Interview: with Peter Hook of Joy Division and New Order

Interview by: Louie Bones
Big Wheel Journalist

We caught up with Peter Hook at his hotel hours before his appearance at Skylight Books where he was scheduled to discuss his new book and sign autographs for fans. We chatted all things Joy Division and current New Order affairs. Peter gave us some great insights into how music is used in films as well as the feeling of some artists on how their music was used, how screwed up the music business it and more. This is a very interesting interview, enjoy!

 

BWM - Hi Peter, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us and talk about your new book. This is the 2nd book you’ve written, and perhaps it will be the one that stirs the most controversy, especially with the surrounding happenings in regards to New Order….

Hook - Controversy is an interesting word… How do you feel it’s controversial?

Well, given what New Order have said to the press recently surrounding how they feel about you and what you’ve said oh how you feel about them.

(Laughs), well that’s a nice way of putting it.

From an outsiders point of view I definitely see where you’re coming from and what a nightmare it must be to have to deal with all the legal issues involved with your old band mates.

Well we’re not the first to have fallen out like that and we wont be the last. See the interesting thing about them is that they did it completely behind my back and presented it.. Now if that happened to you with your lives business.

I’d be devastated.

Ya see it is like a divorce, basically.. Have you ever been divorced?

No.

Ya know when you have a really bad fall out with someone and you’re really at each others throats. It’s like you wouldn’t expect them to sort out your CD collection, or whatever. The argument is quite interesting because the way they say it, it’s supposedly about me stopping them. But there is the 3 of us and what I dispute is because they are doing it without the consent there is just no way they can say they are New Order. That’s like saying Peter Hook & The Light are Joy Division! Because of the way they’ve done it, ya know if they could have manned up and sat down like grownups and said “Oh listen Peter, we want to go ahead, we want to do this.. Can we sort something out to do it?”

You’d go “Well yeah okay fair enough”

We were together for so long, to actually do it behind your back and present it as a fuck you is deliberately antagonistic. Everyone has a different story, if you spoke to them maybe you’d get to the bottom of their problem, but the thing is when people speak to them, I don’t really see a justification for doing what they did. “Oh Peter plays Joy Division music, he deserves it!”


When you began to write “Unknown Pleasures, the story of Joy Division” were you already experiencing unfavorable feelings from the band? When did you start writing?

I started writing it in umm in 2010 just after we did the first concert celebrating Ian, yeah May 2010. What happened was when we split up, like any divorce, the people in the middle who like you both sort of have to decide who they are going to go with don’t they? And that’s the most problematic thing with any relationship that breaks down. Who gets custody of the friends, it’s a tricky one. We were actually working together quite well. Bernard didn’t seem to like me splitting the band. When you split something like that you think there’s no future and the reasons why you started it don’t seem to be there. So you go “I can’t work with you anymore, ya know, it’s over.” And he actually accepted that and then what he took great exception to was that I did an interview where the interviewer, not me, said that we had split, and I had never put it that way. It was the interviewer, he is one of my best friends, Clint Boon from Inspiral Carpets. Bernard took exception to it, it become a tussel of what he wanted to call it and what I wanted to call it and because he sort of stuck with Steve (New Order drummer) he preferred to say that I broke up the band. That was the argument. It becomes a bit more important, that argument when you begin again using the name, because for some strange reason when you leave a band your entitled to less favorable financial treatment than if you split the band. If you’re gonna be nasty minded you’d say its about the money laughs. Its just two fat old blokes arguing isn’t it?

With this book now out and getting acclaim from fans and critics, does it give you fuel to write a book someday on New Order?

(laughs), the interesting thing about my book Unknown Pleasures.. Is that there was no sex, drugs and rock and roll in Joy Division. Well there was lots of rock & roll, but there is no sex drugs or money. You never had a bean from the start till the end, you had nothing. It was quite pure like that, because we had the drive to succeed and the music and no other thought… and New Order isn’t, laughs. So the odd thing about Joy Division is that I do like that people say its not like a typical rock and roll book. Not like a Motley Crue or story of Fleetwood Mac book, it’s quite unusual like that. The trouble with the New Order book would be it’s a much more ordinary rock and roll book.

 

In that you’d expose fans to a side they weren’t familiar with.

