New Order‘s Stephen Morris has spoken out about the chances of reconciling with “angry person” Peter Hook.
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The drummer recently spoke to Rolling Stone ahead of New Order and Joy Division’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame this year. The band was formed by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Morris in the wake of Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis‘ death in 1980.
Since New Order’s most recent reunion, the line-up has been centred around Sumner, Morris and Gilbert without Hook.
Now, Morris has opened up about the potential of reconciling with Hook, telling the magazine: “He’s quite an angry person. Basically, he doesn’t seem happy. He doesn’t strike me as being happy.
“He was happy in Joy Division, I think,” he added, “But even that I’m not entirely sure of because he doesn’t seem happy about anything. He didn’t seem happy in New Order. He doesn’t seem happy playing New Order songs.”
Morris also addressed the number of claims Hook made about the band members. Hook left New Order in 2007 and was later embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with Sumner, Morris and Gilbert over ownership of assets and the use of the New Order name. A “full and final settlement” was reached in 2017, but relations have remained strained.
To Rolling Stone, Morris said Hook believed that “we’re awful, awful people that we’ve been to him”, adding this characterisation was “a bit upsetting, really”.
“Will there ever be reconciliation? I don’t know,” he concluded. “They do say life’s too short.”
He added that if the band ever were to reunite and make one more song, it would be “a song with a long intro”.
Bands are eligible to be nominated 25 years after releasing their first commercial recording, meaning the band could have been inducted as early as 2006.
However, Hook told us that the lack of communication between him and the remaining members of New Order prevented any campaigns for being voted into the Hall of Fame. “You have to let your fans know that they can vote you in. That’s how it’s done – it’s not given to you,” he told us.
“There’s been – shall we say – a lack of enthusiasm on one side for the whole thing,” he added. “Obviously they’re making enough money pretending to be New Order so they don’t have to worry about it. So that’s cool, isn’t it?”
So far, Hook has confirmed he will be attending the ceremony, and dedicated the band’s induction to Ian Curtis.
He is in talks to perform on the day, but has made it clear that he won’t be playing with the other members of New Order.
“What they did in 2011 was, frankly, disgusting, and I can’t forgive it … so I won’t be borrowing their ball, shall we say, for any kind of game,” he said of the band reducing his royalty earnings from 25 per cent to 1 per cent.
Meanwhile, Stephen Morris and keyboardist/guitarist Gillian Gilbert have both announced they won’t be playing with New Order for “the forseeable future”. At the time, it was explained that the pair were withdrawing from touring “due to personal health reasons”, with Morris later elaborating that he was afflicted with a “pretty serious” illness.
In the same interview with Rolling Stone, Morris shared: “I’ve got a bit of a health problem at the minute, which precludes leaving the country for any length of time. We did try. We went to an exhibition, the Ian Curtis lyrics exhibition in New York a few months ago and thought, ‘We’ll see how this goes. If this goes all right, it might be worth thinking …’ And that was only two days, and it just ended in disaster. So maybe not, maybe, but I can’t really say things will get better, because they won’t.”
When asked if he might return to the band at some point, Morris said: “I don’t know. I really don’t want to dwell on what this illness is, but it’s pretty serious. It’s not something that someone’s going to come up with a cure for.”
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