Strange/unexpected Moz references?

Producer Ronin Mode's remaster of Hatful of Hollow, uploaded 11 June 2024

"A Ronin Mode Tribute to The Smiths Hatful of Hollow Full Album HQ Remastered https://www.patreon.com/user/shop/ron... Ronin Mode is an American electronic music producer. He first gained international recognition by releasing remixes of the songs by Chvrches never say die, and Depeche Mode never let me down again, inspired by bands like Nine inch nails, Depeche Mode, and ATB, Ronin Mode study music as a teen but had to quit for personal reasons. After a long hiatus he is back! #thesmiths #80smusic #remastered"

 


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Shaun Duggan still in Smiths' shirts.

 
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Interesting Morrissey mentions in 1998's The New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon by Nina Antonia:

Up in Manchester Steven Morrissey, who would later collate the Dolls’ press cuttings in an underground publication, wrote: “I was thirteen and it was my first real emotional experience”. The Dolls were also crucial to the development of the early Sex Pistols.

Little Steven Morrissey, who still hadn’t recovered from seeing the Dolls on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and had been petitioning Laura Kauffmann, a pleasant employee at Mercury Records, for permission to start up a UK Dolls’ fan club ever since, received a long awaited reply from Miss Kauffmann, in which mention is made of Kent’s review … “We saw that Nick Kent review in NME and were quite upset by it as he had spent some time with the Dolls in the studio and had gone to see their concerts here when they played for a week in the little NY clubs where they first started. We were most upset when we figured out that he couldn’t possibly have heard a finished product in time for the review to be written which is really quite unfair to the band.”

It was a trying time for all UK Dolly devotees, especially Steven Morrissey who wrote to Laura Kauffmann at Mercury Records after the Dolls pulled out of their English commitments. Miss Kauffmann replied to Morrissey on July 30, 1974: “Dear Steve: I’m glad to hear that you’d found out in time the Dolls weren’t going to London. They were very disappointed, but there had just been too little time for us to get everything together for the trip. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before they really will be going over there. Of course that depends largely on how the record does over there, so I’m counting on you to get everyone excited about it. You must have all the fans write to papers and buy records and write to radio stations.”

Although Mercury didn’t officially drop the Dolls until the following year, they withdraw any support towards the end of 1974. Donna L. Halper, the East Coast A&R director at Mercury, responding to a letter from Steven Morrissey inquiring about the welfare of his Dolly darlings, issued the following statement: “Since I know you like them, I am sure you won’t agree with our reasoning but the reality is neither of their two LPs sold very well. Not only that, but they were costing us huge amounts of money because of their tendency to destroy property in hotels. I truly believe that the company tried to be fair and patient with the Dolls but as talented as they were they were a continued source of aggravation for us.”

Steven Morrissey grew up and with the advent of The Smiths got over the Dolls: “Five years ago I would have lain on the tracks for them, now I could never possibly listen to one of their records. It was just a teenage fascination and I was laughably young at the time. I always liked the Dolls because they seemed like the kind of group the industry couldn’t wait to get rid of. And that pleased me tremendously, I mean, there wasn’t anybody around then with any dangerous qualities, so I welcomed them completely. Sadly, their solo permutations crushed whatever image I had of them as individuals.”

However, no one had yet tested David Johansen’s replacement theory which lay dormant like a genie in a bottle for 29 years. Then in early 2004, rumours of a New York Dolls reunion at the request of Morrissey began to ricochet round Cyberspace. Weighing strongly against the possibility was the absence of Johnny Thunders, although according to the gossip mill an army of guitarists including Steve Jones, Izzy Stradlin and Andy McCoy were lined up and waiting to take his place. Why it sounded like The Rolling Stones attempting a re-formation without Keith! Unthinkable. And what about Jerry Nolan?

Kane remained nonplussed until he heard from David Johansen’s tour manager, confirming that The New York Dolls would be playing Morrissey’s ‘Meltdown’ at the Royal Festival Hall in London. In an email sent on March 24, 2004 Arthur concluded: “I am sincerely praying that it all can come together – even a hummingbird told me that all the Dolls in heaven would love to see this London show! Universal UK is supposed to be re-releasing our CDs again this year. I’m stone cold broke at the same time! Oh well! Playing again could be our new futures – especially for three guys with wonderful pasts but no real futures – unless we team up again! Hope Springs Ever Eternal.”

Throughout, Morrissey remained distant yet pivotal to the unfolding developments. Evidently, he had forgiven The New York Dolls their solo trespasses and his heart once again skipped like a needle on a scratched 45 at the very mention of their name. But this was no private amnesty, for the ‘Meltdown’ was one of the cultural highlights of the London calendar. Each year a prominent artiste hosted a week’s worth of events featuring performances by their key influences and favourite acts. Aside from the Dolls, Morrissey’s other luminaries included Nancy Sinatra, James Maker, Sparks and an Oscar Wilde evening. Initially the Dolls were booked to play one show only on Friday June 18, but demand for tickets was so intense, a second gig on Wednesday June 16 was added. Placed between the reality of Nancy Sinatra and Sparks and the make-believe of a night with wild Oscar, The New York Dolls were neither wholly present nor entirely absent despite the mounting media furore. From the offset, this was the great conundrum for how could it be a true reunion without the entire band? Surviving members with guest musicians was more to the point but a lot less punchy to relate.

In the background, the cameras whirr like unblinking eyes capturing every move and sentiment, as the notables air their views and pay homage to The New York Dolls. Morrissey, however, keeps a low profile but although he’s out of sight he’s never out of mind. There are flowers all over the stage – is it a wake, a party or a florist’s convention? No, a Morrissey related event.

By July, the fickle summer weather has already broken which doesn’t bode particularly well for Manchester’s open-air Move Festival at the Old Trafford cricket ground. There’s a reasonable but not magnificent turnout and the Dolls are on before Morrissey. About 30 people at the front of the stage go absolutely nuts when Johansen and company appear, leaving the majority of the audience to restlessly lumber about in anticipation of the headline act.

