Cuttings

SMITHS TO SPLIT THE SMITHS look likely to call it a day after the release of their next album in September, and insiders are blaming a personality clash between Morrissey and Johnny Marr - the group’s nucleus and songwriting partnership - for the split. There’s no official word from Rough Trade, apart from a rather flippant dismissal from Mozzer, but NME understands that relations between the two main men are so bad that they won’t even enter the same studio together. And promoters have been instructed not to arrange any live shows, either in Europe or America, to promote the new material, it is believed. Morrissey, when approached through his press office for a comment, said: “Whoever says The Smiths have split shall be severely spanked by me with a wet plimsoll”. While NME newshounds await the arrival of young Steven armed with soggy footwear, sources in both London and Manchester continue to feed us with snippets which point towards the decline of the nation’s top i...

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...

TWO LIMITED THE OTHER TWO The Other Two And You (London/All formats) "IT'S HARD to go back after ten or 11 years and start again.. unless someone commits suicide." - Stephen Morris, 1993. Nobody died so The Other Two might live, thankfully. So it was inevitable that the duo's long-delayed debut was never going to pulsate with the same sulky splendour as New Order, the same brooding sense of magic and loss, the same cliff-edge emotions and internal scars... But if shot just the lack of ghosts hovering over 'The Other Two And You' which denies it mystique and grandeur. There's the sheen of married thirtysomething contentment which even masterful co-producer Stephen Hague cannot entirely erase. There's the palpable lack of tension with Bernard's petulance and Hooky's laddishness erased from the equation. Then there’s the striking contrast between these dinky electro grooves and the billowing stormclouds of 'Republic', like a ...

LONG LIVE THE KING! THE SMITHS The Queen Is Dead (Rough Trade) THINGS ARE not always as they seem. When The Smiths appeared on Whistle Test a few weeks ago to promote the 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' single, even their most committed fan would have been forgiven for thinking that our most eminent jangling jewels were finally beginning to lapse into self-parody. There on the screen was the Prince Of Pain, the finest furrowed pate in pop, replete in the same old faded denims and that bloody awful hearing aid, bleating on about how he felt like Joan Of Arc and had no right to take his place in the human race. Behind him, meanwhile, a four-piece band were coming on like the new Rolling Stones, all rounded rock maturity and polished cocksure authority. With a crucial third LP on the horizon, it was as if the skin of their beat had finally fully ripened; as if they had defined and perfected their musical pitch and lost their hunger , their need to grow. But things are n...

BETTER RELATE THAN NEVER MORRISSEY Kill Uncle ( HMV/All formats ) WELCOME BACK, Mozzer. Three years in an absurd wilderness of his own making have done sod all for Morrissey's reputation as someone to be taken seriously and a lot for his image as Mr Flaming Pillock. On the few occasions he gave interviews, Morrissey chose to present himself as arrogant, self-obsessed and depressed. Not much new there, except he wasn't funny anymore. In the meantime, he released singles from which invention, melody and the old Moz trick of having something interesting to say had nipped out to the corner shop with no intention of returning. 'November Spawned A Monster', 'Interesting Drug', 'Ouija Board Ouija Board', 'Piccadilly Palare' - a quartet of duller records has not been released in such numbing succession since the last days of Johnny Hates Jazz. If ever there was a man who had lost his way, his interest in making music, or possibly his will to...

PAINT A VULGAR PICTURE DANNY KELLY rattles and hums over the latest Smiths re-issue THE SMITHS Louder Than Bombs ( Rough Trade CD ) 4 x CD Singles ( Rough Trade ) PASS ME my trusty old soapbox! The music on this latest batch of Smiths 'product' (doesn't that hideous - though utterly appropriate - word just drive a stake into your heart?) is mostly so familiar that I feel no qualm whatsoever in an unashamed rant... Back in the dawn of time, y'see, when Rough Trade first emerged, there was much controversy about the label's name, it being the slang term for those pathetic male wretches who survive around London's railway termini by selling their soft-skinned arses to the highest bidder. The 1988-style Rough Trade (and its 1989 model too, I'll wager) have bettered themselves, risen, ahem, above their station; now the ass they flog is not their own, but that of The Smiths. And it makes me, the very Smiths completist/fanatic/bore at whom this stuff ...

TOP OF THE CHOPS HE SMITHS Meat Is Murder ( Rough Trade ) THAT NATURAL Northern charm, bred in the back-to-backs and cobblestone alleyways, shyly smiling, quipping couplets of love forlon and bungled romance, over those infectiously syncopated rhythms. All this can only mean one man . . . Yes, George Formby. However, it’s not George we’re here for, but a man who’s declared an admiration for the Lancashire minstrel and could arguably be seen as his successor. Steven Patrick Morrissey and his popular Smiths band return with this their second 'proper' album, following last year’s incandescent debut and the intermediary 'Hatful Of Hollow’ compilation job. At the least, 'Meat Is Murder’ equals its illustrious predecessors. Given some growing time, it could even better them. Lyrically, these nine new tracks display the Bard of Whalley Range at his most direct. Disciplined and succinct, each song relates an affecting tale or makes a point with killing precision. ...

