Substance: Inside New Order

Peter Hook SIMON & SCHUSTER. £20

Exiled New Order bassist spills the beans.

Hooky’s latest banzai book blast might not ease his return to New Order. One section heading reads “But then twatto returned” – a salute to frontman Bernard Sumner. The way Joy Division and New Order combined high art with base behaviour is well established, but this book rides that tandem to new dimensions – a massively candid sprawl of drugs, STDs and scatological pranks. Hooky is told to fuck off by Liza Minnelli, a roadie steals the shoes from the feet of a sleeping New York tramp and an early Greek festival appearance is announced with a promising local headline: “THE FASCISTS RETURN”. But there’s much more than carnage – including intriguing digression on both studio technology and the Spud U Like baked-potato chain. The 768 pages will delight both New Order-ites and general rock readers, revealing the astonishing human bathos behind this group’s godly future-rock.