We’re Back! And so is Hooky!

Well it’s been a minute hasn’t it?

Things were going along swimmingly near the end of 2019. We had just returned from a once-in-a-lifetime dream gig in Hebden Bridge, UK to see the temporarily reformed Adorable play two stellar gigs at the Trades Club, visited Manchester where, with a music legend leading our way, experienced first-hand some absolutely iconic locations never to be found in any tourist guide, and had returned to Canada to settle in for holiday season with all kinds of plans for Disarm 2020 already brewing.

What’s the saying? Life happens while you’re making plans? Outside of the scientific community, I don’t think very many could have predicted Covid-19, or the impact it would have on the entire planet. We lived through the SARs scare of 2003 in Toronto, which resulted in a music festival where thousands rock-and-rolled at Downsview Park with Rush, ACDC and the Rolling Stones. No lock-downs. No panic. None that I recall anyway. Why would this be any different?

I wonder if anyone kept their Rolling Stones face mask?

In the early months of 2020, work sent us home “for a few weeks”. Just in case. We never returned, at least to that office anyway, as working remotely turned out to be an efficient, and appealing answer for the industry I’m in.

Most of the world shut down. Live music played to packed rooms vanished and the venues and pubs locked their doors. Many forever. The landscape of our world and how we spent our time since Disarm was born was essentially wiped out within a few months. Sadly, we lost a lot of our music heroes too.

Needless to say, the world changed over the next two years. Everyone I know, save a single person, has been hit by Covid. Fortunately, those cases were relatively mild. We too went through it and came out no worse for wear.

So here we are, (mostly) on the other side of it. Restaurants are open. People are socializing. LIVE MUSIC IS BACK!

And so is Disarm.

But where to begin…well what better way to kick it into gear than with Hooky?

Peter Hook and the Light will grace our much-loved Danforth Music Hall for a two-night stint on August 11th and 12th, performing the Unknown Pleasures and Closer albums by Joy Division, and opening with a New Order set.

We are beyond chuffed to be attending the Peter Hook experience for what will be the 7th time, testament to the fact that Hooky and the band never fail to deliver a set that keeps us moving and singing all night long, and always leaving us wanting more.

Tickets are still available, so grab em’ while you can. We hope to see some familiar faces and raise a few toasts to those that survived it, and those that didn’t. It’s the “perfect kiss” to start things up again.

Words and Hooky photos by Dave MacIntyre. Sars photo by Aaron Harris of the Canadian Press.

Peter Hook and the Light Live at the Danforth Music Hall. Love and Will.

There is no other song in the world quite like “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. It is unquantifiable, except to say, you had to be there (on a night in a small room, decades ago, in another realm) or there (spinning records three thousand miles from something called Manchester, just a little too late) or even there, at a Peter Hook and the Light show, last week.

If you are over 40 and a certain kind of music obsessive, for whom music is intertwined with your rapid eye movements and synced to your heartbeat, you’ve listened to this song, and many others by JD & NO untold times in every possible scenario of your life. It’s special in a way that defies attempts at reduction, TV show faux-nostalgia mimicry, or commodification. It is a monument, indestructible,  the remaining, shining, towering anthem of the end of our beautiful century;  of rock and roll;  of underground; of punk, and the end of youth of the last generation that still held any semblance of innocence into adulthood; before the square, interrogation-room bright leash of mobile devices. When we watched and heard everything in the moment, lived without a record or a public statement, of a time so beautiful not one picture of evidentiary value exists, except in our hearts.

At the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, seeing Peter Hook and the Light play live for the fifth time since he mounted his ambitious solo departure from New Order, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” shines, swells, and rockets around the theatre like a firecracker. It spills over friends and strangers alike like an upturned cup of overpriced lager. It shakes, rattles and rolls inside the devout like we were told to expect from religion but the calling totally missed us – it never felt like this. It threatens to bruise like the grip of a girl on her devoted man’s upper arm, the bicep, the hard won grip of a thousand youthful tears, close shaves and real tragedies, as we 80s kids understand and feel more than ever what Ian Curtis was singing about in that heavy heart of his, so long ago. A songwriter, so young to be in so much pain, maybe never dreaming it would change the entire world, or fearing it would. Peter Hook, single-handedly, and despite what anyone else thought about his decision, has erected this monument personally as a labour of love, one he’s been fine-tuning for over five years. The show is a stunning two-for one, no opener, no time. We get, these days, a full New Order Substance, cut for cut, followed by an entire Joy Division show. This time, the crowd are first timers, more cohesive, the girls not just here to “up-down-turn-around” anymore. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is always the closer. A final stunner. It cracks open the despair of love. It is an artifact of the brilliant, shining, matter-of-fact Mancunian truth-telling knack. It lets us into the bedroom of a heartbreak that would never heal, that would instead, yawn into a chasm and just stay there forever. It’s an appeal, and a self-defensive motion at once; the passive-aggressive roller coaster of young lovers embroiled in pains they haven’t lived enough, yet, to master. Some never do. Things harder than romantic love. Illness. These tragedies abound us. These young people haunt us all. Maybe if I say it, I will break the curse. Maybe I’m wrong to be cynical. Maybe if I sing it. Maybe. Without doubt, the force of this song, and others, would have conquered America in 1980.

