Poll: Morrissey's best solo co-writer is...?

Who is/was Morrissey's Best SOLO Co-Writer (min of 4 songs written with Morrissey)?

  • Stephen Street

    Votes: 9 16.7%
  • Mark E. Nevin

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Alain Whyte

    Votes: 29 53.7%
  • Boz Boorer

    Votes: 11 20.4%
  • Jesse Tobias

    Votes: 4 7.4%
  • Gustavo Manzur

    Votes: 1 1.9%

  • Total voters
    54
Jesse Tobias :
Sorry Doesn't Help
I'm Ok By Myself
All You Need Is Me
In The Future When All's Well
Forgive Someone
I'm Not A Man
When You Open Your Legs

Juste for that, respect !
its true, im biased against him primarily because of how horrible he is as a guitarist live :rolleyes:
however, the question was "the best" lyric blah blah blah :guitar: and while some of these are not bad, they hardly make him the best...
 
Moz writes the lyrics FFS:crazy:


Alain Twat has the huge twat vote here cornered.:rock: Skinny, "holloway" and the other sock puppets, MiniMao....Chezzer...
 
Jesse Tobias :
Sorry Doesn't Help
I'm Ok By Myself
All You Need Is Me
In The Future When All's Well
Forgive Someone
I'm Not A Man
When You Open Your Legs

Juste for that, respect !

I do give him props for In The Future When All's Well and Forgive Someone.

EDIT: Forgive Someone is Boz NOT Jesse.

EDIT2: Thanks FWD - Forgive Someone IS Jesse.
 
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Alain. For the melancholy, the wistfulness, the guitars, the TUNES.
I used to be a Jesse basher, but then he wrote Forgive Someone (and I’m Not a Man) and everything was forgiven and forgotten. Well, hell, Moz used to hate the Ramones.
 
Poor Mark E Nevin, I think the music to Kill Uncle is great, but little can survive the damage done by that production.

Is there a best producer poll yet?

Steve Lillywhite for Vauxhall.
Mick Ronson for Arsenal, and Street for Viva,though very different, are both at second place for me.
Third place goes to Visconti for ROTT.
 
Boz is not doing very well, for the longest-serving band member.
A few of my favourites are Boz co-writes - Now My Heart is Full, Come Back to Camden, The More You Ignore Me, Jack the Ripper, etc - but unfortunately few and far between.
 
Forgive someone and im not a man are great songs in my opinion.
 
I think Boz Boorer is severely underappreciated here. Now My Heart Is Full, Lifeguard Sleeping, The More You Ignore Me and Speedway are to me the four best songs on Vauxhall. Teachers... and Reader Meet Author are my faves on Southpaw Grammar while the title track is the peak from Maladjusted. Plus Paris, Come Back To Camden, Art-Hounds, Forgive Someone, Staircase, Mountjoy, I wish You Lonely... Hell, Boz is my pick here.
 
Poor Mark E Nevin, I think the music to Kill Uncle is great, but little can survive the damage done by that production.

Nevin has also said that he never meant the songs on Kill Uncle to be finished compositions. When he sent the music to Morrissey, he though Moz would send them back with some ideas for lyrics, so he could work more on them, send them back to M. and so on. Likea proper collaboration. So he was shocked that Moz just put his vocals on them and then released them. Then he wrote a whole album's worth of music for Your Arsenal, only to hear on the finished album that only two of them had ended up there and that his efforts were no longer needed. So we never really heard what proper Morrissey/Nevin collaborations would have been, had Mark learnt the right way to work with The Man.
 
Nevin has also said that he never meant the songs on Kill Uncle to be finished compositions. When he sent the music to Morrissey, he though Moz would send them back with some ideas for lyrics, so he could work more on them, send them back to M. and so on. Likea proper collaboration. So he was shocked that Moz just put his vocals on them and then released them. Then he wrote a whole album's worth of music for Your Arsenal, only to hear on the finished album that only two of them had ended up there and that his efforts were no longer needed. So we never really heard what proper Morrissey/Nevin collaborations would have been, had Mark learnt the right way to work with The Man.

I recall Mark Nevin saying that now that you mention it. Add that to the list of "what ifs" when it comes to Morrissey. What if he and Stephen Street did at least one more album together? What if Mark Nevin had the chance to polish up his demos into proper songs as he intended? What if he and Johnny played again together as Johnny's book says they discussed? And so on...
 
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Boz is not doing very well, for the longest-serving band member.
A few of my favourites are Boz co-writes - Now My Heart is Full, Come Back to Camden, The More You Ignore Me, Jack the Ripper, etc - but unfortunately few and far between.

Me too. I would also add "The Public Image" and "I Can Have Both" as some of my other Boz favorites.
 
Alain wrote nearly 70 songs for Morrissey.
15 or so really were great but the other 50 ranged from passable to absolutely dismal.
Nowhere near the quality of the Stephen Street compositions.
In the biggest poll ever of all 300 songs that Morrissey sang, there wasn't a single Alain Whyte composition in the top 20. Says it all really. He just didn't quite have that magical songwriting ability. Good to great at his very best but never exceptional.

