Peter Hook, "Unknown Pleasures"

I did finally read Hook's JD bio, and it's a more than worthy addition to the wealth of first-person JD literature out there.  He wrote it knowing that most readers would be long-time fans who had already read Deborah Curtis' "Touching From a Distance", seen the "Closer" and "24 Hour Party People" films, knew the Factory Records story inside and out, and so on.  Hook in fact references those works a number of times.  As such, there are few surprises to be found in "Unknown Pleasures", but it's not meant to be an expose or refutation to what others have written.  Hook's book about New Order, "Substance", is an entirely different style of memoir about a band that we knew surprisingly little about considering their volume of output and the length of their career.  It's much more about setting the record straight.   "Unknown Pleasures" is a mostly lighthearted, often funny read about a band that started from nothing and tried to make it big, and very nearly did. 

There are several pauses in the narrative where Hook weighs on heavier issues and provides commentary with the benefit of more than thirty years of perspective.  This book may finally put an end to the Tony Wilson romanticized version of events, where JD might have become bigger than U2 if not for their doomed prophet Ian Curtis.  In Hook's account, they were all having too good a time and too focused on their music to stop and think about what Curtis was going through.  They were young and hungry and driven and finally tasting success when he died.  If anyone comes out of it looking like the bad guy, it was the doctor(s) (unnamed) who prescribed Curtis' epilepsy medications, which were clearly messing with his body and mind to little medical benefit.  Hook states over and over than what Curtis really needed was to take a long break and rest, but nobody -- including Curtis -- could see that (or admit it to themselves).  According to Hook, nobody wanted to see the band succeed more than Curtis, who habitually insisted he was fine no matter much his health worsened.  
 

"Music Sounds Better With You" at 20

Ryan Alexander Diduck examines Stardust's one-off hit for FACT.

It's funny to see which songs from a fairly lackluster year (1998) stand out twenty years later. 

As Diduck notes, it was completely out of step with the electronic music trends of the time.  Chemical Brothers and Prodigy were bridging the gap between rock and techno, making club music palatable for alternative nation fans who wouldn't have gone near the stuff otherwise.  Against that backdrop, Stardust released their unapologetically retro disco track. 

At the time, I didn't really understand if there were artistic undertones I was missing.  Why release something so simple and repetitive?  Why recycle old ideas when the talent involved clearly had the ability to push the boundaries of the music further?  IDM sort of poisoned us into thinking that techno and house had to be complex, thought provoking, worthy of dissection and careful analysis.  But sometimes a fun disco song is meant to be a fun disco song, best heard in a club.  In that sense, "Music Sounds Better With You" had more cultural impact than entire scenes did later on (e.g. electroclash).     

Diduck loses me toward the end of his piece.  Ronald Reagan was a simpleton and was therefore amorphous -- he was whatever voters wanted him to be, which is why he was so popular.  Similarly, the masks and "screens" worn by Stardust in the video allowed you to project your feelings on to them.  Who made the music and appeared in the video?  There were whoever you wanted them to be.  And yet he seems to claim that Reagan's popularity was nothing but cheap hucksterism, whereas Stardust boldly cultivated a sense of community.   Stardust united dance music fans from several otherwise separate spheres (because their song was so damned catchy), whereas Reagan tricked the masses and blurred the lines between parody and reality?