Yep - you're right. this is old ground. But, hey, the board has been very quiet recently, so it's nice to have a bit of friendly NO discussion.
I do agree with some of your points. He probably had grown apart from Barney and possibly didn't want to be making music with him at the time.
However, I think that situation has possibly changed. Lots of people in bands get fed up, leave / split. Then, years later, realise how much they miss it and reform etc.
I would imagine that he would rather be on stage with the people he wrote these songs with, headlining giant festivals in Rio etc., than being third on a bill at a small festival in Essex or wherever (not that The Light don't go to some exotic locations, but you get my point).
That being said, I'm guessing he would only want to be playing with them under his terms and not, as you say, under Sumner's 'command'.
But, if he did go back, I don't think he would be cow-towing to Bernard. He's too strong a character for that.
I'm sure he feels that, if he was to start working with the others again, he could reassert some of his dominance again.
He was able to do it in the past, even when things got tense between the two of them. So why not again?
I have a certain amount of sympathy / agreement with him in how he thought things ended, i.e. a split, rather than him leaving the band.
After all, although the band made a statement that they hadn't split, for all intents and purposes, they had. Bad Lieutenant was effectively New Order under a different name. If they hadn't 'split', why didn't they just record the BL album under the 'New Order' name?
That being said, Hook definitely did the wrong thing in announcing to the press that the band had split. He was assuming that the band could not be New Order without him (a view he still holds) and he was effectively saying that the rest of the band could not work together under the NO moniker.
(Which if you think about it, is not a nice thing to do; limit other people's income streams, just because you don't want to work with them. BL probably didn't make a lot of money. Now they've switched to the New Order name, they are probably raking it in from festival appearances, TV etc.)
I think the band did the right thing, in almost immediately announcing "He does not speak for all the band, therefore we can only assume he no longer wants to be a part of New Order.”
Even if they did effectively split at that point to form BL, it was the right thing to do and adds weight to the argument that Hook left, rather than the band splitting.
But, there's a great deal of speculation on my part as to how things went down, what was said, how Hook feels etc. I'm possibly completely wrong about whether he wants to play with them. :-)