They are if they’ve read Motley Crue ! Most bands are the same if you know what I mean laughs, unless you are trying to promote a pure image. Regardless of the music, most bands do act the same way! If there was to be a New Order book, well because of the 80’s and 90’s, which were very hedonistic, it would be a completely different book from Unknown Pleasures. I just spoke the other day to New Orders old manager and we talked about the things we all got up to, well its amazing were still here laughs. The whole thing about a band, when a band gets success, you are exposed to a lot more pressures than when there is no success. With Joy Division there wasn’t any success, it was a completely different type of a pressure. It was mainly about Ian’s illness, that was the only thing we sort of had to deal with. Musically we were fantastic, we were writing loads of songs, the songs were getting better and better. The audience was getting bigger, the biggest we played to was probably 400, we really hadn’t had our heads turned by success, there was no money.
It’s interesting when you compare it to how influential Joy Division really is.


Speaking of influence, listeners of modern rock radio may tune in and hear a band, say like Interpol. They in particular take more from Joy Division than the average band who’s influenced by your guys sound does, many say Interpol owe their career to what you guys did in the late 1970’s.. How do you feel about bands who do that?

Well ya know the thing about using music as an inspiration is that the art in it is what you finish with isn’t what you started with. I was doing an interview earlier today where “Shadowplay” which was inspired by The Velvet Undergrounds “Ocean” was played and then “Ocean” was played by the interviewer, they were poles apart. But we did start with The Ocean by The Velvet Underground as inspiration. And that’s the skill I suppose you would have to say, you start with, something like every musician does. With New Order we always said the song you most need is a fast dancey song, and they’re the hardest to write! The mid tempo songs seem to be the easiest to write. To get a fast dancey pop song is really difficult.

You certainly succeeded in that department.

We did, but it was always difficult to get that particular style of song. So what you do is you listen to something you like Kraftwerk, ya know we want something like that, like the Passenger, and you work through it. That’s the secret there as I said before as it doesn’t sound like what you started with. A lot of bands don’t seem to accomplish that. I do take it as a compliment though. The Cure in particular ripped off, they’ll deny it, but “In Between Days” and “The Walk” sound particularly like “Blue Monday” and “Dreams Never End.” The Cure did actually use what we considered to be Joy Division bass lines.


Their bassist did use the same custom basses as you for most of the 1990’s. It‘s fair to say the band took influence from Joy Division

It’s an odd one isn’t it really. I don’t think anybody does anything wrong, I do take it as a compliment. But if you are going to rip somebody off and then sound like them, you are leaving yourself open to criticism. As to whether that criticism is valid, well were all critics aren’t we? laughs it’s an odd situation to be in really. 

Do you find yourself enjoying any of the bands that cite Joy Division or New Order as a major influence?

I do, the interesting thing about The Editors, they were deemed to be very Joy Division’y.... and I actually quite like them.

Joy Division never got the chance to get as big as New Order did. New Order headlined huge venues and played gigantic festivals all over the world in its original formation, even headlining Coachella 2005. The band seemed to do things differently though… Could you elaborate?

Just before we split in the early 1990’s, we did a shed tour and played to average 27,000 to 30,000 people nightly. New Order were actually bigger than Oasis and the Spice Girls. But it was all very underplayed as we weren’t really ones to shout about it, we only did it once and then we stopped and split up. Just as we got to the point that were actually huge and the biggest venue we played was in Toronto, at a football ground where we played to about 34,000 people, it was our biggest audience. Then we stopped, we split up after that and never did a tour that big again, by choice. We didn’t really play the game as such, and in a funny way it actually added to our allure by being that difficult and that odd. Normal bands get that point and playing sheds, they’d just carry on and milk it, but we stopped, we never bought into that bit. The reason we liked America was because the Americans were so welcoming and enthusiastic about what we were doing. And then we’d go play Europe and we’d be like “Ahh shit” laughs . So we’d just go back to America. And we actually inadvertently concentrated on America, and because of college radio and the way that films by John Hughes brought a lot of bands into the mainstream with the “Pretty In Pinks“, “The Breakfast Clubs“, you did become a very very popular group commercially.

Do you have fond memories of ROQ of the 80’s with DJ Richard Blade?

Yeah I do actually! I went to it when it was a shed! When KROQ was a broken down little hub right when it started. It was quite interesting because the rest of the band didn’t do interviews, they just couldn’t be bothered. So it was me that used to go out and do them, it was quite interesting to do that Kroq one and then come back and see that they had grown huge! Absolutely fucking huge! People I find are quite loyal when you support them from the start, well they tend to support you, and later KROQ were always fantastic supporters of New Order.

