Reader Meet Author. No Thank You.
I've been reading Morrissey's autobiography, "Autobiography". Because I've been suffering from terrible insomnia. It's for a thing I'm thinking of writing about an isolated and paranoid rock star at the fag end of the 20th Century popular music movement. Oh, yes - I firmly believe we shall not see its like again, despite fully believing Danny and the Junior's assertion that "Rock and Roll is here to stay". Rock and Roll is still here in its endless permutations, blaring out of car adverts or ironic power ballad karaoke nights. But it doesn't have the awesome tribal power that it used to have, it doesn't offer people a way of life, or an education or an escape the way it used to. Its just music. And there's nothing wrong with that. Its sloughed off a lot of its baggage. The playing field has been levelled. You can like anything now. Its allowed.
Unless you're a middle-aged man still clinging to the notion that you're somehow an arbiter of taste. You are bitter, but taste is a personal thing and you don't get to dictate where the receptors are any more, Granddad.
So... I was writing about an isolated and paranoid rock star and, really who better than Morrissey? I should point out that, in fact, its mainly about Donald Trump or Thatcher, but really...they could be triplets: Devious, Truculent and Unreliable.
The sheer staggering list of people in this book who have betrayed, belittled and abused Morrissey over the years is not surprising - this sort of thing happens to everyone, Steven. What is amazing is the detailed glee with which he names and shames, sometimes 50 years after the event. All of his teachers, individual students, every manager he has ever had, John Peel, every member of the Smiths, Bryan Ferry and Marc Bolan, Madeline McCann, Sandy Shaw, his producers, his design team, poor Craig Gannon gets a proper kicking, Siouxsie, Robert Wyatt, Anthony H Wilson, Thatcher, Nik Kent gets an absolute pummelling. His Dad constantly belittles him but Morrissey secretly still admires him because he is good at fighting.
The list of approved people is shorter: The Krays, the ever loyal Linder and James Maker, various dead family members, Iman (he is more ambivalent about Bowie with whom he had a falling out) James Baldwin, whom he is too shy to approach. Sparks are cool. Mick Ronson, safely deceased, is praised for his physical beauty.
But generally people let him down, steal from him, forget their manners, eat things he doesn't approve of. They jangle their keys. They make eye contact. How do I offend thee, Morrissey, let me count the ways.
What IS wrong with him? Why do this? The opening parts of the book veer into self parody (they are exactly the sort of thing you would expect Morrissey to write) but within the cloying and over cooked prose are flashes of insight, and a picture emerges of young Morrissey as a peculiar cuckoo in a fiercely protective Irish nest. He is happy, after his fashion, surrounded by strong women who will fight tooth and nail for him. Is this his tragedy? That they get old? They die? They send him to school? They abandon him behind iron railings? Is this Morrissey's primal trauma? Alarm bells begin to ring when he devotes page after page to the naming and shaming teachers: their cruelties, their ugliness, their deformities. This book came out when the singer was 54. These people had probably been dead for thirty years. Here he is still flailing about on their graves, thrashing the mildewed headstones with a bunch of lilies.
His greatest enmity is is reserved not for Mike Joyce or the entire legal profession (though don't worry they are decried in page after page of tedious detail) but for Geoff Travis, the erstwhile head of Rough Trade records, a mung bean communist turned Bransonite hippy on the make once he gets a whiff of The Smith's success, though he remains an ungrateful turncoat, forever denying Morrissey top ten records through not pressing enough records, whether through ineptitude or design. Travis is described repeatedly as having a "whooping cough smile", whatever that means, and of repeatedly hating the Smith's best records, only to be silent later on as they go on to be massive hits (presumably Rough Trade pressed enough copies of those ones).
Morrissey has lived a blameless life, continually accosted and assailed by those around him, betrayed by even his closest friends ("As always, Johnny slips out the back door unnoticed."). It's a wonder that he was ever heard of at all, given the way the entire world is against him, as he details in punishing detail towards the end of the book. Even when you would expect him to be pleased: a millionaire pop star buying a house in the Hollywood hills - about as far as you can be from the cramped and cracked streets he emerged from - he still contrives to be thwarted and unloved: "My neighbour is the very famous Johnny Depp who looks away whenever I appear."
He is fascinating. His prose style somewhere between Amanda McKittrick Ros and Nicholas Craig: the clumpy loggorhea of the former and the lack of self-awareness of the latter (if you haven't read "I, an actor" by Nicholas Craig, please do. Its very funny - and funny on purpose). There also a Partridge-esque quality too. If Morrissey could bring himself to laugh he would have the last one on every page. Whether I use any of this in a play, well I dunno - he's too singular. Too unlike anyone else. His personality is infused on every page - like it or not - he has pulled no punches. He has in fact pulled out his guts like the flags of all nations and waved them in your face.
Except that's not quite true. There is nothing about writing songs here. We get that he was offered parts on Friends and Eastenders. We get that all the girls fancied him at school (there's a peculiar macho trend running through the book and the man: he admires violent men, he loves a pint and wants you to know that birds fancy him. And he refers to vaginas as "bearded clams", which is unforgivable!) but we learn nothing of how he started to write songs, how he interacted with Johnny Marr musically, how he found that unique voice and where his peculiar melodic gift came from. He spends the whole book talking about his "difference" but never mentions the thing that makes him different: the aberrant, trans-formative thing: his gift. There's no insight at all. According to this book it was all there from the very first moment: he opened his mouth and was just Morrissey, fully formed. Maybe that's true. But that's the Morrissey I want to read about. Not this guy:" So when Neil Aspinall dies in 2008, I think to myself, "Well, that's what you get for being so nasty."
