Cuttings

POINTS OF ORDER The album Brotherhood is the latest in New Order‘s long line of commercial but independent successes. Mark Prendergast meets them in Manchester. Pics: George Bodnar The emergence of New Order as a joyful and dance-orientated force in music from the harrowing demise of Joy Division has been documented well enough to require no repetition. The original four-piece spawned legions of imitators at the tail end of the seventies, but, after a transitional period marked by their first album and couple of singles, the three survivors, Peter Hook, Bernard Albrecht and Steve Morris, augmented by guitarist and keyboard player Gillian Gilbert, reached a commercial plateau significant for both its widespread appeal, and the terms on which it was achieved. The more morose and introspective earlier years were also marked by a refusal to perform interviews, but the move to 'accessibility' signalled by records like Blue Monday , the best selling 12" si...

DO THESE PEOPLE LOOK SERIOUS? WARNING: this New Order feature contains no soul-baring semantics or deep 'n' doomy description. It does, however, have rather a lot of jokes and some handy information about fishing and spanking. 'They have hours of fun.' says Eleanor Levy. Photography: Joe Shutter IT SEEMS years my petals, positively years. A darkened dance floor, a soft, vaguely droning voice bemoaning how badly a man can be treated. A sharp Arthur Baker production. 'Blue Monday' ringing out. Ah, those fair days when New Order finally became household names to Top Of The Pops’ viewers everywhere. 1983 — and 'Power Corruption And Lies' is released. The last New Order album — consolidating the strong following that's accompanied the band since the emergence of Joy Division. The images of acne-ridden youths in long macs that accompanied them then have never really been shaken off, despite the fact that New Order, if classified at all, are far more a danc...

Blue Monday Mix Master by Dubmaster Mick Middles THE NEW ORDER INTERVIEW REMIX (A ‘dub’ feature) "We had one letter recently from a fan that asked, ‘Who is the geezer called Dub that you keep mentioning? Who is Mr Dub?’. We all had a good laugh about that one, I can tell you.” (Peter Hook, March 1988) They have gone and done it now. How can a band continue to he regarded as an ‘alternative’ when they employ Quincy Jones to remix their finest moment? If you have any doubt that New Order are presently surging into the international big league, then consider this. At the time when U2’s War was invading the bedrooms of America, their manager, Paul McGuinness, bumped into New Order’s Svengali, Rob Gretton, in a Stateside hotel. “He was ecstatic,” says Gretton now, “. . . because U2 had just sold over half a million albums over there. Now I look at Substance and that has sold even more.” Indeed. Anything can happen this year. As Joy Division are unleashed on a mainstream audience for th...

THIS CHARMING MAN 'The tabloids hound me. What makes me more dangerous to them than anybody else is the fact that I lead something of a religious lifestyle. I despise drugs and cigarettes, I'm celibate and I live a very serene lifestyle.' Simon Garfield meets the outspoken Morrissey, frontman of The Smiths and self-proclaimed pariah of the pop industry. If there is any space at all for subversion in the pop charts, then that place is occupied by Manchester band The Smiths. If there has been any creative advancement at all in the music industry in the last year, then that progression has been forged by The Smiths. If there’s been one debut album that can safely lay claim to being ‘a complete signal post in the history of popular music’, then it was ‘The Smiths’ by The Smiths. And if there’s been only one band since the Sex Pistols to upset the cosseted old Biz and genuinely excite young record buyers again, then it’s The... All Morrissey’s views these, and what you’d have ex...

JOGGERS PLAY POP • Any band that hangs out with George Michael, forsakes drugs for jogging and spends five years on that difficult second album must be completely arse, right? Wrong. Not when they're ELECTRONIC, aka Johnny ‘Smiths’ Marr and Bernard ‘New Order' Sumner. TED KESSLER finds out what took them so long. Getting away with it KEVIN CUMMINS Well, you know what happens when you go on the piss with the Pet Shop Boys. You start off in the studio with a couple of kir royales and every intention of getting back to the hotel in time for cooked room service. But by the time you’ve finished playing Neil the album you’ve jettisoned the kir and started swigging the champagne straight from the bottle. So when Neil announces he’s off to Heaven, it seems churlish not to join him. Heaven, it seems, is stiil a good place. Unlike most London dubs it’s not exclusively populated by either snotty-nosed ravers or fashion nazis, and tonight it really feels like these are the good times...

A GOSSIP COLUMN • Wahoo, my little cream buns! Yes, I made it back from sunny Macclesfield all in one delightful piece, ready and raring to get stuck into this week's little catalogue of likely misdemeanours. And goodness me, there were enough being committed in wonderful Manchester last weekend to last me a century. Pity I can't tell you what Morrissey was doing on the staircase of the Britannia with a cup full of hot chocolate, or why Johnny Marr was wearing sunglasses at one o'clock in the morning, or why Ian MacCulloch has suddenly become the victim of a phantom pregnancy or precisely who it was who managed to set the fire alarms off in the aforementioned Manchester hotel, thus evacuating the entire hotel register onto the stairs to rub shoulders with the local fire brigade and coachloads of bewildered American tourists. And what was Tony Wilson doing, walking around the G-MEX Centre all day with a camera crew stuffed right up his nostrils? And did they follow him i...