For several days the sympathy aimed at New Order was pointed at the wrong member of the band. Gillian Gilbert, the keyboardist who joined in 1980 and has been part of the group’s sound ever since, has now said publicly that she is the one living with cancer — not her husband and bandmate Stephen Morris.
“I would like to gently clarify a misunderstanding from the interview, in the course of which comments were misinterpreted leading people to believe that Stephen is seriously ill,” she wrote on Tuesday. “Thankfully, he is well. It is in fact me, who like many other people, is living with cancer. We completely understand how the misunderstanding arose and simply wanted to ensure that the correct information was shared.”
She closed by thanking fans for their messages and asking for privacy while her treatment continues.
Where the confusion came from
The misunderstanding traces back to an interview Morris gave Rolling Stone ahead of New Order and Joy Division being inducted together into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. Asked about his absence from the band’s live shows, he said: “I’ve got a bit of a health problem at the minute, which precludes leaving the country for any length of time.”
Pressed on whether he might return, he went further. “I don’t know. I really don’t want to dwell on what this illness is, but it’s pretty serious. It’s not something that someone’s going to come up with a cure for.”
Read cold, those answers sound like a man describing his own diagnosis, and that is how most of the coverage took them. Gilbert’s statement does not accuse anyone of misquoting him, and it does not explain how the wires crossed — she says only that the comments were misinterpreted and that her husband is well. Morris has not added anything further since her post. It is the one part of this story where the accounts do not sit neatly on top of each other, and neither party has offered to reconcile them.
What is not in dispute is the underlying situation, which the band had already flagged. In June, New Order confirmed that both Morris and Gilbert would not be touring with them for the “foreseeable future” because of personal health reasons. At the time the band gave no detail beyond that phrasing, which is why an offhand line in a later interview carried so much weight.
The quiet one at the back
Gilbert’s place in New Order tends to be underrated, partly because she has never sought the spotlight and partly because the band’s story is usually told through its more combustible personalities. She joined in 1980, after Ian Curtis’s death, when Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Morris regrouped from Joy Division under a new name. She was the only woman in the band and, as she has pointed out, not the addition anyone expected.
“It was weird when I joined because nobody expected a girl to be brought into the band,” she told NME. “They expected another singer.” She has also described the reception on early trips abroad in blunt terms: at a photo shoot in Japan in the 1980s, she said, the crew simply would not address her. “They’d say to the male members, ‘Can you tell her to move?’ That was how they treated women in them days.”
Her influence on people who came later is easier to see from outside than from inside it. The producer and artist Kelly Lee Owens once told the same magazine that “having Gillian as part of New Order’s line-up in the ’80s and ’90s was iconic. She was just up there doing her thing, and she looked so cool. She needs to be celebrated as the synth queen she is.”
Gilbert’s own response to that was characteristically unbothered: “It’s weird — you never think of your work as part of history or influencing people.”
Alongside New Order, she and Morris have recorded as The Other Two, releasing “The Other Two & You” in 1993 and “Super Highways” in 1999. Gilbert stepped away from the band for a stretch in the early 2000s to care for family before returning in 2011.
What happens now
New Order are continuing without the pair for the time being, with dates booked in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Colombia later this year. Neither Gilbert nor Morris has set out any timeline for a return, and Gilbert’s statement pointedly did not offer one — she asked for space rather than making promises about touring.
The band’s wider story remains unsettled in other ways, too. Peter Hook, who left in 2007, is still estranged from his former bandmates despite the Hall of Fame induction bringing all four names back into the same sentence. He has joked publicly that Oasis might be the right intermediaries for a reconciliation.
For now, the practical request is a simple one, and it came from Gilbert herself: the well wishes are welcome, they belong to her rather than to her husband, and she would like to get on with treatment quietly.
