Cuttings

the hook, the chief, the wife and her drummer From melancholy sophisticates to disco evangelists and beyond, they've dominated British pop like no other band. Yet their mystery remains. On the eve of a Reading rebirth, we ask... just who are New Order? story by MIRANDA SAWYER photos by NEIL COOPER NEW ORDER SIT AT A cloth-covered table on the airy bar de terrasse of the Montreux Palace Hotel. To one side of them a film crew buzz discreetly about their business. Above, the pot plants gently sizzle amid the TV lights. Across the road the neon sign of Hazyland ("Dancing CLUB... DANCING club") has just been lit. It's 9.30pm. Just beyond Hazyland, Lake Geneva, huge and silent, flickers in the blurry moonlight.  The bar is deserted apart from the TV corner, where Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert, Bernard Sumner and Peter "Hooky" Hook - surrounded by 20 or so crew and hangers-on - lounge in various states of drunken diffidence. Paul Morley sits opposite. He is int

WAKE ME WHEN IT'S OVER The Manchester scene is press-created, shallow, turgid, "a shuddering disappointment". Dance music has destroyed everything, it's "totally shocking and revolting". You are Morrissey and 1991 is becoming a nightmare... STORY BY MARK KEMP Sitting at a table in the lobby of Manchester's famed Midland Hotel, a stately red-brick building on Mosley Street where C S Rolls and Henry Royce first met in 1904 to talk luxury automobiles, Morrissey is sipping herbal tea and feeling just miserable. That's nothing new, of course, except that today he has a physical, tangible reason for it. "Today?" he asks, raising his prominent eyebrows, dubious of the initial line of questioning. "Well, let's see. Today I've been suffering slightly because I've had a terrible bout of flu, which can't be of any interest to anyone at all." He puckers his lips to one side, forming an understated - and presumably uninte

VIVA DRAMA MORRISSEY Kill Uncle HMV CSD 3789/MC/CD THERE'S TOO much accompanying luggage with this record. The last two-and-a-half years (since 'Viva Hate’) have been loaded with irrelevancies, Mozz-trivia, and they cloud the issue. The issue being, in case anyone's forgotten, whether or not Morrissey can still cut the mustard, whether his music is still worth our attention. He can, it is. 'Kill Unde' is an LP of tiny, shining moments that gradually dawn on the listener, in the same way a damp patch on a car seat only lets the extent of its presence known halfway through the journey (forgive the unattractive image). Morrissey's collaborator for all but two of the songs on 'Kill Uncle' is Mark E Nevin, of Fairground Attraction infamy, and mostly the union is a happy one. ‘Our Frank' opens the album on a bright, hard, high note, the music rolling along happily and conventionally enough (guitars, drums, keyboards) until the stormer of a ch

That was the bleak that was I say, I say! What do you call a band who embodied life without meaning where love is an illusory goal? JOY DIVISION Unknown Pleasures ■■■■■ Closer ■■■■■ Still ■■■□□ Substance ■■■ CENTREDATE/LONDON This is the way; step inside. Bearing in mind the crucial contribution of producer Martin Hannett, these records are essentially the work of five men. Of these five, two are dead; one by his own hand. Ian Curtis’ suicide one bright May day in 1980 casts a long, meaningful shadow over all of Joy Division’s canon. Listening to the songs of The Cure, whether we like them or not, we are always aware that these seemingly agonised tales of rejection and failure are the handiwork of a rich, successful, well-fed, happily-married English professional. When we hear the lyrics of Ian Curtis - fractured, oblique commentaries on a life without meaning, without hope, where love is an illusory goal fraught with disappointments, and shadowy forces beyond our understandin