Peter Hook Doesn't See Rivalry With Bernard Sumner

Posted on Oct 20th 2009 11:58AM by Spinner Staff
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After all the ups and downs former Joy Division/New Order bass player Peter Hook, aka Hooky, has endured you'd expect the final split of his legendary band to be a bitter one. Yet when Spinner literally interrupted him at work on the debut album from his new project Freebass to talk about his first book 'The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club,' he was somewhat uncharacteristically complimentary.

This after all is the man who recently branded Morrissey a "twat who makes Mark E Smith look popular!" But when asked about Bernard Sumner's Bad Lieutenant Hooky was quick to dismiss any potential rivalry. "Do I feel that he's a rival? No I don't actually, because when I listen to their music, to me it sounds like (Sumner's former project with Johnny Marr) Electronic which is basically New Order without the bass," he explains. "When I listen to Freebass it sounds totally different so there's no need for any rivalry."

So how does he feel about working without his band mates of the last 30-odd years? "Well I think Bernard and I are addicted to starting again," he states, "every time we seem to get somewhere we decide to split for a fresh start."

It's this desire for freshness that Hooky feels motivates the estranged pair; "I was looking at New Order's MySpace page the other day and it's like it's covered in cobwebs, but you look at Bernard's site and it's all new fangle-dangle, and then you look at mine and it's all Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! It's like we're addicted to starting again even though the thing that makes us survive, New Order, is pushed to the side."

With so much seemingly in common does this desire for fresh starts and occasional reconciliations point to an addiction between the two of them? "Well I don't know really," muses Hooky, "there is certainly an unhealthy element of co-dependency as I've found out. The interesting thing about the break-up is that it wasn't that either of us was arguing about breaking up, it was about what his band was called. And that's probably the root of our troubles, we never attack the actual problem we always just do the surface bit."

Outside influences clearly didn't help the band during this time either. Now sadly without their late, legendary manager Rob Gretton and Factory label boss Tony Wilson facilitating their squabbles, Hooky feels that the band's new management were a bit too hands off.

"You rely on your management getting you through these things and making sure it doesn't get personal," he says, "but our new team didn't know how to handle us. So they just let us run off and f*** everything up, and that's maybe something Bernard and I will have to live with for the rest of our lives." So does he feel any lasting bitterness towards Sumner? It would seem not, "I wish him all the best," he says, "and I hope he has a great time and enjoys himself, I really do."