Morrissey article from last Saturday's Telegraph

B

Bluenose

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Thanks to one of my work collegues for showing this to me. Apologies for making you look if it has been scanned in already by a more on the ball poster, but better late than never!




pic143790.jpg
 
> Thanks to one of my work collegues for showing this to me. Apologies for
> making you look if it has been scanned in already by a more on the ball
> poster, but better late than never!

Aye right, Bluebles. Thanks a bunch. And you know fine well how old my eyes are. I've got more chance of understanding 2000-year-old cave scribblings than understanding that.
 
Erm, well, you can only post pictures of a certain size on here, Paddy and I'm not very technical-minded so I'm not sure how to make them readable.

I'm sure you don't need reminding, that you can save the picture and then double click on the saved icon and magnify it to the same size as those large print book, you enjoy reading...

> Aye right, Bluebles. Thanks a bunch. And you know fine well how old my
> eyes are. I've got more chance of understanding 2000-year-old cave
> scribblings than understanding that.
 
> Erm, well, you can only post pictures of a certain size on here, Paddy and
> I'm not very technical-minded so I'm not sure how to make them readable.

> I'm sure you don't need reminding, that you can save the picture and then
> double click on the saved icon and magnify it to the same size as those
> large print book, you enjoy reading...

e mail me that Bluenose if you can . Your instructions are to technical !!
 
Anyone else want it e-mailed?

> e mail me that Bluenose if you can . Your instructions are to technical !!

And probably a little inaccurate!!
 
Re: Anyone else want it e-mailed?

> And probably a little inaccurate!!

Yes *please* Bluenose, if you don't mind - [email protected] (Johnny thinks I work for the celebrated brown sauce manufacturers )
 
Re: Anyone else want it e-mailed?

> Yes *please* Bluenose, if you don't mind - [email protected] (Johnny thinks
> I work for the celebrated brown sauce manufacturers )

You do though don't you ?.I am more of a "Daddies" man myself.Yummy.
 
Re: Morrissey article from last Saturday's Telegraph (On-Line)

Article on Telegraph's website

Exiled from England
(Filed: 16/02/2004)

Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Saint Morrissey by Mark Simpson

In 1987 a troubled young man carrying a handgun walked into his local radio station in Denver, Colorado, and took the disc and producers hostage. Cowering and terrified, they asked him if he had any demands that they could try to satisfy. The answer they received was unexpected: he wanted them to play records by a four-piece Mancunian band called The Smiths, whose lead singer, Morrissey, liked to pose for press photos sitting next to graveyard headstones that bore his name. For more than four hours, the airwaves of the American Midwest were filled with songs such as Half a Person or Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.

Mark Simpson believes that if Steven Morrissey had many strange fans, they were only responding to his own strangeness. Born in Manchester in 1959 to working-class Irish Catholic parents, he was a shy boy, clever but unacademic, who spent most of his time locked in his bedroom firing off letters to national music papers, listening to 1960s girl bands, and writing wildly enthusiastic books about James Dean and those early glam-punks the New York Dolls. His own records, co-written with the guitarist Johnny Marr, were hyper-literate, spectacularly introverted and drenched in bitter-sweet nostalgia.

Morrissey was the first pop star to tell the world that the best days lay in the past. Record sleeves featured the likes of Viv Nicholson and Pat Phoenix. He sang about loneliness, incompletion and sexual longing with a candour and wit that listeners felt as lightning bolts to the heart. He waved gladioli on stage. Where other stars spoke of orgiastic excess, he proclaimed himself celibate and a vegetarian. His persona was spectacularly ordinary, from the unassuming name of his band to his NHS specs and Johnny Ray-style hearing aid. His lyrics invoked Keats and Yeats, and were life-affirmingly morbid: "If a double-decker bus crashes into us/ To die by your side is a heavenly way to die."

The Smiths were seen as both sexually threatening and as making music for wallflowers and blubberers. You could get beaten up at school for liking them. Mainstream media shunned them, not least because they recorded for an independent label and refused to make videos. Yet they were also a lifeline for many isolated, yearning teenagers. Morrissey represented an alternative 1980s, the antithesis of the glossy, overblown, success-at-all-costs ethos of Duran Duran or TV series such as Capital City. "Rejoice!" proclaimed Thatcher. "No, thank you," said Morrissey, before writing the song Margaret on the Guillotine.

