I'm not interested in how well someone can sing. It's what you're singing that interests me.

The story of New Order is all about learning from our mistakes.

New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.

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.

I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.

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.

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.

Landscape affects you.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.

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.

The guitarist always looks a bit clever because he's got so many strings and apparently knows what to do with them.

The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.

I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.

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.

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 think New Order have got their own sound. But what we like to do is experiment, using dance music and other things.

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.

As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.

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.

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.

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.

I first read about hypnotism at school, and I used to do tricks like getting a really skinny guy to arm wrestle the local bully.