Forty years after the release of New Order’s seminal album Low-Life, co-founder and bassist Peter Hook calls it “the only true New Order record” – the moment the band truly honed their sound. “We were forming it on Power, Corruption & Lies, we had it for Low-Life, and on Brotherhood it started coming apart,” Hook says over Zoom.
A stunning blend of electronica and rock, Low-Life wasn’t, according to Hook, an attempt to chase the success of New Order’s massive 1983 hit “Blue Monday.” It just felt like the right time to record the next batch of songs they’d written. Still, the album’s lead single, “The Perfect Kiss,” quickly became a hit – though the band wasn’t thinking in those terms. “We didn’t care, to be honest. Once a song was finished, it was gone,” Hook says. “Our manager used to say, ‘The best song is your next one.’”
Yet, he recalls the painstaking nine months it took to finish the song, followed by three exhausting days and nights at the mixing console. “I woke up and had the imprints of all the knobs on my forehead,” he says, laughing.
In the meantime, thanks to touring, “The Perfect Kiss” still feels fresh to Hook. It remains a staple in Peter Hook & The Light’s live shows, as does Low-Life‘s “Love Vigilantes.”
Revisiting the album to relearn the songs, however, evoked difficult feelings tied to his acrimonious 2007 split from the group. “As much as I hate to say this, I can’t fucking stand hearing Barney’s voice,” Hook says of Bernard Sumner, his former bandmate, and co-founder of both New Order and Joy Division. “Everything has been colored by that ending…the spit, bile and hate.”
He likens his current relationship with the band to “a nasty divorce,” further complicated by the songs that bind them – “like children that tie us together forever.”
Yet performing the music brings joy amid their painful division. “When we were together, it didn’t make me happy, because the others were always changing things to get away from the sound of New Order,” Hook reflects. “But the wonderful thing about playing the songs now, exactly as they were written and recorded, is that it makes me happy.”
