Cuttings

YOUNGISH, GIFTED AND FAC • They brought us Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, James, the Hacienda, hypothetical menstrual egg-timers and, erm, Shark Vegas. They invented labels with attitude, artiness and street suss. They gave TONY WILSON the opportunity to shout his mouth off about anything . They are FACTORY RECORDS, and IESTYN GEORGE salutes them Don’t you just hate Factory Records? That pretentious, pseudo-streetwise bastion of self-congratulation fronted by Anthony H Wilson, a man who has remained completely untainted by modesty throughout his 14-year reign as self-styled media assassin? Well, not really. The problem with Factory is that, unlike the other labels in this series of Little Cred Rosters , it’s played an incredibly active role within its native community. Creation can continue to release all the Biff Bang Pow! concept singles it desires and 4AD has all the power in the world to issue wooden boxes with cute mini-CDs housed within - the joy of run...

SOLDER OF FORTUNE NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE  Weld/Arc-Weld  (Reprise/All formats) I GUESS you just really had to be there to fully appreciate the surge of power that has been captured on these two discs, but for those devoted Neil Young & Crazy Horse fans who just couldn't make it to their US tour last spring, 'Weld' manages to give the illusion that you had a front row seat. Live albums are usually hit and miss affairs, a fusing together of all the best bits from a successful tour in the hope that a valid and perhaps valuable document will be the end result. If it charts then that's a bonus! Neil Young & Crazy Horse have had a couple of stabs at making a live album, with varying degrees of success. 'Time Fades Away' from 1973 featured an all-new set of songs never released on record before, a shock tactic that baffled all those who were expecting a run-through of 'Harvest' and 'After The Goldrush' nuggets and a bitter blow...

NEC TIQUE NEW ORDER HAPPY MONDAYS  BIRMINGHAM NEC THE CAFETERIA lady at the NEC takes a well-earned five minutes and joins me for a fag. “My son’s mad about Sonic Youth. Are this lot anything like Sonic Youth?” Oh no, said I. Much, much, more special. How come? Because New Order have hits, get played on Grandstand , take billboard space in your town and generally play silly buggers with the self-adhesive labels of modern pop. Despite claims to the contrary, they really are The Smiths you can dance to. They’re the trump card in every argument you’ll ever have with fans of The Godfathers and Michael Jackson. Living proof that truth and beauty need not be pimply and useless, snivelling in its bedroom with the Violent Femmes. Sometimes it must walk hand in hand with Timmy Mallet. Faced with the cavernous expanse of the NEC, Happy Mondays huddle together protectively in the corner. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that everyone knows how criminally trendy they are...

LOSING THEIR PRECISION REM Monster (Warner Bros/All formats) AND MONSTERS go ‘Grrrrrrrr!" Well, what else were they going to do? As the final chords of 'Find The River" ebbed away and the listener struggled to grasp the enormity of what had just been heard, one instinctively felt that when REM made another album - if REM made another album - it could not be ‘Automatic 2: More Songs About Death And Dying'. So perfectly realised, so beautiful in its dignified exploration of the darkest themes, ‘Automatic For The People' brought the late chapter in the REM story to a most unequivocal close. How could its perpetrators make another relatively quiet contemplative record without starting to repeat themselves? What would be the point? Leaving aside the response that seeing as the perpetrators were REM, the most consistently inspired band of their generation, the results would most likely be wonderful - and that would be the point - the volte face of ‘Monste...

WE ARE TRUSTWORTHY ONCE MICHAEL STIPE COULD sing like a man with a mouthful of ectoplasm and a head full of spells and people would take it on faith that it meant the world. Yet now, the beautiful ascetic with the stained-glass eyes is the consummate striped-trousered superstar, the maps and legends crashed under a pile of celebrity contacts. For eight years REM have been in that hollow place where the glare of fame withers the good, and, as 30 million album sales prove, it's no longer a matter of love, but of trust. It's a matter of trust for the band as much as anyone. Without dummer Bill Berry for the first time, keen to show they don’t exist in vacuum-packed isolation, REM’s take on 'Up' is that it’s just a bunch of guys playing together in a room. There's more than a little preposterous superstar posturing here, but maybe, when you’ve created whole musical solar systems, you just want to be the salt of the earth. For ail the promised adventuring, it...

THE FINAL RECKONING? REM Automatic For The People (Warner Brothers/All formats) EVERY RIVER has a multiple tributaries, glorious sights on its banks, and an end. If you imagine REM's career as a river, the source would be Athens, Georgia and the release of 'Radio Free Europe' in 1980, the tributaries would be the various collaborations Stipe, Berry, Buck and Mills have indulged in over the years. The glorious sights would be the temple of fandom erected around them, and the rapids - that started with 'Document' shifting a million copies and got faster through 'Green', more than doubling that figure to ‘Out Of Time' going supernova last year - have now reached the ocean, flowing around the world with 'Automatic For The People'. Future efforts will be played out on the same grand scale as the Michael Jacksons and Madonnas ... But the river also signifies life, from your humble beginnings as a tot, through teenage years, to middle-age ...