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Friday. You know, I had this mistaken understanding
of professional when I was younger that it meant being
really good.” He laughs in cynical astonishment. “But
it’s actually about doing what has to be done within the
circumstances within which you are allowed to do it.”
The way Saville tells it, his designs have actually influenced
the music. He claims that the musical direction
of what was to be Joy Division’s final album, Closer,
was guided by its funereal sleeve photograph by Bernard
Pierre Wolff (the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself
shortly before its release). But Morris, who’s currently
in the studio writing songs for New Order’s next album
where they recorded the ambient music for the Design
Museum retrospective, is having none of it. “I think
that’s too strong, but not for Peter,” he says, laughing
fondly at such hubris. “I remember him and Rob Gretton
[New Order’s former manager] having a discussion and
the upshot was that Peter said people bought the records
for his sleeves, not for the music.”
“I come to every new job as if it’s Everest to climb
again,” says Saville, lighting up the next of many, many
Gauloises. “I foolishly approach everything as if it’s
really important and that it has to be done, in some tiny
way perhaps, in a way that it hasn’t been done before.
I won’t just repeat myself. I don’t know why I do it.
Partly it’s about anxiety and fear. Partly it’s about the
music business where people would want something
completely different.”
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
He comes across as a perfectionist, utterly disillusioned
with big business, confused by his being in a
grey area where art meets design and wanting to break
free of his financial bonds and take a new direction.
One can’t help but feel that with the kind of reckless
candour with which he talks about the shortcomings
of just about every client he’s ever worked for he’s
trying to talk himself away from commercial art
through autosuggestion. Icon’s photographer, Jamie,
met Saville a few days earlier and was taken aback:
“He was unable to resist art directing himself in the
local playgrounds and parks. And I was amazed at
how open and warm he was.”
Saville clearly has a lot of steam to let off. “Absolutely
everything except the creative act is stretched out
as long as is needed and there’s this notion that you can
resolve the creative issues and problems [clicks his fingers]
like that’s the bigger the budget the more people
sign-off, the more bland and generic it will be. No one
wants to take a chance. I mean, what is happening in car
design? It’s either hideously bland or really quite perverse.”
The record industry was only ever going to be
a professional cul-de-sac for someone fast-approaching
30, and Saville seems more savvy than Machiavellian
when he says that he “learnt quickly how to manipulate
the record industry to my own ends. I took a selfish,
bloody-minded approach to the work and I made life
hell for the people who were paying for it. To me the
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