Having just warpped his American tour performing New Order’s third and fourth albums — 1985′s Low-Life and 1986′s Brotherhood — Peter Hook has announced he’ll return next spring for a tour of the southern U.S. during which he’ll play Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer plus a set of New Order favorites.

The members of New Order have been talking up new music since reuniting a few years ago, and the prospect of a new album became that much more real this past September when the band signed to the legendary Mute label and it was announced the group soon would return to the studio to work on new music.

In a move that once might have seemed unthinkable, New Order — a flagship act of the iconic Factory Records imprint — has signed to the equally legendary Mute label, long home to contemporaries Depeche Mode and Erasure, as the group continues to work on its new album.

New Order has debuted a pair of new songs (“Singularity,” “Plastic”) on tour this year in North and South America, but used the occasion of its concert in San Francisco last night to do something perhaps even more unlikely: a cover of ’60s anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”

When New Order toured South America earlier this year, the band debuted “Singularity,” its first new track since the Waiting for the Sirens’ Call sessions. Earlier tonight, Bernard Sumner and Co. opened a U.S. tour with another premiere, performing the new song “Plastic” for the first time ever.

The U.K.’s Barnaby Festival wrapped up Sunday night with The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess and friends playing in a church, concluding with Burgess bringing Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert onstage to perform nearly-unplugged versions of “Love Vigilantes,” “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “World in Motion.”

On the heels of the success of his recent Joy Division memoir, bassist Peter Hook’s first book — 2009’s ‘The Haçienda: How Not To Run a Club” — was just published in the U.S. for the first time this week, and we’ve got copies of the brand-new paperback to award to two very lucky, U.S.-based Slicing Up Eyeballs readers.