Peter Hook & The Light

Who is Peter Hook? He is a bass player and co-founder of seminal Seventies band Joy Division. When Ian Curtis died, he went on to form New Order with the remaining members. He took over lead vocals, although his voice isn’t brilliant. He’s now touring as Peter Hook & The Light.

The gig was originally scheduled to start at 7:30 at the Opera House, so I booked early at Highwater. It was later rescheduled to an 8:30 start, so we had plenty of time for dinner. The food at Highwater is very good – we had oysters, burrata, pancakes and flounder. All delicious.

Afterwards we toddled down the road to the Opera House, and took our seats in the dress circle. The format of the show, as announced, was to play two albums in their entirety: Substance, by Joy Division, followed by Substance, by New Order. Yes, eco warriors that they are, they’ve recycled their album title. 

Well, they didn’t do that. They started with three songs not on the album, before reaching Ceremony, and playing the whole of New Order’s Substance, then tacking on Touched By The Hand Of God at the end. If you’ve ever listened to Substance, you’ll know that it’s a double album, and some of the singles, notably Blue Monday, were released on 12” format only because they’re so long. At around 10pm, the lights came up and the band left the stage.

But wait, so far they’ve only played one album! This party is going to go on all night if they’re going to play the whole of the Joy Division album as well! I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I can handle that much Joy Division…despite their name, they were a gloomy bunch. It’s grim up North, you know. I don’t know as much Joy Division as New Order, so we took the executive decision not to sit through another hour or so of gloominess just to hear Love Will Tear Us Apart at the end. We therefore curtailed our Hook experience, somewhat thankful that they’d decided to do the New Order album first, and headed home.

That set list in full.