Mocks Morrissey for being known as Morrissey, yet calls himself AA ('apparently
without irony'). What Morrissey says about Keith Bennett carries a ring of
truth.
Sent from my iPhone
> On 14 Feb 2014, at 19:12, "E Walsh" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The following is the review of the autobiography of Morrissey by AA Gill in
> the Sunday Times.
>
> The review won the Hatchet Job of the Year Review 2013
>
> It is worth a read
>
>
> A A Gill on Autobiography by Morrissey
> THE SUNDAY TIMES
>
> AS NOËL Coward might have said, nothing incites intemperate cultural
> hyperbole like cheap music. Who can forget that the Beatles were once
> authoritatively lauded as the equal of Mozart, or that Bob Dylan was dubbed a
> contemporary Keats? The Beatles continued to ignore Covent Garden, and Mozart
> is rarely heard at Glastonbury; Dylan has been silently culled from the
> latest edition of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English.
>
> The publication of Autobiography was the second item on Channel 4’s news on
> the day it was released. Krishnan Guru-Murthy excitably told the nation that
> Morrissey really could write — presumably he was reading from an Autocue —
> and a pop journalist thrilled that he was one of the nation’s greatest
> cultural icons. He isn’t even one of Manchester’s greatest cultural icons.
>
> This belief in high-low cultural relativity leads to a certain sort of chippy
> pop star feeling undervalued and then hoitily producing a rock opera or duet
> with concert harpsichord. Morrissey, though, didn’t have to attain the chip
> of being needily undervalued; he was born with it. He tells us he ditched
> “Steve”, his given name, to be known by his portentous unimoniker because —
> deep reverential breath here — great classical composers only have one name.
> Mussorgsky, Mozart, Morrissey.
>
> His most pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing is
> having this autobiography published by Penguin Classics. Not Modern Classics,
> you understand, where the authors can still do book signings, but the classic
> Classics, where they’re dead and some of them only have one name. Molière,
> Machiavelli, Morrissey.
>
> He has made up for being alive by having a photograph of himself pretending
> to be dead on the cover. The book’s publication was late and trade gossip has
> it that Steve insisted on each and every bookshop taking a minimum order of
> two dozen, misunderstanding how modern publishing works. But this is not
> unsurprising when you read the book. He is constantly moaning about record
> producers not pressing enough discs to get him to No 1. What is surprising is
> that any publisher would want to publish the book, not because it is any
> worse than a lot of other pop memoirs, but because Morrissey is plainly the
> most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who
> ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities.
>
> The book falls into two distinct passages. The first quarter is devoted to
> growing up in Manchester (where he was born in 1959) and his schooling. This
> is laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and
> score-settling that reads like a cross between Madonna and Catherine Cookson.
> No teacher is too insignificant not to be humiliated from the heights of
> success, no slight is too small not to be rehashed with a final, killing
> esprit d’escalier. There are pages of lists of television programmes he
> watched (with plot analysis and character criticism). He could go on
> Mastermind with the specialist subject of Coronation Street or the works of
> Peter Wyngarde. There is the food he ate, the groups that appeared on Top of
> the Pops (with critical comments) and the poetry he liked (with quotes).
>
> All of this takes quite a lot of time due to the amount of curlicues,
> falderals and bibelots he insists on dragging along as authorial decoration.
> Instead of adding colour or depth, they simply result in a cacophony of
> jangling, misheard and misused words. After 100 pages, he’s still at the
> school gate kicking dead teachers.
>
> But then he sets off on the grown-up musical bit and the writing calms down
> and becomes more diary-like, bloggish, though with an incontinent use of
> italics that are a sort of stage direction or aside to the audience. He
> changes tenses in ways that are supposed to be elegant but just sound camp.
> There is one passage that stands out — this is the first time he sings.
