Cuttings

DESIGN The Manchester tradition Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville were studying graphic design at Manchester Poly when punk hit the city, and both quickly became involved with the local music scene. Garrett worked with the Buzzcocks, later starting the design company Assorted Images, and Saville became art director at Factory before setting up his own company, PSA, in London. Together, they established a tradition of local designers working with local bands, shops and clubs continued now by Manchester-based teams Trevor Johnson / Tony Panas and Central Station Design. The Poly now has a reputation for turning out innovative designers — Arena's Ian Swift and our own Pat Glover are graduates, as was Dave Crow, who initiated the Poly magazine Fresh seen above

MANCHESTER Tony Wilson argues that small is beautiful It's a village. It's a village. It's a village. It usually is. When it goes off, when cultures collide and explode and get to figure in the export figures, it's usually a village that came up with the goods. Even the last one, the one that threw up Guns'N Roses, was that part of Los Angeles where the pavements are filled with blond hair and black leather. It was Hollywood, it was a village. As was the first one. I've never been to Memphis, but it must have been a village because how else would Sam and Elvis have met? And what's special about my village — Manchester — other than the fact it is a village? Well, it's a friendly village. In some villages, outsiders feel like outsiders. In my village outsiders are welcomed, made to feel at home. Sure, in 1915 they threw bricks at my grandfather's watchmaker's shop, but they were tough days and anyway my grandfather, Herman Maximilian Knupfer, love...

THE DEEP END   MORRISSEY INTERVIEWED BY NICK KENT PHOTOGRAPHY ANTON CORBIJN  Everything is so neat and spartan in Morrissey's room that the presence of a highly decorative acoustic guitar propped against a chair instantly calls attention to itself. Do you play now, I ask. "A little," he answers, that great anvil of a face suddenly creased with the familiar expression of 'pained mirth'. Why don't you write your own tunes then? It'd save you a lot of grief... "Everyone keeps telling me that," he says evenly. "Let's just say I have an inner voice which keeps telling me... ahem...  stay as pure as you are ." He laughs then settles back. "I mean, my theory is, 'Why dabble with a masterpiece?' In a diluted sense, that's exactly how I feel about... um... things." Four hours later, our interview at an end, one of those random seething energy rushes I've noticed he gets when he's excited will propel him hel...

THE BAND WITH THE THORN IN ITS SIDE The past two years have seen panic in The Smiths camp, with take-over bids and narcotic problems competing with international success. NICK KENT assesses the progress of "the only significant British rock band of the Eighties". Splendid isolationists or drama queens? Photographs by Lawrence Watson NOVEMBER 13, 1986: a year and a half after my excommunication from the precincts of Smithdom, the phone rings. Pat Bellis, the Smiths' press officer, informs me that the anti-apartheid benefit scheduled for the Royal Albert Hall three days hence headlining The Smiths has had to be postponed. Johnny Marr has been involved in a car crash, and although no injuries have been sustained, he's been suffering "on-off" bouts of extreme physical weakness. He refuses to see a doctor and at first is all for 'playing the trouper'. But Marr's shake-up meant that the gig - The Smiths fourth London show within three weeks - was off....

HOME ECONOMICS NEW ORDER ARE 'THE WORLD'S MOST SALEABLE CULT BAND'. HOW, AND WHY, HAVE THEY MAINTAINED THEIR STATE OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE FACE OF CORPORATE TEMPTATION... By Dave Hill Photographs by Steve Speller Filed in a cabinet somewhere in the North of England - or maybe just deep in the imagination of one of its signatories — there lies a piece of paper which effectively proclaims: “New Order owns the music and Factory owns nothing". It is signed by two significant people. One is Rob Gretton, New Order's manager since they were Joy Division. The other is Tony Wilson, Mancunian motor mouth and media mole, a man with a head full of concepts and a telephone in his car. Pray silence, seekers after knowledge, Mr Wilson is about to hold forth. "In 1977, when I was a journalist doing TV programmes about it, I thought that independent record labels were about not being a nursery for the majors. But by '78, when I had my own label, we were a nurs...

The Face, July 1983 Somewhere on the southern outskirts of Manchester there is a graveyard. Next to the graveyard is a rehearsal room where the four members of New Order come to practise their spells. The joke is not lost on them. "Maybe that’s why we sound so gloomy . . If we do. People say we do.” Peter Hook prowls warily around any definitions of the group or their music. His defensive skin is easily riled. He sits idly strummling an unplugged bass guitar. Propped on his knee is a US vis(a) application for New Order’s forthcoming tour. “Listen to this!” he shouts. “It looks like they’re on to us: ‘Have you ever aided in the persecution of peoples for reasons of race, colour or creed, including any involvement with the Nazi state ....'." Are New Order Nazis? The charge, which has surfaced before in the music press and was hurled at them again in a recent issue of Private Eye , appears to be dogging them. Well, are they? The answer is a bemused negative....