Peter Hook calls reformed New Order a ‘tribute band’
The animosity between Peter Hook and his former New Order band mates is nothing new. However, the bassist has criticised the band in a new interview, dismissing their successful global touring and upcoming US shows as the work of a “New Order tribute band”.
New Order reformed in late 2011 without Hook, after the two parted ways acrimoniously in 2007. Hook says that he was “very shocked and angered” by the band’s reformation happening “completely behind my back” without a business deal, in an interview with Billboard. The reformed band toured extensively in Australia and Europe between February and September 2012, which Hook dismissed as “more about financial stability than it is about music.”
In a recent interview with the Telegraph, the reformed band expressed displeasure with Hook’s new band, The Light, performing entire albums made by New Order and Joy Division, New Order’s predecessors. Commenting on the furore, Hook said to Billboard, “I’m afraid that the world is full of much more important things than two fat old blokes arguing about [whether I] left the band or [we] split.”
Hook said that the biggest issue he had with New Order’s touring was that “they just keep playing the greatest hits all the time. That was one of the things that I hated when I was there – when we were actually New Order, as opposed to a New Order tribute band, which is what I feel that they are now. They are as much New Order as I am Joy Division.”
Regarding Hook’s new book, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, former bandmate Bernard Sumner said, “I don’t need to read it, it’s patently obvious that he’s so bitter and twisted.”
On 14 January New Order released Lost Sirens, an album of eight tracks which were left out of the band’s last album, Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, when it was recorded in 2005. The delay in the album’s release was said to be caused by copyright issues according to current band member Gillian Gilbert. Hook said listening to the album “reminded [him] of the good times” and showed that there was “still chemistry between us that was absolutely fantastic” despite the band’s problems.
Source: The Telegraph