Next on is Morrissey who reminds the now attentive audience that in 1972 The New York Dolls had been booked to play at a local club called the Hardrock which was situated just round the corner from Old Trafford. The audience bear with him out of devotion as Morrissey continues to explain how the Dolls had to cancel when their drummer, Billy Murcia, died.

Regards,
FWD.

(Her book Johnny Thunders: In Cold Blood features a similar story regarding the fan club - basically the first 2 quotes above rewritten).
 
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Morrissey mentions in Maconie's book (2005):

To my three-year-old eyes, adult men still looked more like Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning than George Harrison, endlessly combing back lustrous, oily hanks of hair, and they were more likely to be seen clutching a pint of mild than a Scotch and Coke.
Morrissey is a few years my senior but generationally I guess we are cut from the same cloth. The milieu he mournfully celebrates – the cobblestones and rain-bleary streets, factories, football, funfairs, canals and chippies – have always resonated with me.

‘This is how Leiber and Stoller met.’ Thus spake Johnny Maher to Steven Patrick Morrissey on that doorstep in Stretford that May morning. Actually it was probably nearer afternoon. Morrissey was on the dole and not known for being an early riser. I imagine he was in his dressing gown watching Selina Scott, and Johnny Marr (he soon changed his surname to avoid confusion with Buzzcocks drummer, John Maher) may have put in a morning selling jeans at X Clothes or Crazy Face in the city centre. From this meeting came forth The Smiths, a group who, over a decade after their messy dissolution, still inspire fervid, unhinged devotion, still act as shorthand for a particular aesthetic and sensibility, still haunt the canals and railway sidings of Lancashire. To get an idea of why The Smiths meant so much, why they were on first hearing the most important group in the world, why they stopped you in your tracks, why they did not emerge but rather explode on to the British pop scene you have to remember just what the state of Britain and British pop was in 1983.

Probably because I was in the boot, Geoff and my so-called mates decided to drive a hell of a way out of town; to the Farmers Arms in Parbold, a rural inn on a sprawling low hill ten miles distant from Wigan. I felt every camber, cat’s eye and bump of the road, cursing the tardy ratepayers of Wigan as I went. One thing made this ordeal more palatable. Geoff’s car radio speakers were casually mounted on the rear window shelf of his car and I heard Janice Long’s evening show in perfect stereo reproduction. As I lay with my head on the spare tyre, staring at an empty banana milk carton and The AA Book of the Road, I heard a sound that transported me far from my current, fairly tawdry situation to somewhere far more magical. It was the sound of a guitar, a chiming, luminous frill that darted around in your head. It sounded, like ‘Neat Neat Neat’ had years before, like nothing I’d heard previously; thrilling and new, a sense compounded when the singer entered with a plaintive, lovelorn refrain:
‘Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate … will nature make a man of me yet.’

I banged hard on the bulkhead between boot and back seat. ‘Stop!’ I yelled, and then again, and then again until eventually the car was pulled over to the side of the road. The boot opened and mildly concerned faces peered in, behind them raggedy clouds and high stars.
‘Had enough then?’ came the enquiry.
‘No, listen!’ I cried, unfolding myself painfully and leaping from the car. ‘It’s that record I told you about. The Smiths.’ And so we listened and we loved. It is a rather sweet, odd tableau, don’t you think? A small knot of tipsy young men in long overcoats, standing by a car on a high, deserted country lane listening to The Smiths in the chill November night.

‘Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate’. It was some opening gambit. Six words, four of which I don’t think I’d ever heard in a pop song before; a hell of a strike rate. It fitted the moment perfectly of course. The template for the next year was set: of The Smiths getting into every corner of life, illuminating the everyday, celebrating the streets and hills and canals of the North of England. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the first time pop music spoke directly to me. It said something to me about my life. Joblessness, glamour and charm in the face of sullen circumstance, lovelorn musings, lust, furtive encounters, politics, the landscape of the North – The Smiths took all these things and elevated them into poetry, made them radiant, made them worth something. Morrissey himself caught this perfectly when, speaking of his muse and his fascinations, he said, ‘I am forever chained to a disused railway clearing in Wigan.’ I wish he’d meant it literally. I could have gone round and taken him a Thermos.

A month or two later, compassion fever gripped the land. Paul Young, Bono and Bananarama emoting ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was inescapable in every pub, shop and leisure centre; Morrissey was one of the few voices in pop, in the nation as a whole come to that, that dared raise itself in dissent.
‘I detest it all,’ he said of Band Aid and Live Aid. ‘It says that the responsibility for solving hunger and world poverty lies with an eleven-year-old girl in Wigan.’ This struck me as the last word in sound analysis and common sense. And he mentioned Wigan again. Who was this great man?
Steven Patrick Morrissey was but one-quarter of The Smiths; without the contribution of them all, notably Johnny Marr’s coruscating guitar work, The Smiths would never have stolen the hearts of a generation the way they did. But Morrissey was The Smiths in excelsis – mouthpiece, style icon, spokesman, public face. A blousy, camp, square-jawed Mancunian who claimed to be celibate, quoted Oscar Wilde and said things like, ‘Anyone not wishing to be excessively charming should be shot.’ With Tony Hadley and Howard Jones as competition, it was no surprise that he became, almost immediately, pop music’s greatest frontman.

Rather like my romper-suited experience with The Beatles two decades before, I was soon to get my chance to see these new idols of mine in the flesh. It would be in a matter of days, 18 November 1983. The venue, curiously enough, was the old alma mater that I had only recently left, Edge Hill College, whose entertainments secretary, in a rare paroxysm of taste, had actually booked the best band in Britain, a band who, within weeks, would have left the college circuit behind for good.
Chloe, my just-about girlfriend, was still at the college and I was still paying visits there in a desultory, unsatisfactory way. I have to confess, though, and I take no pride in this, that there was a spring in my step as I boarded the train at Wigan Wallgate that weekend. I had tickets for The Smiths, and if you had to endure the death throes of a love affair, you might as well do it to a brilliant soundtrack.

