2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 13 - Peter Hook

THE VIKING

Low-slung bass hero Peter Hook has survived both Joy Division and New Order with his impish humour intact. Roy Wilkinson hears tales of Michael Schumacher’s leather jacket, rucks with Moz and Mexican rave music.

WE JOIN PETER Hook in the studio annexe at his Cheshire home. He’s in the middle of remixing a track for Rock Kills Kid, a new and hygienic Los Angeles quintet.

This extracurricular remix work is new terrain for Peter. His first commission was a recent makeover for The Killers’ track All These Things That I've Done that never saw the light of day. Playing on the song’s “I got soul but I’m not a soldier" refrain, Peter added the voices of young US servicemen, talking about their imminent dispatch to Iraq. The record company decided this was far too contentious for release. Was the indomitable Hook bothered? Of course not.

“I was quite flattered,” he laughs. “Getting banned when I'm knocking on 50? Pretty good going, really.”

As well as numerous Joy Division artefacts, Hooky’s studio pool room contains other interesting fare. The plastic figurine of Spinal Tap's Derek Smalls is explicable enough - Hook has always intuitively understood the bass player’s duty to uphold all that is paganistic and whiskery in the rock universe. Other items are less easily accounted for - George Michael’s old tape deck and Michael Schumacher’s leather jacket, for instance.

The tape deck is affixed with a discreet heritage plaque: “The singer George Michael recorded significant portions of his successful Faith and Listen Without Prejudice albums on this tape deck.” Is Hooky expanding from key Factory heirlooms and embracing a whole new stratum of rock collectible?

“Please make it clear that this is not mine,” he says with concern. “I’m storing it for a pal who’s involved with the Nordoff-Robbins [music therapy] appeal. Some lucky devil is going to buy this and raise some money for charity.”

The bright red Schumacher leather arrived by roundabout means. A friend of a friend came about the jacket when Schumacher inadvertently left it in his car in Amsterdam. Rather than let this philistine sell the garment for 50 quid on Ebay, Peter bought it himself with the sworn intent of returning the item to its native German speed king. “So,” says Hooky, “if Michael wants it back, all he has to do is get in touch...”

With this, Peter settles back into his sofa, ready to answer questions on his specialist subject - Mancunian musical heritage.

Do you have a favourite album made by a Mancunian act?

If I’m honest, it would be something by The Smiths. I fucking hate Morrissey - he’s a cunt - but the music is great. I do like Morrissey’s words; who wouldn’t? He’s a tortured genius, but that still makes him a genius. The album I would go for is the one with the “double-decker bus” [a line from There Is A Light That Never Goes Out]  -The Queen Is Dead. My dislike of Morrissey stems from the Joy Division days. He was always slagging us off. Once, Morrissey was being interviewed for The Tube alongside Rob Gretton [the late Joy Division/New Order manager] . Morrissey started mouthing off about Joy Division. Rob just goes, “The fucking trouble with you, Morrissey, is you never had the fucking guts to kill yourself.” Morrissey just stopped in his tracks and stormed off. I love The Queen Is Dead and I was absolutely seething with jealousy when it came out. That’s my favourite Manchester album, with the first Stone Roses album after that. I was never much of a Barclay James Harvest fan... ”

You’re working with ex-Smiths bassist Andy Rourke - and with Primal Scream’s Mani - on the bold bass exploration that’s your new band Freebass. How’s the search for a singer going?

We’ve been looking for a singer, going through our own version of The X Factor. But, seeing you’re dealing with ex-members of The Smiths and Joy Division, with us it’s The Miserable Factor. We started Freebass because mine and Mani’s singers never seemed to want to tour. I just enjoy it, and I like Mani and I like Andy Rourke. They just want to work and have a laugh. We’ve got about 20 solid song ideas down and now we need to get a singer on to them. For me, whoever sings is taking on a real challenge - because us lot have had such fantastic fucking singers.

I definitely wouldn’t want to sing in Freebass - I've tried singing before and never again. I sympathise with Bernard and Bobby Gillespie, because being a singer is just hard fucking work. But Mani’s line is, “It’ll be a great fucking time to torture the lead singer, because ours have fucking tortured us long enough.”

The most devoted New Order fans call themselves Vikings, clearly in respect of your own Viking deportment. Do you enjoy that?

That came about after me and Terry Mason [former Joy Division/New Order manager/tour manager] watched the film The Vikings, with Kirk Douglas. We were really impressed with it and wanted to live like that. That was David Lee Roth's great comparison to being in a group - it was like being a pirate or a Viking, going around the world, grabbing all the money and taking it home. So, I got the soundtrack from The Vikings and we started using that as New Order's live intro music. Me and Terry loved it, but I think Barney, Stephen and Gillian fucking hated it.

