Peter Hook & The Light, Rescue Rooms, Nottingham

Supported by Humanizer

First up tonight are a band that Peter Hook himself signed to Hacienda Records, Salford’s Humanizer. They combine two musical forces of the Manchester music scene, dance and indie into songs that are complex, ambitious animals. Lots of bass and heavy guitars but at the heart the pulsing technology of a dance beat. It's something that's been done a lot recently but somehow after a slightly indifferent start Humanizer quickly grow on me. Clearly they have something the others don't. Well worth a listen and listen I will.

Peter Hook and the Light take the stage to the Pogues’ ‘Dirty Old Town’. Whether this is a statement of sorts on the mud being flung from both sides after his acrimonious split from New Order, I don’t know but I thought I’d start the rumour anyway.

Post split, Hook decided to revisit the work of their former incarnation, Joy Division, and with his band he’s been playing both of the JD's famous albums 'Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’ in their entirety, as well as more recently the cobbled together compilation 'Still’.

None of which went down particularly well with those remaining in New Order. In fact Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris viewed it as something akin to sacrilege. Hook’s actually gone further and been reinventing some of the songs with X Factor’s Rowetta on vocals. For which, Sumner and Morris might have a point.

There’s no Rowetta tonight however, which is fine because I’d rather hear what Hooky himself can do with the material. Tonight its 1979’s 'Unknown Pleasures’, which is fairly obvious from the fact that we have the album cover as both the backdrop behind the drum kit and on Hooky’s t-shirt. Actually it's good to get the first album first although I prefer 'Closer', which will hopefully come to Nottingham another day.

They don’t start with 'Unknown Pleasures’ though. First up is ‘Exercise One’ a track recorded during sessions for the album but not included on it. Then follows ‘No Love Lost’ and ‘Leaders Of Men’ from their debut EP ‘An Ideal for Living’ from 1978, the rest of which surfaces later. Then it’s ‘Glass’ and the splendid ‘Digital’ from their label’s ‘A Factory Sample’ also from back in ’78.

It seems we’re getting almost a chronological history lesson here as they then, five songs in, launch into the full album set.

The crowd are already impressed, have gone pretty much ape for every song so far and continue to do so all night. A factor in this is probably that the majority of the audience tonight, me included, will never have heard the bulk of this material live before. This, I guess, is why we're here and why I think Sumner and Morris are wrong. There never will be a tour by a fully reformed Joy Division because there can't be. I think Hooky understands this. It would be nice if the others were on board but they’re not and tonight it doesn’t seem to matter because what we get is simply terrific.

Hook and his band deliver a respectful and faithful reproduction of every Joy Division song they take on, not just recreating them but giving them an awesome power than you simply cannot get just from the records. The Light have a terrific guitarist in Nat Watson, an amazing drummer in Paul Kehoe and then of course there’s Hook’s bass, although he shares bass duties tonight with son Jack, who is no shirk himself. There’s also a keyboardist in Andy Poole and you can’t fault the passion that any of them put into it. Making the songs seem rather fresh and modern, not at all dated.

Vocally, things are different of course. Hook isn’t Ian Curtis and probably doesn’t want to be. Yet his vocals seem to fit the material almost as well. It helps that his singing has improved immeasurably since the days of Revenge and Monaco.

Meanwhile the whole thing is conducted amongst one of the best and most enthusiastic atmospheres I’ve seen at a gig for some time. At times, it's actually quite moving.

There are so many highlights but the trio of tracks that form the midpoint of the album - ‘New Dawn Fades’, ‘She's Lost Control’ and ‘Shadowplay’ are particularly outstanding. Not just because during ‘She’s Lost Control’ Hook appears to wave at me, even if it does turn out that I'm stood next to his Mrs.

Then after what seems like no time at all, an immensely powerful ‘Interzone’ segues in to the dark ‘I Remember Nothing’, which closes the album and the set.

The band return for an encore, some of which is drawn from ‘Closer’. ‘Isolation’ and ‘Twenty Four Hours’ are sandwiched between ‘Dead Souls’ and an amazing performance of ‘Ceremony’ before they leave the stage again.

Is that it? No. The band return a second time to treat us to the rest of ‘An Ideal for Living’ in the shape of ‘Warsaw’ and ‘Failures’ but still they’re not finished as they complete the second of two four track encores.

Which isn’t bad coming from a band, in both Joy Division and New Order forms, that have been notorious in the past for not doing them. I've never seen New Order do an encore. Although I see their current line up are doing them these days and also doing the odd Joy Division track as well. Wasn’t that supposed to be sacrilege? Lol.