> “Against the command of everyone I had ever known, I sing. My mouth meets the
> microphone and the tremolo quaver eats the room with acceptable pitch and I
> am removed from the lifelong definition of others and their opinions matter
> no more. I am singing the truth by myself which will also be the truth of
> others and give me a whole life. Let the voice speak up for once and for
> all.” That has the sense of being both revelatory and touching, but it stands
> out like the reflection of the moon in a sea of Stygian self-justification
> and stilted self-conscious prose.
>
> The hurt recrimination is sometimes risible but mostly dull, like listening
> to neighbours bicker through a partition wall, and occasionally startlingly
> unpleasant, such as the reference to the Moors murderers and the unfound
> grave of their victim Keith Bennett. “Of course, had Keith been a child of
> privilege or moneyed background, the search would never have been called off.
> But he was a poor, gawky boy from Manchester’s forgotten side streets and
> minus the blond fantasy fetish of a cutesy Madeleine McCann.”
>
> It’s what’s left out of this book rather than what’s put in that is
> strangest. There is an absence of music, not just in its tone, but the
> content. There are emetic pools of limpid prose about the music business, the
> ingratitude of fellow musicians and band members and the lack of talent in
> other performers, but there is nothing about the making of music itself, the
> composing of lyrics, the process of singing or the emotion of creation. He
> seems to assume we will already know his back catalogue and can hum along to
> his recorded life. This is 450 pages of what makes Morrissey, but nothing of
> what Morrissey makes.
>
> There is the peevishness at managers, record labels and bouncers, a list of
> opaque court cases, all of which he manages to lose unfairly, due to the
> inherited stupidity of judges. Even his relation with the audience is
> equivocal. Morrissey likes them when they’re worshipping from a distance, but
> he is not so keen when they’re up close. As an adolescent he approaches Marc
> Bolan for an autograph. Bolan refuses and Morrissey, still awkwardly
> humiliated after all these years, has the last word. But then later in the
> book and life, he does exactly the same thing to his own fans without
> apparent irony.
>
> There is little about his private life. A boyfriend slips in and out with
> barely a namecheck. This is him on his early sexual awakening: “Unfathomably
> I had several cupcake grapples in this year of 1973… Plunge or no plunge,
> girls remain mysteriously attracted to me.” There is precious little plunging
> after that.
>
> There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn’t be written. Some to protect
> the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In Morrissey’s case, he
> has managed both. This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin
> ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no
> stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or
> likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and
> logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn’t diminish
> Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a
> humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.
>
> This article originally appeared in The Sunday Times on 27/10/13
>
>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Chris Briggs
> Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 10:10 AM
> To: Ian Murray
> Cc: Leeds List
> Subject: Re: [LU] Fwd: RE: LUST lose credibility in one fail swoop
>
> Well, obviously you do as you sprang so quickly to his defence when I added
> an opinion from someone he knew.
> Is there a bromance we should know about, after all it is valentines day ;o)
>
> (Obviously I know that you will take this in good humour and not sulk)
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On 14 Feb 2014, at 09:59, "Ian Murray" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Who cares? Amazing music and funny persona.
>>
>> I'm not mentioned in his autobiography.
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>>> On 14 Feb 2014, at 17:53, "Chris Briggs" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I have it on good authority from someone who has known him since they were
>>> teenagers that he is a complete knobhead, in fact my mate Simon is
>>> mentioned many times in his autobiography.
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>>> On 14 Feb 2014, at 09:24, "[email protected]"
>>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> when they come to write the definitive list of over-rated, self-important
>>>> twats
>>>> of the twentieth century, dear Stephen will be in the top 3.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Morrissey is a legend.
>>>>>
>>>>> He says controversial things to wind people like you up, and it works.
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>>>> John 'Grampa' Sykes
>>>> Rest In Peace old lad
>>>> 28th Oct 1938 - 12 Nov 2013
>>>> MARCHING ON TOGETHER
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> John 'Grampa' Sykes
> Rest In Peace old lad
> 28th Oct 1938 - 12 Nov 2013
> MARCHING ON TOGETHER
>
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John 'Grampa' Sykes
Rest In Peace old lad
28th Oct 1938 - 12 Nov 2013
MARCHING ON TOGETHER
