Stick It to Ya

Last Thursday, The U.K.'s Royal Mail service unveiled 10 new stamps featuring select monumental albums from the last 40 years. My rock'n'roll heart is pretty excited for some of these. The Clash stamp is pure class ... and so are the Blur, New Order, and David Bowie stamps. Here's hoping this is the first installment! Pretty steller idea, don't ya think? I need to get my hands on these, stat! More from The Telegraph.

Hooky Tells All About the Hacienda?

Oh Hooky is at it again. According to Prefix Magazine, New Order bassist Peter Hook is readying the release of his long-awaited story about the Hacienda, the club New Order co-owned with Factory Records head, the late Tony Wilson.

Apparently Simon and Schuster is set to release Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club come October 5, but it might not ever see the light of day should Hook's lawyers not get the go-ahead. After all, Hooky talks about how the Hacienda was a complete disaster and then some. There's A LOT of then some.

Late last month, Hooky took to his MySpace page to blog about the hoopla surrounding the release. It seems as if the post has been deleted, however Prefix Magazine got it all. Read on for a snippet.

21 May 2009

I got this back the other day and thought it read Almost as well as the book? never i hear you say ? well here it is for your delectation......... the first one to get all the names under the xxxx's right wins a copy of Bad Lieutenants first record, the second gets two copies ! Only joking i actually really liked the track bernard did on that Sky show, credit where its due. love hooky

L I B E L R E P O R T
HACIENDA: HOW NOT TO RUN A CLUB
By Peter Hook with Claude Flowers

Introduction

This is the account by Peter Hook of Joy Division and New Order of his involvement in and subsidising of the Hacienda Club in Manchester. As there is a considerable amount of drug-taking and involvement of gangs with resulting violence and a fair degree of professional incompetence in the running of the club, there are obviously potential defamation issues. What one has to consider with defamation is whether the tendency of the words would make third parties think the worse of a person written about as a result of reading them. One working test is whether the man in the street in the complainant's position would like that said about them? One should ask that question separately before going on to consider whether it can be justified or whether it is fair comment or whether there is no likelihood at all of the person in question complaining. If one blurs the two exercises, one may end up simply by making an assumption that a person will not complain only to find that the assumption is erroneous. If therefore it is said of X that they were taking illegal drugs, that is defamatory. The best way of approaching it is to ask oneself how would one deal with a complaint from X ie can one prove that what was said was true and also what are the probabilities of X complaining ie was he a notorious drug-taker? One should bear in mind that the burden of proving the truth a defamatory allegation by admissible evidence rests upon the author and publishers...

The Eternal

[Rob Gretton (center) with New Order]

NME.com announced today that the notebooks belonging to Rob Gretton -- manager to Joy Division and New Order manager -- will be published Tuesday, October 7th.

Entitled 1 Top Class Manager, the collection will include posters, letters, diaries and studio notes, dating from August 1978 to late 1980. Gretton's widow, Lesley Gilbert, culled the book from over 20 notebooks of material. The first print run will consist of 1,500 copies available to order only through the 1 Top Class Manager website. Get it now! It will surely sell out.

Some of the info inside? Who knew that New Order almost named themselves Man Ray? Radical Jesuits, Arab Legion and Sons Of God were also considered as names upon the loss of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis.

For more on Gretton, Joy Division, and New Order, check out the fantastic Joy Division documentary from The Miriam Collection. English actor Paddy Considine also did a great job portraying Gretton in 2002's 24 Hour Party People. Gretton died of a heart attack May 15, 1999 at age 46. RIP.