Substance by Peter Hook

Author:Peter Hook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

‘Jetlag, Pedro’

The Manchester to which New Order returned was a very different place from the one they had left. During the summer of 1988, acid house had taken the UK by storm and nowhere was it more popular than in the cavernous spaces of the Haçienda, where it provided the soundtrack to the club’s sold-out nights: ‘Hot’, which featured dry ice pumped into the club, dance podiums, and acid music played by the resident DJs Jon DaSilva and Mike Pickering; ‘Nude’, another acid house night, again with Mike Pickering DJing to an upfront crowd; and ‘The Temperance Club’, busy forging the indie-dance links that would come to define Madchester. Into this thrilling crucible of rock and dance would come New Order’s ‘Fine Time’ single, the band’s declaration of support for the new dance movement, which along with the Happy Mondays’ Bummed album, would see indie-guitar-loving students discarding their long coats and scowls and taking to the dancefloor.

I had a couple of weeks to kick back and enjoy family life for a while while listening avidly to tales about the mayhem at the Haçienda before setting off to Brazil with New Order.

There was a great sense of expectation over these gigs. Sad to say, we had been tempted mainly by the money, a guarantee of over half a million pounds, which we needed desperately. All we had to do was keep an eye on the costs and the rest was straight in the coffers. Terry had flown over beforehand on a fact-finding, pre-production visit, and had called me from São Paulo. ‘I’m in the biggest whorehouse I’ve ever seen! And they’re all free. It’s called Kilt Shows,’ he squealed down the phone, excitedly, which pretty much set the whole tone for the tour to come.

The gigs were great. We were pretty big in England by now but here the crowds were huge and going absolutely nuts. I remember during one particular soundcheck changing my bass strings, rolling up the used string and throwing it over my shoulder into the empty auditorium. I heard a scuffling behind me on the floor but, thinking nothing of it, carried on doing the same with another. The noise increased. I turned around to see a crowd of people all fighting over the discarded strings, like they were diamonds. It wasn’t because they were fans. They were just poor. There was so much poverty in Brazil, a massive divide between the rich and the poor. Tony used to say that New Order were a bunch of philistines, because when Durutti Column went abroad they’d get out the guidebooks and explore, whereas us lot just hung around hotels, clubs and restaurants with other Brits.

He had a point. We did do a lot of hanging around hotels, clubs and restaurants and not much exploring with guidebooks. But in Brazil you were taking your life in your hands if you went off the beaten track. Even the locals never used to stop at red traffic lights for fear of getting mugged.

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