[tweetmeme]The members of New Order have agreed to release the seven songs left over from the sessions for the band’s 2005 swan song Waiting for the Sirens’ Call, bassist Peter Hook tells Slicing Up Eyeballs, saying the move should help make the group’s acrimonious split “a little cleaner” and finally “draw the line” under the break-up.
Hook discussed the release of the long-rumored New Order outtakes during an interview that will be published on this site next week in advance of his upcoming U.S. tour — which will find the bassist and his band The Light alternately performing the Joy Division albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer in their entirety (see full tour dates and details here).
The consensus to release the Sirens’ Call outtakes came after the use of one of those songs, “Hellbent,” on the Total compilation released earlier this year that bridged Joy Division and New Order, Hook said. That CD, Hook said, “has led us to putting together the remaining tracks to put them out all together. That is coming, which I’m delighted about.”
What remains to be decided by the fractious former bandmates is just how to release the material. Hook said he’d like to see the seven Sirens’ Call outtakes packaged together with full-length versions of the three short New Order instrumentals — “Exit,” “Hypnosis” and “Get Out” — that appear on the now out-of-print soundtrack to Anton Corbijn’s 2007 Ian Curtis biopic “Control.”
But, Hook said, he’s not sure Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris will go along:
“As to whether they’ll put the ‘Control’ tracks in there with them or not, I don’t know. I can just put my opinion forward and see if I get out-voted or not. … I’m asking for a standalone (release). They’re suggesting we repackage Waiting for the Sirens’ Call. I keep telling them it will do them no good, because once once person has it, it will be up on the Internet and nobody will have to buy it anyway.”
Hook said discussions with his former bandmates continue, and while he noted he doesn’t have final say in how they’ll be released (“Every time I try to do something, I get outvoted”), he’s happy the Waiting for the Sirens’ Call outtakes finally will see the light of day.
And that, he said, will bring some closure to New Order:
“It would be nice, from my point of view, to get rid of those tracks in the nicest possible way that would at last draw the line under the New Order split-up in 2006. It hasn’t felt clean in any way, to be honest. So I’m hoping the release of the last remaing material will make it a little cleaner.”
Watch Slicing Up Eyeballs next week for our full interview with Hook, in which he discusses the upcoming U.S. tour, his future plans to tour Joy Division and perhaps even New Order material, the book he’s writing about his experience in Joy Division and the New Order-themed sequel he’s planning, and his work spotlighting new music via Hacienda Records.
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