In 2005 Teddy Jamieson talked to Peter Saville about his life as graphic designer for Factory Records and beyond

THE estate of Peter Saville is spread out all over the floor of his studio-cum-living space in London. Videotapes, glossy magazines (there's everything from Heat to Art Review and Country Life), plaster dogs, plaster cats, notebooks, sketchbooks, big boxes of photographic paper, shoeboxes (all decorated with high-end labels: Prada, YSL and so on), photographs, plates, cutlery, CDs in paper bags, clothes on a rack, a mattress. Stuff, in other words. Lots of it, all neatly arranged around the white-floored room.

To a large extent this is what Peter Saville does these days, this constant gathering and storing up of things; things that could be influences, things that work as references. "It's the fuel of work, " says Saville, who is the nearest thing the field of graphic design gets to a legend. Just one problem. Work isn't something he's doing a lot of.

Actually, that's unfair. There are a few jobs on the go. He's working on a station identity for a new San Francisco television news channel headed up by Al Gore. He's doing some work for a Scandinavian industrial fabric designer he likes. And for the past year he's been working for his home city of Manchester, with a view to recasting its image. While he's posing for the photographer, I also notice an e-mail asking if he wants to design for a new adult toy company (someone is obviously aware of his rather louche reputation. "Somebody told me one evening that they heard I went every month to sex parties in Italy, " he remarks later with disbelief ).

These are not the big-name corporations you'd expect Saville to be mixing with by now.

Instead, much of the past five or six years has been spent on what he's calling his "estate", this coalescing of materials. It started with books - there are probably a thousand of them on the shelves around this room, he reckons.

Art books, design books, film books, even porn books. The work of French photographic artist Sophie Calle stands just a few shelves away from that of homo-erotic cartoonist Tom of Finland. These days, Saville takes in bits of plastic, Styrofoam packaging, items he calls "the interstitials of everyday life".

"A couple of years ago, I began to realise it's a thing in itself, " he says, looking at the stuff that surrounds him. "Maybe I don't need to do anything with it. Maybe the fact it exists and I've saved it and collected it is an end in itself."

And so, instead of 500 acres of Grassmoor, he has a tape from the Learning Zone. "And rather than a handsome collection of Georgian furniture, I've got a funny old Sotheby's catalogue of Georgian furniture." The point of all this? Well, he says, that's wrapped up in the problem - his word - of what he should do with himself now. Saville, it seems, is a designer who has fallen out of love with design, which should make his talk to Scottish creatives in Edinburgh later this month an interesting one.

He never had much time for the meat-and-potatoes work many in his profession do.

"With all due respect to someone doing biscuit packaging or an annual report, there isn't a lot of self-expression in there, " he says. Biscuit packets do not feature too often in Saville's design CV.

It is likely that many of you reading this will own some of Peter Saville's work. If you are under 30 it might be an album cover by Pulp or a single sleeve by Suede (Saville even appears on the cover of their record Film Star, a knowing nod to that aforementioned reputation). If you are over 30 then it might be Peter Gabriel, Roxy Music (his own teenage favourites) or even Wham!

Fashionistas among you might have one of his much lauded Yohji Yamamoto catalogues, created in collaboration with the photographer Nick Knight. Knight and Saville also worked together on a Pirelli calendar, so who's to say the odd back-street garage hasn't got a Saville hanging on its wall?

And if you've a bit of money you might own an original piece rather than a mass-produced artefact. Last year the designer had to sell a few "works" to cover the rent of his London studio. It costs him three grand a month, a sum that doesn't necessarily come easily. Money has always been something of an issue with Saville. Indeed, of all the things he discusses this afternoon - why he doesn't design much these days, the commodification of pop culture and, of course, the legend of Peter Saville - it's surprising how much he mentions money. He has flirted with insolvency, dated bankruptcy and even given genuine pennilessness a fullon snog. He says at one point that he probably spends £10,000 every year that he doesn't have. "If you put that in the context of somebody doing a quite ordinary job, it's extreme, " he admits. "But put it in the context of my universe and it's not." Perhaps, but £10,000 you don't have is still £10,000 you don't have, whether you're wearing Primark or Prada.

