Peter Hook slams critics of his Caroline Aherne 'abuse' book

New Order star Peter Hook has hit back at friends and family of the late Caroline Aherne, who are engraged by his claims that she physically abused him during their three-year marriage.

Peter’s third autobiography titled Substance claims Caroline was prone to ‘screaming-banshee behaviour’ and that she put out cigarettes on him, attacked him with knives, and threw bottles and chairs at him.

Caroline’s brother Patrick Aherne yesterday called the 60-year-old musician “an excuse for a man” whilst her friend Ricky Tomlinson said to The Mirror newspaper: “It’s very, very sad what [Hook’s] done. She can’t answer back. She has no redress. Why couldn’t he have made the claims when she was alive?”

Caroline died following a battle with cancer in July aged 52 and the country mourned the BAFTA award-winning writer and comedy actor, who was famously known for her hit series ‘The Royle Family,’ her work in ‘The Mrs Merton Show’ and ‘The Fast Show’ and most recently, narrating the Channel 4 reality TV series ‘Gogglebox’.

Peter – who was married to Caroline for three years from 1994 to 1997 at the height of her Mrs Merton fame – is adamant he was the “abused husband” and has defended his comments.

He told The Mirror: “I’ve always been very honest in every book, and it is the same thing here.If you’re going to tell the truth, you have to tell the truth about everything. You can’t just pick and choose, you talk about every important part of your life.

“It’s the story of my life.

“I’ve been a successful musician for 40 years, and that [relationship] was a small part of my life, it is 15 pages in a 700-odd page book. I didn’t play it up, I thought I handled it very fairly, considering what it did to me. I’ve told the truth, and if you’re going to be damned for telling the truth then so be it.”

Substance chronicles 30 years of Peter’s life from his first band Joy Division and its transformation into New Order after Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis tragically hung himself in 1980. It also recalls Peter’s relationship with Factory Records and the famous Hacienda nightclub in Manchester.

The story ends in 2007 when he split from his former bandmates Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris (pictured above) and Peter says he’d love to write a book where New Order, for once, had a “happy ending”.

He says: “What struck me is that none of my books has a happy ending, I’d love to do one with a happy ending.

“One where New Order aren’t at each other’s throats and me and Bernard go off holding hands together.”