It was a celebration of not just one but two iconic music acts.
And there was no one better qualified throw the party than the one and only Peter Hook.
So, fans were definitely in for a treat as the legendary bassist revisited the mighty songbooks of his two prior bands — Joy Division and New Order — in amazing fashion at the Warfield in San Francisco on Saturday night.
For those who aren’t familiar with the man routinely referred to as “Hooky,” he first rose to fame as a member of Joy Division, the highly influential British post-punk act that came out of Salford to release two of rock’s greatest albums — 1979’s “Unknown Pleasures” and 1980’s “Closer.” Then, after Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis died in 1980, Hook and the two other surviving band members — guitarist Bernard Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris — went on to form the equally significant synth-pop outfit New Order.
He parted ways with New Order in 2007 and began leading his group — dubbed Peter Hook & the Light — in 2010, and has been delighting full crowds, like the one that turned out to the Warfield on Saturday, with sets of Joy Division and New Order material ever since.
“Salford-cisco,” Hook remarked at the start of his two-set performance, “We are here. And we are ready to rock.”
The crowd was ready as well, hungrily gobbling up all the New Order and Joy Division tunes that the quintet — Hook on lead vocals and bass, David Potts on guitar and vocals, Paul Kehoe on drums, Martin Rebelski on keyboards and Paul Duffy on bass and vocals — would offer up over the course of the 2½-hour-plus gig.
Hook changes up the themes and material with each tour, keeping things interesting as he focuses on different aspects of the two bands’ careers. For this go around, he’s looking at the pair of “Substance” albums released by Factory Records in the late ’80s, which are, for the most part, compilations of the singles released by the two bands.
Although Joy Division is the older of the two acts, it was actually New Order’s “Substance” that came out first (in 1987) and so Hook was, in a way, moving chronologically when he decided to dedicate the first set to that material.
After a few warm-up numbers, Hooky and company kicked open New Order’s “Substance” with “Ceremony” — one of the group’s greatest songs as well as one that seemed highly appropriate for the occasion, given that it serves as a kind of a bridge between the two groups. It was actually written by Joy Division (including Ian Curtis) and first performed by that band, but didn’t make its way onto a record until New Order tackled it and released “Ceremony” as a single in 1981.
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Over the next hour and change, Hook and his talented musical friends would turn the Warfield into one big dance party as the group continued through such U.K. indie chart-toppers as “Temptation,” “Confusion,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Shellshock” and, of course, “Blue Monday.”
The whole fandango was operating at a feverish pitch as the group approached the finish line with two of the definitive anthems of the synth-pop genre — “Bizarre Love Triangle” and the set-closing “True Faith” — which collectively sent the fans into a dance frenzy.
The musicians then left the stage, giving both themselves and fans the chance to cool off, before returning with an even-better second set that focused on Joy Division’s “Substance” from 1988.
The album portion opened with the tense, moody “Warsaw,” which is also the first song found on the 1978 Joy Division EP “An Ideal for Living.” (Warsaw also happens to be Joy Division’s original band name.)
There was one more offering from that same EP — the not-so-post-punk “Leaders of Men” — but the song that really got the crowd going was “Digital,” the 1978 Joy Division number that really was the first to fully capture and showcase the band’s classic mix of frantic dance rhythms, driving pub-rock and art-school lyricism.
“Digital” also kicks off with one of Hook’s signature bass riffs, properly illustrating how important his playing was to the mesmerizing overall sound of the band. It was awesome to see Hook play that groove, as well as some of his other unforgettable parts from the Joy Division catalog, often working from a hunched over position and plucking a bass slung so low that the wrong note might untie his shoes.
Unfortunately, Hook didn’t play the bass nearly enough — which is a problem since, well, he’s one of the genre’s all-time best on the instrument and fans paid their money in hopes for seeing as much of that as possible. Instead, Hook utilizes a second bassist in the band, freeing him up to concentrate more on the front man role, which often translates to just holding the bass with one hand and singing into the microphone.
The bass work, however, is always stellar — whether Hook is playing it or not. Usually, the second bass player in the band is Hook’s son Jack Bates. But Bates is currently out on the road with the Smashing Pumpkins — which performed with Green Day at Oracle Park in San Francisco one day prior. Yet, Paul Duffy was an excellent fill-in on bass and vocals at the Warfield.
Dedicating the second set to dearly departed Ian Curtis, Hook did an excellent job in showcasing the lasting musical legacy of Joy Division as he continued to lead the band through such all-time greats as “Transmission,” “She’s Lost Control” and “Shadowplay.” The show closed with a fantastic double shot of “Atmosphere” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” putting the finishing touch on a night of true “Substance.”
