Luckily, me, Bernard and Steven didn’t get to f*** up the mystique of Joy Division in the way we f***ed up the mystique of New Order.
There’s hardly any footage of Joy Division, there’s hardly any interviews of Ian or Joy Division. Us working class northern males did not go around talking about how we express our feelings in song. I think it would have felt a bit intrusive – when you saw the lyrics to ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, it was obvious that he was breaking his heart about a relationship that was over. While we were jamming and getting the songs together, he was the spotter going, ‘Oh, that sounds good, that sounds good, put that together with that bit’ because we didn’t have any tapes. “In the studio, he kept his corner up perfectly. Sometimes he’d recover instantly, other times it was usually me or Rob that ended up sitting on him and sit with him and hold his tongue while he stopped fitting. A lot of people thought it was part of the act. The roadies would come on and take him off. He’d go glassy-eyed and just fix a stare, then the next minute he’d fall over and be absolutely rigid. When the idiot lighting guy who you’d told not to flash the lights flashes the lights, he’d go almost immediately.
You could usually tell when he was going to go and it was usually always to do with the lights. All we wanted to do was play so if he was going, ‘I’ll be alright’, you go, ‘thank f*** for that’.
No matter how bad his fits got, he always wanted to carry on. He’d go ‘f*** that, we’re doing that gig on Friday, we’ve got to’. If we had a gig on Friday and he’d just had a massive fit, he never said, ‘You know what, I can’t do the gig on Friday’.