The Smiths played the ‘refec’, the same large, depersonalised glass and metal hall where I had watched, half cut on Autumn Gold cider, acts as diverse as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Liquid Gold. It was here that I had got involved in a mass brawl with Ormskirk townies during a set by Girls At Our Best and here that I had shouted disparaging remarks at Richard Digance. Long years of partly washed students availing themselves of chicken curry, oven chips and jam roly poly had imbued it with an unmistakable odour of demoralising institutionalised domesticity. I imagine maximum security prisons are the same. Nothing in its dull life had prepared it for the coming of The Smiths, that was for sure.
For ten minutes before the show began, gladioli showered down upon the audience from behind the amps and curtains. It was the perfect gesture of flamboyance and defiance of the stultifying rock norms. It was also, I later learned, a tactic that blew gaping holes in The Smiths’ take-home pay most nights. But Morrissey wanted it, and so loyal roadies crouched behind amps hurling flowers at amazed students every night.

When they took the stage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band look and sound so completely ineffably right. In Morrissey and Marr, they had a Jagger and Richard for different times. Morrissey wore a billowing violet chemise, a hearing aid, a gladioli in his back pocket and draped the back of his hand across his forehead like a distressed damsel in a silent movie. But this was a melodrama that somehow rang truer than any amount of gritty realism.
Every song seemed better than the last: ‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’, ‘Wonderful Woman’, ‘These Things Take Time’; rainlashed, smoky tales of young marriages failing in flats by the gasworks and illicit meetings under viaducts, a world populated by Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham, The Shangri-Las and Ena Sharples. At this point The Smiths were more than just a group, they were a whole, fully realised world. Drunk with infatuation that night, I even think they played a brief snatch of The Velvelettes’ ‘Needle In A Haystack’, a Motown tune from my Northern Soul days. I could have been wrong though. The details are sketchy now, seen through a haze of longing and misty memory. Afterwards, we took a late train back in silence to an unheated furnished room in the back streets of Southport. It was in itself an almost comical Smiths tableau.

I stood stoically alone in the office on other matters apart from facial hair. Everyone else in the office bar me loved Queen. I hated them.fn2 ‘Well, who do you like then?’ the fat little accountant would ask. Whenever I told him, he would reply, ‘The Smiths?! The Smiths!!’ and would do a little dance, waving his arms around, pirouetting and warbling in a bad impression of Morrissey’s vocal style. ‘Oh I want my mummy, I need the toilet, and I’m really unhappy.’

I’d listen on my Walkman as Morrissey sang on ‘London’ by The Smiths, ‘Train moves onto Euston, and do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?’ The coming year was to be full of decisions, some of them personal, some of them professional, daunting and exciting.

I interviewed the Go Betweens who told me that Sigmund Freud’s theories of personal motivation and behaviour were the curse of the twentieth century. I interviewed Green Gartside of Scritti Politti who told me he’d got an NME subscription when he was eight and joined the Cwmbran Young Communist League at twelve. I interviewed Wigan’s only half-famous pop stars, the Railway Children, over a pint of Burtonwood’s bitter in the Cherry Gardens hotel by Haigh Hall. I didn’t interview The Smiths – they had split up by now – but I moved nearer to their orbit; interviewing a Manchester hairdresser called Andrew Berry, coiffeur to the stars and immortalised in Morrissey’s ‘Hairdresser On Fire’ and also a quintet from Blackburn called, confusingly, Bradford who were Morrissey’s current favourite band.

During the early Nineties, we put Morrissey on the cover whenever the occasion demanded and many times when it signally didn’t. The result was always the same; the paper flew off the shelves. In fact, and this is curious, the NME when adorned with the (usually shirtless) Morrissey regularly sold more copies than the current Morrissey single that the piece was pegged around. This led one to the inescapable conclusion that there were people out there who were fans of Morrissey’s entertaining pronouncements who couldn’t give a monkey’s about his records.

From that very first day at the NME I was aware that there was one meeting above all the others that loomed tantalisingly in the future always just out of reach. One day it would come, though, and I’d be ready. It would be my High Noon. But when it came it wasn’t at noon but at about eleven o’clock at night in a swanky hotel room high above the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Morrissey’s hotel room.
Morrissey is simply the best interviewee in the world. He has turned it into an art form, to the extent that, as stated previously, editions of the NME boasting a Morrissey cover story would sell more than his records did. Morrissey had fans who weren’t actually that wild on his music. They were fans of Morrissey the interviewee.
I’d been waiting in Morrissey’s Berlin hotel room for a while. He was somewhere in the building, I’d been assured of this. For a while I thought he was just shy. Then I began to think that it was an elaborate Lou Reed-style plan to unnerve the hack. But at just this point, a vertiginous quiff appeared around the door.

‘I expect you’ll be wanting a drink,’ he asked in his uniquely wounded and Lancastrian version of camp.
A significant decision, this. I decided to test him out. ‘I’ll have a Jack Daniels and Coke please,’ a provocatively and deliberately Aerosmith-style rock ‘n’ roll beverage for such a sensitive chap. He rolled his eyes. ‘Then you shall at least have it in a champagne flute. Do you have champagne flutes in Wigan?’

Naturally I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember chancing my arm and asking him to come downstairs for a pint afterwards. He did, and we ended up taking in a few of Berlin’s worst nightclubs. He had me sussed I think. During that first conversation, he began one answer, ‘If you’ve studied my career in detail,’ and then leaned forward and muttered, sotto voce, secretive, ‘and I know you have, Stuart,’ with a wry smile.

We didn’t become friends. Moz doesn’t operate like that. But Morrissey was so routinely bad-mouthed and lampooned while being simultaneously factory-farmed by the rock press that I think he knew he had an ally in me. I was Northern. I was a music writer. I was a fan but not a frightening fanatic who would come and live in his garden. Although of course I’m glad he didn’t know that I had once made the car in which I was travelling (in the boot to boot) pull over on a desolate hillside to listen to ‘This Charming Man’.

