M'Lou Elkins 
Peter Hook and the Light – House of Blues – Dallas TX – 9/3/2022
For the first time in years, I bought band merch on Saturday night. It was a tee shirt, signed by Peter Hook. I bought it perhaps due to the emotional high I was still riding from the fourth song in his setlist. But we’ll come back to that.
To open his show at the House of Blues in Dallas on Saturday, Hook seated himself on a stool, armed with a six-string bass, and strummed through a rendition of the New Order classic “Elegia”. The song memorializes Ian Curtis, the legendary, tragic frontman for Joy Division, and features as the first track on side two on Low-Life (1985), New Order’s third studio album. A wonderstruck audience stood in dignified silence, as Hook offered the song’s haunting, wistful instrumental as a requiem to an old friend, for whom the track was written so many years ago.
From there, Hook opened up the soundscape with a string of New Order catalog crowd-pullers. Hook first bled into the equally wistful, if more briskly-paced “Your Silent Face,” followed by the more driving “Procession”, which itself builds from the elegiac to the more propulsive sounds of angst.
It was here that the full, percussive memories of youth were at their most pervasive and why I was compelled to bring home my memento.
As Hook launched into the clamoring drum beats that opened “True Faith,” I was awash in my own emotional bedlam. The words “Oh my god” spilled silently from my mouth as I turned to my friend and immersed myself in the surrealism of the moment. It was 35 years earlier that I rode in my mom’s 1983 Medium Tan Chevrolet Cavalier every morning on my way to Catholic school. My early teens were angsty, miserable and, among other things, plagued by disdain for my religious education. But every car ride, every morning, I would click my New Order mixtape into the cassette player and tranquilize myself with the anthemic poetry of Hook, Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Morris, and Bernard Sumner. “True Faith” played in that car daily, gearing me up to face another shit-filled day.
I suppose I wasn’t alone. The pervasive, pithy refrains of pre-Madchester bands like Joy Division and New Order, alongside The Fall and The Smiths, had architected the soundtrack to our lives. Perhaps more than a soundtrack, the music of these bands was therapy: lifeboats for an ever-grateful generation of youth in distress.
True to form, and embracing his own form of dignified silence, Hooky was fairly reserved onstage. With few words stringing together the movements and passages between various musical eras of his career, the audience would sometimes earn a quick nod of acknowledgement. A few times, the requisite spectator would yell Hooky’s name and draw a quick smile – a blessing, as it were, from the legendary mind behind the epic ruminations of at least one generation.
Evoking both the trauma and therapy, Hook’s music reunited a crowd that has for years, decades, been moved by the hypnotic, pensive strains of his era-defining melodies.
Check out the full photo gallery from the Peter Hook and the Light show…
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