Cuttings

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL TV presenter and Factory Records guru Tony Wilson is probably as famous as the bands he signed. Andy Fyfe digs beneath the motormouth persona to uncover a thwarted actor with a seam of steely determination. TONY WILSON IS very much the public face of Manchester. Born in 1950, the former Granada arts-programme presenter found himself at the centre of the city’s rise as the hub of British youth culture after co-founding the Factory label. He is also the man behind Manchester’s annual music-business conference In The City, and currently runs F4, the latest incarnation of Factory, to which he has signed what he hopes is the future of British hip hop, Raw-T. Since the original Factory disappeared, Wilson has had his fingers in many pies. He has made documentaries about famous Mancunians and travelling to Peru to take strong jungle hallucinogens, and is now embarking on a new career as a building regeneration consultant. H

Industrial Strength How did the world’s first industrial city become the crucible of late 20th century musical innovation? John Harris explains... MIDWAY THROUGH THE 19th century, a man with the improbable name of Angus Bethune Reach wrote a remarkable article about Manchester in the daily Morning Chronicle. It found the author returning home one night and being surprised “to hear loud sounds of music and jollity which floated out of public house windows”. He went on: "In no city have I ever witnessed a scene of more open, brutal and general intemperance... The whole street rung with shouting, screaming and swearing, mingled with the jarring music of half a dozen bands.” Give or take their air of Victorian moralism, the words could easily describe a 21st-century Mancunian Saturday night: droves of people spilling out on to Canal Street or Deansgate, their brains still rattling to the thumping strains of high-street dance m

THE 20 BEST MANCHESTER ALBUMS 1 JOY DIVISION CLOSER Factory (1980) IAN Curtis was beset by health, psychological and personal problems when Joy Division entered Britannia Row studios to record Closer in March, 1980. Their second tour de force was far removed from its predecessor: side two particularly revealed a new, breathtaking, almost supernatural, symphonic music. Painfully honest and unflinchingly emotional, Closer was Joy Division's triumph and Ian Curtis’ personal testament. By the time of its release, he’d committed suicide.  (Un?)intentional parting message to bandmates:  " You take my place in the showdown. I'll observe with a pitiful eye ” (“ Heart And Soul ”)  Highest UK chart position: 6 3 JOY DIVISION UNKNOWN PLEASURES Factory (1979) FORMERLY

PRESS RELEASE OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) From the voice of doom to the voice of dance. From the despair and dire of Manchester's dark gloom, the grime and rhyme, to the rich neon world of New York, the rhythm and the riffs. From an Ideal for Living to a a formula for success... Enigmatic, tragic, vocal, silent. Moody or thoughtful recluses. Uncompromising, manipulative, misunderstood, messiahs, musicians. Whatever. One of the most impenetrable bands to have cast its shadow across the face of rock. From their spawning as Warsaw in the thrashing punk, the industrial intensity of Joy Division and the hypnotic electronic swirls of New Order. Ugly and beautiful, abrasive and sensitive, Romantics and Cynics. Brian Edge traces the enigma from its early promise through the cult hysteria and the senseless tragedy of the suicide of Ian Curtis. Blue Monday is one of the most successful indie singles ever made. Love Will Tear Us Apart and Atmosphere as two

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/19/unknown-pleasures-joy-division-peter-hook-review Love will tear us apart, again Andy Beckett on a raw, surprising account of the classic post-punk band Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook 336pp, Simon & Schuster, £20 Of all the great doomed rock bands, with their mayfly lives and drawn-out, highly profitable after-lives, few have a legend as potent and precisely defined as Joy Division. They played their first concert in January 1978 and their last in May 1980. In that time they released two albums and a few other songs: a pop music close to unique in its icy, addictive bleakness. They wore stark, photogenic clothes and haunted the hollowed-out cities of a decaying northern England. Their singer, Ian Curtis, was so intense onstage that he had epileptic fits. The day before a pivotal first tour of the United States, he hanged himself. He was 23. This solemn version of the Joy Div

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/28/unknown-pleasures-peter-hook-review Here are the young men... A memoir by Joy Division bassist Peter Hook is steeped in guilt, writes Dorian Lynskey Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division Peter Hook Simon & Schuster £20, pp336 It is 16 October 1979. Manchester quartet Joy Division have just played a show in Brussels and are a few days away from recording Atmosphere, the sepulchral masterpiece that will take on uncanny weight seven months later, when the body of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis is found hanging in his kitchen. On this particular night, however, Curtis is urinating in an ashtray in his bandmates’ youth hostel room. “Ha, you wankers, I’m pissing in your room,” says this tortured poet, this future icon of doomed youth. “Ha ha, pissing in your room!” This anecdote is typical of bass guitarist Peter Hook’s conflicted account of his first band’s cruelly abbreviated existence. The Joy

FROM DESPAIR TO WHERE? Hundreds of stars have over-indulged in order to sustain rock’n’roll's central tenet: Live fast, die young. Far fewer have taken the extreme decision deliberately to end their own lives with a bullet or a rope. Fifteen years after the death by suicide of Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer’s ex-wife has written a book about his life. Why, asks Deborah Curtis, have no lessons been learned? In September 1979, a Manchester group called Joy Division showcased their latest single, 'Transmission', on BBC2's new-wave show, Something Else . The opening camera shots panned in on the members of the band, finally stopping on the ghost-grey frame of the singer, hunched over the microphone, his pale blue eyes half-closed in concentration. As the song went on, Ian Curtis became more animated, jerking his arms and knocking the microphone stand to the floor. No language just sound, that's all w

Mancunian City Blues Apart from a new Electronic album, everything's gone quiet in the NEW ORDER camp. Through the NME archives, we look back at this seminal band's career, from their early days as proto-miserabilist JOY DIVISION to their reinvention as dance culture's elder statesmen, Here are the young men... Research by Ian Fortnam and John Perry FROM SPIKED hair to where? When punk rock degenerated into a sad cliché, many of its second- generation protagonists had to reconsider their tack and embrace a brave new world. One such combo were Warsaw. And so, in 1978, Ian Curtis (vocals), Bernard Dicken (AKA Sumner/ Albrecht) (guitar), Peter Hook (bass) and Stephen Morris (drums) changed their name to Joy Division, developed a minimalistic sound and hijacked the musical zeitgeist with one of the finest albums of the decade, ‘Unknown Pleasures'. Those who witnessed their live shows were stunned by vocalist Ian Curtis, whose jerky, spasmodic choreography and d

New Order's only concert in Hertfordshire, and they didn't scrimp on the ticket design... I did try and get tickets for the Sheffield Octagon gig the night after ULU, but had insufficient time to send a cheque and receive them back in time, and they were unable to reserve either. So much easier nowadays (assuming you can get through to the "buy" section of ticket selling sites). The venue wasn't the easiest to find (again, not so much of an issue nowadays), and apparently is another that's no more (following Tiffany's, Tower Ballroom and the Mayfair). The Beloved were the support (although I only found this out later) and it appears I enjoyed them. New Order were on for just under an hour, starting with Age of Consent . At its end Hooky said he couldn't hear something as their " mouth was full of shit ". Maybe he was channeling this into the " long farewell to your soul " scream in Dreams Never End . On one of its last live ou