A working bass hero is something to be: Peter Hook & The Light host homecoming thrills at O2 Victoria Warehouse
The band performed New Order’s ‘Get Ready’ in full.
Photo: William Ellis
Peter Hook & The Light return to Manchester to play Get Ready in its entirety, along with a set of gems from across the decades. It’s a marathon of a show. But one worth the delayed onset of muscle soreness the morning after.
A trademark of The Light at this point, the first feast of the evening is 2000’s Get Ready, played in full, track by track. Not quite as iconic as a certain 1983 rose-basketed LP (or, any of New Order’s 80s output for that matter), Get Ready holds an illusive, but integral, place in the band’s discography: an overlooked come-back record for the new millennium, produced by a band who had long been dead (or, less dramatically and more accurately, fed up).
Crystal and 60 Miles An Hour chug away with charismatic splendour. Turn My Way sorely misses guest feature Billy Corgan — of The Smashing Pumpkins fame — but spotlights one of Hook’s most ‘Hooky’ bass lines of his career. No, there isn’t another word for it. A ‘Hooky’ bass line has become shorthand for a leading melody; brilliantly bittersweet and bittersweetly brilliant.
Frustratingly, the crowd appear a little docile. Usually, this wouldn’t be a problem. It’s not my place to criticise the generation above me for choosing to calmly sip their lager, rather than chug it in one gulp and form a mosh-pit. But, can’t there be a middle ground? What’s frustrating is that the show’s advertisement — a lengthy campaign at that — foregrounded Get Ready as the central hook (pun unintentional). There’s been huge anticipation — from The Light and their marketing team, at the very least — for the under-appreciated LP to be at last played in its entirety. But the crowd seem vaguely disinterested. Waiting for the Joy Division songs they know so well from old tapes of Unknown Pleasures and Substance. Tracks like Someone Like You and Vicious Streak sound sublime — and yet the crowd nod limply, like they’re watching Tom Grennan at a mid-afternoon festival slot.
Oh well, at least I got the satisfaction of hearing Primitive Notion played live: a fast-paced post punk creature of a song that should never have been subject to the constraints of the studio alone.
After Get Ready finishes, Hook dives deeper, playing a handful of rarities that only hardcore New Order-ites would have any hope of recognising (let alone knowing the words to). Brutal holds its own in the live setting — a throw-away tune, shoved inaudibly into the background of Danny Boyle’s 2000 thriller The Beach — and Here To Stay asserts itself as a surprisingly melodic deep cut that perhaps deserved a life beyond the end credits of Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 Factory black comedy 24 Hour Party People.
This is the bizarre thing about Hook’s shows — he plays songs that New Order, in their current form, would never even think about resurrecting. Call it indulgent, call it contrary… Hook knows how to please both die-hard fans and casual enjoyers idling around in time for Blue Monday.
After a quick break, The Light return for, in spirit, the real main event. It’s what they have developed a fierce live reputation for: a joyride through the very best cuts from Manchester’s death-defying punk-rockers-turned-disco-divas. Disorder, already a post-punk classic, has found a new life in the last few years, particularly through Instagram reels… scrap the pessimism. Ian Curtis’ whirring ghost-train through a metallic landscape of flashing lights and crashing automobiles is, simply, a timeless piece of gothic art. The post-punk disco keeps delivering: She’s Lost Control, Shadowplay, Heart & Soul… It’s an unmissable bass-heavy heaven.
The setlist continues to ricochet through the decades, mutating into the sparkling floor-fillers through which New Order carved out a new career for themselves. Sunrise and Love Vigilantes sizzle with adrenaline and earnest stoicism — tales of spurned black sheep, and soldiers half-dead — whilst Vanishing Point turns its focus to European hedonism. Underneath its Acid House layers, however, is a growling bass line, a shadow on the Ibizan sun, fit for The Cure’s most daring goth period records. It’s songs of this calibre that make the crowd ignore their lower back pain.
With a show like this, it’s easy to get stuck in the past. After all, it’s a retrospective. Hook is aware of that. What he may not be so aware of is the profound effect that his bass sound has on current bands of Manchester’s alternative scene (many of which I spot within the audience). This isn’t simply nostalgia. This is a conversation between past and present. Hook’s bass sound remains in the DNA of the city: from Danzic’s electro-goth splendour to In Heather’s jingle-jangle-jungle. Admittedly, I’d also be guilty of aping Hook’s bass exploits in my own group (probably to a self-parodying extent at times).
As The Light catapult through the discography of Joy Division and New Order, the sustained influence of both groups is more evident than ever. Not even in a vague, spiritual sense. Just go to a gig in Manchester or Salford. You’ll hear it.
A working bass hero is something to be. Excuse the bad pun, but that’s what Hook was, is, and continues to be. Never mind that Get Ready didn’t quite get the revival it should have had. That would be too predictable. And, besides, Hook is going to have another stab at it later this year. ‘Keep it coming’ indeed.