Cuttings

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...

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY THE SMITHS Pier 84, New York City SO elementary in construction, so basic in emotional thrust and yet so thoroughly out of the ordinary — The Smiths embody the noble contradiction of head versus heart, never quite resolving it but never giving up either. At one point during this show, tugging hard at his striped shirt with almost erotic impatience over a trade-mark Johnny Marr guitar jangle, Morrissey wondered aloud "does the body rule the mind/does the mind rule the body/l don't know." Me neither. For the rowdy mob packed into this open-air venue on NY's smelly Hudson river, the fun tonight was in the asking. As Morrissey melodramatically flailed his spidery arms, the crowd stepped into the moody groove of "How Soon Is Now", singing "I'm beautiful and I need to be loved" like high school cheer-leaders. They seemed a bit baffled by "Panic" (as yet unreleased in the States) and it's rallying cry...

INTERESTING DRAG MORRISSEY Bona Drag (HMV LP/Cassette/CD) IF, HAVING once been God, you then watched most of your disciples slope off to the church on Northside, I think you might be a little disappointed. Morrissey currently enjoys a critical standing roughly akin to a Saddam Hussein. Cat Stevens stands a better chance of getting a positive review than Moz these days. And woe betide the writer who has a good word for him. The irony is that, in the immediate wake of The Smiths' dissolution, it was Morrissey who quickly got on with the business of making excellent records. The lapses of taste were all Johnny's. But via The Pet Shop Boys and Electronic, Marr has become one of the boys again whilst Moz is increasingly seen as that moaning jessie, largely due to two of the most mocked and derided singles of recent years. The songs are here, along with 13 others, and form 'Bona Drag', an album that Morrissey himself seems spectacularly unconcerned about and is ...

2nd August, 1986 THE SMITHS NEWCASTLE MAYFAIR WE’RE HUDDLED together 2000 of us) in the home of heavy metal, witnessing the early disturbed sound of ‘Bigmouth’. But thankfully they’re just warming up; with Morrissey revealed as a shy thin man eternally trying to capture his shirt-tails. His presence alone makes The Smiths a unique live force; Joyce is buried beneath drums, Rourke's like a zombie, new recruit Gannon’s as stiff as a juvenile Ed Collins, while Marr - the brilliant budgie - calmly controls our changing moods. The new Rolling Stones? Don't talk crap. Jagger never really meant it. “Eh I know you and you cannot sing” , we chant at Morrissey during ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and yet here we are, lapping up his every heartfelt yodel, hanging DJs on his every word. Because those of us of a melancholy hue - who are prone to bouts of debilitating self-pity and a little in love with death - find reassurance in these lyrics. His open-hearted poetry is gilded with a pa...

No real idea why NME did this.....

YOUNGISH, GIFTED AND FAC • They brought us Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, James, the Hacienda, hypothetical menstrual egg-timers and, erm, Shark Vegas. They invented labels with attitude, artiness and street suss. They gave TONY WILSON the opportunity to shout his mouth off about anything . They are FACTORY RECORDS, and IESTYN GEORGE salutes them Don’t you just hate Factory Records? That pretentious, pseudo-streetwise bastion of self-congratulation fronted by Anthony H Wilson, a man who has remained completely untainted by modesty throughout his 14-year reign as self-styled media assassin? Well, not really. The problem with Factory is that, unlike the other labels in this series of Little Cred Rosters , it’s played an incredibly active role within its native community. Creation can continue to release all the Biff Bang Pow! concept singles it desires and 4AD has all the power in the world to issue wooden boxes with cute mini-CDs housed within - the joy of run...

SOLDER OF FORTUNE NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE  Weld/Arc-Weld  (Reprise/All formats) I GUESS you just really had to be there to fully appreciate the surge of power that has been captured on these two discs, but for those devoted Neil Young & Crazy Horse fans who just couldn't make it to their US tour last spring, 'Weld' manages to give the illusion that you had a front row seat. Live albums are usually hit and miss affairs, a fusing together of all the best bits from a successful tour in the hope that a valid and perhaps valuable document will be the end result. If it charts then that's a bonus! Neil Young & Crazy Horse have had a couple of stabs at making a live album, with varying degrees of success. 'Time Fades Away' from 1973 featured an all-new set of songs never released on record before, a shock tactic that baffled all those who were expecting a run-through of 'Harvest' and 'After The Goldrush' nuggets and a bitter blow...