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.