As The Light get around to probably Joy Division's most famous numbers ‘Transmission’ and of course ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ you almost want to burst in to tears in gratitude. Then when it really is the end, Hooky sheds his t-shirt and throws it triumphantly into the crowd. Job done. Point made.

You could call The Light a tribute band, and maybe we should, but OMG it was some tribute.

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Editors, Engine Shed, Lincoln University

Support comes from New York band Cold Cave who are on stage when we arrive, standing behind three bands of synthesizers. It’s so 80’s retro, so Gary Numan, except they don’t sound much like him. In fact they sound more like New Order than current media darlings’ Delphic do, who happily sound nothing like New Order despite what the music press say, at least not when they were any good. Cold Cave are early New Order, when they mattered.

One of their members looks like that guy from Sparks, the miserable one, but only because he looks, well, miserable. There’s a girl on another of the synths, plus a drummer and then there’s lead singer, Wes Eisold, behind his keyboard. He’s more into being moody than miserable but they make a good sound. Their obvious 80’s-ness is mixed with a noisier edge which perhaps points to Eisold’s punk/hardcore background.

I love ‘em. Excellent stuff. My kind of electro, move over Delphic.



We only saw the Editors in October at the beginning of their 'In This Light And On This Evening' tour, but they were so good, we just had to book to see them again. Well, when I say good; they weren’t quite as good as I expected. On that night they seemed oddly subdued, well Tom Smith did, the crowd certainly were and the track selection irked me a little. So a second chance tonight and boy, did they take it.

What I didn't want them to do was to keep the same format of the set, same start, same end, same encore, as they have been pretty much doing, throughout their jaunt across Europe, the US and even down under. The middle of the set though has been ever evolving and that is the beauty of the Editors, they epitomise what I like in a live band. Their set is likely to include almost anything from their three albums, no track is ever completely forgotten and labelled as ‘we don't play that anymore’ as some bands so. Nothing is too obscure. B sides or tracks off the bonus CDs they often throw in with main albums. 'You Are Fading' is one such track that has become a live favourite. I just felt singled out on the wrong end of track rotation in Sheffield last year.

They start the same, although at first I don’t think they’re going to as Tom Smith himself appears to muck up the intro to 'In This Light And On This Evening' and has to start it again. 'Lights' follows and yes, all the big numbers are present and correct of course, 'An End Has A Start', 'Bones', 'Blood', 'Bullets' etc but what’s this... ‘A Life As A Ghost’ off the Cuttings II bonus CD. Cranky enough for me? Oh yes. I always find a cranky set list much more enjoyable than an obvious one. By the way, 'You Are Fading' is absent tonight, so they’ll get letters of complaint about that, but this allowed room for some cracking diversity.



Tonight they also play ‘The Boxer’, the only track off the new album criminally omitted last time. Possibly the best of the more doleful numbers of the new album.

Then there’s ‘Escape The Nest’, a live favourite, not played (just to annoy me) last time, and boy did I take it personally. It’s even more awesome live than on record. I’m one happy bunny tonight.



This is followed by much confusion and blank looks all round. I don’t know this one and looking round nor does anyone else. Turns out to be a brand new track called ‘Last Day’, played for the first time tonight. We are honoured and pretty good it sounds too. Of course Tom Smith still introduces nothing. You would have thought at least a few words about this one but no. Still he’s generally just as theatrical tonight as usual. He is not a man who is capable of standing still, literally throwing himself into things, or sitting still for that matter. He’s just as animated when he’s seated at the piano. His hands and body continually trying to embellish the song. He is so into his own songs and tonight, so too are the crowd, right from the start and this makes such a difference to the atmosphere.

Tom is a treat to watch but then so too is Mr Popular, Chris Urbanowicz, whether this be on his Rickenbacker or on the keyboard with the guitar slung across his back. You be forgiven for thinking that some of the words to their songs are ‘Chris Chris Chris’, such is the frequency of their utterance from the crowd near me.



Slightly surprised that ‘Camera’ is still in the set but it’s excellent again tonight. Then we have a really big finish with ‘The Racing Rats’, ‘Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors’ and ‘Munich’ back to back. Playing ‘Munich’ has really stuffed the encore, so it’s got to be different now.

Tom returns on his own and as he tinkles at the piano I think for a moment he’s going to play ‘Distance’ which would have been awesome but no, he gives us a ‘Twilight’ moment, well a ‘Twilight: New Moon’ moment. Their song ‘No Sound But The Wind’ which was part of the soundtrack but has yet not seen the light of day on any of their own releases.



‘Bricks And Mortar’ lifts the pace a touch before ‘Papillon’ cranks it up further and then Tom turns positively chatty, thanking the crowd generously before ending again with ‘Fingers In The Factories’.

No complaints from me tonight. Ten out of ten.

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