Found this as I was noodling around today. Apologies if this has been posted before but should be good for all the aspiring bassists out there...
New Order Restored
The Revolutionary Style of Peter Hook Leads a New Generation By Brian Fox | May 2005
There are watershed moments in rock & roll—like Woodstock or the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Show appearance—that affect musicians so profoundly that they, in turn, go on to change the face of pop music. For punk and indie rock, one crucial event was the Sex Pistols’ June 4, 1976 show at Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England. In the opening slot, punk-pop’s pioneering Buzzcocks played its first gig. In the audience—which numbered only a few dozen—future members of Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths, and Simply Red stood shell-shocked as the Sex Pistols took the stage and unleashed their fury. Peter Hook, then a 21-year-old dockworker, was among them.
“It was incredible,” recals Hook, who attended the show with his childhood friend Bernard Sumner. “What I saw was so intense and wonderful that I decided to just go for it. I had never played a musical instrument before that, but the next day I went out and got a bass.”
Within a year, the two self-taught musicians formed Joy Division with singer Ian Curtis and drummer Stephen Morris, taking the name from the concentration-camp brothels set up by Nazi officers. Joy Division became the seminal post-punk band, harnessing the energy of punk and directing it inward. The dark, atmospheric soundscapes of anthems like “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “She’s Lost Control” showcased Hook’s chorused tone and raw upper-register melodic bass lines, which snaked between Curtis’s melancholic vocals, Sumner’s angular guitar, and Morris’s mechanical beats.
In May 1980, just as the band’s star was beginning to rise in America, Curtis hanged himself. The remaining three re-formed as New Order later that year, adding Gillian Gilbert on keyboards and guitar. As in Joy Division, Hook’s high lead bass lines formed the core of the band’s songs, but New Order began integrating sequencers and synthesizers into its sound. New Order soon found itself at the center of a dance music craze as the Manchester club scene took off in the ’80s. The group’s 1983 song “Blue Monday” became the top-selling 12" single of all time, and the band continued to release hit dance tracks throughout the decade. New Order took a break in the ’90s, and Hook pursued two solo projects, Revenge and Monaco.
The last few months have been huge for “Hooky” and New Order. NME, the U.K.’s biggist music magazine, bestowed its Godlike Genius award to the band, and Germany’s Dance Music Awards presented it with a Lifetime Award. The BRIT Awards placed Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in the top five of its 25 Best Songs Ever Written, and two Joy Division/New Order songs made the top 200 of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Echoes of Joy Division’s spooky gloom and New Order’s danceable pop reverberate across modern-rock radio, with new groups like Interpol, the Killers, the Bravery, and Kasabian evoking the sounds of both bands [see sidebar, page 102].
But for Peter Hook, there is no time for nostalgic revelry. He and his bandmates continue to push boundaries on Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, a new release that combines classic New Order danceability with fresh-sounding pop. It’s a mixed bag that blends straightahead guitar rock, lo-fi garage rock, and even dancehall.
In the spring and summer, New Order will be on the road, playing the Coachella, Glastonbury, Oxegen, and T in the Park festivals in America and the U.K. The band will play close to a dozen other U.S. dates. “We’ll tour, but we’re too set in our ways to market ourselves heavily,” Hook says. “We’re not out to dominate the world again. After a while, you realize that you have a life outside the group and you have to look after it, so we are.” With Gillian Gilbert on sabbatical from the band since 2001, New Order’s current lineup is Hooky, Sumner, Morris, and guitarist Phil Cunningham, who became a full-time bandmember in 2004.
How would you describe your bass style, and how did it evolve? It’s melodic lead bass, I suppose. It was Ian who spotted that the relationship between high bass and low, chunky guitar was really interesting and unusual. My style of writing and playing came from that. Also, when I started playing bass I had an old Sunn bass cab with an 18" speaker. It was just dreadful—you couldn’t hear a bleedin’ thing. That was another reason I started playing so high, because the bottom end was just awful.
How has your style changed over the years? It hasn’t changed at all. I’m amazed I’ve gotten away with it for so long! I’ve definitely gotten better live—I don’t play half as many bum notes. But I still hit them. It’s part of the punk rock ethic. I’m perfectly happy with what I do, and I’ve never felt that it’s run its course. But it’s very difficult to come up with signature riffs like “She’s Lost Control,” “Twenty-Four Hours,” or “Krafty” [see music lesson, page 56]. I always pray to John Entwistle.