We met regularly over the next few years. I interviewed and wrote about Morrissey at length in various publications. He never let me down. One time we met, at his insistence, in a rough locals pub in a decrepit corner of Vauxhall and did the interview, bizarrely, seated at one of those ancient tabletop space invaders machines while a band in the back room played obscure Eddie Cochrane numbers (which he recognised instantly).
But our most memorable meeting was in Camden. He kept a house there on a private road, perhaps still does, and early one gorgeous summer’s evening, we sat on the grass under a tree outside his place. As we talked, a young woman – clearly an American backpacker, clearly lost – wandered up to us.
‘Hey guys, I’m trying to find this pub where they have the indie shows, the Dublin Castle. You know it?’
As we directed her, the realisation of who she was talking to dawned on her. Morrissey, I mean, not me. Her face froze in a kind of delighted horror. She began to babble.
‘It’s you, it’s you, isn’t it. You. You’re him. You’re you …’

Morrissey smiled at her, and with just the briefest of glances in my direction, said, ‘I’m not the man you think I am.’
It’s a line from ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, one of the less well-known songs on their generally overlooked first album. A good joke – one that you would only get if you’d studied his career in detail. And, as we’ve established, he knew I had.
But even Morrissey had started to lose his way in the early Nineties. It was a thin time all round. Useless scruffy grunge acts whose songs roughly translated as ‘Oh mom, do I have to tidy my room?’ filled the rock press. It was time for something new, something with a bit of of pep, vim, British, humour and savvy. Something that celebrated the virtues of the mods, of Sixties pop, Northern Soul, glam rock. Proper pop, the stuff that we were good at, the mood abroad in the songs and style of groups like Blur, Suede and Pulp. But what to call it, this new British pop.
I’ve got it.
Lion Pop!
No, tried that. Stupid name.
Oh, well, something would occur to me, I’m sure.

Like the rest of the departing class of ’93, I left the NME quickly and without ceremony. The day I left I took something and left something behind. As a leaving present Kevin Cummins framed an enlargement of one of his classic shots of Morrissey. It was a sweet thought, and a terrific picture. On my last day I thought I had it with me in the car. When I got home it wasn’t there. It was still in Danny’s office, or rather the new editor’s office.

I waited until the end of the day, till everyone had sloped off to the pub or a gig and then went back, showing my IPC pass for the last time. I couldn’t find it. Maybe someone had moved it for safekeeping or I’d misremembered where I’d hidden it. But it wasn’t there. I never took the Morrissey picture home. I’m as ashamed of this as anything I’ve ever done. Mentioning it now is a small, belated attempt at assuaging the guilt I still carry around about it. No act of kindness is ever forgotten they say. Well, maybe the same goes for acts of thoughtlessness and ingratitude. Sorry, Kevin.

Standing there a little drunk in the gathering gloom, unable to find my Morrissey picture, I decided to take something else instead. Two, maybe two and a half years previously, Bernard Sumner of New Order had donated the Gibson Les Paul junior he had used in Joy Division as a competition prize. As was often the way at NME, the competition had never run and the guitar, in its battered case, had lived since then, gathering dust, above a wall cupboard in the editor’s office. I glanced up. It was still there. I couldn’t stand the thought of it staying there for another two, three, five, ten years, unplayed, unloved. Or worse, being swung around at Christmas parties as a superannuated prop.

A few interesting bits - whole book is worth a read.
Regards,
FWD.
 
Famous when dead said:
View attachment 105868

Morrissey mentions in Maconie's book (2005):

To my three-year-old eyes, adult men still looked more like Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning than George Harrison, endlessly combing back lustrous, oily hanks of hair, and they were more likely to be seen clutching a pint of mild than a Scotch and Coke.
Morrissey is a few years my senior but generationally I guess we are cut from the same cloth. The milieu he mournfully celebrates – the cobblestones and rain-bleary streets, factories, football, funfairs, canals and chippies – have always resonated with me.

‘This is how Leiber and Stoller met.’ Thus spake Johnny Maher to Steven Patrick Morrissey on that doorstep in Stretford that May morning. Actually it was probably nearer afternoon. Morrissey was on the dole and not known for being an early riser. I imagine he was in his dressing gown watching Selina Scott, and Johnny Marr (he soon changed his surname to avoid confusion with Buzzcocks drummer, John Maher) may have put in a morning selling jeans at X Clothes or Crazy Face in the city centre. From this meeting came forth The Smiths, a group who, over a decade after their messy dissolution, still inspire fervid, unhinged devotion, still act as shorthand for a particular aesthetic and sensibility, still haunt the canals and railway sidings of Lancashire. To get an idea of why The Smiths meant so much, why they were on first hearing the most important group in the world, why they stopped you in your tracks, why they did not emerge but rather explode on to the British pop scene you have to remember just what the state of Britain and British pop was in 1983.

Probably because I was in the boot, Geoff and my so-called mates decided to drive a hell of a way out of town; to the Farmers Arms in Parbold, a rural inn on a sprawling low hill ten miles distant from Wigan. I felt every camber, cat’s eye and bump of the road, cursing the tardy ratepayers of Wigan as I went. One thing made this ordeal more palatable. Geoff’s car radio speakers were casually mounted on the rear window shelf of his car and I heard Janice Long’s evening show in perfect stereo reproduction. As I lay with my head on the spare tyre, staring at an empty banana milk carton and The AA Book of the Road, I heard a sound that transported me far from my current, fairly tawdry situation to somewhere far more magical. It was the sound of a guitar, a chiming, luminous frill that darted around in your head. It sounded, like ‘Neat Neat Neat’ had years before, like nothing I’d heard previously; thrilling and new, a sense compounded when the singer entered with a plaintive, lovelorn refrain:
‘Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate … will nature make a man of me yet.’

I banged hard on the bulkhead between boot and back seat. ‘Stop!’ I yelled, and then again, and then again until eventually the car was pulled over to the side of the road. The boot opened and mildly concerned faces peered in, behind them raggedy clouds and high stars.
‘Had enough then?’ came the enquiry.
‘No, listen!’ I cried, unfolding myself painfully and leaping from the car. ‘It’s that record I told you about. The Smiths.’ And so we listened and we loved. It is a rather sweet, odd tableau, don’t you think? A small knot of tipsy young men in long overcoats, standing by a car on a high, deserted country lane listening to The Smiths in the chill November night.