RESURRECTION SCUFFLE MORRISSEY DUBLIN NATIONAL STADIUM IT’S A film-maker’s version of the idolatry of pop. When Oliver Stone does the movie (‘Dirk Bogarde is Steven Patrick Morrissey!’) these are the things he won’t need to exaggerate: tiny, white-faced colleens on the point of collapse passed hand over hand through the throng; brawny young skinheads tearfully clutching their bunches of gladioli; the Garda, bemused, smiling nervously, gingerly fingering their nightsticks. If you’ve seen newsreel of The Beatles, or a video of Stardust or you can remember The Bay City Rollers, then you’ve seen all this before, but it still doesn’t make it any the less compelling. It’s the point at which admiration becomes hysteria, where love becomes a kind of affectionate bloodlust. Scary.. .and crazily good fun. Morrissey, the ex-Smith, is playing live for only the second time since the dissolution of his really quite good former group. The chosen venue is, by design, a boxing stadium and...

FROM HERE TO MATERNITY MORRISSEY WEMBLEY ARENA CLAD IN Moz bracelets and T-shirts bearing the image of the late Edith Sitwell, the faithful flood into Wembley Arena. Some of them will miss half the show as Morrissey has put the starting time forward half an hour, but most are eagerly clutching their NHS specs and gladioli (still?) and heading for the front. This is stadium Moz time after all and tonight we have come to the biggest bedsit in London to check out the weirdest rockabilly band in the world. The opera overture ends and what has to be one of the worst versions of ‘Interesting Drug’ ever performed falls out of the speakers. Every so often a backing rockabilly person can be heard shouting the chorus but all else is anarchy. Hurriedly burying that one under the carpet, Moz and his cats rumble into ‘Last Of The Famous International Playboys’. Despite lacking the single’s awesome Moog wibble, the song benefits from Morrissey’s somersaults, floor-tumbling and a trick he ...

KITCHEN INK TRAUMA • The troubled life of IAN CURTIS is revealed in a biography by his wife DEBORAH CURTIS. 15 years after the JOY DIVISION singer killed himself.  TOUCHING FROM A DISTANCE Deborah Curtis ( Faber And Faber ) IN THE early hours of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis put Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’ on his record player, took his daughter’s photograph down from the wall, retrieved his wedding photo from a drawer and sat down to write his wife a suicide note. Later that day, at around midday, Deborah Curtis, with her young daughter, Natalie, returned to her home in Macclesfield after visiting her parents. She found Ian hanging dead from a rope in their kitchen. He was 24. Deborah Curtis was the last person to see Ian alive, as well as the first to discover his body. Until Touching From A Distance , she has remained silent about the life she shared with him, so it represents some kind of exorcism of the guilt and confusion that followed his suicide in their home 15 years ago...

WORLD SHUT YOUR MOUTH THE SMITHS The World Won't Listen ( Rough Trade ) WE COULD talk for a thousand years, but nothing quite explains why you just want to yell with joy when you hear the opening bars of 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' or why you so warmly purr to maudlin singalongs like 'Asleep'. Hey! Lost in music and lost for words, you'll yell or purr but all you can understand is that The Smiths are special and you'll hug them to your heart. Take a look out there at those pop charts, those wastelands of irrelevant pap, and it's clear that we wouldn't have much if we didn't have the Smiths. The Smiths are best when they are high in the charts, when their songs are so concise and so POP in their appeal, when the B-sides are slinky, slow numbers. And they are best up there because then they are fighting back, worrying the tabloids, providing a welcome antidote to the useless placebo of modern pop; that which serves only to decorate this co...

TOMB IT MAY CONCERN THE SMITHS Strangeways, Here We Come (Reviewed from an advance tape of the album, due for release by Rough Trade on September 28). 'MAN THAT is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower. He fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay" (Anglican Funeral Service). The Smiths are, after all the speculation, finally heading the queue for the Crem. Look at the pit they dug themselves: signed to deadly EMI; Johnny Marr - the decade's most original rock guitarist and musical keystone of the combo - had done a runner, and Mike Joyce followed, while bass player Rourke's struggled on with his drug problem. Surely the odds stacked against them creating another flawed 'Meat Is Murder', let alone an LP of universally-acclaimed quality like 'The Queen Is Dead'? Predictably, in these circumstances,'Strangeways,...' finds Morrissey with one h...

