The New Order bassman has written three essential memoirs — Unknown Pleasures on Joy Division, The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club on drugs — but Substance is the best, because there’s no story like New Order. Three nobodies from Manchester, in shock after the death of their resident genius Ian Curtis, decide to keep going without him, dabble in electro NYC club sounds, and help invent the Eighties. (Bernard Sumner tells the same story in his Chapter and Verse; needless to say, a major theme of both books is how much they hate each other.) Hence the 1983 Greek festival with the Fall and the Birthday Party, a recipe for chemical disaster. Hooky calls it “the first time I ever got drunk on ouzo and also the first and last time Nick Cave turned into a bat and flew into my room.”