‘Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate’. It was some opening gambit. Six words, four of which I don’t think I’d ever heard in a pop song before; a hell of a strike rate. It fitted the moment perfectly of course. The template for the next year was set: of The Smiths getting into every corner of life, illuminating the everyday, celebrating the streets and hills and canals of the North of England. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the first time pop music spoke directly to me. It said something to me about my life. Joblessness, glamour and charm in the face of sullen circumstance, lovelorn musings, lust, furtive encounters, politics, the landscape of the North – The Smiths took all these things and elevated them into poetry, made them radiant, made them worth something. Morrissey himself caught this perfectly when, speaking of his muse and his fascinations, he said, ‘I am forever chained to a disused railway clearing in Wigan.’ I wish he’d meant it literally. I could have gone round and taken him a Thermos.

A month or two later, compassion fever gripped the land. Paul Young, Bono and Bananarama emoting ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was inescapable in every pub, shop and leisure centre; Morrissey was one of the few voices in pop, in the nation as a whole come to that, that dared raise itself in dissent.
‘I detest it all,’ he said of Band Aid and Live Aid. ‘It says that the responsibility for solving hunger and world poverty lies with an eleven-year-old girl in Wigan.’ This struck me as the last word in sound analysis and common sense. And he mentioned Wigan again. Who was this great man?
Steven Patrick Morrissey was but one-quarter of The Smiths; without the contribution of them all, notably Johnny Marr’s coruscating guitar work, The Smiths would never have stolen the hearts of a generation the way they did. But Morrissey was The Smiths in excelsis – mouthpiece, style icon, spokesman, public face. A blousy, camp, square-jawed Mancunian who claimed to be celibate, quoted Oscar Wilde and said things like, ‘Anyone not wishing to be excessively charming should be shot.’ With Tony Hadley and Howard Jones as competition, it was no surprise that he became, almost immediately, pop music’s greatest frontman.

Rather like my romper-suited experience with The Beatles two decades before, I was soon to get my chance to see these new idols of mine in the flesh. It would be in a matter of days, 18 November 1983. The venue, curiously enough, was the old alma mater that I had only recently left, Edge Hill College, whose entertainments secretary, in a rare paroxysm of taste, had actually booked the best band in Britain, a band who, within weeks, would have left the college circuit behind for good.
Chloe, my just-about girlfriend, was still at the college and I was still paying visits there in a desultory, unsatisfactory way. I have to confess, though, and I take no pride in this, that there was a spring in my step as I boarded the train at Wigan Wallgate that weekend. I had tickets for The Smiths, and if you had to endure the death throes of a love affair, you might as well do it to a brilliant soundtrack.

The Smiths played the ‘refec’, the same large, depersonalised glass and metal hall where I had watched, half cut on Autumn Gold cider, acts as diverse as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Liquid Gold. It was here that I had got involved in a mass brawl with Ormskirk townies during a set by Girls At Our Best and here that I had shouted disparaging remarks at Richard Digance. Long years of partly washed students availing themselves of chicken curry, oven chips and jam roly poly had imbued it with an unmistakable odour of demoralising institutionalised domesticity. I imagine maximum security prisons are the same. Nothing in its dull life had prepared it for the coming of The Smiths, that was for sure.
For ten minutes before the show began, gladioli showered down upon the audience from behind the amps and curtains. It was the perfect gesture of flamboyance and defiance of the stultifying rock norms. It was also, I later learned, a tactic that blew gaping holes in The Smiths’ take-home pay most nights. But Morrissey wanted it, and so loyal roadies crouched behind amps hurling flowers at amazed students every night.

When they took the stage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band look and sound so completely ineffably right. In Morrissey and Marr, they had a Jagger and Richard for different times. Morrissey wore a billowing violet chemise, a hearing aid, a gladioli in his back pocket and draped the back of his hand across his forehead like a distressed damsel in a silent movie. But this was a melodrama that somehow rang truer than any amount of gritty realism.
Every song seemed better than the last: ‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’, ‘Wonderful Woman’, ‘These Things Take Time’; rainlashed, smoky tales of young marriages failing in flats by the gasworks and illicit meetings under viaducts, a world populated by Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham, The Shangri-Las and Ena Sharples. At this point The Smiths were more than just a group, they were a whole, fully realised world. Drunk with infatuation that night, I even think they played a brief snatch of The Velvelettes’ ‘Needle In A Haystack’, a Motown tune from my Northern Soul days. I could have been wrong though. The details are sketchy now, seen through a haze of longing and misty memory. Afterwards, we took a late train back in silence to an unheated furnished room in the back streets of Southport. It was in itself an almost comical Smiths tableau.

I stood stoically alone in the office on other matters apart from facial hair. Everyone else in the office bar me loved Queen. I hated them.fn2 ‘Well, who do you like then?’ the fat little accountant would ask. Whenever I told him, he would reply, ‘The Smiths?! The Smiths!!’ and would do a little dance, waving his arms around, pirouetting and warbling in a bad impression of Morrissey’s vocal style. ‘Oh I want my mummy, I need the toilet, and I’m really unhappy.’

I’d listen on my Walkman as Morrissey sang on ‘London’ by The Smiths, ‘Train moves onto Euston, and do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?’ The coming year was to be full of decisions, some of them personal, some of them professional, daunting and exciting.

I interviewed the Go Betweens who told me that Sigmund Freud’s theories of personal motivation and behaviour were the curse of the twentieth century. I interviewed Green Gartside of Scritti Politti who told me he’d got an NME subscription when he was eight and joined the Cwmbran Young Communist League at twelve. I interviewed Wigan’s only half-famous pop stars, the Railway Children, over a pint of Burtonwood’s bitter in the Cherry Gardens hotel by Haigh Hall. I didn’t interview The Smiths – they had split up by now – but I moved nearer to their orbit; interviewing a Manchester hairdresser called Andrew Berry, coiffeur to the stars and immortalised in Morrissey’s ‘Hairdresser On Fire’ and also a quintet from Blackburn called, confusingly, Bradford who were Morrissey’s current favourite band.

During the early Nineties, we put Morrissey on the cover whenever the occasion demanded and many times when it signally didn’t. The result was always the same; the paper flew off the shelves. In fact, and this is curious, the NME when adorned with the (usually shirtless) Morrissey regularly sold more copies than the current Morrissey single that the piece was pegged around. This led one to the inescapable conclusion that there were people out there who were fans of Morrissey’s entertaining pronouncements who couldn’t give a monkey’s about his records.

