Cuttings

OUT OF THE GRAVEYARD, INTO THE BALLROOM A CERTAIN RATIO The Old & The New ( Factory ) IT'S A MIRACLE that they're still with us, surviving the flak and the sorry neglect; eternally, it seems, walking in the shadows of Factory front-runners; never quite deathly enough to match Joy Division or as perfectly synthesised as New Order. Feel free to see this as a purely mercenary offering from Factory, but, as 'The Old & The New' bears witness, ACR have mined their own spiritual seam since '79; untainted ( I tell you ) by label-mates or contemporaries. Okay, so it's not a barrel of laughs, but nobody said it was going to be easy. I concede that 'Do The Du', 'And Then Again' and 'Thin Boys' may present bleak, bass-fired, mortal pictures of collapsing bedsits ( never Curtis copyists, they co-existed with the great man), but somehow ACR's structures - weird conurbations of funk, jazz, soul, avant garde - consistently hook yo...

A CERTAIN RATIO: Wild Party ( Factory ) Whoopee! A Certain Ratio are wearing their party hats again: this means lots of reverb on the drum machine, plenty of chorus on the slap bass and deadpan voices intoning something very important.

SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL! MORRISSEY’S ‘DRUG’ CRAZED VIDEO AS OSCAR Wilde himself once said - Jesus bleedin’ Christ!!!  The video for Morrissey’s new ‘Interesting Drug’ smasheroo - which, depending on the outcome of the confusion currently surrounding it in the EMI offices (see News story, page three) may or may not be dominating a screen near you soon - is extraordinary . Not extraordinary brilliant, or extraordinary crap, just extraordinary... The epic, made (like previous Mozterpieces) by Tim Broad, starts with a standard concert shot of the great man and ends with scenes of fluffy bunnies; so far, so ordinary. Except that the intervening three minutes are filled with (take a deep breath and a sedative for your Disbelief Glands!); a school named after a member of the Carry On team; the ‘ Coronation Street ’ rooftops; Diana Dors on the cover of NME ; all the books ever written about whales; toilet graffiti (highly literate, natch); a raven-haired temptress who, but for a few ...

THE MAD CHATTER BIG MOUTH strikes again... and again and again and again... For years now the loudest squawk in pop’s deafening parrot-house has belonged to Steven Patrick MORRISSEY. By turns poetically thoughtful, corrosively razor-lipped, brazenly provocative and scathingly hilarious, he’s reigned unchallenged as music’s most quotable, and quoted, chatterbox. DANNY KELLY presents a selection of nuggets panned from our back pages; the wit, wisdom, whimsy and waffle of Mozzer on the subject of... GROWING UP “I’M REALLY chained to those iron bridges. I’m really chained to the pier, persistently on some disused clearing in Wigan. . .’’( Feb ’84 ) “I’VE NEVER had a flat cap and I’ve never smoked Senior Service.” ( Feb ’88 ) “I READ persistently. I swam in books as a child and at some point it becomes quite ruinous. It gets to the point where you can’t answer the door without being heavily analytical about it. But ultimately I think they’ve proved to be positive weapons for me...

ELECTRONIC KICK HAC! ELECTRONIC MANCHESTER HACIENDA “WE FOUGHT the law and we won” smirks Barney and the Hacienda heaves a sigh of relief which erupts into an almighty cheer. Tonight is a time for uneasy celebration, the free tickets are stamped with the word ‘Thanksgiving’, there’s glasses of champagne on the door and once more the floor is ram-jammed with party people. After months of biting their nails, the Hacienda can smile again and relax. On certain occasions Manchester feels like it has to be Madchester, and there is a mass gathering of the clan. Gone are the days when pop stars should be heard but not seen and tonight you can’t move more than three people without tripping over an Inspiral. The music mafia are out in force, from old partisans to fresh young blood, celebrating the Hacienda's resurrection. The Hacienda, once an empty abattoir that no one knew what to do with and more recently host to a scary phenomenon called ‘dance music', has been snatche...

THE MOD COUPLE ELECTRONIC Electronic ( Factory/All formats ) IT'S PROBABLY not actually meant to be ironic that 'Electronic' opens with Barney Sumner declaring, "My name is not important" but it is ironic, a bit. After all, we have turned full circle to the days when rock thought it was maths and that if you put one bloke from a good group in with another bloke from another good group, you got a group that was twice as good. As a rule, natch, what you got was a bloody awful group and Supergroups were outlawed by the World Government and anyone who had worked with Eric Clapton was hanged. But now we have Electronic and wow! they are good. Even though the mere facts that Johnny Marr can play the guitar better than Morrissey and Sumner used to be in a group with someone from Revenge do not immediately cause anyone sane to shout "Hurray! Popular music is safe forever!", 'Electronic' turns out to be very good. Perhaps playing the jangly gui...

