The Cruellest betrayal
Just three months after her death, Mrs Merton star Caroline Aherne’s ex-husband has branded her a sex mad, violent drunk in a savage book. So how COULD he be so callous?
YOU shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, or so the old adage goes. In his new autobiography, rock star Peter Hook actually quotes the saying — before criticising a man he once brawled with at a party, who has since passed away.
Neither does he afford this courtesy to his former wife, the comedian Caroline Aherne, whose sudden death from lung cancer in July stunned her legions of devoted fans.
In fact, he is brutal in his dissection of her character and apparently untouched by any measure of sorrow at her death.
Caroline is painted as a Jekyll and Hyde ‘banshee’ who was physically abusive towards him — claims which have horrified her grieving family.
The cold style of his narration makes the allegations more shocking still. Here, for example, is his account of the night in July 1998, just a year after their divorce, when Caroline called him at 3am before taking an overdose.
‘She was going: “I’m so lonely. I just wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to apologise,” ’ he writes.
But Hook was more concerned that Caroline had managed to find his new phone number, and was interrupting him in bed with his new girlfriend.
‘I told her to f*** off and hung up,’ he writes. ‘Then I said to Becky: “We’re going to have to change this number.” ’
The next morning the couple turned on the TV to see images of Caroline being stretchered into an ambulance.
And that is it. There is no regret, no stomach-churning realisation that however troubled his ex was, she perhaps was trying to say goodbye.
It’s hard to reconcile this bleak picture of misery and hatred with the love story of the once-glossy celebrity couple.
Caroline Aherne and Peter Hook married in 1994, the year she debuted her brilliant turn as mocking chat show host Mrs Merton.
She would go on to cement her reputation for plain- speaking comic genius with her appearances on The Fast Show and The Royle Family, which she co-wrote.
Hook, meanwhile, was the bassist and co-founder of first Joy Division and later New Order, until his relationship with his bandmates deteriorated into a bitter feud.
Their marriage lasted just three years, during which Caroline rose to the height of her fame.
SOME feel that we should applaud Peter Hook’s honesty in revealing the dark side of their supposedly gilded life. When it recently emerged that his new book featured a chapter on his late ex-wife, his car-crash of a marriage and some shocking accusations about her tendency towards domestic violence, several charities were quick to praise him for speaking out.
When you read the entire book, however, it’s hard not to feel that this man — an icon in the music industry — has been horribly vindictive towards a woman who is, sadly, not around to defend herself.
For his memoir is one of the most comprehensive dismantlings of a reputation you are likely to read.
Caroline, so loved for her wit and warmth, is depicted as a ‘screaming banshee’, a jealous, scheming and controlling ‘psycho’ who repeatedly attacked her husband with bottles and cigarettes, and even once drew a knife on him.
When they parted, he claims she told him she would probably kill him if they didn’t.
Shocking stuff, and as Hook relates his resulting descent into depression, it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for the man.
That can’t be said, however, for his decision to open up about their sex life, her predilection for sleeping with married men and her suggestion that they invite a prostitute into the marital bed (Hook says he declined).
He even questions his ex-wife’s sexuality, in a rather gratuitous way, claiming that she had a ‘thing for girls’ and used to visit strip clubs ‘where no one knew her and she could sit transfixed’.
Few characters emerge from this book looking good.
While the music scene is depicted as a world of debauchery, awash with drugs, Hook also paints the mid-Nineties comedy scene as ‘boozy and incestuous’. Comedians were ‘two-faced bastards’, he writes, who, when he and Caroline split, ‘closed ranks’ behind her.
Of Caroline’s fellow comedians, he wrote: ‘They drink together, sleep together, bitch about one another behind their backs, while going out of their way to tell each other how great they are to their faces. They’re insecure, paranoid and hypersensitive to criticism.
‘There was a lot of sleeping around in that world. While we were intimate, she would delight in telling me who she’d slept with and even where they’d done it, complete with all the gory details, like how she’d make them phone their wives after sex.
‘She loved taking me backstage to mingle with these comedians, with me knowing who she’d slept with.’
This isn’t so much airing dirty linen in public as thrusting it into his audience’s faces.
It drips with mischief-making, too. There are vengeful jibes at people who have slighted him and curious digs at famous faces.
Davina McCall will hardly welcome his startlingly vulgar recollections about his encounter with her at the music industry’s annual Q Awards.
‘Up on stage to receive our award, Barney [his former New Order band mate Bernard Sumner] quipped that I couldn’t speak because I’d had one Viagra too many — the funny b****r — and then Davina was mortified when I found my tongue and used the opportunity to try and remind her of an occasion she’d no doubt rather forget involving my hotel-room coffee table. All in all, not one of my finest moments.’
