Why Peter Hook is playing Joy Division's first ever setlist in the pub with the Ian Curtis tribute

Manchester music legend Peter Hook is thinking back to the first ever gig that Joy Division played. It was in Manchester, at the former Pips club, on January 25, 1978.

"It was just this maze of all different rooms," Hooky recalls. "We were still playing punk back then and that gig was the first time Joy Division performed as a group."

Underground club Pips, next to Manchester Cathedral, would go on to become Konspiracy - that Hooky mostly remembers for the infamous Damian Noonan running the door. He laughs: "He would charge you more to go out than he charged on the way in!"

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The reason we're talking about that seminal Joy Division gig now 46 years on, is because Hooky is about to get reappraised with the music from that night in the very finest of detail. He will play the full setlist from the Pips gig at a special, intimate charity gig at another iconic Manchester venue - the Star & Garter pub on Fairfield Street on April 12.

Some of the songs from that night he's never played since. Others, like Day of the Lords, would go on to become part of Joy Division's most cherished anthems.

Rather fittingly, as we ask Hooky to pose up for photos outside, it's the image of his former bandmate Ian Curtis that looms large in the AKSE mural on the pub's outer wall. And that is the reason for doing the gig here and now - it is Hooky's enduring desire to celebrate Ian's legacy and to support mental health charities.

Ian died by suicide on the eve of Joy Division's first North American tour aged just 23 years in 1980. His devastated Joy Division bandmates - Hook, Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris - continued the band as New Order, who would go on to enjoy worldwide