You know it’s a weird situation to be in, even when we signed to Qwest in America, which is Quincy Jones label on Warner Bros. We really didn’t buy into the normal group aesthetic. New Order always used to deliberately do things and just fuck everything up. We still had that punk attitude, an ideal that you liked it when things were difficult. Not things that normal bands did, very punk, quite destructive.

One of the things I did enjoy in Unknown Pleasures is the fact that you say that seeing the Sex Pistols in Manchester in 1976 was the spark that helped start Joy Division and other bands locally, many of which found success. Some bands broke up and later reformed years later, how do you feel about bands from the era that have gotten back together again but haven’t been as effective live?

(laughs), are you talking about New Order? (laughs). It’s a really odd thing now isn’t it? When you’re young you live to work, and as you get older you realize that you work to live. The important things to you when you get older tend to be the complete opposite of what they were when you were younger. Now the funny thing was when the Sex Pistols reformed I went to see them, I went to see them at the Manchester Arena which was really weird, the first time I saw them there was 40 people. The second time there was 16,000 people and the biggest mosh pit of fat old blokes I‘ve ever seen in my life! It was really weird, my mate was promoting the gig, he gave me seat 1-A, it was fucking wild right up front. I’ve got my two Sex Pistols tickets, the very original one from the band that played the first gig, and the reformation ticket.


Both gigs with Glen Matlock on bass guitar, as a bassist were you at all influenced by his style of playing?

No, but the interesting thing about Matlock as a songwriter as he actually writes some very good songs. When he was working with Dead Man Walking he was playing some of his own stuff, less well known than the Sex Pistols. Glen Matlock wrote the music in the Sex Pistols, it wasn’t Steve Jones. The interesting thing about Glen Matlock is as a person he is “square”, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, he is quite normal, you wouldn’t think that he would write those songs. Rotten did the vocals, so it’s to whether you think the music for “Anarchy” is anarchistic or not. The vocals are, but would you say the music was as it fit’s the vocals perfect, it’s a fantastic pop song. But whether the music was anarchic, it’s a tricky one. I’ve never met Glen Matlock, I know Johnny Rotten quite well. P.I.L. toured with us in America and I got to know him quite well.

To have PIL support New Order, that must’ve been like a dream?

I wouldn’t say it was a dream (laughs!) He is a very difficult character, he never has a moment off, he is always Johnny Rotten, in your face, spitting! I actually do like him a lot, for me it’s like in a funny way, its almost as important what he did for me in the way that my mother gave birth to me. Johnny Rotten gave birth to me as a musician and when I was doing the book, the thing that frightened me was what if I hadn’t gone that night to the gig?

You wouldn’t not be here right now.. Would you?

Well I might be here at the hotel, but I’d probably be sweeping the floors laughs, which isn’t a bad place to be. There are worse floors to sweep!

Johnny Rotten, when you saw him it was a little bit ridiculous. When I went to see Led Zeppelin I hadn’t looked at them and thought that I could do that. When I saw the Pistols, I thought I’ve got to do that! Considering I’d never been a musician before, I’d never been a Punk, it is quite shocking, the risk that you took. The other interesting thing is for me and Bernard to be there, to take that plunge together and to do what we’ve done in music together, you couldn’t bet a gamble on that! If you went to a bookie in England and told him these two kids going to a concert tonight, I reckon they both will be in two world famous really influential bands, he’d probably say go piss off mate!

The chances of it happening and it happening to a pair of you were incredible, but you really did take a risk. The truth is you walked in that concert a normal 9 to 5 civil servant as we both were and you came out a Punk rock musician, it’s fucking mad. But not only us, Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, The Buzzcocks, so many people were waiting for that.

You were at the right place at the right time…

New Order happened in many right places at the right time over the years as well, it will make a great book. Because the things that we went through during the 80’s and the 90’s as a group apart from the hedonism were a fantastic period for music. It’s well worth documenting. I wasn’t going to do it, the book because I felt, should I say it’d be betraying too many confidences. It was a little bit odd like that saying what goes in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Were there moments during the writing of Unknown Pleasures where you thought that perhaps sharing certain details might be displeasing to those involved?

Oh yeah! Perhaps it was easier now with Bernard and Stephen and I being so estranged. If I was friends with them I don’t think I would have written the book. Friends would have to ask if it’s alright to say this? So I probably wouldn’t have done it. The book would have suffered for that. We did get offered a book about New Order, when we sat there we talked about it but there was just no way we could all write a book because it wouldn’t be the truth. It would have to be a complete homogenized version that pleased everybody. So its like a fan book it would be, we didn’t see it as being worthy so we turned it down.

