Peter Hook Is Having a Joy Division Fire Sale

The ex-New Order and Joy Division bassist is auctioning off rare Manchester punk memorabilia.
Peter Hook Is Having a Joy Division Fire Sale

The ex-New Order and Joy Division bassist is auctioning off rare Manchester punk memorabilia.

Words: Scott T. Sterling

photo courtesy Sonic PR 

February 15, 2019

Peter Hook was there.

The former bass player of Joy Division and New Order was on the front lines of music history. Growing up in Manchester, England, it was a 1977 Sex Pistols gig that started him on a career in music. He still has the ticket stub from the show, and it’s among the rare and collectible items Hook is putting up for auction next month.

Hook is set to auction off nearly three hundred such pieces from his personal collection, including the notoriously expensive custom Factory Records boardroom table that was promptly broken by members of Happy Mondays.

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Hand-written and signed Joy Division lyric sheets, props from the movie 24 Hour Party People, fanzines, merchandise, and more will also be going under the hammer.

“I have done my time as curator of all this stuff and now it’s time for other people to be able to see it and enjoy it,” Hooky told Manchester Evening News. “But now that it’s approaching, it’s really giving me butterflies—it’s going to feel a bit like empty nest syndrome. I have always felt so proud of what we achieved and I wanted to document it. That’s been the driving force behind collecting all this stuff. It sounds corny, but what I’m doing now is sharing the joy. It’s about everybody being able to have a piece of all this history.” Register to see the complete list of items here.

The auction will take place at the Radisson on Manchester’s Peter Street at 1pm on March 2. Tickets are available here. The location holds special significance for Hook:

“The nice thing is it’s happening in the Radisson, which was the Free Trade Hall, where the Sex Pistols played,” he said in reference to the seminal Pistols gig there in 1977. “When I walked in there that night my life changed forever. By the time [New Order and Joy Division bandmate] Bernard Sumner and I walked out we had decided we were musicians. That’s where it all started, so it’s really nice to be able to go back.”

A proportion of the proceeds from the auction are going to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), the Epilepsy Society, and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust.