Substance Quotes

“Ten things you should always do when you form a group

1. Work with your friends
2. Find like-minded people
3. Have ultimate self-belief
4. Write great songs
5. Get a great manager
6. Live in Manchester
7. Support each other through thick and thin
8. Realise no one person is bigger than the group (thanks to Gene Simmons for that one)
9. Watch where the money goes
10. Always get separate legal advice for everything before you sign; failing that, ask your mam and dad”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Denial is a river in Egypt.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“I’ve read his book. I know he says the problem’s me and professes to be bemused by my antipathy towards him, and it’s true that I came out of rehab without that safety valve of drink and drugs, no ‘off’ button. I was more assertive than before. But he was behaving like the life of a rock star was the worst kind of life there was, and in my opinion he was taking it out on the group, the management, the technicians, and now the audience, and there was one person – one, me – who wasn’t prepared to let him get away with it.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“As we sat down, Barney late as usual, it came home to me how there were some things I didn’t miss about drinking, like choosing the wine. This now seemed like a right load of old bollocks. Hey, believe me, in the past I was just as guilty as everybody else. ‘Is it from the south side of the vineyard? Has it been trod by an Albanian virgin?’ All that crap! Basically just showing off, because believe you me, and you know I would not lie to you, a couple of glasses in, and I’m sure no one, not even Barney, could have told the difference between the finest Chablis and donkey piss.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Now, this meeting would have taken place in mid-to-late 2004, over two years after we started recording, and a lot happened between that summit and the album coming out. One of them was that terrible tsunami in Indonesia on Boxing Day. Because of that, the record company got cold feet on Barney’s cover image, fearing a possible media backlash, and Alan Parkes from Warners had to go to Pete’s studio, pleading with him to do another sleeve. Pete was insistent. ‘No, I don’t want to do one. I don’t want to do it,’ but Alan was just as persistent, until at last Pete got fed up and wrote ‘NO’ on a piece of paper, gave it to Alan and said, ‘There’s my answer,’ and Alan went, ‘That’ll do,’ and took it. I like it. I think it’s one of his best sleeves.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Our record was uploaded on the internet a long time before the release date, losing us unknown amounts of sales. Warners tracked it and found it was a Rolling Stone journalist’s listening copy. They even had his name. Barney was livid, wanting to prosecute the guy immediately, but on reflection Warners thought better of it. I guess they needed Rolling Stone. Our sales on Get Ready would be about 300,000 worldwide. Republic sold three million. Warners reckoned that drop was entirely due to illegal file-sharing.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“We were five gigs into a tour of more than thirty dates and Barney had had enough already. He was in the worst mood you could possibly imagine, not helped by the fact that Moby and, in particular, Outkast were going down a storm, while we were being met with young indifference and treated like dinosaurs.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“I know that Get Ready isn’t considered a New Order classic but personally it’s one of my favourites, much better for me than the dreaded Republic.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“As a group of people, New Order acted like a divorcing husband and wife: we couldn’t even be bothered to hate one another any more. We’d simply stopped caring about each other. We played our guts out most nights – I like to think we didn’t let our band politics affect the performances – but as soon as we were offstage all our heart was lost again.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Barney told me he’d written ‘Liar’ about our manager. I was really shocked when I saw the lyrics. Poor Rob.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Rob fought this so hard. He hired a musicologist in England to analyse the song. It turns out that musicologists use a scale of twelve notes and if eight of those notes are present in both songs, then the accused, us, is deemed guilty. Which we were. Rob wouldn’t have it, so he then got an American musicologist to analyse it. He said the same. We lost again. John Denver got his per cent cut and a writer’s credit. Warners wanted to take it off the album on any subsequent pressings, but we said no. I still don’t hear it now. Denver died in 1997, shortly after it was eventually settled. God, imagine if we did that with all the tunes that sound like us? We’d make a fortune. Humh . . . there’s a thought.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Barney turned up the next day feeling better, and of course the tour went ahead, but if you ask me that was a revelatory moment for him. He must have thought, They need me. They can’t do it without me.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“what happened was that one of the engineers must have heard the Sunkist vocal tape and for reasons best known to himself – shits and giggles, probably – cobbled together a bootleg, a Sunkist ‘Blue Monday’ take for fun. He obviously gave it to someone, who gave it to someone . . . until eventually it ended up with Sunkist, who grabbed it, put their logo on it, did an edit using some of the ‘Touched by the Hand of God’ video and issued it as an official advert. We protested and they ended up pulling the ad, but of course by that time the damage had been done and, like it or not, we’d advertised Sunkist. To add insult to injury, we never got paid for it. Not a cent. It’s still up on YouTube, check it out.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“The story of New Order is in some senses the story of a coup: how a band went from being a democracy to a dictatorship, and of course, it was a typically Barney, bloodless, passive-aggressive coup, in that it happened bit by bit, brick by brick, decision by decision.