The Light live at the Factory

So to Manchester last night to see The Light play at the Factory. Fronted by Peter Hook, the band performed songs from Joy Division’s second album, Closer, on the 31st anniversary of singer Ian Curtis’s death, no less

Somewhat, surprisingly Hook, the former bass player in Joy Division, didn’t play bass last night, but instead stood centre stage where he sang all but two of the songs (Rowetta of the Happy Mondays sang the others). He did a fair interpretation of Curtis, growling like a tomcat cornered with a stolen piece of meat and angrily shouting in the right places, although he lacked the vocal range to render the more tender moments with much meaning.

The best bit? The encore where the band re-visited Joy Division’s punk roots, banging out a quartet of Warsaw songs and a rollicking version of Transmission.

Fitting tribute for Curtis or tribute band? Definitely the latter in my opinion, New Order actually played quite a few Joy Division songs towards the end of their stage career, but I never thought I’d here the likes of Ice Age performed live. Hearing them in the former-HQ of factory records belted out by one of the original members to the band to a pogoing audience was indeed a good way to celebrate their music.

New record casts the Light on Joy Division classics

Peter Hook’s new band The Light release their debut EP in early May featuring Rowetta (of Happy Mondays fame) on lead vocals and a back-catalogue of Joy Division songs to revisit. The EP, on Hacienda Records features Atmosphere, Insight and New Dawn Fades (all sung by Rowetta) plus Pictures in my Mind, with Hooky on vocals, which was an unfinished Joy Division song recently unearthed.

Doubtless the purists will be outraged that Hook is choosing to cover the work of his former band. My view is that if anyone is going to write the gospel it ought to be one of the disciples.

The cover (above) is by local digital artist James Chadderton. It shows the view of Whitworth Street West in Manchester. The building in the middle ground is the Hacienda, which of course has already been knocked down.

Here’s Hooky talking about the project on 6Music

Just booked: Peter Hook’s new band, The Light, perform Joy Division’s second album, Closer, from start to finish. At the Factory in Manchester in May. Tickets still

Factory days: the Hacienda must be rebuilt!

I have been sailing through Peter Hook’s The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club his account of the decline and fall of the Factory empire. Although he is not exactly Tom Wolfe or Nick Kent he tells his tale with some wit and much stoicism. The legendary club nearly ruined him and the rest of the band, as they sank in many millions of pounds to keep it going. Hooky reckons that for every person who came through the door of the Hacienda, it cost him and the rest of New Order around £10. So buy him a drink next time you see him.

The books full of anecdotes and quotes from many famous factory figures (Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Mike Pickering et al). Here’s the club’s former DJ Dave Haslam on the Hacienda’s wonderful music policy:

“Whereas music in clubs is now pigeion-holed and segregated, in those first years of acid house, the dance floor was open minded. In retrospect DJs have tried to convince us of thier purist underground credentials; that wasn’t really the case. In the acid-house era you would have heard hous, and techno, but also hip-hop records like ‘know How’ by Young MC, New Order and Euro-disco tracks by Italian production teams.”

Joy Division documentary is ‘less a requiem than a celebration’

I’ve said this before about Anton Cobijn’s Control (and lived through the disappointment), but the new Joy Division documentary, which goes on release in May, looks fantastic. Jon Savage writes in today’s Observer Music Monthly about the difficulty of finding enough unseen footage to make the film interesting, and the joy of unearthing old reels of Super 8 film to make it so. The film, moreover, has the backing of the surviving members. Peter Hook, the band’s legendary bassist, recently introduced the film at the Salford Film Festival (a phase he says he never thought he would hear himself saying) saying that the film represented the truth “as opposed to the other one [Control] that didn’t”.