Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Hook

Peter Hook’s shrug-of-a-sentence lands like a small act of resistance to the way music culture loves to package artists. In a world that keeps demanding a neat lineage - who you “sound like,” what scene you “came from,” which records you “owe” - “That’s it really” is a polite door closing. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-reduction. The phrasing matters: “at the moment” frames influence as weather, not DNA, and “I wouldn’t say” adds that slippery, Northern-English understatement that refuses to perform certainty for an interviewer’s tape recorder.

The subtext is practical musician logic: influence isn’t always a poster on the bedroom wall. It’s gear, rooms, deadlines, band chemistry, bad gigs, new pedals, a bassline that appears because your hands fall there after years of repetition. Hook, as the melodic low-end engine of Joy Division and New Order, comes from bands whose signatures were often mistaken for pure aesthetic intention when they were also shaped by limitation and accident. Post-punk mythmaking tends to retroactively declare a manifesto; Hook’s line quietly rejects the myth that creativity is a tidy chain of references.

There’s also a strategic humility here. Naming influences invites comparison and diminishes the weirdness of your own voice; refusing to name them protects the work from being turned into a trivia map. In a media ecosystem that treats authenticity like a receipt, Hook’s answer insists on something more honest: sometimes the strongest influence is simply whatever you’re trying to make next.