On Tony Wilson “The sense of egomania in Steve Coogan’s portrayal of Anthony Wilson (in 24 Hour Party People) is a little bit over the top. I’m actually a journalist and not a genius.”

On Manchester “We’re not a great town, we’re a colourful town.”

On fashion “The wearing of scarves is one of the sadder things I have done.”

On the Sex Pistols “The amazing thing is that anyone wearing the kind of denim jeans and, yes, velvet jackets that I did could have in any way understood what the Pistols were doing. But, thank God, I did get the idea.”

On punk “Although punk came from London, Manchester was the punk city.”

On Ian Curtis’s death “My main memory is driving to Chorlton to Rob [Gretton’s] house and coming out an hour later and finding my car sideways in the middle of the road, engine still running and doors open – the way I’d left it, which shows how much other things don’t matter, when something does matter.”

On dance music “Dance music became more of a democratic art form. Instead of having four guys in spotlights on the stage, dance music is one DJ, in white light, on the stage.”

On rave culture “I love the description that two pieces of technology made all this happen – the drum machine, which made white boys dance as rhythmically as black boys, and Ecstasy, which allowed white boys to dance as rhymically as them.”

On drugs “There are those things called ‘cocaine albums’, which are pieces of absolute s***. Cocaine is a great destroyer of creative talent. In fact, Factory Records was entirely fuelled by dope smoking.”

On the Happy Mondays “ Kinky Afro is the greatest musing about parenthood since Yates’s Prayer for my Daughter.”

On Factory Records “On the day we finally went bankrupt, Tosh Ryan, the local record magnate and loony, came up to me and asked: ‘Who lost and who won?’ Apparently I said: ‘The music won’, which is slightly more intelligent than what I would expect to say at that point in time.”

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