Spike Magazine

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Stella McCartney while I’m there. He’s dressed in his
trademark white Helmut Lang jeans, a black T-shirt and
some tan leather shoes (no socks). He speaks in a soft
Mancunian accent deepened by nicotine, and has a distinctive
sustain when pronouncing his Rs. Saville puts
on his black-framed glasses and goes over to the table
to look at large-format Polaroids of Kate Moss in kneehigh
leather boots. “The professional situations I have
at the moment are really quite abusive,” he says matter
of factly. “It’s not a straight, commercial relationship I
have with my clients. They come to me for something
special, and yet for the most part they know that they
can get it cheaply and they do, and that offends me. But
I have to take what’s on offer.”
He has his lunch at 5pm; a solitary sausage roll,
which he’s eating from a large white plate with a knife
and fork. What about all these flash restaurants he’s
supposed to go to all the time I thought it’d be a takeout
from Claridges or something? “I go to the Ivy about
once every two months, despite what’s been written,”
he laughs. “I spend about £20 on a meal.” He goes off to
the kitchen area of his white-floored and white-walled
studio space every so often to make himself an espresso
in his Richard Sapper stove-top, making sure that everything
is left clean and tidy. He mentions that he is going
to watch the Monaco grand prix the following day
and has been following the qualifying sessions. With
his understated elegance and slightly egotistical charm,
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
he could be a poor man’s James Hunt. “Yes, there is
some of that going on,” he admits, a little embarrassed
by this particular reputation, but he’s more interested
in moving from talk of playboy to Playboy: “I’d like
to redo Playboy magazine. I find it lamentable that
there isn’t an intelligent, erotic magazine. There isn’t
a magazine that was like Playboy was 30 years ago,
and I find that’s dumb. Why isn’t there any intelligent,
abstract eroticism? I can find the artist Lucio Fontana’s
colour fields incredibly erotic juxtaposed against a bit
of Rocco Siffredi [a porn star].”
From 1978 to 1991 when he was art director at Factory
Records in Manchester (which he co-founded with
Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) he had carte blanche
creatively. He designed the posters for the legendary
Hacienda nightclub in the city, the album covers for the
Factory bands (Joy Division, New Order, OMD, etc) all
seemingly quixotically free of financial considerations.
His artwork for the cover of New Order’s Blue Monday
12 inch in 1983 was die-cut to make it resemble a
floppy disc, and, depending on whose version of events
you believe, cost the record company anywhere from
2p to 75p everytime a copy was bought. Which perhaps
would have been fine had it been a limited edition, but
it just happened to become the biggest selling 12 inch
record ever. “What I did in my local zone was how I
wanted everything to be,” says Saville. “I was spoilt in
the beginning by being given a big playground to play
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