Playing it was just another way for me to wind them up. I actually just DJ-ed in the Shetlands -1 nearly died because there was a Viking longship in the harbour. It was there to take people on trips around the islands, but the guy wasn’t there that day, so I couldn’t get a photo of me sailing a Viking longship. I've never been to that Up-Helly-Aa ceremony in the Shetlands, where they burn the longboat. But please tell them I’m ready to DJ whenever they want me.

The New Order Vikings are very longstanding fans - they’ve been coming to see us for 20, 25 years. You turn up in Texas and you see this lot down the front row. I find it strange, but also amazing - that someone will travel that far to see your group.

You’ve recently completed a DJ tour of North America. Is this now an ongoing thing?

It's great. I like to work, and DJ-ing gives me the opportunity to work. I must admit, it was Bernard who kept telling me to DJ, telling me what a great laugh it was - getting paid to get pissed and all that. I resisted valiantly for years and years. Then Mani was off to DJ in Barcelona and I went over with him, and that’s what started me off. I went through a period of being pissed all the time when DJ-ing, but then I got into it and wanted to see if I could do it well.

It actually consumes me now - I listen to music all the time, purely to find something good to play. I’ve been listening to loads of contemporary Mexican dance, which is maybe something I never thought I’d find myself doing... Every single time I DJ, I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this - even more so since I started doing it sober. To do a job you love and get paid for is the most amazing thing. DJ-ing is also a great opportunity to annoy people - just play them Johnny Cash at the wrong moment or put on my special out-of-tune version of Kylie's Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, which Roger [the engineer working with Peter on the Rock Kills Kid remix] recorded for his own amusement.

Are you a United or City fan?

I'm United, because I grew up in the shadow of Old Trafford. I used to go and see them a bit, but I haven’t bothered since they went shit. I got so dissatisfied with them that I did that Man U protest song with Terry Christian.

When you were starting in music, both you and Mark E Smith worked at the docks in Manchester. Did you ever come across him at that time?

No, I was working at the Salford docks and he's from Prestwich - the posher bit of Salford! We come from the same place, just about, but I’ve never really had a conversation with him. He’s a great game-player, Mark E Smith, very clever. You’ve got to admire someone who’d eat his cornflakes not with milk and sugar but with speed and Guinness.

What did you make of the Hacienda flats development - the flats that were built on the old site of the club?

I would’ve hated it to become another club.

I was actually glad when the club disappeared, because then you get that effect you always get when something disappears - the Hacienda is bigger, better and more fantastic now to people than it ever was when it was there. And they had to pay me when they did those flats. Me and Rob Gretton bought the name when the Hacienda went bankrupt - no one else was interested. In fact, Oliver Wilson, Tony Wilson’s son, just licensed the name for a Hacienda night he was doing. I like the fact that the name’s still there. I’m actually doing a Hacienda compilation at the moment. I was looking at all these Cream compilations and they’re always shit. So I thought I’d do a Hacienda one - 10 years later, which is very Hacienda, isn’t it?

It must feel odd to now be getting money from the Hacienda name. How do you now feel about the New Order money that was sunk into the club?

If you’re asking me if I'd do it again, would I fuck! When the Hacienda shut, we worked out that for every single person who’d ever been in, it cost New Order 10 quid! If I went down the street in Manchester asking people for that tenner back, how many do you think I’d get?

I think we were all quite naive - when Rob suggested we should put some money back into Manchester, it was a bit of a shock to find he meant everything, the fucking lot! You don’t get bands today reinvesting in Manchester in the way we did, but that was really down to Rob - he was a very idealistic man. Left to our own devices, we would never have built the Hacienda, but because of Rob we thought we might be able to change the world a bit. But most of all, we opened the Hacienda because we had nowhere to go. You couldn’t get in anywhere dressed the way we did.

New Order are scheduled to write the music for Control, Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division film. Have you made any plans for this music?

No, not really. If the film comes about then we'll be doing the music - and the film seems pretty far down the line. At the moment, there are two Joy Division films on the go and two big Joy Division documentaries - one dramatised and one not. One of the documentaries is being made by Michael Schamberg and the other by Tom Atencio, our American manager.

People always ask whether it was tough losing Ian. In some ways we didn’t lose him at all. Even when we played in Manchester recently and did an all-Joy Division set, it didn’t quite feel like we’d lost someone. It actually felt like he was still there with us. Of course, we do some things differently these days. Like we now play Love Will Tear Us Apart in a different key to one Ian did it in - which I thought was fucking sacrilege [laughs] . But, as much as I hate admitting it, I thought we could have done with changing the key for Twenty Four Hours when we did that at the Manchester show. But don’t tell Bernard that, or we'll be off at loggerheads once again [laughs] . It was great to do Twenty Four Hours at that show. When we can still get together and do something like that, it makes all the fights worthwhile. That’s when you feel like Ian’s still here. I think to myself, “Yeah, he’s still here and didn't he just do a great fucking job?" ■