THE BUILDING OF A PEACE MOUNTAIN TIM JARVIS gets a lesson in farm economics from MICHAEL EAVIS—the man who built Glastonbury and is helping to make CND grow. "I SUPPOSE you want to talk about the convoy" says Michael Eavis wearily, at the end of hard day on the Glastonbury site. News bulletins are broadcasting rumours of hippies heading for Glastonbury. "What do you mean, rumours?" he asks incredulously. "They're already here." Sitting cosy on the phone in London I had images of Somerset farmland knee deep in Aduki burgers and joss-sticks with indigenous cows fighting to the death overthe last blade of grass. Eavis is a busy man. His festival has become a big musical fixture and has outgrown the trivialities of former days. It's now billed as "Europe's most effective anti-nuclear fundraiser" and earns more for CND in three days than anything else they do in a year. Throughout the '70s Eavis, a small-stock dairy far...

GOODBYE TO GLASTONBURY? HELLO, READING... LAST WEEKEND'S Glastonbury Festival may have been the last, but the Reading rockfest is poised for a comeback. The Glastonbury promoter, Michael Eavis, said after the three-day event: "There are too many people, and too many problems". Eavis had a licence for 55,000 festival-goers, but gatecrashers and other unexpected arrivals put the attendance last weekend to closer to 100,000, which may have cost the festival its future. CND will be anxious, if this is the case, for the event raises more for the anti-nuclear organisation in three days than it can get in the rest of the year. News reports that the Reading Festival will be back in action this August after a two-year absence have been described by the festival's organisers as "premature". As NME closed for press, there was only a 50-50 chance that the event will return this year. The absence of Britain's longest-running rock festival was caused b...

From US television Sesame Street meets REM Last week, Sesame Street in the US (brought to you by the letter B and the number 19) featured a guest appearance from REM. Here is the full shooting script and transcript, revealing the stadium rock stars’ contribution to cognitive emotions and early learning Title : REM Song: Furry, Happy Monsters Goals : Emotions, happy/sad Music/Lyrics : B Berry, P Buck, M Mills, M Stipe Scenic : Limbo Talent : REM, Monsters, Two-headed monster Music : Track to song Shiny Happy People [As REM starts the tune, we see a group of happy, laughing monsters and the two-headed monster. Their joy is over the top. They skip, jump, run, whoop and high-five each other. Music: track to song Shiny Happy People ] REM sings : Furry happy monsters, laughing... Monsters having fun, happy, happy, See them jump and run, happy, happy Laughing all the while, cheerful, cheerful, Flashing a big smile, that’s a perfect sign That they’re feelin’ fine! ...

His master's voice MORRISSEY will have his debut solo single ‘Suedehead’ released on the reactivated HMV label, through Parlophone, on Monday. And he makes his acting debut next month in the second Brookside spin-off South . The single is backed by ‘I Know Very Well How I Got My Name’, and the 12 inch includes an extra track, ‘Hairdresser On Fire’. All songs have been co-written by Morrissey and producer Stephen Street. The HMV label’s last contemporary release was almost 20 years ago, ‘I Wouldn’t Go Back To The World I Knew’ by Joyce Grenfell, and Morrissey will now be the only contemporary artist on the label. Morrissey will appear on the sleeve of the single himself, the first time he has ever graced one of his own record covers. The photograph was taken by Smiths fan Geri Caulfield at the band’s London Palladium show in 1986. The acting role should be screened at the end of March, but it is only a brief appearance in which Morrissey appears as himself. He descri...

Desecrating Wildly "How could they do this to Oscar Wilde's grave?" Len Brown asks of Morrissey, but finds his genitals reduced to paperweights. (Oscar's that is...) “So we go inside and we gravely read the stones/ All those people all those lives/ Where are they now?” . Oh, what a grey day in Paris’ Pere-Lachaise cemetery, last resting place for top dead French people like Piaf, Proust, Moliere, Modigliani and the headless Danton. But the real attractions are eternal tourists in this beautiful boneyard-international megastars such as Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Doors’ addicts will already be familiar with the grim condition of the Lizard King’s grave. The presence of Morrison's leathery bones has long been a source of irritation and embarrassment to cemetery officials; they've even erased his name from graveyard maps to reduce the number of hippy pilgrims. But still they come, to sit moist-eyed on surrounding slabs, to lay ...

