On 4 June 1976 Peter Hook was twenty, worked at Manchester Town Hall and had never touched an instrument. That evening, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, he saw the Sex Pistols play in front of a few dozen people. The next day he borrowed thirty-five pounds from his mother and bought his first bass. He did not know the difference between a bass and a guitar. He took it home on the bus in a plastic bag.

From that gesture came a career that spans half a century of British music. With Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris he founded Joy Division, the group that redefined post-punk between 1977 and 1980. Hook developed a style without precedent: he played the bass in the upper register, on the D and G strings, turning it into a melodic instrument. At first, the reason was practical: his amplifier was so poor that the low notes were inaudible. Curtis encouraged him to stay in that range. The sound that emerged became one of the most recognisable bass sounds in rock history.

After Curtis’s suicide in May 1980, the three surviving members formed New Order with Gillian Gilbert. The group integrated sequencers and synthesizers into the post-punk fabric, and Hook’s bass remained the link to the music’s physical component. The collaboration ended in 2007, contentiously.

In 2010 Hook formed Peter Hook & The Light; his son Jack Bates would become part of the project on bass. Hook then began a systematic project: performing live, album by album, the entire Joy Division and New Order catalogue. By now, the band has played well over eight hundred concerts. In 2026 Hook was announced among the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees as a member of Joy Division/New Order, and he is devoting the year to the tour for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Get Ready, New Order’s seventh album, dedicated to manager Rob Gretton, who died in 1999.