PETER HOOK 

Peter Hook | Credit: Stefano Masselli

Undone by the death of a singular frontman, the English band Joy Division looms larger in absentia than it did during its actual existence. From 1978 to 1980, in the ailing steel town of Manchester, Joy Division and its creative partners made the strange and bracing music that now attracts a dedicated global following. The glowing reputation of this foundational post-punk band is also a product of savvy stewardship.

Maybe no one argues for Joy Division’s transcendence more effectively than founding bass player Peter Hook, who is on tour with his backing band, The Light, performing the stark songs of Joy Division and its influential electronic successor, New Order.

Peter Hook | Credit: Eric Swalens

The bleak but accessible beauty of the songs themselves is the primary draw. Iconic Joy Division tracks including Control and Love Will Tear Us Apart still hum with internal tension: They are stark and ethereal, and perfectly inhabited by a singer, Ian Curtis, who embodied the band’s duality, channeling  waves of emotion through a clipped, almost robotic baritone. For some, the music also has a tragic allure because Curtis committed suicide on the eve of Joy Division’s first U.S. tour. But with band catalogues so easily accessed online, it’s likely that many newcomers to Joy Division register the songs first and the backstory later.

Hook is a prolific chronicler of those experiences and of the scene that arose against long odds from his city’s industrial economic distress. “We were just dead working-class and had no pretensions,” he wrote in Unknown Pleasures, his acclaimed 2013 memoir of Joy Division.

Known for his guitar-like approach to playing bass, Hook has previously taken the Joy Division albums Closer and Unknown Pleasures on the road. In concert, he handles Curtis’s vocal lines handily. This fall, Hook and The Light are performing tracks from a pair of Joy Division and New Order compilation albums, both called Substance. That’s also the title of Hook’s latest memoir — a reminder that the extension of great band legacies tends to be more organized than their birth.

Peter Hook & The Light perform on Friday, Nov. 18, at the Culture Room, 3045 N. Federal Hwy., Fort Lauderdale, cultureroom.net. Doors 8pm $25 at Ticketmaster.

~ Sean Piccoli