Smiths to reform? Persistent rumours that THE SMITHS will re-form gained weight this week with reports from Europe that the band are to tour there in the New Year. One French promoter who had been booking dates for a solo tour by MORRISSEY in the autumn has been told to scrap the plans because The Smiths will travel there early in 1990. Two independent sources contacted NME this week to confirm the rumours, but there’s been no official announcements of a reunion by the band, who split up two years ago after more than a dozen hits. And if The Smiths do play Europe, will they play dates in the UK? A spokesman at Bandstand, who were brought in to promote Morrissey’s Wolverhampton show last December, told NME : “There were stories that Morrissey was going to play Europe, but not the UK. I haven’t heard anything about The Smiths touring, that’s an interesting one. “But there’s been so much confusion in the past, following their break-up that it’s hard to tell who actuall...

GOODBYE, SMITHS GROUP SPLITS, MORRISSEY TO GO SOLO THE SMITHS are dead. After weeks of speculation about a replacement for Johnny Marr, NME discovered at the weekend that Morrissey intends to record under his own name in the future. His new songwriting partner is Stephen Street, the producer and engineer who has worked with The Smiths since the Sandie Shaw collaboration in March, 1984. And it’s now more than likely that the two remaining Smiths - drummer Mike Joyce and bass player Andy Rourke - will team up with Johnny Marr in his new band. The news started to break on Friday when the NME received a statement from Joyce announcing his departure, saying he had “fulfilled his role” with The Smiths. Rough Trade and The Smiths’ office were unaware that Joyce intended to quit, as he had been approached by Morrissey to play on his solo material. The full truth was revealed on Saturday by Pat Bellis, spokesperson for Morrissey: “It’s taken some time to think things o...

SMITHS TO SPLIT THE SMITHS look likely to call it a day after the release of their next album in September, and insiders are blaming a personality clash between Morrissey and Johnny Marr - the group’s nucleus and songwriting partnership - for the split. There’s no official word from Rough Trade, apart from a rather flippant dismissal from Mozzer, but NME understands that relations between the two main men are so bad that they won’t even enter the same studio together. And promoters have been instructed not to arrange any live shows, either in Europe or America, to promote the new material, it is believed. Morrissey, when approached through his press office for a comment, said: “Whoever says The Smiths have split shall be severely spanked by me with a wet plimsoll”. While NME newshounds await the arrival of young Steven armed with soggy footwear, sources in both London and Manchester continue to feed us with snippets which point towards the decline of the nation’s top i...

HUFFIN' AND PUFFIN THE SUGARCUBES Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week ( One Little Indian LP/Cassette/CD ) SHE WAS laughing ! God, that is, at the moment She decided, in one particularly mischievious mood, to create The Most Unlikely Rock Band In The History Of The World Etc. "And you thought platypusses were weird!", She cackled. "You thought digital watches. Pot Noodle, country dancing and Jonathan King were strange efforts - well just wait till you've seen this lot. They'll be from Bakino Fassa, no, better still, Iceland : they'll be a mixture of pug-ugly boys and moon-faced chicks, and both the chicks will have kids by the creepiest looking lad; they'll dine on extremely photogenic shoreline birdlife and they'll have an incredibly poofy, sickly sweet name -1 dunno, something like The Candyflosses.. ." Yep, She was laughing her ovaries off alright, but now that joke isn't funny anymore. Almost the entire planet has fallen for H...

TWO LIMITED THE OTHER TWO The Other Two And You (London/All formats) "IT'S HARD to go back after ten or 11 years and start again.. unless someone commits suicide." - Stephen Morris, 1993. Nobody died so The Other Two might live, thankfully. So it was inevitable that the duo's long-delayed debut was never going to pulsate with the same sulky splendour as New Order, the same brooding sense of magic and loss, the same cliff-edge emotions and internal scars... But if shot just the lack of ghosts hovering over 'The Other Two And You' which denies it mystique and grandeur. There's the sheen of married thirtysomething contentment which even masterful co-producer Stephen Hague cannot entirely erase. There's the palpable lack of tension with Bernard's petulance and Hooky's laddishness erased from the equation. Then there’s the striking contrast between these dinky electro grooves and the billowing stormclouds of 'Republic', like a ...

