Peter Hook: 'You find a way of not doing everything breakneck'

“I must admit that’s normal for us,” says the 68-year-old band leader. “To be honest with you, it used to be much better but Brexit and Covid between them have cut our foreign gigs down I’d say by 80 per cent. We used to get between 10 and 12 foreign festivals in summer and now we’re lucky if we get one. I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s had a massive effect on our size of bands. Whether they’re doing them in-house or whether we’re too expensive now as an English band, I don’t know, but getting abroad is much more difficult.”

In contrast to the tour buses old, these days Hook prefers to travel to “anywhere that’s nearby” by car to take in the scenery. “I’ve managed to slow myself down so I don’t rush head-long to the gig, I actually take my time,” he says. “All those signposts I used to drive past – Angel of the North, Hadrian’s Wall and stuff like that – I now stop and it’s actually really nice. I think it’s something that happens to you with age, you find a way of not doing everything breakneck. To be honest, it makes little or no difference.

“I love playing the tours of England because I drive myself and I get to see some wonderful places. New Order never did it, we played so little in England and you just took it for granted. So it’s really nice to be able to experience the places and see how wonderful a place like Yorkshire is or in between Newcastle and Glasgow, how wonderful that country is up there. I’ve got a lovely car so I’m able to really indulge myself doing it.”

He talks in proud fatherly terms of watching his son Jack Bates develop as a musician, first as part of The Light and then with the Smashing Pumpkins. It was, Hook believes, a life that he was always destined for. “He’s been coming to gigs since he was two. The first gig he did was Heaton Park, he danced onstage in front of about 15,000 people to acid house,” he recalls.

When The Light started performing Unknown Pleasures album, Jack was the same as his father had been when he made that record with Joy Division in 1979. “He was 20, so it was wild watching him learn the bass lines for Unknown Pleasures, it was the biggest deja vu moment I’ve probably ever had in my life. He looks like me, he acts like me and he was learning to play the bass and working through the songs and I was stood there wide-eyed going, ‘Oh my God, it’s like watching (the Joy Division biopic) Control’,” Hook remembers. “Then he was the same age as I was when we did Closer, the same age as I was when we did (the New Order mini album) Movement, it was absolutely uncanny.”

Nowadays, Jack is off touring the world as bassist in the Smashing Pumpkins. “Jack can play bass exactly the same as me, but he can go off and join the Smashing Pumpkins and play bass like them, which is something I can’t do," Hook says. “I can play bass like me but I can’t play bass like anybody else. But he’s got both gifts. He can listen to a song and pick it up whereas I can’t, I’m tone deaf in that respect, which is quite odd, I know, but it is the truth.”

Hook’s autumn dates include visits to York, Bradford and Whitby, where they headline the Tomorrow’s Ghosts festival in November. Hook recalls Joy Division playing at The Royal Standard on Manningham Lane in Bradford in September 1978. “It was terrifying,” he says. “It was full of skinheads and the atmosphere was really heavy. There was hardly anybody there.” The next year, they played a “big gig” at St George’s Hall with Buzzcocks.

“We played all around,” he remembers. “We played Huddersfield to one person. You name it, we played everywhere in the North. Literally, we would play anywhere for anyone… It’s always a pleasure. When New Order split up in 2007, I DJ-ed all over the world for three years, I had no money, I didn’t know what the hell was happening, I didn’t know what we were going to do, and it was great getting paid to play other people’s music but I really missed playing my own so when it came to 30 years of Ian (Curtis’s) life I was desperate to celebrate Joy Division – and thank God it worked.”

Peter Hook and The Light play at York Barbican on October 10, St George’s Hall, Bradford on November 1 and Tomorrow’s Ghosts, Whitby on November 2. https://peterhookandthelight.live/