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“True Faith’ ended up being a big song for us, no doubt about it. The title I got from a book I was reading at the time, James A. Michener’s Texas, which talked about Catholicism being the only ‘True Faith’. Rob liked that. Here’s a little-known fact: Barney and I were the only two Protestants at Factory; nearly all the rest were Catholics. Read into that what you will.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“I suppose it was karma that Substance would then turn out to be our biggest-selling album ever; we gave away our biggest-selling record to the record company at a reduced cost – for no reason other than they couldn’t pay us for the other ones at the full rate because of bad management.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“On ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ we’d had one of our first arguments about the level of the bass guitar. Our engineer Mike Johnson had insisted to the others they were wrong to suggest turning it down. ‘It’s a great counterpoint,’ he’d said. ‘That’s what New Order is all about.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“We had wanted to use a final sample to finish the twelve-inch track off, “That’s All Folks!” from the Warner Brothers cartoons. But we were quoted $30,000 for one use. And we were on their label. Just shows you . . . no favouritism.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“We were like, ‘Hey, what are you doing!?’ but soon twigged they were trying to give us a proper Japanese welcome by carrying our bags for us. Great. This was the life. Then we looked round and saw Gillian still struggling with hers. Turns out that in this culture they don’t help a woman. We got her a trolley.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“There was the sudden realisation that maybe some of these people in charge – i.e. Rob and Tony – didn’t actually know what the fuck they were doing. But if it was a lesson, then it wasn’t a hard enough lesson, because we reacted to it by doing nothing.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Then came a rather surreal exchange about Joy Division T-shirts, with us proudly proclaiming we did not sell merchandise because we didn’t believe in self-promotion of any kind, preferring to let the music speak for itself. ‘Rubbish,’ boomed Scotty. ‘How come wherever I go I see Joy Division and New Order T-shirts, worn and for sale, eh?’ Now, we had no idea where he was going to see these things, but we were all speechless anyway. He continued, ‘I don’t believe you, and will be fining you accordingly.’ So we would get fined £10,000 for not doing our own T-shirts.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“TEN BEST NEW ORDER SONGS 1.​‘Thieves Like Us’ 2.​‘Leave Me Alone’ 3.​‘Homage’ (unreleased) 4.​‘Too Late’ (John Peel session) 5.​‘Someone Like You’ 6.​‘Ruined in a Day’ (K-Klass Remix) 7.​‘Every Little Counts’ 8.​‘Age of Consent’ 9.​‘Temptation’ 10.​‘Elegia”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“It’s called sticking your head in the sand, and because I did that I lost millions of quid and still don’t have financial security now, even after forty years of being in the music business, the co-writer of ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and many successful albums. At the end of the day I’ve only got myself to blame for said actions and for never raising my voice against signing daft agreement after daft agreement, that signed away 30 per cent of my earnings in perpetuity and all my rights to publishing and song royalties to erroneous partnerships and companies I have absolutely no control over. It’s unbelievable to me now.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Blue Monday’ went on to be our biggest-selling single ever, still is. Even so, it was never that special to us and, to be honest, I thought ‘Thieves Like Us’ was a much better song.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“There was a lot of downtime sitting by Mike, so I read. I had a little table on which I had my pile of books and, by the end, they were nearly as high as the studio ceiling. I used to get all the song titles from them. Even the album titles, as it turned out, because ‘A startling tale of power, corruption and lies’ was a review quote from the Daily Telegraph on the back of 1984 by George Orwell. ‘Leave Me Alone’ came from Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and ‘Ultraviolence’ was from A Clockwork Orange, to name but a few.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“In my rules of a group: never let the singer do his own backing vocals. To me it sounds weird. When Ian was alive he made sure that the other members had a go because that’s what you do in a group. It’s a group. Not just a bunch of musicians backing the singer.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“You reply to a fan, you get a fan for life, Rob would say. I should put that in my rules for a group, really.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“They were also the tracks on which we channelled a love of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. Ian Curtis had first introduced us to the icy Germans, and that was quickly followed by an even greater admiration for Moroder, particularly his work with Donna Summer on ‘I Feel Love’ and his production of the wonderful Sparks track ‘Number One Song in Heaven’. His solo record E=MC2 became a big inspiration and definitely led us into ‘Temptation’. All we had to do was work out how they bloody did it.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“This really was the start of a period where me, Barney and Steve would all be meeting bands and getting into producing them. Barney did Section 25, Happy Mondays. Steve and Gillian produced Thick Pigeon (who, incidentally, were Stanton Miranda, Michael Shamberg’s girlfriend, and Carter Burwell, who later made his name scoring films for the Coen Brothers).”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order

“Movement came out while we were away. The reviews were OK, and though I grew to like it more and more as the years went by, we weren’t especially happy with it at the time. When we listened to the finished product what we heard was the sound of a band whose producer had lost faith. You could hear it. The album had ended up sounding like a Joy Division album with New Order vocals.”
― Peter Hook, Substance: Inside New Order