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    Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
    Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
    Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
    Audiobook7 hours

    Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

    Written by Peter Hook

    Narrated by Peter Hook

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Peter Hook, bassist for the legendary, groundbreaking band Joy Division, takes readers backstage with the group that helped define the sound of a generation and influenced artists such as U2, Radiohead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

    Unlike other books about Joy Division, Factory Records, or lead singer Ian Curtis—who took his own life just before the band's first U.S. Tour—Unknown Pleasures tells Joy Division's story from the unique perspective of one of the three surviving band members.

    Told with surprising humor and vivid detail, Unknown Pleasures is the book Joy Division fans have been waiting for.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 29, 2013
    ISBN9780062282903
    Author

    Peter Hook

    Peter Hook was born in Salford, England, in 1956. He was a founding member of Joy Division and New Order, and now tours both bands’ music with his new group, Peter Hook and the Light. He also DJs, promoting Fac 51 and The Haçienda Classical concerts around the world. He lives in Cheshire, England, with his wife, Rebecca, and children, Heather, Jack, and Jessica, and their dogs, Wilma and Bo.

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    Reviews for Unknown Pleasures

    4/5

    104 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I cannot recommend this enough, the story of joy division’s is one that will stand the rest of time and peter hook tells it so well! From being inspired at a sex pistols concert to recording one of the most influential albums of all time. Hook also tells us of a side to Ian Curtis that is rarely portrayed and that is a young lad with bags of talent and a love of music. I thought Peter Hook paid a lot of respect to Ian Curtis and his death as well as the rest of the bands musical talent despite their differences. I love how the story is told as if I’m talking to the author down the pub and was completely enthralled and engaged.
    • 5/5
      Must read for anyone interested in joy division or in seventies British punk. Excellent writing, frequent humor, and read by author and joy division bassist Peter Hook, who has a marvelous voice.
    • 2/5
      Disappointed. Theres a few good stories but its too technical. He doesnt mention his decades with New Order and the fact that he barely acknowledges Ians death, which may have been the worst day of his life, renders the book almost pointless IMO.
    • 4/5
      When I saw Control, all those years later, I didn’t even notice it was in black and white because it was exactly what my childhood had looked and felt like: dark and smoggy and brown, the colour of a wet cardboard box, which was how all of Manchester looked in those days.

      This is a seemingly honest look at how things were back in the day when Peter Hook started out in not only Joy Division, but in life. He writes about having lived in Jamaica, in Manchester and of meeting Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and a plethora of drummers before coming across Stephen Morris.

      He writes of the good, bad old days, and not so much of the current situation - where Hook and Sumner have communication issues that prevent them from functioning together - which is good. This is after all a book on Joy Division.

      Hook has done a lot of thinking, maybe not because of Curtis' death, but maybe because he has re-hashed everything now that he's no longer part of New Order.

      There's a lot of piss-taking of himself here, e.g.

      You know what? It was the same being in a group. Just goes to show that you can take the boy out of Salford but you can’t take Salford out of the boy, because we were terrible for nicking things in Joy Division and New Order. We used to go to these wonderful gigs with all this beautiful stuff backstage and nick it all. Now you’ve got bands like the Happy Mondays, or Oasis (in the early days), who had big scally reputations, but they had the same background as us: just working class thieves. You never had anything so you took it. Same attitude to music: you’ve got to start somewhere. The difference was that nobody expected that sort of behaviour from us in Joy Division or New Order because we had the arty intellectual image. These days I restrict it to hotels.

      At the same time, it's great to see another angle of Ian Curtis, which is not the apotheosised person we often see today:

      But looking back that’s exactly what he was: a people pleaser; he could be whatever you wanted him to be. A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth – he was definitely that. But he could also be one of the lads – he was one of the lads, as far as we were concerned. That was the people pleaser in him, the mirror. He adapted the way he behaved depending on who he was with. We all do a bit, of course, but with Ian the shift was quite dramatic. Nobody was better at moving between different groups of people than he was. But I also think this was an aspect of his personality that ended up being very damaging to him. He had three personas he was trying to juggle: he had his married-man persona, at home with the wife, the laddish side and the cerebral, literary side. By the end he was juggling home life and band life, and had two women on the go. There were just too many Ians to cope with.

      The book also displays what it's like being in a band, even one which has been lauded since after Curtis' death:

      22 September 1978

      Joy Division play the Coach House, Huddersfield. “One person turned up. It was diabolical.”

      Plus some other details on other bands, e.g.:

      14 November 1978

      Joy Division play the Odeon, Canterbury, as part of their tour with the Rezillos and the Undertones. “The Undertones – they were so young. They’d bought an air pistol and were having target practice backstage, shooting cans off the stairs. Then someone brought in letters from home because they’d been away touring for a while, and next thing they were all crying in the dressing room reading letters off their mums. Me and Ian were looking at each other like, Aw, isn’t that sweet?”

      I love the bits about how the tracks came about, e.g.:

      ‘Shadowplay’ happened in a similar way: Bernard had been listening to ‘Ocean’ by Velvet Underground and wanted to write a track like that, with the surf sound, a rolling feeling in it. So we started jamming and that’s how we came up with ‘Shadowplay’. You wouldn’t say it sounded anything like Velvet Underground, but once you know you can hear the root.

      And a bit on how very little money was very good:

      So that was two days to record Unknown Pleasures. Closer took three weeks. Movement took about two months and Waiting for the Siren’s Call, New Order’s last, took three years.

