Morrissey: Un dandy de camisa abierta - interview in Clarín.com



Morrissey: Un dandy de camisa abierta - Clarín.com (Argentina)

Translation to English:

You usually compose with others (just as you did during The Smith): how do these creative couples work?

-I do not consider myself a "musician" in a strict sense, so I like the idea of adding to the music with which my collaborator has been working. The vocal melody usually changes the musical direction of the song, that's true. But it's fine and I also know my place in the collaboration.

-If there are cases in which you only write the lyrics, is it the one that comes first or only arises after the melody?

-The lyrics are always in advance, but the "patch" to the music. It is a craft and at the same time requires effort. It's not easy, but I enjoy it. Because, as I once said, the lyrics should be written as if everyone was listening to you ... although that probably does not happen! Most modern composers joke about how well they spend writing the lyrics but do not make any intellectual effort thinking about the audience, the listeners.

- Of all the producers and collaborators with whom he worked (Stephen Street, Mark Nevin, Alain Whyte, Boz Boorer, Jesse Tobias), which one did you feel most comfortable with?

-It is an unfair question because each of them has their good things and their individual methods.

-It's his autobiography you mention how insistently Bowie was looking for him to do something together. What are your favorite records of {el?

-I would say that The Man Who Sold The World, Diamond Dogs and of course The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I think, by then, no one else could have got away with it as he did. And none more was close to what he achieved! I like artists who have an audacious awareness of everything they do. Today with most modern groups, it does not even matter if they are good or not: they usually jump to the nro. 1 of the charts and ready.

-I would like to ask you about your musical tastes. For example The Kinks in whom I see a kind of elegance and sophistication avant la lettre for The Smiths.

-The Kinks in the 60s were a perfect triumph ... absolutely original ... a wit and occurrence that no other group even tried and definitely memorable. I loved each of his singles but his success was so instantly accepted that no one took the trouble to analyze them. If someone wrote a song like Waterloo sunset today they would give him 42 Grammy awards.

-Nuevamente in his biography, you have writes very unique analogies, as when he says "The Stooges, Lou Reed and Patti Smith are our new Goethe, Gide and Gertrude Stein." I wonder then what essay writing interests you.

-The classics, obviously ... and with classics I mean what almost everyone agrees. As for example, in the 60s, the classic period of pop were The Beatles, Stones, The Who, The Supremes, The Four Tops, Bacharach-David, Phil Spector ... and so on. And with respect to modern speakers, I love listening to Germaine Greer, Anne Marie Waters and reading Christopher Hitchens. They always give me the answers I hope to find.

-Is it your idea that your memoirs be published in the "Penguin Classics" collection, a collection that Penguin only reserves for the canon of deceased writers?

-DO NOT! Of course not! Someone in the press invented that story to make me look like an insufferable person. But I'm used to it ...

-Finally I would like to ask you about the biopic about your life, England is mine.

-I never saw her and I was never consulted by her. They did not approach me or my family, so I have a hard time understanding how the filmmakers could understand what they were doing. Whereupon I ask myself: is it really about me?
 
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Great to see a shoutout to Christopher Hitchens. What was he reading, ‘arguably’?
 
Portrait of an indie emblem

If on the eve of his fifth recital in Argentina, since that initiation Luna Park in 2000, he wanted to observe the most current Morrissey, the table or, rather, the English tea, could not be better served for an artist as British as the penny coins: in short time their long-awaited memories, Morrissey, which were translated into Spanish this year, the amazing album Low in high school, edited at the end of last year and even a film about its beginnings, England is mine.

Morrissey, Morrissey, Morrissey. The importance of being called. As if the dictum of his venerated Wilde and his wit were present in every gesture, in every attitude of the artist. Is that, if you trace a tour of what the best anthologists of pop music have written about Mozz, you could get an essay in itself. Simon Reynolds, in his flash As a stroke of lightning, located from the beginning to The Smiths as the other side of post-Glam: The Smiths, the first indie musicians, who instead of signing a contract with a giant of the mainstream they did with Rough Trade, a small English label that would reappear at the beginning of the 2000 with The Strokes or Anthony and the Johnson (groups that still interpellate, as much by its guitar essence as by the singularity of its singers, both authorial characteristics of The Smiths). Going against the "mainstream" was also refusing both the synthesizers of the moment and the MTV policy of converting their discography into videography. Like The Beatles (and many times compared to them by the English press), they could triumph in singles and albums alike. In their strident supernova star life of just four studio albums, The Smiths (with the most common of the English surnames as a name) gave extraordinary songs that served to feed entire discographies of independent bands in the future, such as Belle and Sebastian, Animals that swim or Magnetic Fields. And Reynolds is one of the few who analyzes the staging of Morrissey: "In the thin boundary between trance and ridicule, his mixture of grace and awkwardness recalls the pirouettes of a teenager locked in his room with a turntable and a mirror, as if suddenly a private moment occupied the most public stage of English pop. " Morrissey, this is the key, it is the sentimental education of a generation raised under a warm winter sun, between reading and independent cinema, which prefers "to spend the summer days indoors" as it sings in "Ask", disc Louder than the bombs of The Smiths.
 
