Peter Hook & The Light
Hindley Street Music Hall
13th July 2026
Monday is more grey than blue. Adelaide borrows Manchester’s steel skies, preparing for the arrival of Peter Hook & The Light. It’s fitting, few musicians remain so tied to the sound and mythology of a city, and fewer still can carry a legendary catalogue with such conviction.
Last here in 2024 performing Joy Division’s Substance, Hook returns to Hindley Street Music Hall with another chapter of his musical history. This time the focus is New Order’s Get Ready, the band’s 2001 ‘comeback’ record that arrived after an eight-year silence, announcing that New Order had spent the peak years of Britpop as an influence, while not partaking. While other Mancs dominated the airwaves, Hook, Sumner and company took their time to return with an album that pushed the guitars back into their DNA without abandoning either side of their identity.
A quick check of Moog punctures the room before the lights fall, like a trumpets herald. The crowd is to be expected for an icon like this, the same as those who turn out for Sex Pistols and The Damned. There are the parents who bought the albums the first time around alongside teenagers dressed with uncanny accuracy in late-70s post-punk attire, looking like they’ve wandered straight out of Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall or queued outside The Haçienda.
The opening songs may have felt unfamiliar to this crowd, not because they’re played poorly, but because Get Ready may not have occupied the same cultural space as Power, Corruption & Lies or Technique. The simple rippling keyboard introduction of Crystal showing New Orders skill for making the basic so compelling ushers the band on stage. On record the track bursts forth with massive drums and chiming guitars, but it’s going to take the first few tracks for the band to find their feet tonight. As minor tuning gremlins disappear, guitars bloom, and suddenly the record begins revealing itself in ways it perhaps never quite managed on release. Hook’s menace and growl roughening edges, giving grip to the slick production of the album.
Hook prowls constantly, dragging his famously low-slung bass even further down as though challenging gravity itself. His high-register lead (an influence for a million four-string heroes) slices through every arrangement, while son Jack quietly anchors the low end behind him. It’s a compelling dynamic. Rather than doubling his father, Jack allows Hook the freedom to play the melodies that helped redefine bass guitar altogether. It’s a family affair too, Jack is the touring bassist for Smashing Pumpkins, proof that the craft has been passed down without losing any of its edge.
By Turn My Way the entire band locks in. David Potts’ guitars shimmers while his lead/backing vocals conjure Billy Corgan’s guest turn on the original. Rock The Shack becomes the perfect explanation of what Get Ready really was: New Order rediscovering rock music without forgetting how to make people dance, similarities to Primal Scream’s Evil Heat released the year after make sense in this setting.
For a band built by synthesiser, the electronic elements are restrained. They’re used with purpose rather than excess. Someone Like You explodes with driving drum programming underneath Hook’s strongest vocal performance of the first set, while layered harmonies and Potts’ textured guitar work give the song enormous depth. For the first time tonight, Hindley Street Music Hall stops feeling like Adelaide and starts feeling like The Haçienda.
Hook remains a man of few spoken words. He lets lyrics and songs carry conversations. During Slow Jam he simply points towards the audience as they answer the repeated refrain of “Can’t get enough of this,” allowing the room to become another member of the band.
The closing stretch of Get Ready reminds everyone that beneath the electronics New Order always possessed the heart of a rock band. Run Wild arrives with warm compressed Les Paul tones and genuine emotional weight as David Potts takes lead vocals beautifully, rewarded with an approving nod from his commanding general. The harmonium slowly fades beneath Hook’s muscular bass, bringing the album to an understated close.
“Thanks for indulging us,” Hook smiles. “Life is brutal. Get Ready is twenty-five years old… and we’re all getting old.”
The punchline is delivered with the non-album Brutal kicking everything back into gear. The mood shifts towards club classics, with melancholy and euphoria becoming impossible to separate, a hallmark of every great song Hook has ever helped create. Here To Stay closes the first half with the audience fired up to dance, ignoring the fact that it’s still only Monday and work awaits for many in the morning.
After a brief interval Hook returns with a simple dedication.
“We’re going to dedicate this set to Ian Curtis. God rest his soul.”
And then it goes dark.
No Love Lost drags the audience back to the earliest incarnation of Joy Division before Leaders of Men reveals Hook’s harsher vocal delivery, carrying more bite than his New Order material ever requires. Then comes Day of the Lords, enormous in every sense. Hook physically winds himself into the climactic “Where will it end?” and somehow gives the already devastating original even greater weight. It’s hypnotising, like a cobra waiting to strike.
Warsaw, one that seems to galvanise the crowd, especially younger adherents, rips the room like a bandsaw, exposing the raw violence buried beneath the polished sheen of the first set. The band clearly understand and love these tracks, transforming the sparse late-70s studio takes, the keystones of Post-Punk into something massive. It’s a trade between understated, creeping, brutality and outright violence. David Potts deserves enormous credit throughout. His playing respects every original part while benefiting from another four decades of experience, giving these songs extra muscle without ever becoming self-indulgent.
Isolation begins to blur the line between Joy Division and New Order, revealing the rhythmic heartbeat that would eventually drive the latter. The abrasive drum machine pulse sits beneath Hook’s surprisingly articulate vocals, demonstrating how naturally the band’s evolution now makes sense when performed in chronological context.
If anyone ever needed a masterclass in Peter Hook’s famous lead-bass style, She’s Lost Control provides it. Hook attacks the melody from the top of the register while Jack holds everything together below, allowing the guitar to sound emboldened and more physical than the lean, brutal original recordings. The restrained dancing throughout the room somehow feels entirely appropriate, less club euphoria than post-industrial release.
Then comes the run everyone has been waiting for.
Transmission. “Dance, dance, dance to the radio.”
Regret.
Ceremony.
Vanishing Point.
Each explains the musical journey from Joy Division’s darkness to New Order’s sunlight and shade optimism. Ceremony in particular illustrates why Hook continues performing, living, these songs. His delivery is as much himself as it is a paean to Ian Curtis, understanding where the irreplaceable Joy Division frontman’s fragility belonged while allowing Potts to inhabit the brighter New Order material. It’s hard to do such a strong impression of a vocalist without tipping into karaoke, but Potts really does convince without fawning.
By the time World In Motion arrives, complete with birthday celebrations and acknowledgment of a diehard in the crowd sporting the appropriate shirt, the evening has kicked in and the band and room are feeling the effects. Hook laughs off a stumbled intro to Monaco’s What Do You Want From Me, apologises, and carries on with verve. There’s no sense of nostalgia, no museum theatre. This lives.
Bizarre Love Triangle finally unshackles the room, followed quickly by True Faith, all chrome, gloss and late-80s decadence. Hook grins from ear to ear.
“It’s been an eventful evening. For a Monday it’s not bad, it feels like a Saturday.”
Then the one, the lovelorn poem that’s soundtracked a billion teenage tears.
Love Will Tear Us Apart arrives alive, a monument to a band, a city, a country and a style. The audience transform the chorus into a football terrace chant, joyful despite every ounce of heartbreak contained within its lyrics.
After over 2 hours and 30 songs, Hook leaves us the shirt off his back, literally, and bids farewell, offering one final sentiment.
“God bless Ian.”
Peter Hook & The Light don’t present tribute. It’s an (atrocity) exhibition, carefully curated, refined and performed by a group of musicians who have put in the work and spent the time together to get under the skin of these songs and understand exactly why they matter.
Nearly fifty years after Hook first slung that bass around his shoulders, and let it hang to his knees, these songs don’t merely survive, they evolve.
