The more the short, glorious life of Joy Division is weighed, the more incredible it seems that this mercurial and tight-knit group functioned so well for so long.

Peter Hook’s memoir, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, teems with anecdotes about the Manchester band, evoking a near-past when the pinnacle of a band’s ambition was a session on John Peel or the front cover of the NME.

But it was the death of the band’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, more than 30 years ago that inevitably haunts this tale about a band that remain one of the most influential and revered groups in British rock.

“What gets me sometimes about the deification of Ian Curtis is that it suggests a real division between Ian and the rest of the band that in reality wasn’t there,” said the band’s bassist, who appears at the Ilkley Literature Festival tonight.

“He was just one of the lads, you know. The first time I got talking to him was at the Sex Pistols show at Manchester’s Electric Circus and he was just a kid with ‘hate’ written on the back of his donkey jacket.

“Ian was happy a lot of the time and was sincerely happy about Joy Division’s success and the hard work that we’d put in.

“He was a very generous person, certainly not a morose man and a very generous individual to work with. After working with a lot of people over the years, you don’t meet many people who have his attitude. I remember him fondly.”

A rock and roll mythology has grown up around the story of Joy Division, and with Curtis’s death it seems to have that glossy finish, the same way that Nirvana have.

“That’s what happens to groups when they suffer: they become immortalised. Ian is always frozen in time, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and myself have aged around him, but he’s always the same. That’s a weird feeling.”

Hook added: “While I was in New Order, we completely ignored anything to do with Joy Division. The myth was good: ‘They all think we’re dead arty and intelligent and intellectual.

“I’m happy to buy into the myth, so when I came to write the book, I was wary about breaking it. Do people want to know that Bernard used to eat his dinner in the bath?”

Hook recalls recording Closer in Pink Floyd’s Britannia Studios, with Joy Division on a weekly wage of £12 each.

“We played a gig at Preston Warehouse and when the beer pumps packed up, it caused all the equipment to break down,” he said.

“It was a debacle. Halfway through Transmission, the DJ announced: ‘The last bus to Burnley is leaving in five minutes’. It’s strange what you remember, isn’t it? The promoter wouldn’t pay us so we nicked 30 frozen chickens from a freezer and that’s all we got.

“Joy Division was together for two and half years, but we were only a professional band for six months. It was a very hand-to-mouth existence.”

While Sumner and Morris are continuing to tour as New Order, Hook is contesting their use of the name, leading to the current ‘war’ between the former band members.

“At the moment it feels like I’ve split with the missus and come home to find that she’s chopped the dog in half, that’s how entrenched and bitter it has become between myself and New Order,” said Hook.

“They’ve resurrected the corpse of New Order – but it just feels like Frankenstein’s monster to me.

“It has left a very bad taste in the mouth. I would probably have looked at it a lot more fondly if I wasn’t in court with the other members very shortly.”

Hook said he began writing the book before he could listen to Joy Division’s music again.

“I thought it would be cathartic, but in the end, I realised that I’m as much to blame as everybody else,” he said.

“I didn’t get the absolution. I didn’t find out why Ian killed himself. It didn’t give me any release from the guilt I felt about Ian.”

  • Peter Hook is at Kings Hall, Ilkley, tonight from 7.30pm. Tickets, costing £12, are available by calling (01943) 816714.