Cuttings

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