How did you write this new batch of material? Steve has a barn on his farm that he’s converted into a studio, and we always record there. Mostly we just jam together. We all play live, and we each go off on our own tangents. Then we get the ideas together, carve them up, and develop them. We work on it in sections—it’s a proper jigsaw puzzle. The task of putting an album together is amazingly daunting. We basically worked 40-hour weeks for a year and a half to write it, and another nine months to record and mix it. It was quite intense work—it certainly does not get easier over time. But I always felt like I was making progress. The upshot of it was that it was very prolific, enthusiastic, and totally natural.
Does the new album sound different from 2001’s Get Ready? For Get Ready, we were able to write the way we did with Joy Division—minimizing the use of sequences. It sounded very fresh and very angry, but it lacked the subtlety and mellowness that New Order had. When we started playing those songs live, we found that a lot of the fun was missing.
How did you come up with your bass lines? I’m quite methodical in how I work them out. If a track is prepared, I do six or nine tracks of jamming, trying different ideas with different basses. When I’ve got all the riffs on tape, I sift through them to get the best ones. In a typical New Order song there’s an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge, and a break, so if I’ve got a riff for each, I’m rocking. One of my general rules of thumb is that I don’t really play over the verses, because of how I play lead bass. I take the breaks, Bernard’s vocals take over in the verses, and we compromise on the choruses.
How did you first go about learning? I was lucky because Bernard and I started learning together. Playing with someone else is a much faster way of learning than when you sit in your bedroom with a book. Plus, the punk scene at the time made everything totally accelerated. If you formed a band, you didn’t need to have any real material to play out.
When a teacher shows you what to do, then you’re off in a certain way immediately, and that’s the opposite way of how I did it. I’m almost anti-teaching. My son Jack just got into trouble at school because his music teacher was saying to him that all musicians read music. He told her, “My dad’s a musician, and he doesn’t read music.” And she gave him a detention. Ridiculous! So that’s the sort of thing I fight against. One of the beauties of New Order is that we don’t take ourselves very seriously. People have a very serious image of us because how our music has been presented, but we as people aren’t that serious.
What has been your typical live setup? My Alembic F2-B valve [tube] preamp goes to an Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory chorus pedal, then to a Crown DC-300A, a fantastic old valve power amp. I’ve used that setup for about 25 years. The Crown’s bottom end is amazing. At one point I had six of those old Crowns, but they kept going down all the time. I used to use a Roland SIP-301 preamp as well. I use two 15" Gauss 5460 speakers; they’re 20 years old, so they’re nice and soft, and they add distortion.
With Revenge and Monaco, I updated my setup to an Ampeg SVT. I would crank it up all the way when I played live. But in New Order, I have to keep my stage volume down. So now I’m trying to work out my sound with Ashdown. Ashdowns sound fantastic on the bottom end, but since I don’t actually play that many low notes, I’m checking out their guitar amps. I’ve been using an Ashdown guitar amp live in the studio, and it’s been absolutely amazing—it’s a wicked sound. But there’s something psychological about playing through a guitar amp.
What is it that you want out of an amp? Crunch, presence, and warmth—a crunchy softness. Being lead bass, it needs to have sustain. But mainly, I just need to know that if I switch an amp on, it’ll work. I’m paranoid—I’ve got five spare setups.
How do you get your tone? On the instrument, I leave the bass and treble knobs all the way up, but not the mids. I suppose I’m very lucky—my settings haven’t changed for 20 years. Bernard and Philly spend days and weeks searching for guitar tones. I sometimes get paranoid about not changing my sound, though. It’s a weird predicament that you feel when everyone around you is changing, but you’re not. But they all say, “What are you worried about? It sounds great!”
What basses do you play the most? The Eccleshall is perfect for playing live because of how it sings; the sustain is great. But it just doesn’t work well in the studio. For that, I always use the Yamaha BB1200s.
You don’t have onstage feedback problems with the hollowbody? Oh, I love the feedback!
Have you always played with a pick? Yes, because I like the attack and the physicality of banging away with a pick.
What strings do you use? Elite Bass Sensors. They’re fantastic. I use really heavy strings: .060, .065, .080, .105. They’re like tree trunks, and very hard on the fingers. Since I play high all the time, that’s how I get the strong-sounding bottom end. I also strung my 6-string with heavy strings, .050, .050, .060, .065, .085, .105. So it sounds nice and tight, but it kills your fingers after a couple of weeks off.