Originally from what was already the capital of the new disco music of the United Kingdom, Manchester, with its avant-garde New Order looking to the future or its beloved Buzzcocks back, Morrissey will never have the look of a "24 hour party people" , but rather that of a dandy with an open shirt that throws gladioli to his audience. Sexually ambiguous and attractive for both genders, he will never use gay pride as a banner, as if Boy George or later George Michael or Ricky Martin, had spent forever the vindicating act that that declaration contains.
 
On the other hand, in his heterodox history of modern music, Yeah, yeah, yeah! Bob Stanley hits the mark when he says: "Morrissey's conservatism offered an escape in a very conservative era." And Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage ratify it in their mastodóntico The faber book of pop when they quote the man from jopo rockabilly in an interview affirming: "I despise the monarchy".

Which brings us to his last album, Low in high school, with the suggestive and robespierreano subtitle of "Ax to the monarchy": ax to the monarchy. A crunchy album, full of pathos, like all his solo discography, which begins with rocker and adolescent spirit scent in "My love I'd do anything for your love" (that "hey, hey, hey" epic, irresistible) and shining songs of inconceivable political content such as "Jackie's only happy when she's on the stage" ("this country makes me sick" and an "exit" that the final chorus seems to turn into "Brexit") or "Who will protect us from the police? " The question about the terroir of this "blood Irishman with an English heart" (as one of his classics reads) emerges in the exquisite Dickensian lyricism of "Home is a question mark" ("home is a question mark") and there is room for pop perfection in "Spent the day in bed" or the curse of loneliness in "I wish you lonely" or "I bury the living", which is the closest thing to the pentalogy of The River of Time, Fernando Vallejo If the comparison sounds hyperbolic, we must remember that Morrissey wrote, on an album with arrangements by Ennio Morricone, "You have killed me" in which he confesses: "Pasolini, it's me; you ... you will never be Anna Magnani. "

Manchester, a closed city, raised Morrissey in a particular way, as his autobiography demonstrates. Those who try to find explanations of their songs or bedroom secrets with Michel Stipe of R.E.M. will fail. But whoever searches for literature will run into paragraphs like this one, when he describes the singer Nico: "A bank of fog, a frost; the voice of a body that falls down the stairs and speaks as if the hanged man's hands choked the throat, she is the last humpback whale traversed by a harpoon. I keep with devotion his four albums ... none of which contains the slightest hint of hope
 
Morrissey, a postmodern McCarthyist, sees leftists even on the BBC or criticizes the mayor of London as Muslim (and, unfortunately, not the only one of the xeno-rock: John Lydon or Roger Daltrey of The Who have expressed their depreciation for Polish immigrants in their country). Contradictory ("Thatcher, neither lady nor iron, is a human ax incapable of recognizing one's mistake." The despot rejoices in the destruction of the miners and torpedoes an Argentine ship, the Belgrano full of teenage soldiers, despite not presenting no threat and be outside the zone of exclusion of the Malvinas, "writes in his autobiography), unforgivable and misanthropic, his De profundis wildeano does not seem to come from an English prison, if not the Hollywood mansion where he lives from the 90. His message to the world, to his lovers and fans is not epistolary, but irresistibly rocky. His letters in lyrics and music also make up some of the most beautiful and impressive songs of the end of the millennium and the beginning of it.
 
Thanks Neal. Interesting interview. :thumb:



Morrissey: Un dandy de camisa abierta - Clarín.com

Translation to English:

You usually compose with others (just as you did during The Smith): how do these creative couples work?

-I do not consider myself a "musician" in a strict sense, so I like the idea of adding to the music with which my collaborator has been working. The vocal melody usually changes the musical direction of the song, that's true. But it's fine and I also know my place in the collaboration.

-If there are cases in which you only write the lyrics, is it the one that comes first or only arises after the melody?