It is all this and more, and yet it’s entirely transformative. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” transforms itself, played live by its only creator who is now able to do so, so well, into the opposite of its bald fears and hopeless despair. It rallies, it asserts, by its towering originality, its impossible, unpredictable and unusual nature, its powerful truth, and the contradictory truth that emerged out of its creation and longevity: (This) Love / music will keep us together. Forever is real. We know all too well that the bedroom gets very cold. We know too much about love’s destruction. And yet here we are, enveloped in an unlikely anthem that was the only anthem possible out of our brilliant, misunderstood time (which is still our time, our music still ahead of its “industry”.)

What “Love Will Tear Us Apart” says and what it does is a beautiful contradiction that sums up all of us spilling out of that time we now call post-punk. We are standing here experiencing it all, – for not the first time – and not even the first time of this version of Peter Hook’s / New Order’s / Joy Division’s music, but there is still discovery. How could something so full of relatable despair from faraway and long ago written by a lost poet create something so transcendently powerful? Here, in 2018? Worldwide? Uplifting and healing and something that keeps our very hearts afloat? Our feet on the right side of ledges? It’s a beautiful mystery. It takes a lot to surprise me, to raise my brow. But I wait for it. I’ve been watching & listening forever.

It’s a mystery Peter Hook understands and carries with him as casually as a low-slung bass. He wears it gracefully, he sloughs off the shallow social media comments that once followed the New Order split, and as ever, rises above the nays, and the fray, he always has. He’s written essential books about his time, and now lets his work speak for itself, for he is one of the most interesting cats to ever walk on a stage, yet elusive, so that when he appeared right beside me once, on the fan side of the barrier at the best new festival in the U.K., Shiiine On Weekender, to watch a bit of someone else’s gig, looking right at me, I failed to process it and must have looked a right arse, forgetting my good manners to even nod in recognition before he went backstage again. To me, he had always been eight feet tall, on a video screen, in my shock, my imagination was stuck in a video loop of long ago.

As reporters of the burgeoning renaissance of OUR music (the best of the best of the best artists who still remain) this magazine has happily attended a number of life-changing events that cross-cut time and make decades disappear like sinking ships* in the last three years. But this one is different. We directionless teenagers learned something from Peter Hook, faraway, long ago, impossibly grand on our floor model TV sets in suburbia. Then, it was a detached cool, a uniqueness, a devil-may-care anti-fashion that was better than any bespoke suit. We have so much to learn even now. People who don’t know the difference might miss that what occurs on stage with actual legends is quieter, with no pyro, with no razzle dazzle needed but the sound. Peter Hook, looking twenty years fitter than most of the room, leads by example not just musicianship & hard graft but about shaking shit off, overcoming, adjusting, mourning, celebrating, preserving, and the most careful budgeting of (other people’s) nostalgia that is also transformed by the artist so that it isn’t nostalgia at all, but relevant and real and alive.  Seeing “Factory Records” on a page at a current day box office creates strange, powerful feelings in me that only the most romantic souls would understand. Many of them stand in the room with me. One of them towers just a little above us, way too close to believe, fully reining in what could easily fill the Pyramid Stage right now, and aren’t we lucky? We who stood at the back of some concrete piles on top of plastic folding chairs at the bizarre setting of a roller coaster park in what used to be a nowhere north of this city to see shapes that were said to be New Order, once? Where bands used to play, where cameras had to be dashed into shrubbery to be forgotten later, where beer was elusive and so we poured whatever money we had on Republic t-shirts.

