If you've seen DJ Stereo Faith spin, you know he's a straightforward party starter who keeps it cool no matter where he's spinning. But when he opened last Friday for Peter Hook and the Light—the latest project from the former Joy Division and New Order bassist—he got uncharacteristically nervous, he says. No wonder: "Joy Division's my all-time-favorite band," writes Stereo Faith, aka Steve McPherson.

At the show, Stereo Faith's DJ set was heavy on post-punk, including many of Joy Division's early-'80s peers. (You can listen to the set on Soundcloud.) The devotion did not go unappreciated.

"When it was all said and done, I tried to sneak out of the club without talking to the bass player of what I consider to be the best band ever," writes Stereo Faith. Hook grabbed Stereo Faith before he could make a quiet exit. According to Stereo Faith, the conversation went like this:

Peter: You were the DJ right?
Me: Yeah.
Peter: That was great!
Me: Thanks.
Peter: I'm sitting here with the band and I go "This is great!"
Me: Cool.
Peter: You also played a Revenge song. F**king excellent man! I heard it and was all like "I know this song." Then I realized "I f**king wrote it!"
Me: Ha! I know, bro. (Yes, I bro'd him. Ask anyone who was standing there.)

Then he signed "Keep the Faith" for me on a piece of paper and I got the hell out of there.

Stereo Faith Live at 930 Club 9-21-2011 by djstereofaith

AM & Shawn Lee

Where my geeks at: Tonight, Joy Division co-founder Peter Hook and his band The Light returns to the 9:30 Club to perform the iconic post-punk band's second album, Closer. (He played Unknown Pleasures at the club last winter.) 6 p.m. $25.

AM & Shawn Lee, a collabo between, erm, AM and Shawn Lee, bring their somewhat thin but pleasing brand of comfy-pop to Black Cat tonight. Fool's Gold and Static of the Gods open. 8 p.m. on the backstage. $10.

U Street Music Hall is hosting a multifaceted hip-hop showcase tonight (sponsored by Fuze Beverage): It's part Tabi Bonney performance, part beat battle judged by Florida production team J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League; and part panel discussion with a bunch of music journalists. 7 p.m. $15 in advance.

Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour—a City Paper critic's pick this summer—plays a free show at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall tonight. To get tickets, line up starting at 4 p.m. in the Hall of Nations. Show starts at 6 p.m.

Tonight's talk at the S. Dillon Ripley Center sounds juicy: "Fakes, Forgeries and the Art of Deception" focuses on the history of forgeries in major art institutions. Curator and researcher Colette Loll Marvin will dish on how forgers pull off this kind of thing, and what technologies are being developed to crack down on phony masterpieces. 6:45 p.m. $40.

Love him or loathe him, celebrity chef Bobby Flay is at Sixth & I tonight hawking his latest book, Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain Cookbook. $40 admission includes a copy of the book.

On the low-key side: Ian Svenonius is spinning 45s at Café Saint-Ex tonight at 10 p.m. Admission free.

Masters of minor-key minimalism, Gang of Four's funk-inflected angst provides solid motivation for a night of heavy drinking and plotting. Don't let go of your anger if you want to see this through.

The tortured soul of Ian Curtis gave Joy Division its dark edge. Just don't lose control while hammering out the bitter logistics. Harness the rage.

The semi-local SPRCSS, now at least half-based in D.C., has a penchant for primitive rhythms and fierce sounds. Utilize the band's sharp grooves to spur your last cruel plans, just remember your actions won't bring anyone back. After hours of thought alone in the dark, you might want to get out and see a show. In that case, be sure to check out SPRCSS live at Black Cat this Saturday, opening for The Ex.

Washington City Paper: What gave you the idea to do the first 30th anniversary shows of Unknown Pleasures back in May at your Manchester club?

Peter Hook: Originally, it wasn’t my idea. It was posed by the Macclesfield city council, the town where Ian was born. Some guy in the council came up with the idea of doing the 30th anniversary in celebration of Ian and it would also be a charity gig. Then, all of the sudden, the backing for the show just disappeared. So, I sat there and thought to myself, “Well, I didn’t celebrate one year and I didn’t celebrate five, 10, 15, or 25 years and yet Ian and Joy Division are still very important in my life.” So I just thought, “Fuck it, I’ll do it meself.” I will admit that I was absolutely terrified beyond belief, because the gravity of the group and the record are certainly not lost on me. I appreciate how important it is to so many people, so I was absolutely terrified. And I ended up singing, which I didn’t envision. Other people were supposed to be singing, but then they got a bit worried about the gravity of the situation.

WCP: Was it difficult for you to sing the songs either emotionally or logistically?

PH: It was emotional. I wanted to do it justice and show Ian respect as much as possible, so I was very careful to stick very much to the recorded versions that I did with Ian. I stayed very, very faithful to the originals. I must admit that it came out a lot rockier and a lot ballsier though.

WCP: You talked about the gravity of doing a concert like this and there are obviously some people who want to just see the record stay the record, never to be touched again. What do you have to say to those detractors who feel like you’re just sullying Ian’s memory?