-The lyrics are always in advance, but the "patch" to the music. It is a craft and at the same time requires effort. It's not easy, but I enjoy it. Because, as I once said, the lyrics should be written as if everyone was listening to you ... although that probably does not happen! Most modern composers joke about how well they spend writing the lyrics but do not make any intellectual effort thinking about the audience, the listeners.

- Of all the producers and collaborators with whom he worked (Stephen Street, Mark Nevin, Alain Whyte, Boz Boorer, Jesse Tobias), which one did you feel most comfortable with?

-It is an unfair question because each of them has their good things and their individual methods.

-It's his autobiography you mention how insistently Bowie was looking for him to do something together. What are your favorite records of {el?

-I would say that The Man Who Sold The World, Diamond Dogs and of course The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I think, by then, no one else could have got away with it as he did. And none more was close to what he achieved! I like artists who have an audacious awareness of everything they do. Today with most modern groups, it does not even matter if they are good or not: they usually jump to the nro. 1 of the charts and ready.

-I would like to ask you about your musical tastes. For example The Kinks in whom I see a kind of elegance and sophistication avant la lettre for The Smiths.

-The Kinks in the 60s were a perfect triumph ... absolutely original ... a wit and occurrence that no other group even tried and definitely memorable. I loved each of his singles but his success was so instantly accepted that no one took the trouble to analyze them. If someone wrote a song like Waterloo sunset today they would give him 42 Grammy awards.

-Nuevamente in his biography, you have writes very unique analogies, as when he says "The Stooges, Lou Reed and Patti Smith are our new Goethe, Gide and Gertrude Stein." I wonder then what essay writing interests you.

-The classics, obviously ... and with classics I mean what almost everyone agrees. As for example, in the 60s, the classic period of pop were The Beatles, Stones, The Who, The Supremes, The Four Tops, Bacharach-David, Phil Spector ... and so on. And with respect to modern speakers, I love listening to Germaine Greer, Anne Marie Waters and reading Christopher Hitchens. They always give me the answers I hope to find.

-Is it your idea that your memoirs be published in the "Penguin Classics" collection, a collection that Penguin only reserves for the canon of deceased writers?

-DO NOT! Of course not! Someone in the press invented that story to make me look like an insufferable person. But I'm used to it ...

-Finally I would like to ask you about the biopic about your life, England is mine.

-I never saw her and I was never consulted by her. They did not approach me or my family, so I have a hard time understanding how the filmmakers could understand what they were doing. Whereupon I ask myself: is it really about me?
 
Christopher Hitchens ... an interesting choice. Hitchens is in some ways conservative but liberal in others. Not easily pinned down. I can see how that might appeal to Morrissey.
 
Oh dear. Oh deary, deary me. And he'd been doing so well recently.
Well indeed. He won't change. Wherever people know about his despicable racist views, his career has gone down the shitter. All that's left is to take money from people who don't know in places halfway round the world.

He's a despicable bigot and racist, and he deserves all the opprobrium. All of it.
 
Well indeed. He won't change. Wherever people know about his despicable racist views, his career has gone down the shitter. All that's left is to take money from people who don't know in places halfway round the world.

He's a despicable bigot and racist, and he deserves all the opprobrium. All of it.
:laughing:
 
Well indeed. He won't change. Wherever people know about his despicable racist views, his career has gone down the shitter. All that's left is to take money from people who don't know in places halfway round the world

Yeah,those Johnny foreigners are so dumb, living on the other side of YOUR world.
 
Yes, I don't agree with the xeno rock thing, but most of it is very good. Eventually, time will tell who is who.

Sorry did I miss something?

What do you mean by ‘ xeno rock ‘ ?

Thanks in advance.
 
Well indeed. He won't change. Wherever people know about his despicable ‘racist’ views, his career has gone down the shitter. All that's left is to take money from people who don't know in places halfway round the world. “

:rolleyes:

Yeah, how could they know anything? They probably don’t even have internet down there
‘in places halfway around the world ‘, can they even read ?

:rolleyes:
 
Thanks for the translation. He sounded surprisingly agreeable and no controversial quotes that will land him in hot water. Success.
 
Well indeed. He won't change. Wherever people know about his despicable racist views, his career has gone down the shitter. All that's left is to take money from people who don't know in places halfway round the world.
He's a despicable bigot and racist, and he deserves all the opprobrium. All of it.

This post coming from the disgusting racist man who claimed Morrissey's career went downhill simply because he employed a non-white guitarist/songwriter i.e. Jesse Tobias.
Please be 100% clear that your appalling, vile racism appalls and sickens us all.
 
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