The weird, scary, wooden roller coaster, rising out of nothing, taunted us and landmarked road trips north, once. It’s now all expensive suburbia of a Toronto that is endless, that has mostly turned away from music, from self, from the fire in our young bellies. That roller coaster, that park, when it came, finally made us feel a little more American, which we thought meant cool, fun and daring. But it became something better: a place for 80s kids to see British bands we loved with all our hearts, planning our summers around their visits, like our parents would for relatives, all of us saving up middling minimum wage money. We never understood why they came down from our TV screens, which hardly ever played the best music except for late at night, once a week, and came to our Wonderland and didn’t just pass us by. Toronto had the biggest inferiority complex, then, and so did all of us born into it. Between artists and us was a sea, literal and figurative. We got music late then, by boat. We had to seek it out, on whiteboards written by someone who closely read the bible, NME, in one specific store downtown. I had one particular friend that would call the store, who would go and haunt that board, who kept us all organized, and so made sure we caught one of the only five copies of Select Magazine, which, although they never gave us the free tapes promised on the cover, we would happily shred to death; reading, sharing, discussing, in suburban basements.

The trajectory, worthiness, or current status of the music of Peter Hook-Joy Division-New Order is not something I debate with anyone. It’s like Jesus, or Shakespeare, or chocolate. Either you know, or share in this love, or you don’t. It’s beyond moot to me. In the bad divorces of beloved bands, the heartbreak and unlikelihood of long careers and the many short lives that pile up around all of us still here, in the fractured current non-culture that is screaming in pain everyday calmed only by gifs of doggies and kittens as our inner toddlers come to the fore, the fact of Peter Hook and the Light building this new show, this band, and working tirelessly around the world since 2012 could only be good prima facie, you know, if it was even okay. But it’s not okay. It’s epic. We’ve watched it grow here, and even in the U.K., traveling far and wide ourselves for music love at last, in little ‘ol Toronto and the unreal digital space that we never knew was important to the world of music at all, frail & precious things and places we must fight to defend with only our fists. What Peter Hook and the Light’s efforts have been are something monumental like the nostalgists would have you believe can only happen at a time you must have surely missed. In black and white, in another place. Wrong. Forget ’em. Listen to me.

We journalist / fans have been lucky and also smart to be there for the new and brightest era of Peter Hook, the man who now bends and folds time, who once reinvented the bass and made it a lead instrument / almost vocal like no one else has ever done and only ever plagiarizes. Hooky’s deep notes and basslines carried forth into New Order a mystical thread of Ians’s own singular voice, a subtle dirge for the lost young artist and man. New Order, after Ian’s death, went 180 degrees from Joy Division, of course they did, they had to, pivoting into synth and dance music, pioneering that also, by digging deep into scenes on two continents to keep moving, stay alive, and save their worthy dream. Ian Curtis is still a touchy subject, and now, so is New Order. But none of that is up for debate, anymore, in my circle. This music needs to be played and be heard; it is important and special and much needed today. Because, among the other reasons we all know, something in the new millennium is about willful forgetting. A tendency toward consumption, hoarding; an ultimately unromantic world of “storage” and “content” and compression and minimization. People who miss it need to see this music played live by Hooky, where it can be appreciated, and where, now, their own music-oriented kids can learn from the experience. In Toronto, A bass player friend who’s in five different local bands appears in the crowd from somewhere, he knows our usual spot; front, left. He’s here to see us, to “Woo!” Canadian-style, (we’ve slowly grown bolder over time) and he’s here for a closer look at the bass playing; the ratio matters not to us. We make room, our laughter childlike, unrecognizable, unrestrained. We’re all part of this transmission. From darkness to light.

Jacqueline Howell

Photos: Dave MacIntyre

*The Killers, Dustland Fairytale.

Peter Hook & The Light Live in Toronto

Peter Hook & The Light at the Danforth Music Hall, Tuesday November 29, Toronto

Peter Hook and the Light take the stage at Toronto’s best, most special and most fun venue, early, at 8:20, and with no opener. They’ve made a good number of Toronto stops in their just four years touring Hooky’s Joy Division and New Order music, with increasing buzz each time. In a tremendous reversal of what a lot of new music today does, or gets to do, Hook’s new work grows all by itself through authenticity and real, old fashioned, word-of-mouth. It doesn’t hurt that the music was developed over the last great musical era, in the most fertile place in all of Europe, by the most innovative band who was unafraid to experiment and take risks, even after early success and terrible loss under another name.

