New Order keyboardist Gillian Gilbert announces she is ‘living with cancer’

Gillian Gilbert, keyboardist with New Order, has announced she is again having treatment for cancer.

The 65-year-old musician announced the news on Instagram, as a response to an interview her husband and New Order bandmate, drummer Stephen Morris, gave to Rolling Stone earlier this month. Morris had said: “I’ve got a bit of a health problem at the minute, which precludes leaving the country for any length of time … it’s pretty serious.”

Gilbert wrote: “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. 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 thanked everyone who had shared “kind words and well wishes”, and said she would “appreciate some privacy as I continue with my treatment”.

Gilbert has been part of New Order since almost the very beginning of the band, after they formed out of Joy Division in the wake of the death of that band’s frontman Ian Curtis. Morris, with frontman Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook, played one tour before recruiting Gilbert on keyboards and guitar.

“It seemed like a dream, really,” she said in 2023. “A dream come true. I was a bit daunted because they were obviously songwriting, and I couldn’t play keyboards at all, and I thought I’d just play guitar. But they said, ‘Well, we’ve got some keyboard parts.’ So, I got my sister’s Bontempi organ out.”

She then performed and co-wrote on every New Order album between their debut Movement and 2001’s Get Ready, before taking a decade-long hiatus from the group to focus on looking after her and Morris’s children, including daughter Grace who had become physically disabled after an illness.

Gilbert was successfully treated for breast cancer in 2007. She later returned to the touring lineup and contributed to the band’s most recent album, 2015’s Music Complete.

New Order are due to tour South America in November, with Gilbert and Morris replaced by touring musicians in the lineup. The band will also be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the same month.