Cover star

Peter Saville knows why his career went wrong. 'When I started out I was spoilt,' he says. 'Absolutely spoilt.' Saville is the art director best known for the record sleeves he designed in the late Seventies and Eighties -particularly those at Manchester's legendary record label Factory for Joy Division and New Order, but also Roxy Music, OMD, Ultravox, the Buzzcocks and the one that no one ever mentions, Wham!

Saville did something revolutionary - he packaged music as fashion, using graphic and photographic treatments that were previously only the preserve of fashion advertising. By applying highbrow ideas of postmodernism and classicism to the traditionally lowbrow medium of pop music, Saville was part of the first wave of the post-punk British style scene, a scene where you could make a splash just by the cut of your typography.

While his work was unusual, so were the circumstances he worked in. At Factory he was allowed to set his own budgets and deadlines and do exactly what he wanted to do. 'Now the motivation for work is to achieve something for your client,' he grumbles. 'I'll be sitting in meetings and somebody will say "hey, let's not forget, we're all just here to make money". Well, actually that's not why I'm here. I'm here to make things better.'

Saville studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic between 1975 and 1979. Legend dictates that he refused to do the first project he was set, complaining that it was too easy. It was the first hint of a career that would see him playing up to the image of the maverick playboy, a wilful force with little regard for the normal structures of life. Even today he has no home - he's effectively permanently house-sitting for friends, and has a string of beautiful, young, thin girlfriends.

While the last decade has seen Saville struggle to find a place where he can effectively use his talents, happily this year, two major retrospectives should put him back on the map - The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum and a book, Designed By Peter Saville.

Saville is holding court in his Clerkenwell studio, a large white space filled with hundreds of art books and boxes of photographs arranged in straight rows. (One of his colleagues says he has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and you can believe it - everything is at right angles, even his pens and pencils.) He's 48 this year, though with his boyish hairstyle and groovy white jeans, you'd never know it. He's immensely likeable and talks incessantly - puffing away on his cigarettes, alternating between packs of Gauloise and Gitanes. His CV makes impressive reading - co-founder of Factory Records in 1979, then opening his own studio, moving to an LA ad agency to work for, among others, Yohji Yamamoto in 1993, and consultancies for Givenchy and Pringle in 2001 - but it tells only half the story. He's a notorious perfectionist, terrible with deadlines, useless with money and defiantly operating on a different clock to everyone else - sleeping during the day, dining at the Groucho Club at midnight and working through the night. As such, he's been fired from almost every company he's worked for.

'He just lives in his own world,' says Peter Hook of New Order. 'When I first met him I thought he was a pompous prick. Now that I've known him for 26 years, I think he's a pompous prick. But I like him.'

Saville was once so late with a New Order tour programme that it turned up three days before the end of the tour. There are still 45,000 unsold copies in a warehouse in Stockport.

All this adds to what Hook calls 'the Peter Saville myth', a muddle of fact and fiction that Saville naturally encourages. Some stories are easy to prove (he had his company credit card taken off him when he worked in LA, after he used it to furnish his Hollywood apartment; he will only buy his cigarettes from Selfridges), others aren't (according to a colleague, he became so enamoured with porn that he gave up sex for a while). But he's nice enough to admit his own shortcomings.

'By my mother's terms I'm not successful at all - I don't live anywhere. I don't have any money. What I do have is a reputation.'