Substance: Inside New Order by Peter Hook review – as debauched as Led Zep

The band’s bassist gives full details of drugs, groupies and excesses on tour, but his account of New Order’s voyage to becoming a pop institution remains haunted

When I was 13, in 1983, I spent several weeks trying to like a new LP called Power, Corruption & Lies. There was no band name, or band photos, or song titles on the record sleeve, which was dominated by a doomy old painting of a basket of roses, bone-coloured blooms against a dark backdrop. The music seemed equally forbidding: long, circling, incremental songs, with a small-voiced singer trudging across great expanses of bass and drums. Most British pop then was much brighter and less mysterious. The older boys at school noted my choice of listening with approval.

Over the 33 years since, New Order have gone from cult taste to pop institution – pioneers of both dance music and rock, co-writers of England’s only decent World Cup song, global performers of addictive, happy-sad hits such as “True Faith” and “Blue Monday” – in a way that would have bewildered earnest early fans like me. This book, by the band’s bassist Peter Hook, aims to be “the most complete and truthful record of life inside New Order as is humanly possible”. It is as self-importantly long as a Victorian novel.

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