Creativity Quote by Peter Hook

Hook’s line is a neat little correction to the romantic myth of the band breakup as a kind of death. When New Order stopped, he insists, the work didn’t. The phrasing is blunt, almost managerial: “busier than ever.” It punctures the fan fantasy that musicians vanish into silence when the spotlight moves. For Hook, the engine is always running; the brand name on the hood just changes.

The real dagger is in the second sentence. “The only gaps have been while we’ve been writing” flips the usual hierarchy of music-making. In the pop imagination, writing is the sacred core and touring is the grind. Hook implies the opposite: the “gaps” are the quiet stretches where the mythic creative act actually happens, while the rest of the time is motion, logistics, performance, making a living. It’s a wry admission of how modern musicians survive: constant activity, side projects, live shows, reissues, collaborations, memoirs, interviews. The machine rewards visibility.

Context matters: Hook’s public split from New Order was messy, legalistic, and deeply personal, tangled up with legacy and ownership. This quote sidesteps the soap opera and reframes him as relentlessly productive, not bitter or stalled. Subtext: you can’t write him off as the guy who “left” a beloved band. He’s reminding you that the identity is bigger than the institution, and that the supposed downtime of artistry is often the hardest labor of all.