Cuttings

THE VIKING Low-slung bass hero Peter Hook has survived both Joy Division and New Order with his impish humour intact. Roy Wilkinson hears tales of Michael Schumacher’s leather jacket, rucks with Moz and Mexican rave music. WE JOIN PETER Hook in the studio annexe at his Cheshire home. He’s in the middle of remixing a track for Rock Kills Kid, a new and hygienic Los Angeles quintet. This extracurricular remix work is new terrain for Peter. His first commission was a recent makeover for The Killers’ track All These Things That I've Done that never saw the light of day. Playing on the song’s “I got soul but I’m not a soldier" refrain, Peter added the voices of young US servicemen, talking about their imminent dispatch to Iraq. The record company decided this was far too contentious for release. Was the indomitable Hook bothered? Of course not. “I was quite flattered,” he laughs. “Getting banned when I'm knocking on

A CERTAIN RATIO THE NORTH-WEST'S PUNK FUNKATEERS MANCHESTER NEVER KNEW what hit it - A Certain Ratio (their name lifted from Brian Eno’s track The True Wheel) exploded on to the punk scene in 1977 with their exhilarating, obdurate live show, which mixed James Brown-styled syncopated funk with punk, disco and electronica. Tony Wilson was so impressed that he signed them to Factory, where a seven-year tenure with the label spawned five albums - 1979’s cassette-only The Graveyard And The Ballroom, 1981’s Martin Hannett-produced To Each..., the following year’s Sextet and I’d Like To See You Again, and their label swansong, 1986’s Force. And that’s not to mention a string of truly awesome singles, including Do The Du and their irascible funk-punk take on Banbarra’s Shack Up. Beginning life in 1977, the combo - comprising singers Martha Tilson and Simon Topping, guitarist Peter Terrell, guitarist/trumpeter Martin Moscrop, drumme

ODE TO JOY Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures has become one of the most influential albums of all time. Peter Hook and Stephen Morris help Roy Wilkinson trace its genesis through crates of Vimto, mysterious moorland meetings and industrial rhythms. STRAWBERRY STUDIOS SITS on Stockport’s Waterloo Road — a street whose Victorian brickwork and sturdy facades suggest time slipping stoically by. Fifty years before Joy Division arrived to record their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, in April 1979, Waterloo Road was home to the marine engineers F Bamford & Co, experts in the hydrodynamic arts. Bamfords supplied the propellers that powered Sir Henry Segrave to a world water-speed record in 1930. After that successful run, a further dash across Lake Windermere sent Segrave to his death. Of course, you can find portentous signs for Ian Curtis’s suicide anywhere - if you look hard enough. But the link betwee

WHAT DO I GET? Smiths drummer Mike Joyce wanted to be a Buzzcock, but fate had something even more extraordinary in store. Johnny Black discovers an amazing trip with a muted comedown. MIKE JOYCE’S untutored, dynamic percussion gave The Smiths a propulsive core that was as imaginative and eccentric as any Morrissey lyric. He and Johnny Marr, close friends and bandmates long before the formation of The Smiths, maintained an unshakeable friendship until the band's demise. That relationship, however, crumbled in 1996 when Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr in a bitter but successful legal action which secured him a 25 per cent share of the group’s performing-rights royalties. He has recently secured a recording deal for his new band with Birmingham punk songsmith Vinny Peculiar, and is about to begin DJ-ingon Manchester radio station Revolution Active.2. Were you aware of Manchester’s rock heritage when you were young? Not until I was 15 or 16. Prior to that I was

GET THE MESSAGE Guitar genius Johnny Marr tells Andrew Male about pinching record sleeves as a kid, the shadow of the Moors Murders and the irresistible rise of Manchester’s late-’80s club culture. ONE OF THE MOST important decisions The Smiths ever made was not signing to Factory Records. In 1983, with the Hacienda celebrating its first birthday and the release of New Order’s Blue Monday, Manchester’s musical identity was bound up in the stark, glacial aesthetic of this ambitious little empire operated by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus out of 86 Palatine Road, Didsbury. The Smiths, between 1983 and their demise in 1987, created a new identity for Manchester - romantic, mordant, cinematic and, at times, blushingly celebratory. Yet, by the time of the split, Johnny Marr at least was caught up in an altogether more high-tech, hedonistic mood emerging in Manchester. He left The Smiths and, with Bernard Sumner, formed the dance-music

THE HAPPY PRINCE Morrissey - Wildean, gladioli-waving Smiths frontman turned rock royalty in self-imposed exile - tells Andrew Male about crippling shyness, celluloid escapism and finding there really is more to life than books. MORRISSEY WAS ALWAYS pulling away from Manchester. Growing up in the south of the city during the ’60s - rain, urban decay, Brady, Hindley - young Steven Patrick Morrissey would regularly, and perhaps understandably, immerse himself in a romantic, fictional netherworld of film, music and comic books. By the mid-’70s this rag-bag of escapist stimuli had coalesced into some kind of philosophy and battleplan, based on the conviction that, in Manchester at least, there was no one else quite like Morrissey. Look back at the lyrics Morrissey wrote with The Smiths between 1983 and 1987 and you discover a romantic soul forever looking for an emotional way out of this cold, industrial hell, like some lovelorn va

THE SMITHS IN MANCHESTER Fronted by Morrissey, The Smiths were the most influential British band of the ’80s, creating witty, doleful music that reflected Manchester’s rain-soaked streets and the UK’s industrial and spiritual decline.  isolation In 1985 Nick Kent joined The Smiths on tour. He recalls a band at full throttle and a singer drifting into his own orbit. APART FROM BEING the greatest group ever to rise out of Manchester and the only truly worthwhile thing to have come of age in the appalling ’80s, The Smiths were also the last entity I’ve ever been a giddy-headed unconditional fan of. Their music genuinely changed my life. Between 1982 and 1984 I’d stopped writing: nothing inspired me any more. Then someone in a squat played me the first Smiths album, and it was like waking up from a coma. After the long, uncertain and largely underwhelming years bridging punk with new wave, an English