From that very first day at the NME I was aware that there was one meeting above all the others that loomed tantalisingly in the future always just out of reach. One day it would come, though, and I’d be ready. It would be my High Noon. But when it came it wasn’t at noon but at about eleven o’clock at night in a swanky hotel room high above the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Morrissey’s hotel room.
Morrissey is simply the best interviewee in the world. He has turned it into an art form, to the extent that, as stated previously, editions of the NME boasting a Morrissey cover story would sell more than his records did. Morrissey had fans who weren’t actually that wild on his music. They were fans of Morrissey the interviewee.
I’d been waiting in Morrissey’s Berlin hotel room for a while. He was somewhere in the building, I’d been assured of this. For a while I thought he was just shy. Then I began to think that it was an elaborate Lou Reed-style plan to unnerve the hack. But at just this point, a vertiginous quiff appeared around the door.

‘I expect you’ll be wanting a drink,’ he asked in his uniquely wounded and Lancastrian version of camp.
A significant decision, this. I decided to test him out. ‘I’ll have a Jack Daniels and Coke please,’ a provocatively and deliberately Aerosmith-style rock ‘n’ roll beverage for such a sensitive chap. He rolled his eyes. ‘Then you shall at least have it in a champagne flute. Do you have champagne flutes in Wigan?’

Naturally I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember chancing my arm and asking him to come downstairs for a pint afterwards. He did, and we ended up taking in a few of Berlin’s worst nightclubs. He had me sussed I think. During that first conversation, he began one answer, ‘If you’ve studied my career in detail,’ and then leaned forward and muttered, sotto voce, secretive, ‘and I know you have, Stuart,’ with a wry smile.

We didn’t become friends. Moz doesn’t operate like that. But Morrissey was so routinely bad-mouthed and lampooned while being simultaneously factory-farmed by the rock press that I think he knew he had an ally in me. I was Northern. I was a music writer. I was a fan but not a frightening fanatic who would come and live in his garden. Although of course I’m glad he didn’t know that I had once made the car in which I was travelling (in the boot to boot) pull over on a desolate hillside to listen to ‘This Charming Man’.

We met regularly over the next few years. I interviewed and wrote about Morrissey at length in various publications. He never let me down. One time we met, at his insistence, in a rough locals pub in a decrepit corner of Vauxhall and did the interview, bizarrely, seated at one of those ancient tabletop space invaders machines while a band in the back room played obscure Eddie Cochrane numbers (which he recognised instantly).
But our most memorable meeting was in Camden. He kept a house there on a private road, perhaps still does, and early one gorgeous summer’s evening, we sat on the grass under a tree outside his place. As we talked, a young woman – clearly an American backpacker, clearly lost – wandered up to us.
‘Hey guys, I’m trying to find this pub where they have the indie shows, the Dublin Castle. You know it?’
As we directed her, the realisation of who she was talking to dawned on her. Morrissey, I mean, not me. Her face froze in a kind of delighted horror. She began to babble.
‘It’s you, it’s you, isn’t it. You. You’re him. You’re you …’

Morrissey smiled at her, and with just the briefest of glances in my direction, said, ‘I’m not the man you think I am.’
It’s a line from ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, one of the less well-known songs on their generally overlooked first album. A good joke – one that you would only get if you’d studied his career in detail. And, as we’ve established, he knew I had.
But even Morrissey had started to lose his way in the early Nineties. It was a thin time all round. Useless scruffy grunge acts whose songs roughly translated as ‘Oh mom, do I have to tidy my room?’ filled the rock press. It was time for something new, something with a bit of of pep, vim, British, humour and savvy. Something that celebrated the virtues of the mods, of Sixties pop, Northern Soul, glam rock. Proper pop, the stuff that we were good at, the mood abroad in the songs and style of groups like Blur, Suede and Pulp. But what to call it, this new British pop.
I’ve got it.
Lion Pop!
No, tried that. Stupid name.
Oh, well, something would occur to me, I’m sure.

Like the rest of the departing class of ’93, I left the NME quickly and without ceremony. The day I left I took something and left something behind. As a leaving present Kevin Cummins framed an enlargement of one of his classic shots of Morrissey. It was a sweet thought, and a terrific picture. On my last day I thought I had it with me in the car. When I got home it wasn’t there. It was still in Danny’s office, or rather the new editor’s office.

I waited until the end of the day, till everyone had sloped off to the pub or a gig and then went back, showing my IPC pass for the last time. I couldn’t find it. Maybe someone had moved it for safekeeping or I’d misremembered where I’d hidden it. But it wasn’t there. I never took the Morrissey picture home. I’m as ashamed of this as anything I’ve ever done. Mentioning it now is a small, belated attempt at assuaging the guilt I still carry around about it. No act of kindness is ever forgotten they say. Well, maybe the same goes for acts of thoughtlessness and ingratitude. Sorry, Kevin.

Standing there a little drunk in the gathering gloom, unable to find my Morrissey picture, I decided to take something else instead. Two, maybe two and a half years previously, Bernard Sumner of New Order had donated the Gibson Les Paul junior he had used in Joy Division as a competition prize. As was often the way at NME, the competition had never run and the guitar, in its battered case, had lived since then, gathering dust, above a wall cupboard in the editor’s office. I glanced up. It was still there. I couldn’t stand the thought of it staying there for another two, three, five, ten years, unplayed, unloved. Or worse, being swung around at Christmas parties as a superannuated prop.

A few interesting bits - whole book is worth a read.
Regards,
FWD.
Click to expand...
Thanks, looks like a good read. I’ve downloaded it on Kindle.
 
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Friend of the site, Stephen Wright, offering a new take on his classic photo.
4679802.tifmember.com

SQUARES

<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="1" style="width:100%;"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="vertical-align: top;"> The iconic Salford Lads photo from the 'Queen is dead' original album sleeve and an alternative version.</p> Also the "Strangeways here we come" back of album photo.</p> and From...
4679802.tifmember.com
FWD.
 
