Strictly for hardcore JD fans. ( )

Hooky oh Hooky.. this book managed to make me laugh till my stomach hurt and nearly cry as well.

Hooky, aka Peter Hook, needs no introduction. He is the bassist of Mancunian bands Joy Division and New Order, bands who have managed to make music spanning from the darkly gorgeous tones of Atmosphere and Shadowplay to the fluorescent crystalline tones of Blue Monday and Fine Time (lovely song btw).

He covers Joy Division's history from its early inception as Stiff Kittens and Warsaw; also adding in humourous ( if somewhat far-fetched stories) anecdotes about his bandmates, up till the tragic death of Ian Curtis and Joy Division.

Hooky is a brilliant curator, although the book, in all honesty, does tend to lean towards painting Bernard Sumner as a wimpy whiner and Hooky himself as long-suffering. I'll definitely be looking forward to reading Barney's acount of Joy Division. ( )

When I saw Control, all those years later, I didn’t even notice it was in black and white because it was exactly what my childhood had looked and felt like: dark and smoggy and brown, the colour of a wet cardboard box, which was how all of Manchester looked in those days.

This is a seemingly honest look at how things were back in the day when Peter Hook started out in not only Joy Division, but in life. He writes about having lived in Jamaica, in Manchester and of meeting Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and a plethora of drummers before coming across Stephen Morris.

He writes of the good, bad old days, and not so much of the current situation - where Hook and Sumner have communication issues that prevent them from functioning together - which is good. This is after all a book on Joy Division.

Hook has done a lot of thinking, maybe not because of Curtis' death, but maybe because he has re-hashed everything now that he's no longer part of New Order.

There's a lot of piss-taking of himself here, e.g.

You know what? It was the same being in a group. Just goes to show that you can take the boy out of Salford but you can’t take Salford out of the boy, because we were terrible for nicking things in Joy Division and New Order. We used to go to these wonderful gigs with all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all. Now you’ve got bands like the Happy Mondays, or Oasis (in the early days), who had big scally reputations, but they had the same background as us: just working class thieves. You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behaviour from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had the arty intellectual image. These days I restrict it to hotels.

At the same time, it's great to see another angle of Ian Curtis, which is not the apotheosised person we often see today:

But looking back that’s exactly what he was: a people pleaser; he could be whatever you wanted him to be. A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth – he was definitely that. But he could also be one of the lads – he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned. That was the people pleaser in him, the mirror. He adapted the way he behaved depending on who he was with. We all do a bit, of course, but with Ian the shift was quite dramatic. Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very damaging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife, the laddish side and the cerebral, literary side. By the end he was juggling home life and band life, and had two women on the go. There were just too many Ians to cope with.

The book also displays what it's like being in a band, even one which has been lauded since after Curtis' death:

22 September 1978

Joy Division play the Coach House, Huddersfield. “One person turned up. It was diabolical.”

Plus some other details on other bands, e.g.:

14 November 1978

Joy Division play the Odeon, Canterbury, as part of their tour with the Rezillos and the Undertones. “The Undertones – they were so young. They’d bought an air pistol and were having target practice backstage, shooting cans off the stairs. Then someone brought in letters from home because they’d been away touring for a while, and next thing they were all crying in the dressing room reading letters off their mums. Me and Ian were looking at each other like, Aw, isn’t that sweet?”

I love the bits about how the tracks came about, e.g.:

‘Shadowplay’ happened in a similar way: Bernard had been listening to ‘Ocean’ by Velvet Underground and wanted to write a track like that, with the surf sound, a rolling feeling in it. So we started jamming and that’s how we came up with ‘Shadowplay’. You wouldn’t say it sounded anything like Velvet Underground, but once you know you can hear the root.

And a bit on how very little money was very good:

So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Closer took three weeks. Movement took about two months and Waiting for the Siren’s Call, New Order’s last, took three years.

...and:

The beauty of Joy Division is that we never made much money while the band existed so there was nothing to sully it – no piles of drugs or cases of booze in the dressing room. We went everywhere in a convoy of knackered van and Steve’s Cortina and stayed with friends – no hotels for us, just the odd B&B. Even when we went to London to record Closer we stayed in a quite scruffy pair of flats with £1.50 per diem: you could spend how you wished, dinner or a couple of pints but not both. We didn’t yet have any money from the record. (Publishing, as in who wrote what in the songs, brings nearly all bands down. I remember the immortal quote from the Mondays: ‘Why is the one playing the maracas getting as much as me who writes the songs?’ Ironically Bez is now as important as all the songwriters, if not more. How the world turns.)

So how reliable is the book? Hook answers that himself, and I deem him to be quite reliable just by judging on how he writes, e.g.:

I liked Annik, though, and still do. Years later we talked about that interview she did at Dave Pils’ flat. It was featured in Control and my character’s sitting there saying dopey things about the name ‘Buzzcocks’, which I hated when I saw it. Made me look a right twat. I told Annik I would never have said anything so daft and she said to me, ‘Ah, but I have the tape, ‘Ooky, and zat is exactly what you said.’ So there you go. You shouldn’t trust a word I say.

And in ending:

But we didn’t do it the normal way, of course. We did it the Factory way. Not that I’d change anything, mind you. I’d stop Ian hanging himself, obviously. But otherwise I really wouldn’t change anything.

( )

Well writ and very readable. ( )

Hooky gives an insiders view of the history of Joy Division and life inside the band. Even the most knowledgeable fans will learn something new here. An easy and enjoyable read but with too much on inter band pranks and not enough about the music for me. Martin Hannett has for long been credited with creating the Joy Division sound and this comes across clear in this account. The small insights into the various personalities within the band were interesting and sometimes amusing. Stephen coming across as a nervous wreck, Bernard somewhat selfish - note that Hook has publicly fallen out with his ex-band members - but he does give significant credit to them at various points in the book. Apparently Hooky always had to drive the van, which he reminds us of on every second page. ( )