A lot of your songs have been used around film and television. Are you involved in allowing Joy Division and or New Order tracks to be used in film, commercial or soundtracks?

Yes I am, it was me who used to handle it all actually.

Fans may recall songs you’ve recorded getting major airtime in movies, for instance a comedy like The Wedding Singer, Trainspotting, and of course Pretty In Pink. Were you generally satisfied with the end result of lending your music to a films soundtrack?

There is one business that you have no control over whatsoever and that is the film industry. Once you agree to do something, even if you’re told on what terms it’s going to be done on, there’s no comparison to the terms you end up with. So really, the first couple times we did it, we were upset. I remember we did The Beach, we did a track for The Beach called “The Beach“. We were told it was gonna be featured, they commissioned it and paid quite a lot of money for it as well. It was when we were coming back so it was very important to us, the song. It’s actually a great New Order song and we were really looking forward to it seeing how it was featured in the film. In the film it is actually featured on radio when there’s a tropical lightning storm on a tin roof so you can’t fucking hear it anyway!

I’ll always remember Echo & The Bunnymen when we did Pretty In Pink, our songs in Pretty In Pink were used quite a lot and featured very heavily and it was really good. Echo & The Bunnymen had a song and we all went to the premiere and everyone was really looking forward to hearing how their song was used in the film. Echo & The Bunnymen’s song was used on the radio while he was having a shower and they got up and stormed out! They were really annoyed! There was another girl, Suzane Vega, she was really upset with the way her song was used, she started crying.

So the thing is when you give permission to a film, you have no control with what happens in the end. You have to sort of realize that and make allowances for it. And the allowances you make with a film like The Wedding Singer, it’s obviously gonna be a very popular film, and it’s great for the band. It may be a bit cringey, it’s actually quite good fun, but you do have to bear that in mind when you do anything with film. When we did 24 Hour Party People and we were involved with the production, when we saw it at the end we were a little bit upset, but that’s the industry.

When can fans expect to see Peter Hook & The Light on tour again in North America?

Hook - It’s been a really weird time to be honest, with New Order doing what they did and excluding me while I was doing the Joy Division stint, it was quite an odd feeling. For me to play the New Order stuff like I just have done in England, it was really weird getting those songs back as well. The decision is whether we carry on playing Joy Division stuff which you do feel guilty about because as a creative musician you always sort of have to carry on writing. When you’re not writing you do feel a bit weird, it does make me feel a bit weird even though I’ve done Freebass and also done a lot of new music with my other guys as Man Ray which is a band I use on Hacienda Records. So yeah, it was an odd feeling and now they’ve asked us to play New Order songs over here which we are supposed to be doing in September. It’s weird ya know? New Order splits up and all of a sudden you end up with two fucking New Order’s, laughs.

The current lineup of New Order toured through Los Angeles in October of last year, I personally spoke to different kinds of fans, casual’s to diehards. Some were into seeing it live and others were strongly opposed to the idea of it…

It’s really interesting isn’t it? It‘s a really odd one. I was talking to this German guy, I was doing a DJ gig in Germany and this guy is a huge Dead Kennedy’s fan. We were talking about things and New Order and he then said (in Peters best German accent) “It happened to me with Dead Kennedy’s, there is no Jello Biafra but I love them, so I thought I will get them a chance!”
So I says to him, well what was it like?
He says.. “I would not go again!!” laughs

In a weird way it’s a really hard position, and I think if they hadn’t had done it in such.. Well their intention was to get rid of me, and in a funny way they didn’t get rid of me in a way where they excluded my bass from the songs. A lot of people come up to me when I’m DJ’ing or signing and they say they saw me recently with New Order and I go well cheers mate and shake their hands.


Clueless fans?

Well clueless might be a little bit of a strong way of putting it, the thing is if you’re gonna bring it down to enjoyment maybe you have to admit to yourself that anybody can play the songs and if they play them well then it’s okay, it’s really difficult to judge. Really I would love it nobody went to see them because I wasn’t in it, that would be wonderful. But life isn’t like that. If there’s one thing that I learned this past year is loyalty, and not just particularly with the audience but especially with the people who you worked with. I sort of thought, because of what they’ve done to me was so horrible that people would go “Oh what a bunch of bastards” but they all just fucking worked with em, every festival put them on, they didn’t fucking care. That was a shock really.  It’s ego isn’t it? It’s a really weird position to be in, watching people that you love and have loved for years just act like you’re not there anymore. Man I love that guy! I worked with him for 30 years. Fuck ya know! It’s very very strange and a horrible horrible feeling. There are times when you realize that in the same way that I’m playing Joy Division songs without them, they’re playing New Order without me, but I do feel a hell of a lot better now that I’ve played New Order as well. Their bass player actually got involved in the slanging match and Phil Cunningham and really they’ve got no place to talk about anything to do with me. My argument is with Bernard, Stephen and Gillian. It’s not with two guys that don’t know what happened anyways because they weren’t there. I did have to phone Phil Cunningham up say “Be careful what you say, I‘ve got no argument with you but don‘t fucking join in cuz you weren’t there.”