LONG LIVE THE KING! THE SMITHS The Queen Is Dead (Rough Trade) THINGS ARE not always as they seem. When The Smiths appeared on Whistle Test a few weeks ago to promote the 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' single, even their most committed fan would have been forgiven for thinking that our most eminent jangling jewels were finally beginning to lapse into self-parody. There on the screen was the Prince Of Pain, the finest furrowed pate in pop, replete in the same old faded denims and that bloody awful hearing aid, bleating on about how he felt like Joan Of Arc and had no right to take his place in the human race. Behind him, meanwhile, a four-piece band were coming on like the new Rolling Stones, all rounded rock maturity and polished cocksure authority. With a crucial third LP on the horizon, it was as if the skin of their beat had finally fully ripened; as if they had defined and perfected their musical pitch and lost their hunger , their need to grow. But things are n...

BETTER RELATE THAN NEVER MORRISSEY Kill Uncle ( HMV/All formats ) WELCOME BACK, Mozzer. Three years in an absurd wilderness of his own making have done sod all for Morrissey's reputation as someone to be taken seriously and a lot for his image as Mr Flaming Pillock. On the few occasions he gave interviews, Morrissey chose to present himself as arrogant, self-obsessed and depressed. Not much new there, except he wasn't funny anymore. In the meantime, he released singles from which invention, melody and the old Moz trick of having something interesting to say had nipped out to the corner shop with no intention of returning. 'November Spawned A Monster', 'Interesting Drug', 'Ouija Board Ouija Board', 'Piccadilly Palare' - a quartet of duller records has not been released in such numbing succession since the last days of Johnny Hates Jazz. If ever there was a man who had lost his way, his interest in making music, or possibly his will to...

PAINT A VULGAR PICTURE DANNY KELLY rattles and hums over the latest Smiths re-issue THE SMITHS Louder Than Bombs ( Rough Trade CD ) 4 x CD Singles ( Rough Trade ) PASS ME my trusty old soapbox! The music on this latest batch of Smiths 'product' (doesn't that hideous - though utterly appropriate - word just drive a stake into your heart?) is mostly so familiar that I feel no qualm whatsoever in an unashamed rant... Back in the dawn of time, y'see, when Rough Trade first emerged, there was much controversy about the label's name, it being the slang term for those pathetic male wretches who survive around London's railway termini by selling their soft-skinned arses to the highest bidder. The 1988-style Rough Trade (and its 1989 model too, I'll wager) have bettered themselves, risen, ahem, above their station; now the ass they flog is not their own, but that of The Smiths. And it makes me, the very Smiths completist/fanatic/bore at whom this stuff ...

TOP OF THE CHOPS HE SMITHS Meat Is Murder ( Rough Trade ) THAT NATURAL Northern charm, bred in the back-to-backs and cobblestone alleyways, shyly smiling, quipping couplets of love forlon and bungled romance, over those infectiously syncopated rhythms. All this can only mean one man . . . Yes, George Formby. However, it’s not George we’re here for, but a man who’s declared an admiration for the Lancashire minstrel and could arguably be seen as his successor. Steven Patrick Morrissey and his popular Smiths band return with this their second 'proper' album, following last year’s incandescent debut and the intermediary 'Hatful Of Hollow’ compilation job. At the least, 'Meat Is Murder’ equals its illustrious predecessors. Given some growing time, it could even better them. Lyrically, these nine new tracks display the Bard of Whalley Range at his most direct. Disciplined and succinct, each song relates an affecting tale or makes a point with killing precision. ...

RESURRECTION SCUFFLE MORRISSEY DUBLIN NATIONAL STADIUM IT’S A film-maker’s version of the idolatry of pop. When Oliver Stone does the movie (‘Dirk Bogarde is Steven Patrick Morrissey!’) these are the things he won’t need to exaggerate: tiny, white-faced colleens on the point of collapse passed hand over hand through the throng; brawny young skinheads tearfully clutching their bunches of gladioli; the Garda, bemused, smiling nervously, gingerly fingering their nightsticks. If you’ve seen newsreel of The Beatles, or a video of Stardust or you can remember The Bay City Rollers, then you’ve seen all this before, but it still doesn’t make it any the less compelling. It’s the point at which admiration becomes hysteria, where love becomes a kind of affectionate bloodlust. Scary.. .and crazily good fun. Morrissey, the ex-Smith, is playing live for only the second time since the dissolution of his really quite good former group. The chosen venue is, by design, a boxing stadium and...