Famous when dead said:
View attachment 105868

Morrissey mentions in Maconie's book (2005):

To my three-year-old eyes, adult men still looked more like Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning than George Harrison, endlessly combing back lustrous, oily hanks of hair, and they were more likely to be seen clutching a pint of mild than a Scotch and Coke.
Morrissey is a few years my senior but generationally I guess we are cut from the same cloth. The milieu he mournfully celebrates – the cobblestones and rain-bleary streets, factories, football, funfairs, canals and chippies – have always resonated with me.

‘This is how Leiber and Stoller met.’ Thus spake Johnny Maher to Steven Patrick Morrissey on that doorstep in Stretford that May morning. Actually it was probably nearer afternoon. Morrissey was on the dole and not known for being an early riser. I imagine he was in his dressing gown watching Selina Scott, and Johnny Marr (he soon changed his surname to avoid confusion with Buzzcocks drummer, John Maher) may have put in a morning selling jeans at X Clothes or Crazy Face in the city centre. From this meeting came forth The Smiths, a group who, over a decade after their messy dissolution, still inspire fervid, unhinged devotion, still act as shorthand for a particular aesthetic and sensibility, still haunt the canals and railway sidings of Lancashire. To get an idea of why The Smiths meant so much, why they were on first hearing the most important group in the world, why they stopped you in your tracks, why they did not emerge but rather explode on to the British pop scene you have to remember just what the state of Britain and British pop was in 1983.

Probably because I was in the boot, Geoff and my so-called mates decided to drive a hell of a way out of town; to the Farmers Arms in Parbold, a rural inn on a sprawling low hill ten miles distant from Wigan. I felt every camber, cat’s eye and bump of the road, cursing the tardy ratepayers of Wigan as I went. One thing made this ordeal more palatable. Geoff’s car radio speakers were casually mounted on the rear window shelf of his car and I heard Janice Long’s evening show in perfect stereo reproduction. As I lay with my head on the spare tyre, staring at an empty banana milk carton and The AA Book of the Road, I heard a sound that transported me far from my current, fairly tawdry situation to somewhere far more magical. It was the sound of a guitar, a chiming, luminous frill that darted around in your head. It sounded, like ‘Neat Neat Neat’ had years before, like nothing I’d heard previously; thrilling and new, a sense compounded when the singer entered with a plaintive, lovelorn refrain:
‘Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate … will nature make a man of me yet.’

I banged hard on the bulkhead between boot and back seat. ‘Stop!’ I yelled, and then again, and then again until eventually the car was pulled over to the side of the road. The boot opened and mildly concerned faces peered in, behind them raggedy clouds and high stars.
‘Had enough then?’ came the enquiry.
‘No, listen!’ I cried, unfolding myself painfully and leaping from the car. ‘It’s that record I told you about. The Smiths.’ And so we listened and we loved. It is a rather sweet, odd tableau, don’t you think? A small knot of tipsy young men in long overcoats, standing by a car on a high, deserted country lane listening to The Smiths in the chill November night.

‘Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate’. It was some opening gambit. Six words, four of which I don’t think I’d ever heard in a pop song before; a hell of a strike rate. It fitted the moment perfectly of course. The template for the next year was set: of The Smiths getting into every corner of life, illuminating the everyday, celebrating the streets and hills and canals of the North of England. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the first time pop music spoke directly to me. It said something to me about my life. Joblessness, glamour and charm in the face of sullen circumstance, lovelorn musings, lust, furtive encounters, politics, the landscape of the North – The Smiths took all these things and elevated them into poetry, made them radiant, made them worth something. Morrissey himself caught this perfectly when, speaking of his muse and his fascinations, he said, ‘I am forever chained to a disused railway clearing in Wigan.’ I wish he’d meant it literally. I could have gone round and taken him a Thermos.

A month or two later, compassion fever gripped the land. Paul Young, Bono and Bananarama emoting ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was inescapable in every pub, shop and leisure centre; Morrissey was one of the few voices in pop, in the nation as a whole come to that, that dared raise itself in dissent.
‘I detest it all,’ he said of Band Aid and Live Aid. ‘It says that the responsibility for solving hunger and world poverty lies with an eleven-year-old girl in Wigan.’ This struck me as the last word in sound analysis and common sense. And he mentioned Wigan again. Who was this great man?
Steven Patrick Morrissey was but one-quarter of The Smiths; without the contribution of them all, notably Johnny Marr’s coruscating guitar work, The Smiths would never have stolen the hearts of a generation the way they did. But Morrissey was The Smiths in excelsis – mouthpiece, style icon, spokesman, public face. A blousy, camp, square-jawed Mancunian who claimed to be celibate, quoted Oscar Wilde and said things like, ‘Anyone not wishing to be excessively charming should be shot.’ With Tony Hadley and Howard Jones as competition, it was no surprise that he became, almost immediately, pop music’s greatest frontman.

Rather like my romper-suited experience with The Beatles two decades before, I was soon to get my chance to see these new idols of mine in the flesh. It would be in a matter of days, 18 November 1983. The venue, curiously enough, was the old alma mater that I had only recently left, Edge Hill College, whose entertainments secretary, in a rare paroxysm of taste, had actually booked the best band in Britain, a band who, within weeks, would have left the college circuit behind for good.
Chloe, my just-about girlfriend, was still at the college and I was still paying visits there in a desultory, unsatisfactory way. I have to confess, though, and I take no pride in this, that there was a spring in my step as I boarded the train at Wigan Wallgate that weekend. I had tickets for The Smiths, and if you had to endure the death throes of a love affair, you might as well do it to a brilliant soundtrack.

The Smiths played the ‘refec’, the same large, depersonalised glass and metal hall where I had watched, half cut on Autumn Gold cider, acts as diverse as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Liquid Gold. It was here that I had got involved in a mass brawl with Ormskirk townies during a set by Girls At Our Best and here that I had shouted disparaging remarks at Richard Digance. Long years of partly washed students availing themselves of chicken curry, oven chips and jam roly poly had imbued it with an unmistakable odour of demoralising institutionalised domesticity. I imagine maximum security prisons are the same. Nothing in its dull life had prepared it for the coming of The Smiths, that was for sure.
For ten minutes before the show began, gladioli showered down upon the audience from behind the amps and curtains. It was the perfect gesture of flamboyance and defiance of the stultifying rock norms. It was also, I later learned, a tactic that blew gaping holes in The Smiths’ take-home pay most nights. But Morrissey wanted it, and so loyal roadies crouched behind amps hurling flowers at amazed students every night.

