In the studio with Martin Fisher

“For this album we had a little writing room in Out Of The Blue Studios in Ancoats in Manchester, that Rob Gretton [New Order’s manager/Rob’s Records/the Pleasure label] established. I did a lot of tracks and demos there, before Martin Desai, the other half of J-Walk, established his commercial studio [Codebreaker] where we did most of it.

“Rob gave me New Order’s Akai S900, and it was running through an Atari 1040ST computer. I had 11 seconds memory.

“The studio had an Akai S2000 XL – that was the main sampler. Then we had a [Roland] JV-1080, that we used for orchestral sounds – so, xylophones, glockenspiels, strings. Then the Juno-60, Casio MT-40, a Korg MS-20, and an SH-101, but I could never get my head around it – I just thought, oh it’s dead little and plastic. But we used it for a lot of the bleepy, sweepy, pingy noises, really. Then there were another coupla synths, but I can’t remember the names…”