Peter Hook Has Plans For Newly Unearthed Joy Division & New Order Recordings

Last week recording engineer Julia Adamson made the startling announcement that she’d uncovered long-lost recordings of sessions from Joy Division and New Order, revealing that she’d sell them to a potential buyer via Facebook. Now the former bassist of both bands, Peter Hook, has announced plans to get them back from her.

Adamson, who was both a member of The Fall and an assistant to producer Martin Hannett, had claimed that she had contacted Hook when she stumbled across the recordings, which includes a master copy of Joy Division’s seminal Unknown Pleasures, but Hook says that’s a load of baloney, telling Rolling Stone, “There is no way on Earth that I, renowned collector of all things Joy Division and New Order, would have not been interested.”

Hook went on to say that the tapes legally belong to him and the other surviving members of the bands:

“If I found some Nine Inch Nails tapes or Stone Roses tapes, and you contacted the Stone Roses, they’d all go, ‘They’re ours!’ There’s a culture of finder’s keepers, so invariably, over the years, I’ve bought many items of memorabilia back from various people. But English law is very explicit about ownership. The band owned the copyright and the music, and under English law it’s illegal to give away people’s music without their consent. So, if Julia did want to give them away, she needs our permission. It’s the same as illegal file-sharing on the Internet.”

However, ol’ Hooky doesn’t care as long as he can get his hands back on the recordings, with plans to hopefully release a set of Joy Divison out-takes and alternate mixes, saying, “It’d be nice to issue something that fans would love and cherish. Hopefully these tapes will enable us to do something different.”

We’re giving it about five seconds before Bernard Sumner weighs in on the situation with a conflicting viewpoint. There’s no love lost between the former bassist and the current New Order frontman, with a bevy of legal problems and a general ongoing pissing contest between the two still going strong, with both having plans to write tell-all books about the New Order experience.

(via Rolling Stone)

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