Unless you're a middle-aged man still clinging to the notion that you're somehow an arbiter of taste. You are bitter, but taste is a personal thing and you don't get to dictate where the receptors are any more, Granddad.
So... I was writing about an isolated and paranoid rock star and, really who better than Morrissey? I should point out that, in fact, its mainly about Donald Trump or Thatcher, but really...they could be triplets: Devious, Truculent and Unreliable.
The sheer staggering list of people in this book who have betrayed, belittled and abused Morrissey over the years is not surprising - this sort of thing happens to everyone, Steven. What is amazing is the detailed glee with which he names and shames, sometimes 50 years after the event. All of his teachers, individual students, every manager he has ever had, John Peel, every member of the Smiths, Bryan Ferry and Marc Bolan, Madeline McCann, Sandy Shaw, his producers, his design team, poor Craig Gannon gets a proper kicking, Siouxsie, Robert Wyatt, Anthony H Wilson, Thatcher, Nik Kent gets an absolute pummelling. His Dad constantly belittles him but Morrissey secretly still admires him because he is good at fighting.
The list of approved people is shorter: The Krays, the ever loyal Linder and James Maker, various dead family members, Iman (he is more ambivalent about Bowie with whom he had a falling out) James Baldwin, whom he is too shy to approach. Sparks are cool. Mick Ronson, safely deceased, is praised for his physical beauty.
But generally people let him down, steal from him, forget their manners, eat things he doesn't approve of. They jangle their keys. They make eye contact. How do I offend thee, Morrissey, let me count the ways.
What IS wrong with him? Why do this? The opening parts of the book veer into self parody (they are exactly the sort of thing you would expect Morrissey to write) but within the cloying and over cooked prose are flashes of insight, and a picture emerges of young Morrissey as a peculiar cuckoo in a fiercely protective Irish nest. He is happy, after his fashion, surrounded by strong women who will fight tooth and nail for him. Is this his tragedy? That they get old? They die? They send him to school? They abandon him behind iron railings? Is this Morrissey's primal trauma? Alarm bells begin to ring when he devotes page after page to the naming and shaming teachers: their cruelties, their ugliness, their deformities. This book came out when the singer was 54. These people had probably been dead for thirty years. Here he is still flailing about on their graves, thrashing the mildewed headstones with a bunch of lilies.
His greatest enmity is is reserved not for Mike Joyce or the entire legal profession (though don't worry they are decried in page after page of tedious detail) but for Geoff Travis, the erstwhile head of Rough Trade records, a mung bean communist turned Bransonite hippy on the make once he gets a whiff of The Smith's success, though he remains an ungrateful turncoat, forever denying Morrissey top ten records through not pressing enough records, whether through ineptitude or design. Travis is described repeatedly as having a "whooping cough smile", whatever that means, and of repeatedly hating the Smith's best records, only to be silent later on as they go on to be massive hits (presumably Rough Trade pressed enough copies of those ones).
Morrissey has lived a blameless life, continually accosted and assailed by those around him, betrayed by even his closest friends ("As always, Johnny slips out the back door unnoticed."). It's a wonder that he was ever heard of at all, given the way the entire world is against him, as he details in punishing detail towards the end of the book. Even when you would expect him to be pleased: a millionaire pop star buying a house in the Hollywood hills - about as far as you can be from the cramped and cracked streets he emerged from - he still contrives to be thwarted and unloved: "My neighbour is the very famous Johnny Depp who looks away whenever I appear."
He is fascinating. His prose style somewhere between Amanda McKittrick Ros and Nicholas Craig: the clumpy loggorhea of the former and the lack of self-awareness of the latter (if you haven't read "I, an actor" by Nicholas Craig, please do. Its very funny - and funny on purpose). There also a Partridge-esque quality too. If Morrissey could bring himself to laugh he would have the last one on every page. Whether I use any of this in a play, well I dunno - he's too singular. Too unlike anyone else. His personality is infused on every page - like it or not - he has pulled no punches. He has in fact pulled out his guts like the flags of all nations and waved them in your face.
Except that's not quite true. There is nothing about writing songs here. We get that he was offered parts on Friends and Eastenders. We get that all the girls fancied him at school (there's a peculiar macho trend running through the book and the man: he admires violent men, he loves a pint and wants you to know that birds fancy him. And he refers to vaginas as "bearded clams", which is unforgivable!) but we learn nothing of how he started to write songs, how he interacted with Johnny Marr musically, how he found that unique voice and where his peculiar melodic gift came from. He spends the whole book talking about his "difference" but never mentions the thing that makes him different: the aberrant, trans-formative thing: his gift. There's no insight at all. According to this book it was all there from the very first moment: he opened his mouth and was just Morrissey, fully formed. Maybe that's true. But that's the Morrissey I want to read about. Not this guy:" So when Neil Aspinall dies in 2008, I think to myself, "Well, that's what you get for being so nasty."
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