PH: I call that kind of talk keyboard terrorism. In this day and age with YouTube, nothing is left to the imagination. People can look at what we’ve done and decide. If anyone is wondering whether I’m going to be any good at all – or whether I’m not showing enough deference or respect – they can go look at it on YouTube and then just stay away if they don’t like what they see. But since we did those two nights in Manchester, I’ve been bombarded with requests from all around the world to play it. We’ve just done a sold out tour of Australia and I never thought I’d get to Australia again after New Order split. We also did very well in Spain and we are going to Italy before we come to America. Judging by the reaction of the ticket sales in America, I think we’re going to do really really well over there. I’ve always found that America is one of those places that if you go over there and you show them you mean it, it’s like a snowball going downhill – everybody catches on. They get the vibe and they get the passion.

WCP: There are obviously so many young bands that are influenced by Joy Division, such as White Lies, the Drums and Editors. Do you enjoy listening to any of them?

PH: Funnily enough, we played with White Lies in Portugal. It was quite easy to sit there with a wry smile on my face thinking, “Oh my god, they sound like Joy Division.” I always take it as a great compliment. When people come up and say, “Oh man, you’re a living legend,” the thing that strikes me most is the living bit. I’d like to be a living legend instead of a dead legend.

WCP: You’re in the middle of writing a two-part memoir. One will cover Joy Division and one will cover New Order. How difficult or easy is it to exhume all of those memories and how much of it do you actually remember?

PH: I can’t blame the loss of memory on anything other than youthful exuberance, because we had no money. We had not been introduced to drugs at all back then, so we were literally high on life. Frankly, I couldn’t remember a lot of it when I started writing. But as I’ve started delving into my memories, a lot of it has started to come back. I’ve read so many books about Joy Division from people who weren’t there, so it’s time for somebody who was there to bloody write the story. Now I bet you $100 that Bernard and Stephen will not agree with me, because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that everybody remembers everything differently.  So this autobiography will be the story of Joy Division from my point of view. It will be my truth.

WCP: You’re on the verge of releasing the Freebass record. It’s been years and years in the making, so what took it so long to come to fruition?

PH: Because of the simple reason that we all have separate careers and all could only get together to finish it when the time allowed us. Mani, Andy and I are all pretty much impoverished, jobbing musicians. We’re not at the poverty line, but we still have to work for a living. So you couldn’t just get everybody together, which is why it took so long. The saddest thing was that when we did actually get everybody together, it didn’t work.

WCP: There was some really brutal sniping between you and Man in the press right before it was announced that the record was actually going to come out. What happened there?

PH: We’re beyond that now. We are the best of friends again, which is quite funny. I learned with New Order that you do not take your argument to the world and Mani hadn’t learned that yet. So he had to learn the hard way, in the same way that I had to learn the hard way. But Mani is still a great friend of mine; he always will be. He’s part of Manchester and he’s part of what I grew up with and that will never change. Freebass was a fantastic idea and it’s a great record, but the group just couldn’t work. But now I’m here with the Light doing Unknown Pleasures, so I couldn’t be happier. It all worked out in the end.

PETER HOOK AND THE LIGHT PLAY ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1 AT THE 9:30 CLUB, 815 V ST. NW. $25. (202) 265-0930.

Ian Curtis

But I wonder: Joy Division's morose post-punk casts a pretty long shadow over the genre, but never so much in this punk town (we had other influential figures named Ian). What about these days, though? Which are the most Curtisian bands in D.C.?

Here's my votes: True Womanhood (disclosure: I know them) and Screen Vinyl Image. Am I wrong? Watch and listen below, and then tell me what you think in the comments.

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.

Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I've collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

These United States and Vandaveer—the folky side project of  TUS's bassist, Mark Heidinger—contributed cuts to Dylan Mania, a French tribute compilation that slipped under the radar when it dropped in May. Vandaveer's take on "The Man In Me" is fairly straightforward, if not nearly as creepy and self-satisfied as the 1970 original. These United States' version of "To Ramona," meanwhile, is more animated and unhinged, benefiting greatly from a galloping rhythm and some thickly applied pedal steel. You can hear both songs on the groups' respective MySpace pages.

Ugly Purple Sweater has a cover of the Woody Guthrie-penned folk standard "This Land Is Your Land" up on its MySpace page. No surprises here, really—except that the duo has tweaked the title a bit, and decorated the song with a fairly silly falsetto. Which, strangely, is pretty awesome.

Last Tide—whom I wrote about in this week's One Track Mind—includes a swirling, eerie cover of Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" in its live set. Cover Me—a blog that, yes, covers covers—has an mp3 of the song from the band's recent appearance on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program. Also, Last Tide frontman Nate Frey's other band, Detox Retox, does an, um, interesting cover of Joy Division's "Transmission":

The gloomy art-punk outfit Screen Vinyl Image taps one of its sonic forebears in this live cover of an early Slowdive B-side. Bonus! The woozy video quality and seizure-inducing lights are straight out of any shoegaze music vid circa 1989:

Ted Leo doesn't make music in the District anymore, but I like his tense, crescendoing cover of Robert Pollard's "The Numbered Head"—from the recent Score! 20 Years Of Merge Records: The Covers! comp—enough to include it here. You can stream the song at the Merge Records online store. It's got nothing, though, on the all-adrenaline cover of "Suspect Device" that Leo played at Fort Reno a few years ago.

Yo La Tengo hails from Hoboken, N.J, but the group played a pair of (kinda) D.C.-related covers at its 9:30 Club show recently: "Firecracker, Firecracker," by Half Japanese, and "Nervous Breakdown," which L.A.'s Black Flag wrote about three years before the District-born Henry Rollins joined the group. Rollins' provenance was a shaky excuse for Yo La Tengo to play the song, but the crowd was happy to forgive the trio. You can stream the entire set at NPR.