Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
Updated: Aug 8
I suppose if there was an order in which one should read Peter Hook's books, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division should have, for obvious reasons, come before The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, but my interest in the latter had loomed large in my imagination since reading the lawyer's advisory notes for clearing legally problematic passages prior to its release, and so, in one of the great run-on sentences outside of a David Foster Wallace novel, is it, despite my love of Joy Division (and New Order), unlikely that I would have read this had it not been for the utter … shit … joy?, pleasure? I had in reading Hook's The Haçienda. After all, I'm not one who has wanted to peek too closely behind the curtain of his "heroes." (After Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One, this is just the second "rock biography" I've ever read.) But Hook's honest, self-deprecating depiction of the horrible mismanagement of (to put it euphemistically) one of the most (in)famous clubs in the world, was a fun, refreshing, wild ride, and while the tragic history of Joy Division would no doubt read differently, I was looking forward to Hook's unvarnished, warts-and-all perspective on the whole Joy Division mythology.
For the most part, Unknown Pleasures delivers. There is, of course (how could there not be), a sadness and some wish-I-knew-then regret that hangs over it all, but mostly it’s full of youthful, punky energy, wide-eyed optimism, and a lot of great we-were-there and how-did-that-happen? stories. But there’s also a cautiousness to the storytelling here, especially when it comes to all things Ian, that, despite Hook’s assertion that he doesn’t buy into the Ian legend—that he and the guys never saw him that way—still manages to serve and protect that legend. On the one hand, Hook wants to lay it all out (warts-and-all, as I said), and he does that—sometimes. But on the other hand, he’s got his cards close to the vest, playing it safely, and giving the impression that he’s being careful to protect the reputations of all involved. Which, I suppose, he is. I can understand that, but with The Haçienda it felt like there was none of that, and that liberated feeling is what made that book such a treat. Still, it’s a minor complaint that shouldn’t stand in the way of reading this book if you’re a Joy Division fan, but I do hope Hook is a bit more freewheeling when he gets around to writing the New Order memoir he’s promised.
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