“A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT”-PETER HOOK AND THE LIGHT AT VICTORIA WAREHOUSE
- Paul Evans
- Apr 22
- 5 min read
Victoria Warehouse, Manchester, 19th April 2025.
WORDS AND IMAGES PAUL EVANS
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It’s a Saturday night in Manchester and once again the city becomes the spiritual heart of British post-punk and musical revolutions as Peter Hook and The Light descend upon the O2 Victoria Warehouse. It’s to be a seismic two-part performance of New Order's album Get Ready in its entirety with an all-encompassing greatest-hits pilgrimage through the most hallowed catalogue of both Joy Division and New Order. It’s going to be a passionate homage to two of the most influential bands in modern music history so buckle up.
Peter Hook is a towering figure both literally and musically and tonight is another part of his desire to play every song he has ever recorded live. He walks on stage with the same defiant posture that defined his time with Joy Division and New Order. Wielding his signature low-slung bass, arm raised in the air, he carries the weight of decades of musical innovation with a weathered pride, not just as a performer, but as a proud custodian of a shared past, a living conduit for a sound that has come to define generations.
It's easy to forget how fresh and urgent Get Ready sounds when taken out of the shadow of New Order's 1980s catalogue, but from the very first note the room is electric. Crystal is a burst of adrenaline, its cascading synth lines and relentless bass propel the song forward with Pottsy’s backing vocals perfect. Hook prowls the stage coaxing every ounce of electricity from his iconic bass. Each note strikes like a revelation and by its close, the audience is already heaving with anticipatio.
A seamless segue brings 60 Miles an Hour, whose urgent guitars and rolling percussion spur the crowd into a rhythmic frenzy. The song’s soaring chorus crystallizes the duality at the heart of New Order’s appeal: an electrifying austerity married to a playground of swirling melodies. In Hook’s hands, it carries an almost spiritual gravity, as though every ounce of life’s transience is encoded in those chimes and stabs. The song is a classic New Order dichotomy, but it’s Turn My Way that truly stuns. Originally a collaboration between Bernard Sumner and Billy Corgan, the track shimmers with unexpected vulnerability. Hook's voice, grizzled with a wounded sincerity, brings in a new depth to the lyrics, transforming it from a late-career experiment into a set highlight that casts a hush over the crowd. As bass and guitar intertwined beneath sorrowful vocal arcs, the track emerges as an emotional high-water mark of the night.
With the audience suspended in that rare intersection of rapture and solemnity, Hook and The Light delve further into “Get Ready" with Vicious Streak and Primitive Notion. Songs that reveal the album's emotional complexity. The former, a study in seductive gloom, unfolds over shadowy synths and delicate percussion, while the latter channels a brooding tension that hints at Joy Division's haunted past. Hook’s son, bassist Jack Bates, echoes his father’s trademark melod, but adds a fresh ferocity, proving that this inheritance of sound is alive and evolving.
The Victoria Warehouse, with its cavernous architecture and blue backlighting, provides a perfect visual and acoustic complement to what’s unfolding, an echo of Joy Division’s spectral past filtered through New Order’s glimmering modernity. Slow Jam, true to its name, brings the tempo down but the intensity up. Its jagged guitar work and simmering bass create an atmosphere of thick introspection. Hook prowls the stage, locking into the groove like a man possessed. The emotional apex of the night comes with Close Range, a stunningly great performance that resonates deeply in the industrial walls of the venue before the beautiful Run Wild closes the “Get Ready” set with grace and poignancy. The song, one of the most beautiful in the New Order canon, is rendered with breathtaking clarity and heartfelt emotion. It’s a great, great performance of a classic New Order album. An album that is up there with their best work with Hook and his band giving the album new life, treating each track with reverence and raw energy.
Transmission begins the second set with a jolt and the crowd erupt into pure post-punk worship. The room, already charged, now feels volcanic as the opening drone dissolves into the skeletal riff. Hook's voice cracks with emotion as he sings "Dance, dance, dance to the radio" and the audience obey like disciples. The floor ripples with every pulse of the iconic bassline, a living monument to Ian Curtis’s ghost, summoned back by Hook’s unwavering faith.
What follows is a masterclass in post-punk legacy. Disorder and She's Lost Control are savage and lean, stripped of polish, but heavy with impact. The rawness of these early Joy Division tracks still feels shockingly fresh in Hook’s hands. Atmosphere with its aching grandeur, is offered like a eulogy, an elegant tribute to Ian Curtis, whose ghost still lingers in every note. The song’s climax, the silence breaks in a collective exhale, an affirmation of the song’s haunting resonance, but there is no nostalgia here. Only the raw power of a band responding to the immediacy of the moment, Hook’s bass line thrumming beneath Curtis’s famously fragile lyricism.
Ceremony marks the bridge between eras, a song written by Joy Division and carried into New Order. Its chiming guitar and driving rhythm are flawlessly delivered, giving it the weight of history and the spark of rebirth. It’s simply one of the most emotional and greatest songs ever written and as powerful and perfect tonight as it ever was. Soaring guitar riffs, thunderous drums and heart wrenching bass an electrifying testament to the continuum of creativity flowing from one band to the next. Love Vigilantes offers a moment of catharsis while Sunrise pounds with defiant energy, the guitars rasping like city smog cutting through dawn light. Blue Monday is a sonic tidal wave, its mechanized groove triggering mass euphoria. Hook’s bass is the engine, unstoppable and precise and the drums and synths transform Victoria Warehouse into a dystopian cathedral of noise and light. No rest is given as Temptation follows. Hook’s vocal swoop on “Oh you’ve got green eyes!” soars, wrapping the crowd in a shared, euphoric embrace.
As always Love Will Tear Us Apart closes the night. Tonight, Peter dedicates it to his wife Becky for putting up with him. “You need a medal” he adds. If there is ever a song that should be an official song of Manchester it’s this one. .It’s everything it should be tonight, haunting, emotional and timeless. Strobes flash like lightning on a storm-ravaged sea and for a moment, all time, past, present, future collapses into a singular tremor of sound.
The crowd sings every word, arms raised in collective memory as the notes hang in the air like incense, bittersweet and eternal.
Peter Hook and The Light don’t just perform songs. They channel decades of heartbreak, ecstasy, loss and triumph. They remind us that music doesn’t just exist in the past, it lives, breathes and evolves with us. Through “Get Ready”, they have reclaimed an album, breathing new purpose into its songs. Through Joy Division and New Order classics, they have reminded us how deeply one man’s bass playing can resonate in the soul of a city and the world beyond. At Victoria Warehouse tonight they didn’t just play a show. They created a moment. And what a moment it was.
SET LIST
1/ Get Ready
2/ Crystal
3/ 60 Miles an Hour
4/ Turn My Way
5/ Vicious Streak
6/ Primitive Notion
7/ Slow Jam
8/ Rock the Shack
9/ Someone Like You
10/ Close Range
11/ Run Wild
12/ Brutal
13/ Here to Stay
Best of Joy Division and New Order
Transmission
1/ Warsaw
2/ Digital
3/ Disorder
4/ Heart and Soul
5/ She's Lost Control
6/ Shadowplay
7/ Atmosphere
8/ Your Silent Face
9/ Ceremony
10/ Sunrise
11/ Love Vigilantes
12/ Regret
13/ What Do You Want From Me?
14/ Vanishing Point
15/ Blue Monday
16/ True Faith
17/ Temptation
18/ Love Will Tear Us Apart
FOLLOW PETER HOOK AND THE LIGHT
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