But it’s not name recognition or love of this iconic music that’s made this tour a sellout, conquering US city after US city like a modern day Viking before a lovely finish in Montreal and then, here, the dessert: Toronto, where someone deserving is welcomed like a god for bloody once.  Hook’s performance honed over more than 30 dates in two months is utter musical reinvention and reclamation, the purity and clarity of stripping down something monstrous- a worldwide famous household name brand- to its essence by a genius with an ear unlike any other, different than the other geniuses out there wielding an ax, but no less a guitar god than whoever in Metal is so often named. It’s now Peter Hook’s reading of New Order and Joy Division that matters. Like Johnny Marr’s recent solo efforts, it is much more these days than the sum of its parts was, and better by miles than the competition. It’s streamlined, a killer beast, majestic, lithe, the top of the food chain, rogue, punk. It’s punk again. It’s anti-establishment. And it sings.

We are told that Peter Hook and the Light, made up of members of one-time side-project Monaco with the addition of Hook’s son Jack Bates, have done 400 gigs as of tonight. More than New Order did in 40 years. Not just shade, this fact is deeply significant. It illustrates the point about stripping down, packing light, and taking only what you can carry. Like Renton escaping his groundhog day life at the end of Trainspotting. The stage is spare, no banner or flag, everything heaped in the center, musicians around it, nothing frivolous or decorative. (How often does a venue staffer say that it was an easy set up, when a legend is in town?) It looks like a jam in someone’s house. Hooky’s house.

Trust me when I tell you, Toronto doesn’t let loose unless they mean it. Tonight was the wildest, most open -hearted night of strangers we’ve ever seen, and been part of, in all these years. That I can ever remember. It was, in fact, the closest three hours to Shiiine we’ll ever find here. And all of us there helped make it so, led by the visionary co-creator and bassist of the best album of singles of the last 40 years, played live, cut for cut. After just a few minutes break, a tour of Joy Division’s works, music that demands to be played and heard, is played for another full hour. No one dares to budge. No one will succeed in pushing to the front now. Tonight, those at the front have earned it.

New Order live was never like this; beholden to machines, maybe, on big, cold, faraway stages, in the crummy sports arenas of our lo-fi youth, something sterile in the mix got in the way of the beauty of their creations, there were too many cooks. But this is raw, alive, sweaty, loud, uncut rock and roll, unashamed love and life itself. And even on the bigger stages will remain so, now-we can attest. We know every note, every beat, and yet it’s better than the records, it jumps off the records, and it simply shorts out whatever circuitry is left in the mockery of music in this era of the digital file, in the homes and heads of people who have no stereos anymore. We betrayed ourselves for pocket convenience. We’ve been conned. We betrayed our art, our own gods, this. Guys, we have to go back.

Our fandom, here in Toronto, of New Order, was strong, but very remote indeed. Toronto in the eighties felt to us like (and was) an island far away from the world we loved, Britain, where we sometimes got music a few years too late. But we’d caught up by 1987, and you see, when we got it, it stayed with us forever and forever and forever.

It is 25 years later.

We are telling people we are newly acquainted with, good, fun, interesting people, who’ve been at the gig in different places around the happiest room we can ever remember, alone, together, about our trip down to Shiiine On Weekender in the UK to see Peter Hook last year. The Kaleidoscope is flipped. For this night alone, Toronto is the center of the world. And a corner of England and a festival that, in this group, only we know about is a faraway, unknown thing. 

Peter Hook and the Light know about Shiiine,  though, they (very much) helped make it historic, and it was. He’s headlining a two night mini-cruise that’s the next Shiiine project, with two different set lists for the most devoted, in March. We know our place, but feel part of a larger Shiiine Family that extends all the way to Hooky himself, something unbreakable and special. Something new, tailor made for this new era of iconic tunes. We can’t help but tell our friends, only late at night, about what we saw and felt, there, in the afterglow of what has happened here tonight.

But the truth, that I only dare whisper to my partner and my Shiiine friends in private messages is that tonight is even better. The rest is all agog stunned incoherence, like we felt when Marr came in 2014.

