With an advertised running time of 8 hours and 25 minutes, this whopping 8 CD set brings you the voice of Peter Hook himself reading his in parts amusing and unpretentious take on his days as one quarter of Joy Division. Any conceptions of the mythic, pained, sullen and mysterious image of Joy Division as a band is taken in hand and dismantled by Hook. You’d be hard pressed to balance the immature, laddish wind-ups and downright cruel ‘japes’ played on one another by the band with the somewhat sombre yet brutal grace of the music they made, as told by Hooky. There’s a recurring retrospective regret to proceedings as the inevitable end of Ian Curtis unfolds. A good many ‘why didn’t we see what was happening?’ or ‘why didn’t we take a break?’ questions arise as one event after another that should have rung the klaxon of concern takes shape, is absorbed, patched up or glossed over and everything proceeds relentlessly all the same. All too often the urge to forget the implications and move on seemingly from Ian Curtis himself. Hook jokes about naming his book ‘He Said He Was All Right So We Carried On’ and you have to chuckle, darkly.
