Cuttings

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/28/unknown-pleasures-peter-hook-review Here are the young men... A memoir by Joy Division bassist Peter Hook is steeped in guilt, writes Dorian Lynskey Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Peter Hook Simon & Schuster £20, pp336 It is 16 October 1979. Manchester quartet Joy Division have just played a show in Brussels and are a few days away from recording Atmosphere, the sepulchral masterpiece that will take on uncanny weight seven months later, when the body of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis is found hanging in his kitchen. On this particular night, however, Curtis is urinating in an ashtray in his bandmates’ youth hostel room. “Ha, you wankers, I’m pissing in your room,” says this tortured poet, this future icon of doomed youth. “Ha ha, pissing in your room!” This anecdote is typical of bass guitarist Peter Hook’s conflicted account of his first band’s cruelly abbreviated existence. The Joy ...

CD OF THE WEEK Now you better believe that Bjork's angry... Bjork Volta (One Little Indian) £11.99 Bjork’s latterday works, such as Medulla in 2004 and 2005’s film soundtrack, Drawing Restraint 9 , were impressive but rarefied. Volta is a real volte-face. On her ninth solo album, the Icelandic composer plunges back into the avant clubs on the arm of hip hop maestro Timbaland. On ‘Innocence’, you can hear someone getting beaten up at a rave: ‘ Thwap! hurgh !' On ‘Earth Intruders’, a rag-tag army of woaded tribesmen marches polyrhythmically on the First World, armed with poisoned thumb pianos. You can’t move for Timbaland’s beats these days, but Bjork doesn’t follow herds. He first came to her 10 years ago, cap in hand, for a sample of ‘Joga’. The beats aren’t even the most exciting thing about Volta . Bjork has engaged a superlative Icelandic brass section, who mimic ships in fog. Two improv drummers, the blistering Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt) and the more free-form Chr...

POP CD OF THE WEEK Strange but true BJORK Vespertine (One Little Indian 046026) BJORK’S place as one of the defining acts of the Nineties isn’t in doubt - like Massive Attack, her individuality and fusion of forms has been much copied - but her last album proper, 1997’s Homogenic , made me wonder whether she wasn’t in danger of replicating her achievements for diminishing returns. It was fiercely modem, and rumbled with drum’n’bass beats, but charmless compared to 1993’s Debut and 1995’s Post . Since then, there has been her Oscar-winning role in Dancer In The Dark , but the soundtrack she supplied for Lars Von Trier’s grand folly proved as unconvincing as her millennial Icelandic cockney performance. Bjork has wisely moved on for Vespertine (‘active in the evening’), toning down the stark volcanic soundscapes of Homogenic in favour of ethereal backings laden with dreamy harps, heavenly choirs and washes of sound. It’s an intimate album, whose songs revolve around moments of tender ...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/27/new-order-music-complete-interview TOUGHER, HAPPIER.... MEET THE NEW NEW ORDER Eight years on from their acrimonious split with Peter Hook, New Order are back with a new album, a new lineup and a newfound joy in the electronic sound they made their own with 1989's era-defining Technique. By Miranda Sawyer I meet New Order in Manchester Central Library, which has had a makeover. It was always a beautiful building, but the entrance has been redesigned and the whole place has a new feel: modern, airy, welcoming. It would be easy to use the library as a metaphor for New Order – a Mancunian institution, born out of the city’s industrial past, refreshed and equipped for the future with contemporary add-ons – but, you know, let’s not. Instead, let’s say that in 2015, New Order is the same, but different. Though the lineup has changed over the years, the band is consistent, still about the same thing: revolutionary music made by anti-musicians ...

BACKBEAT Paul Abbott, award 'winning scriptwriter and creator of 'Shameless’, asks New Order’s lead singer Bernard Sumner about Manchester, Coronation Street, why he loves his boat, and working with Scissor Sisters Paul Abbott: Why do you think Manchester and the Northwest seems to be such a fertile place for generating frontline talent, be it musicians, artists, or writers? Bernard Sumner: I can only speak from my own experience and say that when I was at school, if you were creative, it seemed to puzzle them and even though they taught Art and Classical Music, anything contemporary was ignored. Which of course was what we were interested in, so this resulted in a Do It Yourself culture. You were also made to feel useless if you weren’t any good at maths - logarithms or algebra. I thought that was a load of bollocks, so I just ignored school and when it was over, I did what I wanted to do all along. PA: Be honest! Did you think the film 24 Hour Party People was a true reflect...

  https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/sep/16/popandrock.joydivision NORTHERN LIGHTS How to make a film about the short and tragic life of Ian Curtis? On set, and talking to the cast and to members of Joy Division, Paul Morley reports. Exclusive photographs by the director of 'Control', Anton Corbijn 001 Steven Morris cannot believe it. When he talks about what he's lived through as a simple, dedicated drummer, first Joy Division, then for New Order, he can start to sound like a post-punk Victor Meldew, increasingly indignant at the chaos that unfolded all around him mainly because he found himself, through no real fault of his own, a Factory Records recording star. Don't get him started on the Hacienda, the Manchester nightclub his two groups helped finance, early in the Eighties, for up to £10,000 a month, where he never got a free drink in eight years. He still hasn't really recovered from the time 27 years ago when Ian Curtis, his 23-year-old Macclesfield...

  https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/mar/24/jon-savage-joy-division-transcend-time-and-place-interview In Jon Savage's remarkable oral history of Joy Division, extracted overleaf, surviving members and key figures in the Manchester scene tell the definitive story of the group. Below, the author explains why the band transcend their time and place Music journalist Jon Savage, 65, has wanted to write a book about Joy Division for as long as he can remember. But the spark for his new oral history of the band, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, is easier to pinpoint. He assisted on Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary film Joy Division and knew how much material had been left on the cutting-room floor. Lead singer Ian Curtis was long dead of course (he killed himself in 1980), but there were in-depth interviews with the remaining members of the group – Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – as well as material that Savage had compiled over four decades fo...

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/aug/12/popandrock.joydivision Closer to the birth of a music legend Ian Curtis, the tragic lead singer of Manchester post-punk pioneers Joy Division, comes alive again in a stylish new biopic. Here, the acclaimed photographer who captured the band's brief blaze of glory tells how he helped fashion their bleak image Kevin Cummins Anton Corbijn's film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, Control , which premieres in Edinburgh on Friday, is set in a Manchester that is high-gloss, highly saturated, monochromatic. This is pure fiction. The 1970s reality of Manchester is of a bleak post-industrial Victorian city. Large, decaying warehouses were yet to become idiosyncratic hotels and urban living spaces. Mainly they were filthy, dilapidated and abandoned. In his celebrated English Journey of 1934, JB Priestley described the light in Manchester as being 'a turgid sooty gloom that was neither day nor night'. Furthermore, M...