Once the gig ends about 11:00 we move the night to a nearby pub we frequent for vinyl night. This is among our patch of haunts now in a new life we’ve made, and we love it. We spin our own copy of Low-Life for ourselves and everyone else with us, or not with us who’ve come rushing in for late night drinks we don’t need but conversation and understanding that we all do, will bank for regular chilly Toronto days with our blank runway stares that we wear all the rest of the year. We run into the girl who caught Peter Hook’s T-shirt. She fought a few guys for it, she tells me. I love that. Later, when the socializing is over and the night goes silent, last up as usual, it will be teary stillness and late night secret messages to early risers across an ocean, who understand this. Even though this music has never left our lives, something ricochets back to age sixteen with Substance 1987 (/2016) tonight, to that mess of tangled, knotted Christmas lights inside me. To hit the ground at 4 am, full of operatic regret, and write to a faraway friend, just daring them to respond: “It’s the sound of a time that never happened. Like the world was our oyster. It wasn’t. It sounds like fuel enough to conquer the world. I didn’t.” He rises to this unreasonableness. So, never happy, I press on “this is decidedly anti-nostalgia. I am course-correcting that stupid girl-” Well, I’m sorry, but that’s the power of music like this. From this source. Across an ocean. Across 25 years. Across a lifetime. Across the human heart. Beautifully stubborn. Evergreen. Essential. Unstoppable.

Up, down, turn around, please don’t let me hit the ground. Tonight I think I’ll walk alone, I’ll find my soul as I go home.

But two hours earlier, just before we leave, still up, never down, the bartender/DJ stops us. Wait! Wait! Don’t go. He’s young, encouraging, he started this vinyl thing last summer and he is interested in history, in histories, in music, in liner notes,  gets the wonderful absurdity in Kenny Rogers’ trajectory and the deep, obscure religion that is Elvis, celebrates with us that early period Tom Petty is deeply unsung, and much more, in a hodge podge of a roommate’s vinyl, with newer, classy items handpicked just lately, welcoming all to join in, free of judgement, erasing the usual biases buried in music snobbery; in near-downtown bars. He takes us back to the happiness of discovery & sharing a listener experience that was so important once, and the funny little details that only happen in the artwork of vinyl records of certain ages and origins. In people. Even in us. He mans the whole bar, a kind and funny word for everyone, and runs to catch the skips that happen even on the overpriced “mint condition” vinyl we all buy nearby, that we can’t afford but need to save. That we have no way to play, except for here and now. I wonder if he knows about the Peter Saville pure works of art that the New Order sleeves are, probably, he does.

He gives us hope; he brings his record player across town every single week on public transit. He wanted to go to Hooky, he gets it, but he had to work, he is needed. He stops us. He forgot to play it before, he was saving it- just today he picked up a Joy Division single of Love Will Tear Us Apart. We’ve never even held this single in our hands or seen it, and it’s from our own youth, when records were shared and special, when we thought we’d always have the friends whose bedroom floors we lounged on like cats, whose houses stood close to our own, mirrors, we imagined were our own, that have been demolished now, most cruelly, like a beating heart. In a glowing, vivid night that can simply not get any better, he plays it very loud at 2:30 a.m. just for us. We rattle apart like cheap speakers, we fly to pieces like wooden picture frames hung on finishing nails in first apartments, we feel like we’ll never be able to speak or write another word.

Words by Jacqueline Howell, gentle prodding and photos by Dave MacIntyre

Peter Hook & the Light: Substance On Tour

The city we live in, and the wider world of music lovers who know and remember the 70s and 80s, has finally turned a corner.

Peter Hook & The Light at The Phoenix, 2011.

After a committed, years-long effort to widely tour first, his Joy Division masterpieces and then, the early works of New Order, Peter Hook, an undeniable bass god, innovator, musical (and Manchester) ambassador has achieved something brand new in the cities that need routine shaking up these days: He’s made us remember, in our bones, what it felt like, back then. He’s made a clamour, just like he and his band mates did all those years ago, he’s ripped apart the complacency and staleness that befalls even the biggest music cities in between very special visits from those very special living legends across all genres that matter, and he’s done this by doing the impossible: by reinvigorating and reinterpreting music so iconic and so deep it is tattooed upon two generations’ very marrow. Songs that feel as innate as a pulse, that beat the same way. Grooves that he alone invented, using an underappreciated instrument in all new ways, that took the masses from the Joy Division depths of the darkest places of the soul, to the transcendent crystalline New Order anthems that would define and dictate what it meant to dance in the 1980s. And not just in Manchester or England or Europe, but across the world.Peter Hook should not have to prove anything to any one of us. He’s changed the world a couple of times already. But the world of music needs him now. New Order tours in the 80s and 90s in North America were spotty, intermittent things, but well-remembered, and attendance at those in the big and lucky Canadian and American cities is one of those badges of honour still carrying currency when you feel out a new friend or business associate to this very day.  The importance of Joy Division, and of New Order, can simply not be overstated. No matter how many pints are attacked and left for dead in an evening of discussing one of our bands as deeply as our own family members, and with more invested sometimes.

