Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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.
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.
Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.
If you have a bereavement in your family, it's a terrible, terrible thing. But, you know, time passes. It's part of the cycle. It doesn't hurt so much.
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.
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.
I think in South America people are very, uh, they have no inhibitions and wear their hearts on their sleeves - what's the word? They're very expressive, demonstrative.
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.
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.
There's parts of touring I like. I like the actual performance part, but the bit when you're in the airport waiting at the carousel for your bags to come around, I don't like that a bit.
I've realized that I owe people a look behind the scenes of my own story, because I don't think anyone can have a true understanding of the music without an insight into where it came from.
I was interested in Prozac from a personal point of view because I can be a bit moody - things do get on top of me sometimes - so I was quite keen to find out what it would do to my personality.
We're all private people, but as a musician, I think that once you get to the point where there's more of your life behind you than in front of you, you owe it to your public to explain yourself.
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.
I never knew my father. He'd disappeared from the scene before I was born, and I still have no idea who he is. Perhaps strangely, it's never bothered me; I certainly don't believe it's really affected me.
It's weird: people used to want your autograph; now what they want to do is to take your photograph with an iPhone. And sometimes they'll pop their arm around you to hold their iPhone; they're shaking when they take it.
My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.
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.
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.
When you grow up without a brother or sister, you tend to see things just through your own eyes. You have friends and everything, but you spend most of your time watching TV or sat in a room making decisions about your life on your own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think when you're in your 20s, going from adolescence to about 24, I think your life is a series of emotional storms that you have to weather. Life is more emotional at that time, and you're less equipped to deal with what life throws at you. I always think that if you can get past 24, than life really starts at that point.
If you're a lead singer, then you can't afford to be sensitive. On stage, everyone looks at the lead singer, even if you don't want them to - in America, they have those massive follow spots on you all the time; it does your head in. So, if you are a lead singer and you don't toughen up, you're in the wrong job, and you have to get out.