Cuttings

BY JINGO! Miserabilist and fabled celibate Morrissey, pop music’s wounded fawn, ponders the impermanence of fame, the intractability of Twixes, and what it means to be British. BY NICK COLEMAN ‘I don’t want the world to read this interview — if indeed they have the time — and conjure up the image of a crooked arthritic figure in a little chair with his head between his knees and deep circles beneath unseeing eyes — even though it’s a slightly accurate picture ... considering what I’ve been through, considering that operation, yes, hmm .. How would you like to be perceived then? If you had to write up the interview you’ve just done, how would you want it to work on your readers? ‘I’d settle for blind adoration. And I’m not trying to be funny. I’m not being funny.’ Morrissey is in a stew. Sitting back on his little chair in the mullioned bay with one knee under his chin, he stares with struggling eyes into the autumn of the Manor gardens. One arm crosses his body to t

THIS CHARMING MAN 'The tabloids hound me. What makes me more dangerous to them than anybody else is the fact that I lead something of a religious lifestyle. I despise drugs and cigarettes, I'm celibate and I live a very serene lifestyle.' Simon Garfield meets the outspoken Morrissey, frontman of The Smiths and self-proclaimed pariah of the pop industry. If there is any space at all for subversion in the pop charts, then that place is occupied by Manchester band The Smiths. If there has been any creative advancement at all in the music industry in the last year, then that progression has been forged by The Smiths. If there’s been one debut album that can safely lay claim to being ‘a complete signal post in the history of popular music’, then it was ‘The Smiths’ by The Smiths. And if there’s been only one band since the Sex Pistols to upset the cosseted old Biz and genuinely excite young record buyers again, then it’s The... All Morrissey’s views these, and what you’d have ex

Bizarre Love Quadrangle Since 1993, original Man sourpusses New Order have been in and out of the tabloids, on and off Prozac and barely on speaking terms. But on New Year's Eve, they'll headline 'Temptation' at Alexandra Palace, This can't mean they like each other, can it? Interview Peter Paphides Photography Trevor Ray Hart 'I'd rather be in bed to be honest. But I suppose this will do.’ Bernard Sumner is not a well man. A 12~hour session with Alex from Blur has taken him from the Groucho to a series of other West End bars and back to the Groucho in time for breakfast. As a result, his features are even paler than his bleached hair, and his horizontal frame occupies three seats in the cellar bar of the Landmark Hotel. As drinking buddies go, Blur's fop-star bassist and the street-smart frontman of New Order seem an unlikely pairing. But since mutual buddy Keith Allen introduced them. it’s been a beautiful, if hazy, alliance: 'I don'