With or without the cred or the opportunity to have seen New Order when New Order was intact (& included founding member Peter Hook) the music he worked to create in those formative years holds an uncommon place in millions of hearts that loves it still, like a first, best crush that never let you down. Like if Molly Ringwald’s Samantha of Sixteen Candles and her Porsche driving Adonis of substance, everyone’s boyfriend Jake Ryan, stayed young and in that first bloom-freeze frame forever, candles burning brightly, never got old or fat or yelled at one another, and definitely never ended in bitter divorce, the rusted Porsche now being bitterly fought over, their bratty and ungrateful kids never even knowing how beautiful their parents were, once, that impossible red hair now gone ashen.

New Order music still shimmers and raises the roof of any room the discs are spun in, and it always will. Joy Division still hits us in those sad places, comforting and empathetic when we are at a low. The specialness, the untouchableness of these records is well known. But what’s newer, and what really adds profound meaning to all this casual beauty of all of our younger days is that as the original players and fans all age, we are confronted with the truths of mortality everyday. In music, whether because we’re pining for that heroic singer we never got to see who will be forever mourned who died long ago, or the legends who died in 2016. Our 80s dance, post-punk, and new wave (aw, hell, the best of it has no genre at all, internet cataloging be damned) has a different lifeforce than the holier than though, mono, diner sountracked 60s. It came of age, we came of age, in the cold war. In various kinds of cold wars. The end of the century. Fear and loathing. Recessions and repressions and disconnectedness as normal. And music was then our only church, our only teacher, our only dad. This truth cuts across a bunch of genres but has a feeling. It was made by, and speaks to, creative people who aren’t about databases, lists and soundbites but know the plain truth that there is a genre called, only, Clash Music. There is a genre called, only, Joy Division Music. There is a genre called, only, Cure Music. And there is a genre called, only, New Order Music. And for many of us that last genre ended,  in its original form, in 2007.

Peter Hook & The Light in Minehead, 2015

What came out of New Order’s dissolution was there for anyone fit, willing and able, to pick up the pieces and move on. Never mind the books, the press banging out the same old note, loving a feud as they do, loving to see, to fan the flames of, and to feast over any bones they can get of any ugly public breakdown, as if this majesty could be reduced to a red top headline. You need only be in one of the rooms (or watercraft) when Peter Hook has been playing with his new outfit, ably accompanied now by his son, Jack Bates, trading off highs and lows, changing the narrative and evolving, unafraid, committed, the frontman he always really was, in tour after tour now developing into an appealing singer far closer to Ian Curtis than Sumner ever was, to forget all you knew or read or wondered or grieved or griped about that band or this band or the band before; to know that this is a rare artist whose heart is bigger than his talent even; underneath that utter cool, that he breathes and lives to this music as we do, more, you know, you must know, and that the claim upon all this art and these beats is asserted because it’s right and good and erasure of the past is sometimes all you can fucking do to live again. It’s the news of the day. It has happened without much fanfare at first, with the easy sneers the now irrelevant press taught us drowned out, and been built, again, from the ground up inside a room in Manchester, and brick by brick in a new foundation of sound and feeling. You’ll know if you were there, if you’ll be there. That is, if you can get a ticket.

Peter Hook & the Light play Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall Tuesday November 29th (Sold Out).

We’ll be writing on and photographing the show when not cheering and crying as we’ve done on two continents since 2012 so check back with us for more on this story.

Words by Jacqueline Howell, all photographs by Dave MacIntyre

We wrote about Shiiine On Weekender’s first year and the historic, still talked about Peter Hook & the Light show that brought the house (tent) down, here.

Here’s a snippet of that review, just about a year ago now:  “Hooky’s God-like status intact, we are the lucky ones at a very special gig. Here we get no less than an assault of Joy Division and New Order’s finest, and their finest can touch you in places in the heart you thought for sure had died along with your innocence…it’s genius: unencumbered by the grind of breaking in new music and at last answerable only to himself, the fans get an intense and pitch perfect wave of nothing but gold. This alone would have been worth the trip (overseas from Canada to UK), and the ridiculously reasonable ticket price.”