Caroline’s brother, Patrick Aherne, has said on social media that he is ‘ disgusted’ by Hook’s claims.
‘He was married to my sister over 20 years ago and they were divorced because the marriage did not work well. What sort of man would make these claims after the death of Caroline? Is this
because she is not here to defend herself?’ he wrote.
‘Why did it take Hook 20 years to make them? I know the general public will now realise what type of individual Hook is and I sincerely hope that they do not waste their money on his book.
‘R.I.P. Caroline — the world knows you were an amazing woman. I do not think the world will be saying the same about that excuse of a man.’
PATRICK is also upset, understandably, that Hook has seen fit to include some deeply unpleasant anecdotes about Caroline’s family. He relates being at the hospice where her father was dying, and being the only one in the room with the old man as he passed away — because the rest of the ‘mad’ family, Caroline included, were out in the corridor, embroiled in an argument.
He goes on to describe, in toecurlingly flippant style, the moment of Mr aherne’s death: ‘I’m sat there looking at this stranger and he’s looking at me, and then he does this weird throaty sound that I can only describe as a death rattle, and he dies right in front of my eyes.
‘God forgive me, my first thought was: “Oh no, she’s going to f***ing kill me for this!” I had to go outside and break up the fight to tell them the poor b*****d was dead.’
an intrusion too far? Patrick isn’t the only one to think so.
‘the family are distraught,’ said Lucy ansbro, agent of Caroline’s friend and co-writer Craig Cash, and a good friend of the aherne family. ‘It is cruel.’
She also questioned why Hook’s allegations of domestic violence were not raised at the time of the couple’s divorce. after all, the animosity between them at the time was well known.
Interestingly, no one except Caroline’s brother has claimed that these allegations were not true — but there is almost universal agreement that Peter Hook has gone too far in making them public in this way.
another of Caroline’s old flames, the comedian David Walliams, whom she dated for a year in 1999, told similar stories of her dark side in his autobiography. But his account was far kinder.
‘Caroline, sober, the real Caroline, is the sweetest, kindest, gentlest most loving person you could ever meet,’ he wrote. ‘However, when she drank, the alcohol poisoned her mind.’
although Hook does say she had a kind and generous side (he talks of him once admiring a Harley Davidson, then of her buying it for him for his birthday), the good is far outweighed by the negative.
Even those who might have been expected to speak in Hook’s support have declined to do so.
PR consultant Jayne Houghton, who has known him since the early 1990s, said she felt he had ‘gone a bit too far’. ‘She was a national treasure,’ she said of aherne.
It is never easy to decipher the truth when the glare of celebrity distorts a story.
and yet, from Peter Hook’s side, every person we speak to mentions the word ‘honest’ when describing him. trevor Johnson worked for Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub — the musical hub of Manchester in the Nineties — and knew Hook professionally during his marriage to Caroline.
He said the first he knew of any serious problems was this week when he saw reports of the battered husband claims — yet he had no doubt that Hook’s report would have been accurate.
‘all I can say is they presented themselves in a certain way for the public. What went on in private was clearly very private and very different.
‘ I think he’s described what happened honestly and in a certain context. I have known Hooky for a long time. He’s a nice fella.’
Explaining why Hook might face a backlash for only now revealing his story, he added: ‘People have an affection for Caroline aherne that they did not have for Hooky.
ANOTHER acquaintance, who asked not to be named, said: ‘ Hooky is the most straight-talking guy I know. a lot of this did come as a surprise, but his relationship with Caroline was a nightmare. they just brought out the worst in each other.
‘Hooky has many faults, but being dishonest isn’t one of them. He just tells it as it is.’
But there are times when his bluntness is horribly inappropriate.
His book includes a throwaway story about arriving at the undertaker’s to arrange his mother’s funeral. He was high on drugs and, when told the funeral director was absent because of a bereavement, enquired: ‘Does he get a discount?’
Back then his ‘acting like a loon’, as he puts it, was forgiven. ‘Everybody put it down to grief,’ he writes, clearly amused.
alas, he can’t cite grief as an excuse for his attack on the woman he once swore to love and cherish.
Indeed, as he proudly writes, he did not join in the mass outpouring of grief at Caroline’s death and could not, in good conscience, pay his respects.
But will he come to regret being so eye-wateringly candid about a woman whom so many idolise?
One thing is sure. It isn’t just his ex-wife’s reputation he has trashed in writing this book. His own is in pieces, too.