If Saville is known for anything it's for being the man who gave a visual identity to Factory Records, the record label set up in Manchester during the late 1970s that became home to post-punk luminaries Joy Division, later to transform into New Order. It was Saville who showed Ian Curtis, Joy Division's singer, the elegiac Bernard Pierre Wolff photograph that was to grace the cover of the band's album Closer: a cover that, by the time it was released, seemed all too relevant given that Curtis had killed himself. ("What was Ian already thinking?" Saville later said. "I'm showing them images of tombs because I think they look trendy, and for all I know he's thinking, 'That's where I'll write my suicide.'") And it was Saville who came up with the floppy-disc-inspired cover of New Order's Blue Monday; a cover that was so expensive to produce that every record sold cost Factory, depending on who you believe, somewhere between 2p and 75p. (As the best-selling 12inch record of all time, it sold a lot. ) As Tony Wilson, Factory's instigator, explains on the phone, with typical Mancunian arrogance-stroke-self-belief, for a time in the late seventies and early eighties the label made the "best designed, best packaged music in the world".

Along with Neville Brody, the graphic designer behind the style magazine The Face, Saville could be said to have invented the look of the 1980s; a look that is being appropriated (along with the sound) by the music scene of 2005. It all seems rather fitting given that Saville's early approach at Factory was all about appropriation - sticking a Fantin-Latour painting on the cover of a New Order album, for example - even though it doesn't actually appeal to Saville himself.

His reputation had other facets, of course.

Saville's Factory years marked him as a perfectionist with a lax notion of the concept of deadlines and cost. In the film 24 Hour Party People, based on the Factory story, the Saville character turns up at the end of a gig with the poster meant to advertise it (Saville wasn't consulted by anyone involved in the making of the film, and has little time for it).

"We used to have meetings where we would consider very seriously paying for a hitman to get the train to London and go and f-ing kill him, "Wilson explains. "There used to be serious meetings to discuss that. I used to get so exasperated I did the artwork myself. There's an example in his book of a piece I did that he says is his own now (Fac 4, a poster, for any Factory completists who care) and it's obvious it's mine. It's shite."

At least Peter Saville isn't late for today's interview, although he is still in his dressing gown when he comes to the door. It's four in the afternoon. He was never one for regular office hours, something that proved a problem in the early 1990s when he joined the design giant Pentagram. He doesn't operate by what he calls "the conventional template of everyday life"; but then, he argues, neither did many of the people he used to work with. Meetings with George Michael in the days Saville was designing Wham! covers would take place at 2am. While working for the fashion industry he could be getting calls from America late at night and then from Japan in the early hours of the morning. He says he never goes on holiday, but then as Pentagram director John McConnell once said to him: "Peter, [to you] every day's a holiday."

As Saville speaks, his partner Anna is busying herself in the background. They met in Berlin a couple of years ago and have been living together for the last 18 months. "This is the first time I've lived with somebody for 23 years, " Saville says. The lease is up for renewal in the summer and he doesn't know yet if they'll move, but he can't envisage a different set-up.

"If I had a studio and a home, it wouldn't work. If Anna was somewhere else waiting for me to show up, it wouldn't work."

It wouldn't work because, he says, for him there is no difference between morning, afternoon or evening. Weekdays and weekends. It's an inevitable side-effect of his perfectionism, and it also explains his attitude to deadlines.

"You've got to give all the hours you can steal and stretch the deadline, " he says. "This is not businesslike. But the result of it is why you're sitting talking to me now."

He has what might be called a "guid conceit" of himself. He tells of how he and his assistant Brett Wickens once stayed up three days and two nights working on a "stupid Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark tour book" because he was "striving to produce the sublime", even though, as he admits, the sublime wasn't what the record company was after.

This was part of the problem with the music industry, he says. Or at least his problem with the music industry.

While musicians were always given plenty of latitude to produce the music, the same freedom was never extended to the record's designer. "Doing a record cover is about getting some words and some paper around a record - it's not about anything else, " he says dismissively. It was not an idea he ever had much time for.

These days, he adds, even the records are just stuff; just things to sell, with no intrinsic meaning over and above the fact they're a commodity. "It's become about consumption rather than identity or freedom or personal fulfilment, " he says. "Profitability is the bottom line. If you work with some fashion groups and corporations and record corporations and film corporations it's shameless. There's no meaning to any of it. But what they're interested in is the look of meaning. They want to know what the look of meaning is in order to shift more products, and that's not interesting to me. I find it coercive and corrupt."

Even rebellion has been commodified, he says. Want to be a rebel? Buy yourself an outfit from Diesel, or maybe a Franz Ferdinand CD.

"Factory Records was about something for a while, " says Saville. "It was about 'Is there an independent way of doing this? Can we have our own record company? Can we have our own club?' In some ways Factory was one of the last true stories in pop. Because for 14 years nobody ever made a decision based on profitability. This is exceptional, and it's interesting that Joy Division and New Order are so quotable now because there's something believable there."

