Peter Hook & the Light prepares to time travel at the Bluestone

In the time since Peter Hook parted ways with New Order in 2011 – an acrimonious split attributable to personal and creative tensions developed over years between Hook and former bandmate Bernard Sumner – the bassist has continued to push at the wounds left in the wake of this fracture, committing to revisit each New Order album, along with releases from his earliest band, Joy Division, in an ongoing series of tours with current project Peter Hook & the Light.

“It’s like [the albums] are all tainted with the pain and the anger and the frustration you felt,” said Hook, who will play the entirety of the New Order album Get Ready, from 2001, along with a selection of career-spanning greatest hits, when he joins his band the Light in concert at the Bluestone on Wednesday, May 28. “So, it is a bit weird, and I must admit sometimes I regret having agreed to this crazy bucket list idea of mine.”

Hook said he initially approached Get Ready with the same trepidation that accompanied his revisitations of previous New Order albums. “I thought, fuck. This is going to be shite,” he said, and laughed. “Because I’ve not heard the LPs, obviously, and I’m less inclined to listen to them now because of what happened.”

The challenges were magnified this time around by the circumstances that surrounded the making of Get Ready, which Hook described as New Order’s “honeymoon album,” since it was recorded after he and Sumner made amends, putting to bed a five-year hiatus that for a time threatened a permanent end to the band. Hook said the good feelings spurred by this reconciliation permeated the early weeks in the studio, with he and Sumner setting aside past grudges and working harmoniously with producer Steve Osborne. It didn’t take long for the mood to curdle, however, with old, accumulated gripes and griefs again worming to the surface.

These opposing emotional poles tugged at Hook during the earliest Get Ready shows he performed with the Light, a band he’s joined in by his son, Jack, who also serves as a touring bassist for the Smashing Pumpkins. “The first three gigs we played [the record] were an absolute pleasure, but my son goes to me, ‘Dad, why are you so nervous?’” Hook said. “And I was like, “Nervous? I’m not nervous!’ And then I thought, fuck, why am I so nervous? And I think I was nervous because this LP was the closest [Sumner] and I had been since we were in bloody school and started on this path together after seeing the Sex Pistols, before Joy Division even became a band. And whilst it might not have lasted, and things actually ended bloody awful with New Order, this record manages to capture me and him, I think, at our best.”

On multiple occasions, Hook described his desire to revisit the entirety of his musical catalogue in concert as “a bucket list” waiting to be checked off. But he also said the act has enabled him to again stake a claim in music he was instrumental in creating, and from which he had long felt a degree of emotional distance owing to the lingering bad blood. “It’s like you lost your kids somehow,” he said. “And then all of a sudden, they come back to you.”

Performing these songs, Hook said he is inevitably rocketed into the past, the music dredging up specific events and emotions that have necessarily led him to reconsider the person he was in those times. These feelings of deja vu are heightened by the experience of performing alongside his son, who has served as something of a living mirror into the past. When Peter Hook & the Light first performed the entirety of Joy Division’s 1979 debut LP Unknown Pleasures, for instance, Jack Hook was roughly the same age that Peter had been when he tracked his initial bass parts. “And then he was the same age when we did [the Joy Division album] Closer as I was when we did it in the first place,” Hook said. “And the same with [New Order’s debut album] Movement, which was the weirdest thing ever.”

Hook’s quest to revisit all his expansive catalogue has been granted additional urgency by age, with the 69-year-old allowing that thoughts of death arise more frequently with the passage of time. 

“[British comedian] John Cleese, he’s 85, and he said he was surrounded by a massacre of friends,” said Hook, who was gearing up to run a 10k in the days after we spoke in late May. “So, yeah, it does have an effect. And I must admit that 69 has … made me quite anxious and paranoid, because it does begin to feel like you’re counting down. I had a close friend who died by suicide recently, and we just lost Mike Peters from the Alarm this week. There are so many people you’re losing who have run alongside you in your life. So, yeah, it’s fucking terrifying. But again, this is the weirdest business in the world to be in for that, because when you strap on the bass and start strutting around the stage performing all of these great songs, you feel fucking 20 again.”