As Joy Division, and then New Order, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris have been responsible for some of the most spellbinding, groundbreaking and downright brilliant music of the past twenty-five years. With their new album Waiting For The Sirens' Call in the top 10, the legendary trio here sound-off about the legions of bands they’ve influenced, Madchester, Ian Curtis, 24 Hour Party People, Bez, Gwen Stefani, and why they intend to continue their quest for sonic innovation for some time yet.
Post-industrial Manchester provided a fittingly bleak setting for a regional aftershock and punk’s death rattle. You can hear Ian Curtis' world collapsing – the epilepsy, the drugs, the bizarre love triangle – in every stentorian plea.
They may sport one of the most original sounds in rock’n’roll – but along the way they’ve been influenced by some of the greats.
STUART BAILIE identifies the ten (plus!) key influences on the music of U2
As the punk revolution took hold in the UK, Manchester was notable for the bleak, industrial soundtrack even its most successful bands were making. But that all changed with the explosion there of a new and hedonistic culture, centred in and around The Hacienda, a club run by the city's most influential music biz entrepreneur, the boss of Factory Records, TONY WILSON. The story of the transformation of the city into the centre of rock'n'roll's emerging drug and club culture – of the change from Manchester to Madchester – is told in 24 Hour Party People. With the Happy Mondays as it primary musical focus, there's no shortage of on-screen drugs and fighting – but this is really the extraordinary saga of one of the great rock'n'roll towns, in all its gory glory… Tara Brady reports
Just before headlining the main stage on Saturday night, New Order - all of them - drop into the Hot Press chat room to regale us with their rock'n'roll tales.
Just before headlining the main stage on Saturday night, New Order - all of them - drop into the Hot Press chat room to regale us with their rock'n'roll tales.
Steve Lillywhite, who produced U2's first three albums – and has featured on the production team of almost all of their records – looks back over the band's career and recalls the highs... and the lows
The former NME rock crit, ZTT founder and hyper of Frankie has written a book. But it s not about pop it s about the suicide of his dad. PETER MURPHY reports on how Nothing matters.
Cast as fictional conjoined twins who start their own punk band Harry and Luke Treadaway have delivered one of the year’s funniest and most moving performances in the mocumentary Brothers Of The Head.
JJ72 are being cast as the great new hopes of Irish music. Intense, passionate and melodic, their music has captured an increasing number of fans. With a single in the UK Top Thirty and a debut album about to hit the shelves, they tell NIALL STANAGE how good they are and how good they want to be. Portrait of the Artists As A Young Band: MICK QUINN
It was a Jubilee ago that The Sex Pistols exploded onto the world stage and changed music forever. Except little has changed, according to John Lydon and that's why he's back
The grim labouring of heavy machinery. The voice of a drugged god. The bottom falling out of heaven. If these are a few of your favourite things, step right up.
As suede prepare for their headline slot at Dublin Castle next month, their stock has never been higher, thanks mainly to the success of their fantastic third album Coming Up. craig fitzsimons talks to singer brett anderson about it and invites him to take stock of the last few wildly successful months.
In the making of their third album, Coldplay may have abandoned all hope at one juncture and come within an inch of splitting up, but the record has now finally arrived in the shape of X & Y. Chris Martin and co. here give Peter Murphy the inside story on the fraught creation of perhaps the most anticipated album of the year.
In the nineties, renegade novelist, short-story-writer and establishment-bothering journalist WILL SELF had the additional dubious distinction of being the literary world's most high-profile drug addict. He begins the new decade clean, sober and with How the Dead Live, a new novel many are lauding as his finest work. He talks to KIM PORCELLI about being free of his own past, being alive, being dead, and being 'deader'
Think about direction, wonder why . . . It’s eleven years since Stano released his debut album Content To Write In I Dine Weathercraft. Despite his genuine originality and dedication to his art over the intervening years, he remains one of Ireland’s most enigmatic performers, more appreciated on the continent than in his homeland. Interview: Joe Jackson
James Dean Bradfield on The Cult of Richey, The Spanish Civil War, Jon Bon Jovi, and the new album This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. Truth Serum: Peter Murphy. Light Detector Test: Simon Clemenger.
Other People’s Problems bathes the listener in anodyne, no-more-tears formula wishy-washyness. The problem lies in balancing this Radox-rock with enough vitality to not make it veer towards the insipid. The Upper Room stay on the right side, but only just.
This is Bloc Party’s first show of the year and surely the last time for a while that they’ll be playing somewhere where the stage is so close to the back wall. They know it too, approaching it with an energy and vitality that suggests they can’t wait to get started.
Some of you will doubtless remember Rollerskate Skinny, who released a bone-fide Irish classic in Horsedrawn Wishes all of ten years ago. The band’s vocalist/guitarist Ken Griffin relocated to the US and now fronts this Brooklyn-based quartet who formed in 2004, when he teamed up with Philadelphia psych-poppers, Aspera. With major label backing they’re being tipped for big things across the water.
It’s easy to see A Certain Ratio as a less remarkable sister band to Joy Division/New Order. Sonically, their careers followed a roughly similar path, arriving at a danceable sound, following more post-punk beginnings.
She Wants Revenge, the first record from the Los Angeles duo She Wants Revenge, is in many ways the generic debut: occasionally promising, frequently overreaching, rather too in-thrall to its influences and, ultimately, not wholly satisfying.
Hales has ploughed his own furrow in an admirably single-minded and low-key fashion, deservedly earning himself a loyal following for his Tindersticks/ Joy Division-indebted brand of spectral melancholia.
Hales has ploughed his own furrow in an admirably single-minded and low-key fashion, deservedly earning himself a loyal following for his Tindersticks/ Joy Division-indebted brand of spectral melancholia.
Bloc Party's A Weekend In The City is both less oblique and more understated; initially the album proves harder work than its predecessor – at the same time it's more open about what it has to say.
New Order are giants, the four-piece that saved guitar pop. At a terribly dull time in the '80s, they brought the rush of possibilities of electronic music to the knuckle-dragging indie masses and added sophistication, sex and mystery to their genre of choice, a genre dying on its arse. Every guitar band that has added electronica to its palette without fear of the sky falling in – from U2 to The Killers – owes New Order a cut.
New Order are giants, the four-piece that saved guitar pop. At a terribly dull time in the '80s, they brought the rush of possibilities of electronic music to the knuckle-dragging indie masses and added sophistication, sex and mystery to their genre of choice, a genre dying on its arse. Every guitar band that has added electronica to its palette without fear of the sky falling in – from U2 to The Killers – owes New Order a cut.
They’ve embraced the big sound of America but The Killers still aren’t fully comfortable with the burdens of stardom, reveals frontman Brandon Flowers.
Once director John Carney has picked up yet another gong at the British Film Awards, while Armagh cinematographer Seamus McGarvey was honoured for his work on Atonement.
Five years ago no-one would have believed it. But with dance music reaching new heights of popularity, Irish rock ’n’ roll is engaged in a desperate fight for its very survival. Reporting from both sides of the battle line: Stuart Clark
