But "that's news to us" fired back New Order frontman Bernard Sumner and Morris, starting off an ongoing contretemps between the two sides.
Meanwhile Hook began touring and playing Joy Division songs with his own pick-up band. He's due here in April to play the band's second album Closer having done his Unknown Pleasures show in Auckland last year. The "tribute" shows having angered the other former Joy Division members.
As late as July last year, while promoting the Joy Division/New Order compilation Total, Morris was saying no more.
"There's no future for New Order, "he told The Guardian. "It's hard to draw a line under everything, but I think we have."
But by October, New Order were back on stage, minus Hook - his distinctive high-up-the-neck basslines delivered by ring-in Tom Chapman, who is also part of Sumner's side project band, Bad Lieutenant.
First they played in Brussels and Paris, where they played a charity show for Michael Shamberg (producer on many of their early videos who also ran the New York office of the band's Factory record label) who is in ill health.
They soon added shows in South America in December before playing in London before Christmas. And now they're playing in Auckland before dates in Australia.
In an odd way the Hook vs the rest dispute has created attention they might not have otherwise got ...
"I know," accepts Gilbert, "I think with Hooky he can do what he likes and we are doing what we like for a while. It's put a weird spin on the current New Order but not a lot of thought went into it.
"When we started rehearsing for Brussels and Paris it was sort of like a one-off. We weren't going to go any further but because we enjoyed ourselves and the audience seemed to love it we thought we could do some more gigs. It never started off big.
"And I think that was always the thing about New Order - you never thought you could get this big anyway. You just did what you felt like doing and stuck to your values and, you know, didn't move out of Manchester. You didn't move to London. It was all very close-knit and with the Joy Division thing with Ian it was all very close-knit and personal when he died. So that has been how we have always worked."
Gilbert has some sympathy for Hook - she too has seen the band continue on without her. She spent most of the past 10 years away, caring for one of her daughters who has the neurological disorder transverse myelitis.
"When I left because my daughter was ill, the thought of them carrying on without you was really hard to deal with. But now I feel like I've never been away. But I'm glad I took a step back."
Having been in an all-woman Manchester punk band, Gilbert gravitated to Joy Division - and eventually Morris - who rehearsed nearby. She was invited to join the fledgling New Order, initially, as the band's musical odd-job woman and multi-tasker.
"I was kind of new so it was 'can you do that?' Yeah, I can do that. 'Can you just play that sequence line while I play something else?'Yeah, I can do that ... it just built up."
Her keyboard-guitarist replacement, Phil Cunningham, remains in the line-up. Some things have changed since she last played live with the group and from their early days when their attempts at marrying the first generation of sequencers and samplers to a live rock band had its risks. Much of the pre-programmed part of the band's live sound can now run off laptops rather than the hefty musical hardware they once had to cart around the world in the 1980s. "All the equipment that we used in those days should really have been in a studio and not moved. If the power wasn't right all the sequencers would go out of phase."
There's been other changes. Gilbert laughs at how at the Paris show she started walking off during the band's perennial anthem Blue Monday as that was always the last song.
"But for some strange reason we had to play Temptation after it. Or Love Will Tear Us Apart. And I just walked off automatically and thought it was the 80s. And they are looking at me like, 'where are you going?"'
She laughs again at another Blue Monday memory. Playing it in London in December, she looked out into the moshpit to see her adult nieces dancing to a tune that is older than they are. Though it has been re-released several times. It's the song that wouldn't die: "I know. Thank God."
Seeing that hit, as well as the likes of Temptation, Bizarre Love Triangle, Thieves Like Us performed live will certainly wind the clock back for the New Order faithful, some of whom will be swapping yarns about seeing the band on previous New Zealand tours in 1982, 87 and at the Big Day Out in 2002.
But as to the future and another album? New Order long-players have often been blood-from-a-stone affairs and Gilbert says as always with this band, they aren't making any plans.
"It would be nice to let the dust settle from playing live and be inspired again before going into the studio."
LOWDOWN
Who: Gillian Gilbert, keyboardist, guitarist of New Order
When and where: Vector Arena, Monday
-TimeOut
