Ex Peter Hook makes claims in new book

Caroline Aherne’s ex-husband has claimed she was an abusive partner who caused him physical and emotional pain.

The New Order bassist this week publishes his autobiography, three months after the Royle Family star died from cancer at the age of 52.

And in it, he claims she subjected him to such violence he  ‘couldn’t in all good conscience’ join those paying tribute after the death.

Hook tells how she would attack him with knives and bottles, and put cigarettes out on in his arm, saying that although Aherne was ‘a great comic talent’ she was also ‘a very troubled person’.

He said her emotional torment – including cutting up photographs of his children – caused him to become clinically depressed as he became an abused husband.

Hook – who was also leader of the house band on The Mrs Merton Show – writes: ‘She attacked me, using her nails to scratch at my neck, tearing off my necklace and ripping my top. It was proper shocking stuff."

‘And although she was really contrite the next morning it marked the beginning of some serious screaming-banshee behaviour - putting cigarettes out on my arm, attacking me with bottles, knives, chairs and other assorted furniture."

‘It would be set off by the slightest thing - talking or looking at another woman was a favourite… I was an abused husband and it’s embarrassing, and you feel ashamed, and you can’t tell anyone.;

The couple met in Manchester's Hacienda club and married at the Elvis Presley Memorial Chapel in Las Vegas in 1994, but divorced two years later. The relationship came to an end after ‘the worst argument ever’ after Aherne accused him of flirting with a pub landlady. 

They returned to their Didbsury home where, Hook says: ‘She picked up a chair and threw it at me but I ducked, so she picked up a glass and lunged at me, and then she thew a wine bottle, and then produced a kitchen knife, and that was the moment I thought, "Oh my God this has gone too far. I'm going to have to defend myself or she's going to stab me.’"

"I knew we'd reached a new low - something from which we weren't going to be able to recover, but she came to her senses, thank God, threw down the knife and ran off in distress.

"This was it. She got up the next morning and left. Later she phoned and said, "I’m not coming back, Hooky, I'm leaving. I'm going to kill you if I don’t."’

After they spilt,  Aherne said: ‘I'll never love anyone else like I love my Hooky. There's no one else for me.’

She then fell for TV producer Matt Bowers. But Hook became embroiled in a public fight with her new love, with the pair punching and kicking each other at the celebrity opening of Bill Wyman's Sticky Fingers restaurant in Manchester in 1996. Bowers too died of cancer, in 1997, aged just 27.

Aherne battled depression, and in 1998 attempted to take her own life in her west London flat

Hook’s book Substance is published on Thursday,

Published: 3 Oct 2016