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| Hook's original flyer campaign received a mixed reception. |
Former Joy Division and New Order bass player Peter Hook claims to have found a renewable energy source capable of powering his beloved home City for a generation or more. Embedded deep below the cellar of his club, FAC 251, is the rotating corpse of his former frontman, Ian Curtis.
Sat here in front of me, Peter Hook is a confusing figure. Despite his clearly expensive clothing and high end cologne, he still looks like one of the homeless; almost like someone laminated a tramp. He spoke at length about his life-changing discovery.
“It’s incredible to think that so many years after Ian’s death, he’s still bringing light and heat to the very same people he entertained in his youth”, said Hook. “I’m sure if he wasn’t so dizzy he’d be very proud”.
Hook first realised the potential energy of “Rotisserie Curtis” when he first began to piss on his former mentor’s legacy by forming Monaco in the 1990s. “It was just a twitch at first”, he remembers, “but you could feel it. Every time I visited his gravestone there was a sort of humming noise, and the soil seemed to be churning”. Hook experimented by digging wires into the Earth, attaching Curtis to a generator and then selling the rights to New Order classic ‘Ceremony’ to a major TV advertising campaign for a high street bank. The results astonished him.
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| The site of Hook's 'Eureka' moment. |
“The day that advert went out, he went into overdrive. He was doing a couple of hundred RPM and by the afternoon I was generating enough out of him to power a small fairground”. Never one to miss an opportunity, Hook quickly constructed stalls and rides around his spinning friend’s burial grounds, charging £5 for the privilege of entry. Life was good for Peter, but better was to come.
“I was trying all sorts to maximise Ian’s output, you know, releasing fifty substandard remix albums, singing vocals on Ian’s tracks live, offering free Joy Division albums with McDonald’s Happy Meals, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get enough juice out of him to power more than my country manor. And I needed more. Then Tony happened.”
Following the death of Factory Records maverick founder and owner, Tony Wilson, in 2007, Peter Hook had a revalation.
“I suddenly remembered that Factory Records had been my idea from the start. As in, all of it. The Hacienda. The bands. The music. All of it was me. I don’t know why it slipped my mind. So to celebrate, I released one hundred shit books, twice as many fuckin’ awful compilation albums, painted every building in Manchester yellow and black whether it had anything to do with Factory Records or not, and started DJing. As in, I stand there and get pissed, and some young lad plays records for me.
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| Hooky DJing. Above you can see his Curtis-powered twat vortex. |
Then I protected the name of the Hacienda forevermore by selling the fucking name of the club to Crosby Homes so they can stick it on the side of their shit apartment building and whore the legacy of a famous Northern institution to cockneys who fancy roughing it up North.”
Hook paused for laughter, a disconcerting noise, like air being squeezed out of a child with razors for tonsils.
“Anyway, for some reason, Tony starts spinning in his grave even faster than Ian fuckin’ did! So now I had a turbine engine!”
His rapery of significant cultural icons almost complete, Hook installed Wilson next to Curtis in the cellar of FAC 251, situated on the site of Factory Records’ former offices, and used the duo to power his new nightclub.
“The ampage I can get through these speakers is fuckin’ immense, but sometimes I reckon I can still hear Ian screaming.”, he says. “On a busy night, I might have a couple of hundred girls in here who’ve never even fuckin’ heard of me, Ian, or Tony, but I reckon we’re continuing what we started thirty years ago. I think when the history of Manchester comes to be written, they’ll say that I, Peter Hook, the man who invented Northern music, built the Hacienda again.”
The interview then had to be cut short due to a muffled explosion coming from the bowels of the building.
Rob Riot
FPWK
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