BERNARD SUMNER

Landscape affects you.

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 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.

I used to be a party monster, very into Acid House, which I saw as my weekend reward for working hard all week.

I felt that by the late '90s, I'd gone as far as I could with the keyboard.

You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.

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.

Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.

I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.

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.

I was no good at anything else at school. But I was good at one thing, which was creativity.

In New Order, I played about 95% of the synths. It's not much fun for the other guys in the band when I'm playing my synth parts.

I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.

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

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.

Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.

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

I like a challenge. I like learning new skills because I didn't learn much at school.

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.

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.

When Joy Division started, I was scared to death of having to get a normal day job.

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

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.

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