      ...and:

      The beauty of Joy Division is that we never made much money while the band existed so there was nothing to sully it – no piles of drugs or cases of booze in the dressing room. We went everywhere in a convoy of knackered van and Steve’s Cortina and stayed with friends – no hotels for us, just the odd B&B. Even when we went to London to record Closer we stayed in a quite scruffy pair of flats with £1.50 per diem: you could spend how you wished, dinner or a couple of pints but not both. We didn’t yet have any money from the record. (Publishing, as in who wrote what in the songs, brings nearly all bands down. I remember the immortal quote from the Mondays: ‘Why is the one playing the maracas getting as much as me who writes the songs?’ Ironically Bez is now as important as all the songwriters, if not more. How the world turns.)

      So how reliable is the book? Hook answers that himself, and I deem him to be quite reliable just by judging on how he writes, e.g.:

      I liked Annik, though, and still do. Years later we talked about that interview she did at Dave Pils’ flat. It was featured in Control and my character’s sitting there saying dopey things about the name ‘Buzzcocks’, which I hated when I saw it. Made me look a right twat. I told Annik I would never have said anything so daft and she said to me, ‘Ah, but I have the tape, ‘Ooky, and zat is exactly what you said.’ So there you go. You shouldn’t trust a word I say.

      And in ending:

      But we didn’t do it the normal way, of course. We did it the Factory way. Not that I’d change anything, mind you. I’d stop Ian hanging himself, obviously. But otherwise I really wouldn’t change anything.
    • 4/5
      Well writ and very readable.
    • 3/5
      Hooky gives an insiders view of the history of Joy Division and life inside the band. Even the most knowledgeable fans will learn something new here. An easy and enjoyable read but with too much on inter band pranks and not enough about the music for me. Martin Hannett has for long been credited with creating the Joy Division sound and this comes across clear in this account. The small insights into the various personalities within the band were interesting and sometimes amusing. Stephen coming across as a nervous wreck, Bernard somewhat selfish - note that Hook has publicly fallen out with his ex-band members - but he does give significant credit to them at various points in the book. Apparently Hooky always had to drive the van, which he reminds us of on every second page.
    • 3/5
      Peter Hook's "Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division" reads like a transcript of what you'd expect a conversation with Peter Hook at a pub to be, talking about Joy Division. This has its upsides and downsides. It makes the book, at times, a breeze to read, but other times, when Hook slips into colloquialisms that I, in Philadelphia, don't understand, the book is a bit disappointing. The structure of the book also seemed a bit off. There were sections where Hook would be telling the story, with occasional interjections in italics from someone who I can only imagine is the editor, and then there were sections called "Timelines" which recapped the previous sections from Hook in short snippets by date, but these also contained tidbits that weren't in the previous section. I would have liked an introduction that explained how the book was laid out, who wrote what, etc. I can only interpret this form as the punk ethos coming through in his writing, but I found that back-and-forth between times and styles to be jarring. On the whole, I found the breakdown of the two Joy Division albums by track to be the best parts of the book, and the ones that I wished were longer.
    • 4/5
      Okay. Two reasons why I requested this book for review. 1. The hombre loves Joy Division. and 2. I wanted to know more about the band. Now I’m not a fan. Yes, I listen to a few of the songs when the hombre plays them (I must say, he still has the CD set of Heart and Soul that I bought him as a gift years ago - which makes me all warm and fuzzy because I got him something that he loves and still listens to..anyway! I’m going off topic here....)I thought the book was pretty good - now I completely understand a fan would greatly appreciate this book as it gives you an insight on how the band was. I liked the way it was written, it was to the point, and at some times really blunt. I found myself laughing at bits of it. Gradually as the book progresses though, it does get more serious and more sad - since you know what’s going to happen to Ian Curtis and although he was undergoing serious health issues they just kept going. It’s admirable because they went through a lot of struggle in the beginning, but they persisted (it’s also extremely difficult to be successful as a rock band as I learnt while reading through this book)The book also includes a more detailed description on each track the band has made which I believe fans will greatly appreciate and lots of references to other bands they have met, toured with, and sometimes fought with (hah, those were funny parts). It was also interesting to see how Hook describes Ian Curtis during their tour stops. (He can be just one of the guys too - which was hard for me to see) You also had to sympathize for him and his struggle with epilepsy. Hook’s narrative is very good and easy to follow and above all very entertaining.Fans will greatly appreciate this book, non fans wanting to read how a real (yes I say REAL) band works should pick this up to get a glimpse at how hard it really is (no seriously, it’s really hard and not as easy as you think!) also, nice small appearances from The Cure and Bono!!!!
    • 3/5
      Peter Hook does a very good job making you feel like he is just having a friendly chat about Joy Division. His prose style is very informal and loose. And his different view of Ian Curtis does a great job making him less mythic and more human. It must have been a difficult journey for Hook to look at this time in his life, he repeatedly states his feeling that they all let Ian down (including Ian himself) and should have done something. But as with any book written by someone in a group dynamic, we get one man's side of every situation. Bernard Sumner might have a completely different view point. So we are left with a good book, that you must take with a grain of salt. I just got to the end and my everlasting feeling was simply "I miss Ian".
    • 5/5
      I got into this book with mixed feelings. How can a bass player develop into serious writer? Thankfully I was so wrong. This book is really entertaining and it reads more like fiction than boring listing of facts. It's a true story, as Peter Hook remembers it. I liked how the book showed musicians side of Joy Division, compared to movie Control, which concentrated more on the cool factor of the band. You get the highlights and the downsides and funny insight to the life of a bass player. I'd recommend this book to not only Joy Division fans, but to anybody who's ever played in a band. It may be a long reach, but funniest parts of the book are comparable to adventures of Spinal Tap.