It’s the weirdest thing, being in the music business for 35 years, this last year has been the hardest, weirdest year. It’s really been an educational and not a nice one, maybe I was a bit naïve for 34 years, laughs.

Most musicians who’d spent that much time would think that they’d probably seen and experienced everything that could happen in the music world.

It was horrible, a horrible thing to go through and the thing that struck me was that if you’re going to start a band again after 5 years away, it seemed a hell of an odd way to start a new career. They could’ve done the deal with me and gone “Yeah yeah yeah we done the deal with Hooky and everything’s fine, yeah yeah yeah, I would gone good luck to em.” I love the music, I love the boys, good luck to em and instead the sniping, constant sniping which has even gotten worse this week and over the period of a year and over a year and a half, it just seems fucking ludicrous really.
I suppose I should take it as a compliment really.

You’re under their collective skin.

Right, see they’ve got the band back, got the headliner gigs back and they’re supposedly really happy… Why do they have to mention me at all? Let alone discredit ya in front of the fans. I suppose it should be a compliment, it’s not. Quite a pain in the ass. I suppose it’s better than being ignored.

When was the last time you were all together in person?

Well we had a mediation, but that has to be private.

If you were out at a music festival in England and happened to come across them all backstage, say at catering.. Would you shake hands and say hello, or would you feel it’s best to not even go in their direction and speak to them?

I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, but I won’t be shaking their hands, no. What they did was incredibly underhand and incredibly cowardly and the accusation that they did it cuz I played Joy Division music doesn’t actually ring true. They actually played it before me. Bad Lieutenant played before The Light, they played New Order and Joy Division music in October and we played it in May, of the next year!
In a funny way it’s a very difficult economic situation and I do feel that if Bad Lieutenant had in particular been a success I don’t think they’d be resorting to New Order. It’s not about the fans in my opinion, it’s more to do with the economic situation than it has to do with the fan base. I mean, I’m still seeking a legal remedy.

I wish you the best in all of that.

I wish nothing but the best for all of us. But my God, if you’re gonna act, act in a certain way to do it, it just seems for a manager and a lawyer to actually say well hey this is a good way of doing it, I find that unbelievable. The great thing about being in a group is it’s a license to act like a child for all your life, especially as a successful musician, you are allowed to behave very badly indeed, and all of us are guilty of doing that and you do have to resort to the grownups, the people who look at it objectively at a level point of view to achieve anything, but in this case it seems.. Well it’s just been left to the schoolyard. It’s like a game of bleeding tennis, you knock one over, laughs... They hit one back!

With the recent release of the book, have you received much praise from fans of the band via social media networks?

The interesting thing about that is really the book is judged as a story. It has a very tragic ending, now the fans are either gonna like it or they’re not. You see, Joy Division used to get played very much from a dark, intense, gothic, arty, intellectual point of view and it was that side that I could never really buy into because I knew the boys. I knew what we were really like behind the scenes and my frustrations really with every time somebody wrote a book about Joy Division, it was always about that same aspect. I felt that didn’t show any of the humanity, it didn’t show the human side of it, which was an inspiration ya know? The hard work that you put in was mind boggling really as it was a very difficult thing to do, to get a group off the ground as we did then at that time. It was very difficult and really hard work and I think that was the thing that was never coming across, the struggle and the fun we had while we struggled. So that’s what in a way I wanted to say, to get our side of the story across. I didn’t know whether the fans would like it or not.


It is interesting to read about an influential band on the road having hardships in a crashed van opposed to reading about a band and their groupies on their bus as that has been said and done many times before in rock and roll memoirs.

