Peter Hook and The Light: Bringing the spirit of Joy Division and New Order to Interzone at Scarborough Spa

The legendary Joy Division and New Order bassist is trying to write a setlist when it’s time for his interview with The Yorkshire Post, a video call from his home in Port d'Andratx, Mallorca, when he’s back online after Spain’s recent power outage.

The song does not match the setting when he pops on screen from his apartment, shirtless and smiling in big tortoise shell spectacles – looking a little more like Ray Winstone’s sun-soaked Mediterranean expat in the film Sexy Beast than the portrayal of his own younger self in the Control biopic – but he is generously reflective about his late friend, the adored and much-mythologised frontman Ian Curtis.

“Dead Souls, funnily enough with its long intro, was Ian Curtis's favourite song. Which was quite bizarre because he didn't get to sing on it until about two and a half, maybe nearly three minutes into the song,” says Hook, 69.

“You do have to bear in mind that the audiences in those days were quite hostile. Punk was really angry and the crowds actually did channel that anger and that frustration. I mean, you were literally playing for your lives a lot of the time.”

Consequently Joy Division, which formed in 1976, often opened their sets with Dead Souls so that Curtis could gauge what kind of audience they were dealing with before starting to sing.

Hook says: "It was such a pleasure to watch him indulge himself in that moment of when he just used to get into the music. And I must admit, watching him every time we played, I didn't hear his lyrics for months and months and months, but I just knew from watching his face and his body language that he meant every bloody word, even though I couldn't hear it.

"Hearing it when we went in the studio to do Unknown Pleasures with (producer) Martin Hannett” – although it was not on the album – “was like a revelation. I thought, Oh my God, these words are just wonderful, absolutely wonderful. So he used to use that moment of Dead Souls to relax. It's like a boxer warming up, isn't it?

“And then, of course, he’d launch into what was an amazing song, lyrically, and again, full of angst, full of frustration, full of anger that we felt as young boys. Maybe we use it in a different way now. It's a very important song. It's like I always say to the audience when we play it, when I was playing (back then) I used to always watch Ian out of the corner of my eye and even when we play it now, I'm aware that, sometimes, I'm able to connect with him on that level just playing the song, which is fantastic.”

Hostility no longer greets him when he performs as Peter Hook and The Light, 45 years on from Joy Division’s disbanding – and their reforming as New Order - after the suicide of Curtis aged 23 in this month of 1980.

Since 2010, Hooky and his band have been performing all the Joy Division and New Order albums sequentially, in full, and are on to the latter band’s 2001 record Get Ready (his disputes with former bandmates Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert are well-documented – he parted ways with them later in the noughties).

However, they do throw some ‘best of’ shows in too, and that’s what the audience will get tomorrow when The Light headlines Interzone, a day of post-punk in Scarborough with bill also including Leeds group The Wedding Present, The Farm and Spear of Destiny.

That’s what the aforementioned setlist is about, with Dead Souls among the “gnarly” tracks they allow themselves to play to certain crowds – punk festivals being a perfect opportunity.

He adds: "It's weird to think that when I went to see the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, you were watching the start of a real cultural movement, and when you look at (Blackpool festival) Rebellion and Interzone in Scarborough, you see what that caused and how the ripples are still being felt now, all these years later.”

The festival is named after the song Interzeon on 1979 album Unknown Pleasures. It was another memorable moment for Hook because he shared the track’s lead vocal duties at the behest of Curtis.

"I've never met a lead singer like that since,” says Hook, who now sings for The Light, which also features his son Jack Bates, Paul Kehoe, David Potts and Martin Rebelski

"It was such a wonderful step for me to go from doing the backing vocals to doing the lead vocal and to actually get that wonderful vocal interplay that's on the song with Ian in Joy division, was wonderful, it really was. It was such a big moment in my life.”

Salford-born Hook finds it amazing to see so many young people in the crowd – fans the same age, or younger, than he was during the four years of Joy Division.

Speaking about Joy Division, he says: “We had a wonderful way of reaching out to… I mean, we were troubled teens. We didn't know what the world held for us. We were very in awe of it. We were worried about what was going to happen to us. I think the thing is that Ian caught that feeling so wonderfully with these words and backed by our music, and it still catches it today.”

He adds: “When I started playing again in 2010, the reason was I was just missing playing my own music. I was DJing quite happily all around the world and being paid to play other people's music is a great compliment either way, but I really was missing the physicality of playing. And when I came back, I thought our audience would be full of fat old blokes like me. I never envisaged for one moment that someone would bring their son along, or their daughter, because they'd been brought up on Joy Division and New Order’s music.”

Hook says that “it's really weird at my age having young kids coming up to me, you can see that they're 16 or 17, asking me what Ian Curtis was like.

You're like: ‘He was just like you. We were just like you’.

"I don't carry it lightly, let me put it that way. I realise that what we did, thanks to (their record company) Factory and thanks to being in Manchester, was caught the wave, shall we say, of the desperation people managed to get through with punk.

"That's what I love about the audiences of Interzone, and when you go to (Blackpool festival) Rebellion, you're just looking at a load of punks that are as hopeful as you were at that time. To become a punk was such a relief for me because I really didn't know what to do with myself and where I was going to go and what I was doing life for. I hope that people still do get that rescue from it.”

He has mentioned previously how people have accused him of wearing his heart on his sleeve – but surely that’s good for an artist?

"I think it’s a great thing. Barney (Sumner) always used to say that to me: ‘Oh you’re so melancholy, you’, like it would be my downfall in some way.

"I suppose it’s that attitude to Ian, you know, the thing about losing Ian and then literally your whole life is based around carrying and enjoying his legacy. Is that melancholy? I don’t think it is.”

Peter Hook and The Light play Interzone at the Scarborough Spa tomorrow. Visit: www.scarboroughspa.co.uk/whats-on/interzone