According to this Alain has written 74 released songs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Whyte

Also that poll was about as accurate as a broken Swiss watch. Yes there was 1000s of votes cast but not for each song and people lost interest when newer songs became available so there was not many votes cast for these songs and People are the Same Everywhere and The Kid's a Looker were in last place which was rather silly. There's no way they are the 2 worst songs.
 
According to this Alain has written 74 released songs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Whyte

Also that poll was about as accurate as a broken Swiss watch. Yes there was 1000s of votes cast but not for each song and people lost interest when newer songs became available so there was not many votes cast for these songs and People are the Same Everywhere and The Kid's a Looker were in last place which was rather silly. There's no way they are the 2 worst songs.
I like kids a looker,then again im easily pleased.
 
According to this Alain has written 74 released songs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Whyte

Also that poll was about as accurate as a broken Swiss watch. Yes there was 1000s of votes cast but not for each song and people lost interest when newer songs became available so there was not many votes cast for these songs and People are the Same Everywhere and The Kid's a Looker were in last place which was rather silly. There's no way they are the 2 worst songs.

Over the years there have been various polls for Morrissey/Smiths songs in different publications. Most are typically filled in by 10 to 15 journalists at any given publication.
The poll on this site was on a completely different scale - over 10,000 votes were cast, and every single song was included. It is easily the most comprehensive poll ever carried out into the Morrissey/Smiths back catalogue. And, yes Kid's a Looker and People are the Same were rightly voted his worst songs ever (and would still be voted likewise). If you're a big fan of these songs, you must be an absolute f***ing idiot.
 
Over the years there have been various polls for Morrissey/Smiths songs in different publications. Most are typically filled in by 10 to 15 journalists at any given publication.
The poll on this site was on a completely different scale - over 10,000 votes were cast, and every single song was included. It is easily the most comprehensive poll ever carried out into the Morrissey/Smiths back catalogue. And, yes Kid's a Looker and People are the Same were rightly voted his worst songs ever (and would still be voted likewise). If you're a big fan of these songs, you must be an absolute f***ing idiot.

Yes you’re right I’d rather listen to Journalists Who Lie and Born To Hang over these any day.
 
Nevin has also said that he never meant the songs on Kill Uncle to be finished compositions. When he sent the music to Morrissey, he though Moz would send them back with some ideas for lyrics, so he could work more on them, send them back to M. and so on. Likea proper collaboration. So he was shocked that Moz just put his vocals on them and then released them. Then he wrote a whole album's worth of music for Your Arsenal, only to hear on the finished album that only two of them had ended up there and that his efforts were no longer needed. So we never really heard what proper Morrissey/Nevin collaborations would have been, had Mark learnt the right way to work with The Man.


That’s odd, I mean, didn’t Nevin play on Kill Uncle? Guess he didn’t mind that his songs were not finished and agreed to go into the studio and record them that way. He also must of noticed with all the overdubs and time spent in a proper studio that what he was recording was more than just demos.

And then to agree to give him more ‘unfinished’
songs for the next album, knowing from previous experience that Morrissey won’t ‘properly’ collaborate with him, and his songs again will be released unfinished.

What do you make of that?
 
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That’s odd, I mean, didn’t Nevin play on Kill Uncle? Guess he didn’t mind that his songs were not finished and agreed to go into the studio and record them that way. He also must of noticed with all the overdubs and time spent in a proper studio that what he was recording was more than just demos.

And then to agree to give him more ‘unfinished’
songs for the next album, knowing from previous experience that Morrissey won’t ‘properly’ collaborate with him, and his songs again will be released unfinished.

What do you make of that?

From Mozipedia, under "Nevin, Mark": Nevin regrets that Morrissey's unorthodox working methods -- keeping words and music separate, with no eye-to-eye collaboration -- prevented him from developing his tunes beyond their original rough sketches. "I'd given him a demo thinking it was a base on which to build upwards but we never did. He just used the bones of what I gave him. There was no discussion about how we might improve the music. It took me a while to get my head around that."

So obviously my memory simplified things, but the main point was true. Nevin was probably in awe of Morrissey, who has never been a great communicator, so that's why Nevin never pressed the point.
 
No I didn’t doubt you. Just seems he really didn’t mind that his songs were not developed to full potential, if he agreed to continue to work
with Morrissey for Arsenal, even if he didn’t like or understand the way Morrissey works.

It’s a shame, I remember Nevin saying somewhere that Our Frank was in his mind supposed to be a harder song, so yes Mark had a different vision for his songs, though as I said
in my other post, I don’t think the production helped make things any better.

I like to fantasize what November would have sounded like if Ronson produced it.

From Mozipedia, under "Nevin, Mark": Nevin regrets that Morrissey's unorthodox working methods -- keeping words and music separate, with no eye-to-eye collaboration -- prevented him from developing his tunes beyond their original rough sketches. "I'd given him a demo thinking it was a base on which to build upwards but we never did. He just used the bones of what I gave him. There was no discussion about how we might improve the music. It took me a while to get my head around that."

So obviously my memory simplified things, but the main point was true. Nevin was probably in awe of Morrissey, who has never been a great communicator, so that's why Nevin never pressed the point.
 
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