Peter Hook and The Light at Manchester Albert Hall in 2018.
Image credit: Jody Hartley
Peter Hook, Salford born bassist and founding member of Joy Division was set to remember the 40-year anniversary of the death of frontman Ian Curtis this May with a UK tour, but dates have now been rescheduled to January.
Ian Curtis committed suicide on 18th May 1980 at his home in Macclesfield, aged just 23.
“We’re playing Unknown Pleasures and Closer,” Hook says, explaining how he and his band The Light will play both of Joy Divisions albums in their entirety to celebrate the life of bandmate Ian Curtis.
The gig at Manchesters Apollo was set to take place on May 16th but has now been rescheduled to the 30th of January 2021 due to Covid-19.
Images by Jody Hartley
“I’m celebrating the fact that despite what happened he lives on,” says Hook.
“Ian and Joy Division have reached out to every generation since Joy Division finished, so its a hell of a compliment to my bandmates that we’ve had such longevity.”
At the time of Curtis’s death Hook was only 24 years old.
“To go through what we went through at our age in that time, which was a much more closed down, less communicative time than it is now, was very difficult” he says.
Curtis suffered from epilepsy and was very ill in the lead up to his death.
“We were too young to help him and too badly informed”, explains Hook, “you sort of live with that every week, every day every hour in some way.”
Hook explains how he and his bandmates coped: “We finished as Joy Division when Ian died, we made a deal between ourselves as kids that if any of us left then Joy Division would be over, so when Ian left Joy Division was over.”
This lead to the quick formation of New Order: “I thought, you know what, I don’t wanna go back to work, I want to carry on making music.
“We were very lucky I suppose to have the talent and the drive to get from nothing again- its a bit like snakes and ladders really, you were just getting to the top of a ladder and all of a sudden you fell down a snake…we should be celebrating 40 years of New Order very much because what we did was amazing”.
Hook left New Order in 2007 and went on to form his new band The Light in 2010 who perform the best Joy Division and New Order tracks “The reason I started playing them again was to celebrate 30 years of Ian Curtis’s life, as I prefer to call it, so its a big anniversary, we’ve been going as the light now for 10 years”.
Remaining tickets for Peter Hook and The Light’s 2021 tour can be found here.
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