Damon Albarn formed Blur after watching a South Bank Show about him. Jonathan Coe, Douglas Coupland and Willie Russell have all written novels that quote copiously from his lyrics. In 2002, New Musical Express voted him the "most influential artist ever". Now Mark Simpson has written a "psycho-bio" of the man he calls "the greatest ever lyricist of desire". It's an amusingly partisan work, glistening with hyperbole and extravagant phrases, but always acute, especially when it comes to the topic of Morrissey and national identity.

For after The Smiths split in 1987, Morrissey's solo career was going great guns until he appeared on stage in front of a bunch of skinhead fans while draped in a Union Flag. The music press crucified him as a racist, citing songs such as The National Front Disco. His career never recovered and he eventually relocated to Los Angeles. Simpson sees him as a modern-day Oscar Wilde, another self-created, gay artist of Irish descent who behaved like an intellectual aristocrat, delivered brilliant epigrams and was ultimately exiled from England.

Controversially, Simpson also compares him to Margaret Thatcher, a fellow "rebel-patriot with chips on both shoulders, whose resentment against the British-English Establishment was as strong, if not stronger than her love for England". She believed in Victorian values; Morrissey was imaginatively in thrall to the black-and-white world of terrace houses, kitchen-sink drama and early Coronation Street. Simpson compares him to Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett, "Northern artists who did something very few other writers bothered to do before them: they listened to the way northern women talk".

Morrissey devotees who want to read scrupulously researched accounts of the genesis and recording of individual songs would do well to stick to Simon Goddard's The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life. And for a creative take on how The Smiths saved the life of an American teenager it's worth reading Joe Pernice's touching Meat is Murder. But it's Simpson's book that is the most provocative. The Ecstasy-fuelled club culture of the 1990s had little time for someone who celebrated repression and bedsit melancholy and who hated most dance music. But dance music itself has waned in importance recently. With the release in April of his first album for seven years, Morrissey may find his time has come again: ol' big-mouth always said it would.




Exiled from England
 
Re: Anyone else want it e-mailed?

I need to re-scan the article, I think. The Magic Fairy has given me strict instructions on how to scan for a better image, so give me a few hours to suss it.

> Yes *please* Bluenose, if you don't mind - [email protected] (Johnny thinks
> I work for the celebrated brown sauce manufacturers )

I have to admit, I thought the same as Johnny
 
Re: Anyone else want it e-mailed?

> I need to re-scan the article, I think. The Magic Fairy has given me
> strict instructions on how to scan for a better image, so give me a few
> hours to suss it.

> I have to admit, I thought the same as Johnny

Too late ya numptie. Someone has already put the link on.Get yer act together
 
Yeah, but mine had a 15 year-old picture

Oh well, the thought was there
 
Re: Yeah, but mine had a 15 year-old picture

> Oh well, the thought was there

Youir head has got a 15 year old brain but no one is mentioning that are they
 
That's where you are wrong

My head has got a 15 year old ON the brain

> Youir head has got a 15 year old brain but no one is mentioning that are
> they
 
Re: That's where you are wrong

> My head has got a 15 year old ON the brain

Jesus ! What do you do during the school holidays when you can't get to see 14 year old boys in their school uniforms ?

Do you go into withdrawals or just take pills to calm your libido ?
 
Re: Hey! Where's my scans?? :o)

> They're in the post!

Plain brown envelope, as usual? ;o)
 
Re: Yeah, but mine had a 15 year-old picture

> Oh well, the thought was there

You ignore all this sarcasm, Bluenose, some of us appreciate your efforts. And it’s not as if you’re not making progress. For that Will Self article we had to wait nine years after it was put online before you posted an unreadable scan up here. This time we can enjoy trying to read your post a mere week after it was transcribed on the main page!
 
Re: Anyone else want it e-mailed?

> Yes *please* Bluenose, if you don't mind - [email protected] (Johnny thinks
> I work for the celebrated brown sauce manufacturers )

You should pretend you do, Al. Think of the prestige.
 
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