Cuttings

50 GREAT MANCHESTER ALBUMS From the Buzzcocks to Doves, Britain's second city has unleashed a succession of albums that changed the face of music. Here's your guide to the best of them.... THE DURUTTI COLUMN The Return Of The Durutti Column FACTORY 1979 Cult miserabillst plays super-sad instrumental guitar. For a movement that was meant to be about free minds and expression, punk dogmas were quick to harden. The Durutti Column, aka guitarist Vini Reilly, kicked against them profoundly with nine meditative instrumental pieces, augmented by minimal programmed rhythms and the judicious use of an Echoplex unit, courtesy of producer Martin Hannett. The seemingly improvised results were delicate and melancholic. But there’s still comfort and even joy here. IH JOY DIVISION Unknown Pleasures FACTORY, 1979 Stark and atmospheric - this is their solemn, definitive st...

A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU With 24 Hour Party People, director Michael Winterbottom set out to re-create the Factory myth in celluloid. Yet he hadn't banked on a nightmare of drugs, frayed tempers and madness to equal the real story. By Damon Wise ON FRIDAY 2 March 2001, Tony Wilson arrived at the Hacienda and found the place in chaos. Actually, he was lucky to find it standing; it had, after all, been demolished some six months previously, three years after various cash crises and public-order concerns had conspired to close it for good. He was actually in a warehouse in Ancoats, looking at FAC 451, an extraordinarily detailed re-creation of the Manchester nightclub. The original Hacienda was part of local history, built in a former yacht showroom in 1982 with the profits from Factory Records as a thank-you to the city and rewarded in its early days with almost total ingratitude as the local clientele stayed...

THE VIKING Low-slung bass hero Peter Hook has survived both Joy Division and New Order with his impish humour intact. Roy Wilkinson hears tales of Michael Schumacher’s leather jacket, rucks with Moz and Mexican rave music. WE JOIN PETER Hook in the studio annexe at his Cheshire home. He’s in the middle of remixing a track for Rock Kills Kid, a new and hygienic Los Angeles quintet. This extracurricular remix work is new terrain for Peter. His first commission was a recent makeover for The Killers’ track All These Things That I've Done that never saw the light of day. Playing on the song’s “I got soul but I’m not a soldier" refrain, Peter added the voices of young US servicemen, talking about their imminent dispatch to Iraq. The record company decided this was far too contentious for release. Was the indomitable Hook bothered? Of course not. “I was quite flattered,” he laughs. “Getting banned when I'm knocking on ...

A CERTAIN RATIO THE NORTH-WEST'S PUNK FUNKATEERS MANCHESTER NEVER KNEW what hit it - A Certain Ratio (their name lifted from Brian Eno’s track The True Wheel) exploded on to the punk scene in 1977 with their exhilarating, obdurate live show, which mixed James Brown-styled syncopated funk with punk, disco and electronica. Tony Wilson was so impressed that he signed them to Factory, where a seven-year tenure with the label spawned five albums - 1979’s cassette-only The Graveyard And The Ballroom, 1981’s Martin Hannett-produced To Each..., the following year’s Sextet and I’d Like To See You Again, and their label swansong, 1986’s Force. And that’s not to mention a string of truly awesome singles, including Do The Du and their irascible funk-punk take on Banbarra’s Shack Up. Beginning life in 1977, the combo - comprising singers Martha Tilson and Simon Topping, guitarist Peter Terrell,...

ODE TO JOY Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures has become one of the most influential albums of all time. Peter Hook and Stephen Morris help Roy Wilkinson trace its genesis through crates of Vimto, mysterious moorland meetings and industrial rhythms. STRAWBERRY STUDIOS SITS on Stockport’s Waterloo Road — a street whose Victorian brickwork and sturdy facades suggest time slipping stoically by. Fifty years before Joy Division arrived to record their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, in April 1979, Waterloo Road was home to the marine engineers F Bamford & Co, experts in the hydrodynamic arts. Bamfords supplied the propellers that powered Sir Henry Segrave to a world water-speed record in 1930. After that successful run, a further dash across Lake Windermere sent Segrave to his death. Of course, you can find portentous signs for Ian Curtis’s suicide anywhere - if you look hard enough. But the link betwee...

WHAT DO I GET? Smiths drummer Mike Joyce wanted to be a Buzzcock, but fate had something even more extraordinary in store. Johnny Black discovers an amazing trip with a muted comedown. MIKE JOYCE’S untutored, dynamic percussion gave The Smiths a propulsive core that was as imaginative and eccentric as any Morrissey lyric. He and Johnny Marr, close friends and bandmates long before the formation of The Smiths, maintained an unshakeable friendship until the band's demise. That relationship, however, crumbled in 1996 when Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr in a bitter but successful legal action which secured him a 25 per cent share of the group’s performing-rights royalties. He has recently secured a recording deal for his new band with Birmingham punk songsmith Vinny Peculiar, and is about to begin DJ-ingon Manchester radio station Revolution Active.2. Were you aware of Manchester’s rock heritage when you were young? Not until I was 15 or 16. Prior to that I was...

GET THE MESSAGE Guitar genius Johnny Marr tells Andrew Male about pinching record sleeves as a kid, the shadow of the Moors Murders and the irresistible rise of Manchester’s late-’80s club culture. ONE OF THE MOST important decisions The Smiths ever made was not signing to Factory Records. In 1983, with the Hacienda celebrating its first birthday and the release of New Order’s Blue Monday, Manchester’s musical identity was bound up in the stark, glacial aesthetic of this ambitious little empire operated by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus out of 86 Palatine Road, Didsbury. The Smiths, between 1983 and their demise in 1987, created a new identity for Manchester - romantic, mordant, cinematic and, at times, blushingly celebratory. Yet, by the time of the split, Johnny Marr at least was caught up in an altogether more high-tech, hedonistic mood emerging in Manchester. He left The Smiths and, with Bernard Sumner,...