It's disrespectful to the older generation to have long hair. They fought in two world wars; they didn't fight for us to grow our hair and look like girls.
— Bernard Sumner
You can't escape from yourself, can you?
You spend more time with your fellow band members than your girlfriend or wife, and you end up at each other's throats. It happens to all bands.
II'm quite a successful musician, but I'm not sure if it's my vocation.
I was no good at anything else at school. But I was good at one thing, which was creativity.
When Joy Division started, I was scared to death of having to get a normal day job.
I'm very proud of New Order and Joy Division, that heritage of songs.
One of the things I like about music is it's an abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing.
I saw the Sex Pistols, and they were terrible.
I'm not interested in how well someone can sing. It's what you're singing that interests me.
If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.
You have to find balance. Whenever I start feeling stressed or not feeling myself, it's about balance, and it means I need to find it again.
Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.
The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.
If you're driving around or at home with the stereo blasting pure dance track, it gets boring within about 15 minutes. It doesn't work at home like it does in a nightclub. You've got no atmosphere.
As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.
If something I do now sounds like something I did in the past, it's because I played it. I can't help sounding like myself. That's going to happen. The things that I play on guitar that resonate with me are probably the same things that resonated with me when I started playing in Joy Division.
As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.
I'm sure every time I bring something out that isn't New Order, people say it sounds like New Order.
Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.
There were certain things I couldn't do with New Order without upsetting the rest of the band, so I started to write some solo stuff.
I always felt like there were always egos involved when I was trying to get music finished in New Order. Sometimes it would feel like I was running through water.
People come up to me and say, 'You changed my life.' I don't think I changed anyone's life. I think their life changed while they were listening to the music.
Choosing a name for a band is always a difficult thing, and I don't think people should read too much into a name because, after all, it's just a handle. It doesn't mean anything.
The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.
If it wasn't for John Peel, there would be no Joy Division and no New Order. He was one of the few people to give bands that played alternative music a chance to get heard, and he continued to be a champion of cutting-edge music throughout his life.
The story of New Order is all about learning from our mistakes.
I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.
Landscape affects you.
In Salford, we had fish in our tap water. I remember, one hot summer day, running to the toilet at playtime and dunking our heads in a sink full of water. I remember putting my head in and seeing all these little fish in it.
I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.
I think New Order have got their own sound. But what we like to do is experiment, using dance music and other things.
If you hear a New Order track that's mostly electronic, it's generally come about through one person sitting at a computer and programming it.
We didn't play any Joy Division songs for 10 years after the start of New Order, which was a very honourable thing to do even if it meant shooting ourselves in the foot.
Joy Division finished the 1970s on a high. Our debut album, 'Unknown Pleasures,' was doing well; we'd just finished a hugely enjoyable and successful tour. The band's profile was higher than it had ever been, and it seemed to be growing by the day.
You don't see yourself in the same way other people see you.
I used to be a party monster, very into Acid House, which I saw as my weekend reward for working hard all week.
I never met Morrissey.
If you start off writing an album with a band, the reality is that you're constantly in each other's company, so it's really important that you get on with each other.
I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.
I tend to think in images and feelings rather than non-abstract concepts.
I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.
You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.
New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.
If I work on music, it'll be for 10 hours a day, so sometimes I'll feel stressed, and I'll go for a two-hour walk. That sorts me out.
By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.
The guitarist always looks a bit clever because he's got so many strings and apparently knows what to do with them.
We played at a festival in Mexico City, at the same time as another famous artist, and I reckon we had 55,000 people watching New Order; the other had 7,000. I think from that I've discovered the secret of success in the music industry: don't do any promotion.
Where I grew up was a place called Salford, which was the industrial heartland of Manchester. And where I lived in Salford, I could walk to the center of Manchester within about 20 minutes. So I lived really close to the center.
I think if you take 'Get Ready,' 'Waiting For The Siren's Call,' 'Lost Sirens' - those three New Order albums were mostly guitar-based. There were a couple of dance tunes in there, but they were mainly guitar-oriented. They came about through jamming, a lot of them.
