New Order founding member Peter Hook is suing his former bandmates for “millions of pounds,” according to BBC reports. The bassist claims that he’s been denied 2.3 million pounds since Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, and Gillian Gilbert formed a company together to handle the band’s assets in 2011. Hook characterizes the loss of income as a “pillaging.”
Though he has continued to tour New Order material, Hook left the band in 2007, but the rest of his bandmates continued to use New Order name — including releasing an album this year called Music Complete — and formed a new company called New Order Ltd. in 2011. A lawyer for Hook called the move “clandestine, premeditated and deliberate,” and suggested that it was like what might have happened if “George Harrison and Ringo Starr had got together at George’s house one Friday night and had acted together to divest Paul McCartney of his shareholding in the Beatles, and didn’t tell Yoko about it either.”
Hook is presently due 1.25 percent of the band’s royalties and other income, but he wants that number to increase to 12.5 percent.
