Lorenzo Casini writes:

There is The Best of Morrissey (due Nov. 6) announced on the upcoming list of Rhino records. Does anyone know anything more about it?

Morrissey - The Best Of Morrissey(Warner Archives)

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This "Best Of" is mentioned in "The Very Best Of The Smiths" - remastered tracks, Morrissey's response - May 25, 2001

Grant writes:

In hopes to dispel all those "nasty rumors" of the evil Gap Inc. monster trying to be clever with thier upcoming ad campaign, I offer an insider view on the subject. I work for Gap in the San Francisco headquarters and the following was posted today on our company's web-page:

“Getting Personal”
(excerpt from Gap Web – Gap Inc.’s internal web-page)

"Forget the monolithic marketing messages about what to wear this fall. For Gap, it's all about personal style. "We want to inspire our customers to find their look, their style through Gap."

Illustrating this new direction is "My First Love," Gap's fall advertising campaign, which features emerging celebrities and models calling out their first loves."...

-So it seems that the (handsome) gentleman in the recent ads is speaking for himself...something I find quite relieving.

• Related item: Gap print ad - "My first love: The Smiths" - Aug. 2, 2001

sleeper writes:

As previously mentioned, here is a transcription of the Vini Reilly interview (a scan of the one page can be found here).

From ALTERNATIVE PRESS #158 (Sep 01):

Dan B. Pearl writes:

Andrew Collins, who did fine work on the NME when it was half-decent, is taking part in a discussion on a comedy discussion site about the sad history of that music paper. The NME's treatment of race issues came up and Collins wrote:

Posted By Andrew Collins on Thu Jul 26 09:25:39 BST 2001:
Riots. I know what they're doing. We never did riots in my day (1988-1992) but the week we decided to "expose" Morrissey as a racist gave us all a buzz in the office - it was like being "proper journalists" for a rare couple of days as we pieced together what was, if not an actual "news" story, certainly more vital than just putting an interview with Kingmaker on the cover. Being a music journalist is not being a journalist - a painful truth we all knew - it's an easy, cossetted, spoon-fed life of Riley, so when the chance comes to do something "newsy", no matter how anodyne and forced it looks to us on the outside, the staff of pale young men will have got a real kick out of doing it. They probably all fell back and had a post-coital cigarette after sending the issue off to the printers, as if they were working for an underground Jewish paper during the first days of the Nazi era.

It's still bollocks though.

(Original post at http://mudhole.spodnet.uk.com/~frogger/cforum/forum561.html - scroll about 7/8ths of the way down, or search for "racist".)

charles byron sends the link:

The Last Word - Alistair Fitchett

From the main Tangents page:

I always remember a page in a fanzine that I bought in the 1980s for the lines it reprinted from a letter the fanzine's author had received. It said, in big bright red letters: 'don't give in! - There are those who understand…' That fanzine, and those words in particular always meant a lot to me, were ones I could always come back to and gain strength from. I've since considered myself immeasurably lucky to have received communications from individuals which have said much the same, or at least have made me feel that at least some of the words that I have written down the years have connected with people, have maybe made some sort of a difference to people. And as I say, I feel immeasurably lucky to be able to say that.

Of course, as is the way of the world, I have also occasionally received words from people who have singularly failed to connect, or agree with whatever I have written/said. This I accept as part of the process of putting my opinions in the public arena, open for interpretation and to perhaps instigate debate. And although I know that for the most part I ought to simply leave those critics to go on their merry ways, sometimes the sense of being totally misunderstood and misinterpreted is just too great, and I fall foul of the need to try and make things clearer. Such is the drive behind The Last Word, a piece that attempts at least in part, to respond to the torrents of abuse I have had (publicly on the guestbook) and even more so privately (through emails) in the past few weeks from Morrissey/Smiths fans responding to the Miserable Lie article I wrote way back in June. Feel free to ignore the article if the idea of more discussion on the subject bores you to tears.

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Sounds like some of you really got under his skin. On a side note, why is it so difficult for some people to put a simple link to this site? The mouseover to Morrissey-solo in the article reads "go there if you must..."

Related items:

• Alistair Fitchett on Morrissey's fans at Tangents.co.uk - Aug. 6, 2001
• "Miserable Lie" by Alistair Fitchett at Tangents.co.uk - July 28, 2001

Joern writes:

For those of you, who might be interested, here's a little story.

Farin Urlaub, the singer of the popular German Pop-Punk-Band "Die Ärzte" makes his solo debut in autumn with his forthcoming CD "Endlich Urlaub".

With the song "Sumisu" he pays a surprising tribute to the Smiths, because he sings (translated from german lyrics: "...and whenever we were sad, we went home, I took you in my arms, and we heard the Smiths, sometimes the Cure or New Order, but most of the time The Smiths". Musically the guitar sounds exactly like "Handsome Devil" and Farin sings obviously exactly like Morrissey. Another Song is called "Jeden Tag Sonntag (Everyday Is Like Sunday)". Short Info here but kinda interesting, 'cause it shows, that even todays kids idols are highly influenced by the best band in the world.

Does anyone understand the "Sumisu" - reference?

An anonymous person writes:

The 'Young Guns: Go For It' documentary on The Smiths, which aired on UK Horizons tonight, was a different edit to the version which originally aired on BBC2 in 1999.

Whilst all of the original interview segments were the same, and some of the programme actually cut due to an advertisement break, there was also extra footage and different music used. The new footage mainly consisted of still photographs and more of the modern day Manchester footage which was used in the original version. The new footage was mainly mixed into the interview segments and this, together with the different music, gave the programme a faster and more upbeat feel to it.

• Related item: "Young Guns Go For It" - The Smiths

JJ writes:

Happen to come across this article with the sub heading "...Think Morrissey, but not gay". The article is somewhat good, and the paintings very good. But felt the sub heading had no need to mention or mock Morrissey. Maybe you can ask why.

OC Weekly: Art: Dark, But Not Sad (Orange County, CA)

Xhris writes:

I don't know if this site's been mentioned on Morrissey-solo before (it's not really that big of a deal), but there is a website I found via Alternative Press's web site called MozWorld. Apparently, it's some sort of "interactive TV" experiement, and has absolutely nothing at all to do with our man Morrissey! They even have a link that says "Contact the Moz" meaning, I guess, the company, not the singer. Why didn't Morrissey trademark his name! Does this mean he cannot call himself Moz any longer? This is taken from their site:

1.1.00
MOZworld Entertainment to Launch Interactive Television Network

ATLANTA- Today MOZworld Entertainment, www.MOZworld.com, announced its entrance into the broadband content market. MOZworld is poised to exploit the convergence of television and the Internet by providing Generation Y with a fully interactive, online television network. The Atlanta based company is a pioneer in the emerging high bandwidth content arena, with plans to stream original programming to the web in upcoming months.

...I wrote to them and asked if there was a Morrissey connection. "Just a coincidence," they said.