At the age of 49, Saville knows there is a danger he might sound like a grumpy old man when he's talking about pop culture, but he believes what he says. It's his alienation from this commodification of culture, after all, that limits the work he does now. He accepts there might still be an alternative, underground culture out there that he doesn't know about - but if there is, he suspects it's something very dark, very cynical. "To me an automatic weapon is the new electric guitar, " he says.

"When you want to upset your friends now, playing Anarchy in the UK on the school PA system isn't really the deal. Kids are going into school and killing a few people and what is that about? That's an anarchic response that will get their attention. That is the sense of dissatisfaction now. It's quite extreme."

Alongside his dissatisfaction with the culture in which he finds himself, there is another possible explanation for Saville's current "problem". He's been spoilt.

Straight out of Manchester Poly with a Bryan Ferry fixation - he even had the white tuxedo for a while - he approached Tony Wilson, the latter recalls, at a "very bad Patti Smith concert" in 1978 and began working for the nascent Factory, a place where nobody ever really bothered to tell him what to do. He had free rein to design as he wanted - and at Factory, Wilson says, "there was nobody concerned with the bottom line". In the end that did for the label, and maybe for the designer too.

But then Saville, the youngest of three brothers, was already used to being spoilt by his dad, an industrial agent for a sanitaryware manufacturer. "The astonishing thing about my father was he was incredibly generous to myself and my two brothers, " says Saville. "He wanted to buy a little boat for himself all his life but he never did because someone's motor-car or someone's school tuition or someone's harebrained scheme kept draining whatever money he ever made for himself."

Saville was always thought the brightest in the family and was seen as professional material, maybe a lawyer or a doctor. But he had other ideas and set his heart and his stubbornness (of which he appears to have a substantial amount) on art college. "He let me do that, " Saville says of his father. "He didn't see how it would be a real career, and to a large extent he was right."

It wasn't until Saville joined Pentagram that his father acknowledged there was perhaps something positive about his career choice. "It wasn't until he came to visit me there and I was earning pounds-90,000 a year as a partner - more than he'd ever earned. He patted me on the back for that. He wasn't too happy two years later when I left Pentagram. He died in 1999, but through the nineties he was quite bemused with what my problem was with getting on with things."

At Pentagram Saville learnt the language and protocol of working with business. "And I learnt that I didn't want to do that, " he says.

"I learnt that my agenda and the business agenda weren't on the same wavelength." For a while, though, he kept trying. In 1993 he decamped to Los Angeles to work for Frankfurt Balkind. Legend has it that he spent six months shopping on the company credit card, but he says the legend isn't true. Well, not quite, anyway.

The problem, he says, was that the company didn't sort out his visa for six months, so they couldn't pay him. His clothes and furniture were in a bonded warehouse and he couldn't get them out until he had a visa, so he was stuck in LA with no money and no possessions. And nothing to do, since he didn't have a workspace, and hadn't been told what he was meant to be working on. He needed somewhere to live, so he got a house and began furnishing it; began buying some clothes, some plates and forks, a kettle, the stuff you need to live. The only way to pay it was indeed with the company credit card. His assistant Brett did the same thing, Saville points out. "But Brett very sensibly bought a couple of sweatshirts and some cheap disposable furniture from Ikea, and I wasn't interested in buying disposables."

He says he moved to LA to work on a new multimedia idea but the LA office of Frankfurt Balkind just did movie posters and he had no time for that. Before long he'd had a falling-out with Aubrey Balkind, who'd hired him. That's when he got a real lesson about the value of money. He was stuck in LA with no income when the 1994 earthquake struck; stuck in a national emergency zone with no money. He didn't want to ask his father for a loan - he was 39, felt a bit past that - and so he had nothing, absolutely nothing. He was reduced to selling the things he'd bought on the Frankfurt Balkind credit card to get by. "I ended up for at least a month dedicating each day to the pursuit of $20. I worked out that I needed $20 to exist.

I was having to take CDs to sell for $10 so I could eat something, and I'd need $5 to put gas in the car to get to the f-ing record store."

It's an experience that doesn't seem to have scarred him. Or taught him too many lessons.

Ten years on, as he admits, he is still living beyond his means; and, of course, he's turning down lucrative work because it doesn't offer him the freedom he requires, or represents a value system he despises. To some it might seem stupid, but there's a heroism to it too.

Peter Saville has designed his own life and, as designs for life go, it's audacious, extravagant, foolish and maybe just a little beautiful. Much like his work, if you think about it.