Cuttings

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 ...

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, a...

POST PUNK IN MANCHESTER In 1978, Joy Division turned their raw musicianship into a virtue, inventing an austere, intense, industrial sound. When local media figure Tony Wilson signed them to his new Factory label, a legendary era began. Heart & Soul Martin Hannett was Factory Records' genius in-house producer - a sonic alchemist inspired by dub and drugs. Martin Aston charts his mercurial rise and tragic end. "I WAS OUTRAGED," snorts Tony Wilson, former MD of Factory Records, when the subject of his late friend, business partner and nemesis is raised. “Last year I picked up this magazine article titled ‘The Ten Craziest Producers Of All Time’. And it didn’t include Martin Hannett! I immediately called the assistant editor, and said,‘You fucking cockney shite, how can you miss him off?’ “24 Hour Party People [the dramatised story of Wil...

Atrocity Exhibition Matthew Norman, from the Manchester Digital Music Archive, unveils an amazing cache of recently discovered Joy Division artefacts. MANCHESTER’S BIGGEST EXPORTS are music and football,” explains Matthew Norman, curator of the Manchester District Music Archive and expert on all things Manc. “You can visit the football grounds, but there’s nothing here for people interested in the city’s musical history. Our long-term ambition is to create a proper museum, though we’re a bit scared of that word because it conjures up images of dusty shelves and glass cabinets.” Matthew and his team have already sourced thousands of rare artefacts - records, posters, flyers, recordings, personal journals - including many predating the rock era.“It’s about everything,” he says, “not just indie kids in the ’80s. We’re just as interested in the Halle Orchestra, one of the first professional orchestras, which was started here in the 1850s. The ...

Lost Inside Vini Reilly, Factory's delicate guitar genius with the dark past, has endured illness, penury and Morrissey's whims to create 20 extraordinary albums. By Ian Harrison VINI REILLY WAS in a bad way in 1979. “I was seriously depressed,” says the famously fragile guitarist today, “I was desperate to eat and be well, but I’d been wrongly diagnosed with anorexia and put on medication that completely did me in. I lost all sense of the real world... over the next couple of years, psychiatrists would try to have me sectioned 12 times.” At such a juncture in a musician’s life, few record companies would see fit to send them into the studio. The newly birthed Factory Records was such a label. For two days in spring, producer Martin Hannett would roll up to a house on Pytha Fold Road in Withington in his Volvo, to convey the guitarist and his Les Paul to Cargo Studios in Rochdale. En route, Ha...