(Laughs!!) That’s what I was saying to you before with the comparisons of the New Order book and Unknown Pleasures; the Joy Division book. The reason that the Joy Division book is special, it’s the truth about how hard it was to make a band successful. Even though you had the impetus of Punk and the wonderful interest of all things Punk, once you got through that, to establish a group, even in this day and age to establish a group it’s probably more difficult now than it was in the 1970’s. There are hundreds of thousands of bands now, and the internet brings all those bands together into your living room. Before all you had was local competition, but now you have international competition so its very very difficult. Musicians now have to be real businessmen to survive. In the 80’s and 90’s when the record companies were king you were allowed to just be musician, now you have to be a businessman and a musician, otherwise you wont survive.

The record company is not there to baby bands or nurture groups in ways that they were in the past which is really sad actually, it’s a real odd situation to be in cuz they can’t earn any money because of illegal downloading. You can have huge hits, but they’ll never see the income from a decent gigging band. From a medium scale success band, they cant make any money from it, it’s really frightening cuz those bands have to find a new way to survive. Bands have to look after their merchandise. It’s a weird situation, my mates have a thrash metal band in England and he was saying to me that his fans have no concept of paying for music, not for an EP, not a single or tracks on their website, the kids wont buy it, they have no concept of it. But the band can sell their old guitar strings and the kids will buy them as fast as they will come off! All the t shirts, all the drum skins, they’ll fucking buy anything but they cant get their heads around paying for music.

It’s a bizarre time.

It’s a really weird situation to be in. If you go to a lot of countries, say like Russia or European countries where download is king, literally people in our merch stand when we were in Russia were all crowding around our CD’s cuz they had never seen one, a CD!

I’ve read before that bands who visit those countries often don’t sell well because their albums are more often than not bootlegged by vendors. Was this something you noticed with New Order?

That’s why we stuck to America!
But no its true, the biggest bootlegging country in the world today is Italy. Italy has really strange copyright laws, and the laws that do exist don’t really allow you to stop Italians copying your music and your record and selling it. What the Italians do now, they don’t restrict it just to Italy, they now import your copied records all over the world. So I will sign a record, probably one tonight where it will be an import from Italy that we don’t get paid for. Bootlegging is a real big problem.

Also if you go on Itunes, and it wasn’t long ago that I went on and saw a load of Joy Division songs for sale that were up for download that wasn’t by us! The bootleggers had put them up, we had to fight with Itunes to have them take em down. It took ages to get it off, people are very opportunistic in what we do. There is an entrepreneurial streak to what people do which you have to admire while they’re doing it. You have to be very careful. It is also now that vinyl is coming back, kids are buying vinyl again.. The bootleggers are gonna start bootlegging that.

On your book tour fans are allowed to also have Joy Division and New Order items signed, what has been your favorite item to sign thus far?

There was a 12” copy of Ideal For Living yesterday and it was original as well. I can tell the difference. The guy had two, he had the original 12” and a fake, its amazing the things that turn up.
It’s part of life’s rich tapestry isn’t it? I remember being in Bangkok once right, and when you walk along the main street there’s a market with loads of stalls selling bootleg CD’s. And I was walking around spotting The Simple Minds, The Clash, The Police, The Pistols and I thought well why no New Order? Aint that shit! We aren’t being fucking bootlegged! Anyway I came up to the next one and I see New Order.. Oh you fucking bastard laughs!!
You can’t win can ya?


There’s an old saying that I believe Dave Gahan said he’d heard from Keith Richards.. “If you aint being bootlegged then you aint worth a shit.”

Yeah! And If you aren’t it bothers you and if you are it bothers you! It’s a really odd situation to be in, you cant win can ya? You’ve go to be realistic.
I’m not sitting here an object of poverty am I? I’m not homeless on the street, I’ve had a very very good life and made a really good living out of it. While they may be annoying they haven’ t stopped you from achieving a wonderful level of standard of living. They can sell all the bootleg shirts and albums they want, but the fact that I get up on stage and am appreciated for writing and playing the music is the best thing. It is an odd thing, you don’t want to fixate on that side of it too much cuz it really does devalue the rest of it. I suppose in a funny way that’s what the argument with New Order does. The argument with New Order devalues everything that you achieved in the past because all you remember is the bad thing at the time. If we could settle this stupid argument then you’d start looking at it in a completely different light. And that’s what amazes me when people ask if ill ever get back with them, it’s like splitting up with your psycho girlfriend when she’s just about to split your dog in half with a saw and someone turns around and goes “Do you think you’ll ever get back with her?!?”
Not at the fucking moment! laughs
Maybe in ten years when we’ve happily shared the dog ya know what I mean!?


That was all we could discuss as Peter had to soon get ready to leave for his book event. We want to thank Peter for being so generous with his time.>

 

 

 

 

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