Cuttings

INTERVIEW the sugarcubes In New York with Martin Aston New Order's Barney has a stomach ulcer, the triple NO/PiL/ Sugarcube bill currently touring America - cringingly titled The Monsters Of Alternative Rock Tour’ - has had to reroute back to Detroit, and Einar has had enough. “We aren’t even going to attend our own Bad Taste evening," he fumes down the phone, referring to tonight's Icelandic bill of Bless/Reptile/Ham + poetry readings, sponsored by The Sugarcubes. That's 13 people they've flown into New York, so when the next snidey comment about Bjork counting their merchandising money (a staggering £200,000), remember where it gets spent. Meanwhile, Bragi has his next book out this year, alongside his, Einar and Thor's first books translated into English for the first time. Money and integrity? “Don’t talk to me about that," One Little Indian’s Derek Birkett sighs. “They have this vision of releasing a live album for 99p early next year, which is more t...

HUFFIN' AND PUFFIN THE SUGARCUBES Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week ( One Little Indian LP/Cassette/CD ) SHE WAS laughing ! God, that is, at the moment She decided, in one particularly mischievious mood, to create The Most Unlikely Rock Band In The History Of The World Etc. "And you thought platypusses were weird!", She cackled. "You thought digital watches. Pot Noodle, country dancing and Jonathan King were strange efforts - well just wait till you've seen this lot. They'll be from Bakino Fassa, no, better still, Iceland : they'll be a mixture of pug-ugly boys and moon-faced chicks, and both the chicks will have kids by the creepiest looking lad; they'll dine on extremely photogenic shoreline birdlife and they'll have an incredibly poofy, sickly sweet name -1 dunno, something like The Candyflosses.. ." Yep, She was laughing her ovaries off alright, but now that joke isn't funny anymore. Almost the entire planet has fallen for H...

Last night nerves - NME NEW ORDER, PIL, THE SUGARCUBES NEW JERSEY “UP YOURS too, ya wanker..." In the bowels of a New Jersey basketball stadium, two Englishmen - one a pineapple-topped dayglo Andy Pandy, the other sporting a £500 Comme Des Garcons suit jacket, tangerine acieed shorts and flip flops- are swapping V-signs . . . The cartoon aggressor is rotten PiLlock John Lydon; the pricily casual clotheshorse is Factory Records supremo and all-round smartass Tony Wilson. Whether their snarling interface is genuine antagonism or playful release is hard to say. This is, after all, the last night of a three month marathon that has seen PiL, New Order and The Sugarcubes on a coast-to-coast grind from one air-conditioned dome to another, so any emotion is possible. High above the designer slanging match, 18,000 kids - guys in Peter Saville T-shirts at $25 a throw, chicks in Madonna/Estefan/Easton lace bras - are blissing out on the climax of what they know is the hippest US...