook: »I agree with you but you’re preaching to the converted here, mate.«

Participant: »Can I ask you a second question in relation to that, because it happens to me a lot. If I play something like that, people go: “It sounds like The Cure basslines.”«

Peter Hook: »Ironically, the people ripping you off never really bothered me. What bothered me about The Cure was when I saw the guy and he was actually playing like me, which actually annoyed me more than him sounding like me. You bastard. I don’t mind people ripping you off because when we start writing, we generally start by ripping someone off. “Let’s do a Kraftwerk one.” I think the skill is when it is finished it doesn’t sound like Kraftwerk, but you’ve used it as a step. We got sued by John Denver for a track called Run, because he said it sounded like Leaving On A Jet Plane. Anyone can play me that track and then play Run. I’ve done it, it does not sound to me like Leaving On A Jet Plane. Yet, they’ve got these people called musicologists who analyse it and then decide whether it is, and then that’s a legal decision. So he had an American musicologist. It seems John Denver employs somebody to listen to all music to see if anyone’s ripping him off, as if he doesn’t have, or didn’t have, enough money at that point already. They found us and the musicologist says it sounds like John Denver, eight notes out of twelve, which is the scale they use. So we thought, 'Ha, ha, we’ll get an English musicologist and he’ll prove that it doesn’t sound like it'. So he did it and he agreed as well. We had to give John Denver 20%. It does happen, but we don’t do it. That’s our stand as a band, New Order, if people rip us off – and there have been bands, like The Cure, where even my mother says: “That sounds like you, our Peter.” You know, The Walk, In Between Days, stuff like that. But I take it as a compliment. Maybe it’s something you save for your retirement.«

RBMA: »Thank you very much, Peter.«

(applause)