Cuttings

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL TV presenter and Factory Records guru Tony Wilson is probably as famous as the bands he signed. Andy Fyfe digs beneath the motormouth persona to uncover a thwarted actor with a seam of steely determination. TONY WILSON IS very much the public face of Manchester. Born in 1950, the former Granada arts-programme presenter found himself at the centre of the city’s rise as the hub of British youth culture after co-founding the Factory label. He is also the man behind Manchester’s annual music-business conference In The City, and currently runs F4, the latest incarnation of Factory, to which he has signed what he hopes is the future of British hip hop, Raw-T. Since the original Factory disappeared, Wilson has had his fingers in many pies. He has made documentaries about famous Mancunians and travelling to Peru to take strong jungle hallucinogens, and is now embarking on a new career as a building regeneration consultant. H

Industrial Strength How did the world’s first industrial city become the crucible of late 20th century musical innovation? John Harris explains... MIDWAY THROUGH THE 19th century, a man with the improbable name of Angus Bethune Reach wrote a remarkable article about Manchester in the daily Morning Chronicle. It found the author returning home one night and being surprised “to hear loud sounds of music and jollity which floated out of public house windows”. He went on: "In no city have I ever witnessed a scene of more open, brutal and general intemperance... The whole street rung with shouting, screaming and swearing, mingled with the jarring music of half a dozen bands.” Give or take their air of Victorian moralism, the words could easily describe a 21st-century Mancunian Saturday night: droves of people spilling out on to Canal Street or Deansgate, their brains still rattling to the thumping strains of high-street dance m

Ooh I say! The lighter side of football violence. The death of pop music. Getting the urge for sex. Being racist. The TV star who is “a pig in a man’s body”. The loathsome comedian. The author who ought “to die in a hotel fire”. Morrissey’s views may seem a couple of bus-stops short of reason. “But that doesn’t mean I’m some great twit who lives in a hut and eats straw,” he reassures Adrian Deevoy. "Monsieur Morrissey?'’ puzzles the well-preserved concierge. “Eez a pop group, non?'" Upstairs in his room on the third floor of this cloyingly plush Parisien hotel. Monsieur Morrissey, pop group, has just taken delivery of the finished artwork for his new long player, Your Arsenal. Its cover is a live photograph of the singer, tongue out, shirt asunder (stomach scar courtesy Davyhulme Hospital) suggestively waggling his microphone at fly-height. Morrissey studies the sleeve intently, then holds it at arm's length and squints inscrutably - or could it be myopically

The Soft Touch Your fans are fiercely loyal but always "with an aura of love and gentleness". You're being sued by two former band members but accept it as "par for the course". You're a staunch supporter of the slighted, the lonely, the misunderstood - people, in fact, much like yourself. You are Morrissey and you're talking to Mat Snow. For a man who, in his time, has sprouted a bush from his back pocket, sheathed his torso in capacious ladies’ blousewear from Evans Outsize, strung great ropes of bright plastic beads round his neck and, indeed, sported a conspicuously large, outmoded and quite unnecessary hearing-aid, the icon they call Morrissey seems ever so slightly rattled when asked about his latest contribution to the world of fashion and personal grooming. “Aah, the question is so basic it’s hard to answer: why did you shave your armpits? I find it very fascinating. I did it for a long time, all through The Smiths’ career and I still do

LOVING Morrissey saves himself. • MORRISSEY Your Arsenal HIS MASTER'S VOICE CSD 3790  There comes a point in many major artists' careers where they have to make an album of some significance or the game is well and truly up. Morrissey is at exactly that point. The solo career had reached a stage where the song titles were more interesting than the songs themselves, and many a revisionist knife was sufficiently sharpened to suggest that The Smiths have had little lasting influence - unless James and Raymonde really count - and that, bar a few cracking singles, they weren't actually that great. Your Arsenal is his musical salvation. It's his wise choice of sidemen that really scores. Mick Ronson is Morrissey's ideal producer. Aside from his serious health problems placing the singer's hypochondria in its proper context, his glam background matches Morrissey's latent '70s fixation, giving a beefy sound - huge drums, sparingly used power chords - that h

Oh, such drama! Morrissey? Ah yes... that listless mode of deportment so shambolically bereft of chic. Those incorrigibly provocative tunes so intoxicatingly drenched in melancholy. Those tortuously-interwoven pronouncements so shamelessly strewn with florid mots justes. The Smiths' singer is driven by a distaste for normality. Any day now, he tells Paul du Noyer, he fully expects to be locked up. Steven Patrick Morrissey, 28, momentarily reflects upon a subject which has commanded his unswerving interest for a number of years. Himself. “I suppose I’m just an arcane old…  wardrobe , really,” he sighs, in a Northern voice, softly cobblestoned. Quite so. But such a remarkable item of furniture he has proved, so amply stocked within – with shirts of doubt, entire overcoats of irony, sock drawers of secrecy and not a few trousers’ worth of anguish. An unusually capacious cupboard, also, with room in its gloomiest corners for a huddled mass of waifs and strays. To the more inte