Do you play keyboards as well? I’ve written on keyboard for New Order, but I just love playing the bass, and all I want to do is play the bass.
What music do you like to listen to? I get into a lot of new music these days. I love Snow Patrol, Bloc Party, and Secret Machines, and I’m a great fan of the Zutons. The Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlite, and Kasabian are all brilliant. My son Jack is at the age where he’s digging it all. He’s good at spotting the stuff that sounds like Joy Division and New Order. He’ll bring it to me and say, “This sounds like you, Dad. Listen!” He gets more upset about it than I do. He’s just started playing bass himself. I’m delighted, because if he gets half as much out of it as I do, he’s going to be a very happy boy. It’s strange to be sitting around talking about bassists with your son. It’s quite sweet and touching, really.
Who are some of the bassists you admire? One hero of mine was John Jack Brunell of the Stranglers, because of how he’d play loud riffs. And I always liked the way Paul Simonon wore his bass with the Clash.
Live, you wear your bass down by your knees. Do you record sitting down? Recording is serious work, so when I’m doing it, I have to stand up and go for it.
When you play live, do you improvise much? No, it tends to all be written out beforehand. The problem I have is that when we play, I get really excited and run around like a fucking maniac, which leads to me playing some fantastically wrong notes! It’s all very strange, because I remember a time when I was very shy. But we turned from kids who played with our backs to the audience into leather-trousered, motorcycle boot-wearing, groin-thrusting lunatics. I don’t know how it happened.
In your two side projects, Revenge and Monaco, you used another bass player. Yeah—I’d play the high lead parts, and the other bassist would go low. That’s because I can’t really sing and play at the same time. We went through about five different bassists, because nobody could play like me. I think the way I play is very simple, but I couldn’t find people who could do it. They were all very accomplished bass players, but they just had different instincts, and your instinct is what makes up your style.
You’ve also worked as a producer. I went through a period of having my own studio, but I realized what a pain in the ass that is. I actually got to the point in my production that I was doing pretty well. I did the Stone Roses, the Go-Betweens, and a few others. I like producing. It’s rewarding, but it’s very hard work.
As a producer, what do you bring to a session? Instinct. I’m good with people, so I can get them to do things. Most of the people I work with are friends, and it still stays like that. The way I produce is that I will not do anything the band doesn’t like. When I was young, a producer came and did something I didn’t like with our music, and I have to live with that every day.
What drives you? I get terrified at not being able to put a bass riff on a song. It breaks my heart if I don’t put a top bass riff on every one of our songs. I’m devastated. So that’s what drives me, because that’s all I want to do. I want to be the bass player in New Order, and I want people to hear it and go, “Fuckin’ hell—he’s done it again!”
Toy Division Hooky sounds off on some of the basses he’s played over the years:
Yamaha BB1200s “It’s a 22-year-old bass that’s been on every single New Order album. I’ve tried to find a backup to it, but I’ve never found one that sounds better. The top end you can get out of it is amazing. It took me eight years to find another one; now I’ve finally got a spare.”
Eccleshall “It’s made by Chris Eccleshall in Cornwall. I wanted a hollowbody with Yamaha electronics, so he took the active electronics from a BB1200s and built a full-scale neck-through bass with 24 frets.”
Shergold Marathon 6-string “I used to play it a lot, but I haven’t used it on the last two albums.”
Overwater C Bass & Guild Starfire “When John Entwistle died, I went to the auction for his guitars, because I wanted to buy his Gibson Thunderbird. It went for 57,000 pounds! I bid three times, but I realized my wife was going to kill me if I went through with it. I was really glad to get these two, though.”
Gibson EB-2 “I loved the shape of it, but it just wouldn’t stay in tune. I must have spent about 200 quid on a new bridge, new pickups.”
Hondo II Rickenbacker copy “It was absolute shite.”
Gibson EB-0 copy “It went out of tune between F and G on the E string.”
Thanx for posting!!
cos it was such a blatent rip-off of isolation, so i had to go grab him and share the angry moment with him. its fun, we talk bass a lot its well good 
My dad wasn't, but I could have given her a long list of musicians who say they've never read music at all in their careers and still turn out quite sucessful.
What a good interview.
but i will reply to it tomorrow cos im going to bed now, im not well today, got a cold, but i will reply to it all tomorrow i promise.
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