BALLROOM BLITZ THE SMITHS Rank ( Rough Trade LP/ Cassette/CD ) "Elvis Presley leant down from the sky and whispered to me 'Morrissey's the name of my latest flame'... " Kenneth Williams in conversation with Ron Atkinson, Old Trafford, Oct 86 OH THE aggression, the aggression. And you never thought they were such rockers. A Noddy Holder style 'Hello' roars from amidst the heart of Prokofiev's 'March Of The Capulets', Mike Joyce's drums run off the stage with 'The Queen Is Dead' and, before you can gasp "Bernard Breslaw", Morrissey is willing us through his harvest festival of hurt and anti-social surrealism, and Johnny is stomping up and down on his Marr Wah Pedal like it's a portable tyre pump. 'The Queen Is Dead' is chased immediately by the guitar spangled 'Panic' which hurries through every rotten alleyway of this spoiled Isle touching and affecting as it goes. Winning hearts and everlas...

SLEEVING BEAUTY SPECULATION THAT the cover of The Smiths live LP would feature The Mozzer - in loin cloth and baby oil - poised to strike J. Arthur’s gong has, alas, been dashed by the choice of ALEXANDRA BASTEDO as the boatrace gracing 'Rank’. Bastedo, pink-rinsed culture vultures will recall, was the curvaceous, coiffured member of ’67s classic special agent/style pig triumvirate The Champions . According to ATV guff these three agents for Nemesis were resurrected with supernatural powers having been killed trying “to locate and destroy deadly bacteria specimens possessed by ruthless Chinese scientists in Tibet." Truly they were “champions of law, order and justice” and, just to make sure, had a fab Tony Hatch theme tune to boot. But while her co-stars have since fallen on hard times - William Gaunt in Beeb sit-coms; Stuart Damon in a home for Joe Mannix lookalikes - it’s no surprise that the glam-goddess herself has become an international hostess at Miss UK ...

VANDALISM BEGINS AT HOME THE SMITHS LONDON PALLADIUM IN THE footsteps of such music-hall and variety greats as Tommy Trinder, Ted Ray and Jimmy Tarbuck, tonight The Smiths tread these venerable boards to confront a frothing audience of boys and girls who forego the sedentary comfort of Edwardian plush in favour of a constant, hollering ovation. Connoisseurs of the only mildly incongruous will also delight in the fact that the other six nights a week (plus matinees), the Palladium stages the musical La Cage Aux Folle s. We are thus welcomed to our seats to the strains of George Formby’s little ukulele, followed by an appropriately heroic aria from, I do believe, Gluck's opera Orfeo , seguing into the haughty 'March Of The Capulets’ from Prokoviev's Romeo And Juliet . A capital 'E' Event beckoned. The event, it turns out, is Business As Usual. Morrissey's no doubt prescription dark glasses and Marr's cock-height Gibson Les Paul alert me to what...

EDUCATION IN REVERSE MORRISSEY  Viva Hate (HMV LP/ Cassette/CD) WASN'T IT Neil Sedaka who, while twisting decorously in hideous acrylic leisurewear, first observed that breaking up is hard to do? And so it is. Yet imploding in full public view must be harder still, and for Morrissey - a startlingly prolific if sometimes profligate songwriter - to emerge so swiftly post-Smiths with a solo album is remarkable in itself. By proving that he can work successfully with Stephen Street he is delivering a slap in the face with a wet fish to the nudging ranks of non-believers who felt he would fall apart creatively without the support of Johnny 'Guitar' Marr. 'Viva Hate', if not exactly open heart surgery, is still the rigorous exercise in self-examination we might have expected. And like most new beginnings, it has its roots in the past. "I'm so glad to grow older/ To move away from those awful times " , he sings in 'Break Up The Family',...

THE LAST OF ENGLAND VIVA HATE! HMV FOR too long, a faction around here feels, the fey, blithe Morrissey has been allowed to saunter through pop history unchecked, fawned upon even — and it was about time some of the chaps got together to administer a tarring, a feathering, and deposit him in the nearest ditch. Faced with the prospect of putting “Viva Hate” into critical perspective, the Windsor Davies in us all, bulging with choleric indignation at the antics of Mr La-De-Da Gunner Graham, welled to the surface of many a soul around here, as they sharpened their pencils and scraped their hooves in readiness to proffer a sound critical kicking to our erstwhile hero. But I’ve always been renowned for my sense of fair play and it was to me, lingering modestly at the back of the pack, that the task of reviewing the record was eventually assigned. And I say that through musically thick and musically thin, swoops and (appalling) lapses, this is Morrissey, Morrissey, Morrissey...