A couple of quick music news items today:
– Man, the guys from New Order really hate each other, don’t they? In this piece from The Guardian, journalist Rob Fitzpatrick sits down with Peter Hook on one phone line and Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Morris and Bernard Sumner on the other to try and figure out what happened. There’s still something that happened on the band’s last tour of Brazil that no one will talk about, but it seems that the seeds of discontent were sown much earlier, and involved Haçienda, the famed nightclub built with New Order money. According to Hook, band manager Rob Gretton suggested to the band that they buy the rights to the Haçienda name, and so Hook gave him £5,000 to do that. According to the rest of the band, Hook “stole” the name for himself. Hook counters that he faithfully attended Haçienda business meetings for years, while Sumner and the others didn’t, and didn’t care about the club at all until 1994, until it became possible to make money off the club’s name. It’s all depressing and sad. Read more here.
– I was a fan of The Smiths for a few years back in the 80s and early 90s… but I’ve never been much of a fan of Morrissey’s solo work. It all seemed so… self-indulgent, in the same way that the rest of 10,000 Maniacs seemed to keep Natalie Merchant’s propensity for sad, mopey songs in check. Anyway, it looks like Moz is really starting to lose it. David Tseng, founder of Morrissey-Solo.com, one of the largest and oldest Moz fansites on the web, flew 5,000 miles from LA to Copenhagen to attend a Morrissey show. But he was thrown out (without a refund!) before the show began? Tseng’s crime against Moz? Allowing commenters on his website to say less then flattering things about Moz. So if you have your own music fansite, make sure to heavily edit what people post… or just don’t support such a whiney and needy “artist” in the first place. Read more here.