When they took the stage, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band look and sound so completely ineffably right. In Morrissey and Marr, they had a Jagger and Richard for different times. Morrissey wore a billowing violet chemise, a hearing aid, a gladioli in his back pocket and draped the back of his hand across his forehead like a distressed damsel in a silent movie. But this was a melodrama that somehow rang truer than any amount of gritty realism.
Every song seemed better than the last: ‘This Night Has Opened My Eyes’, ‘Wonderful Woman’, ‘These Things Take Time’; rainlashed, smoky tales of young marriages failing in flats by the gasworks and illicit meetings under viaducts, a world populated by Albert Finney and Rita Tushingham, The Shangri-Las and Ena Sharples. At this point The Smiths were more than just a group, they were a whole, fully realised world. Drunk with infatuation that night, I even think they played a brief snatch of The Velvelettes’ ‘Needle In A Haystack’, a Motown tune from my Northern Soul days. I could have been wrong though. The details are sketchy now, seen through a haze of longing and misty memory. Afterwards, we took a late train back in silence to an unheated furnished room in the back streets of Southport. It was in itself an almost comical Smiths tableau.

I stood stoically alone in the office on other matters apart from facial hair. Everyone else in the office bar me loved Queen. I hated them.fn2 ‘Well, who do you like then?’ the fat little accountant would ask. Whenever I told him, he would reply, ‘The Smiths?! The Smiths!!’ and would do a little dance, waving his arms around, pirouetting and warbling in a bad impression of Morrissey’s vocal style. ‘Oh I want my mummy, I need the toilet, and I’m really unhappy.’

I’d listen on my Walkman as Morrissey sang on ‘London’ by The Smiths, ‘Train moves onto Euston, and do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?’ The coming year was to be full of decisions, some of them personal, some of them professional, daunting and exciting.

I interviewed the Go Betweens who told me that Sigmund Freud’s theories of personal motivation and behaviour were the curse of the twentieth century. I interviewed Green Gartside of Scritti Politti who told me he’d got an NME subscription when he was eight and joined the Cwmbran Young Communist League at twelve. I interviewed Wigan’s only half-famous pop stars, the Railway Children, over a pint of Burtonwood’s bitter in the Cherry Gardens hotel by Haigh Hall. I didn’t interview The Smiths – they had split up by now – but I moved nearer to their orbit; interviewing a Manchester hairdresser called Andrew Berry, coiffeur to the stars and immortalised in Morrissey’s ‘Hairdresser On Fire’ and also a quintet from Blackburn called, confusingly, Bradford who were Morrissey’s current favourite band.

During the early Nineties, we put Morrissey on the cover whenever the occasion demanded and many times when it signally didn’t. The result was always the same; the paper flew off the shelves. In fact, and this is curious, the NME when adorned with the (usually shirtless) Morrissey regularly sold more copies than the current Morrissey single that the piece was pegged around. This led one to the inescapable conclusion that there were people out there who were fans of Morrissey’s entertaining pronouncements who couldn’t give a monkey’s about his records.

From that very first day at the NME I was aware that there was one meeting above all the others that loomed tantalisingly in the future always just out of reach. One day it would come, though, and I’d be ready. It would be my High Noon. But when it came it wasn’t at noon but at about eleven o’clock at night in a swanky hotel room high above the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Morrissey’s hotel room.
Morrissey is simply the best interviewee in the world. He has turned it into an art form, to the extent that, as stated previously, editions of the NME boasting a Morrissey cover story would sell more than his records did. Morrissey had fans who weren’t actually that wild on his music. They were fans of Morrissey the interviewee.
I’d been waiting in Morrissey’s Berlin hotel room for a while. He was somewhere in the building, I’d been assured of this. For a while I thought he was just shy. Then I began to think that it was an elaborate Lou Reed-style plan to unnerve the hack. But at just this point, a vertiginous quiff appeared around the door.

‘I expect you’ll be wanting a drink,’ he asked in his uniquely wounded and Lancastrian version of camp.
A significant decision, this. I decided to test him out. ‘I’ll have a Jack Daniels and Coke please,’ a provocatively and deliberately Aerosmith-style rock ‘n’ roll beverage for such a sensitive chap. He rolled his eyes. ‘Then you shall at least have it in a champagne flute. Do you have champagne flutes in Wigan?’

Naturally I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember chancing my arm and asking him to come downstairs for a pint afterwards. He did, and we ended up taking in a few of Berlin’s worst nightclubs. He had me sussed I think. During that first conversation, he began one answer, ‘If you’ve studied my career in detail,’ and then leaned forward and muttered, sotto voce, secretive, ‘and I know you have, Stuart,’ with a wry smile.

We didn’t become friends. Moz doesn’t operate like that. But Morrissey was so routinely bad-mouthed and lampooned while being simultaneously factory-farmed by the rock press that I think he knew he had an ally in me. I was Northern. I was a music writer. I was a fan but not a frightening fanatic who would come and live in his garden. Although of course I’m glad he didn’t know that I had once made the car in which I was travelling (in the boot to boot) pull over on a desolate hillside to listen to ‘This Charming Man’.

We met regularly over the next few years. I interviewed and wrote about Morrissey at length in various publications. He never let me down. One time we met, at his insistence, in a rough locals pub in a decrepit corner of Vauxhall and did the interview, bizarrely, seated at one of those ancient tabletop space invaders machines while a band in the back room played obscure Eddie Cochrane numbers (which he recognised instantly).
But our most memorable meeting was in Camden. He kept a house there on a private road, perhaps still does, and early one gorgeous summer’s evening, we sat on the grass under a tree outside his place. As we talked, a young woman – clearly an American backpacker, clearly lost – wandered up to us.
‘Hey guys, I’m trying to find this pub where they have the indie shows, the Dublin Castle. You know it?’
As we directed her, the realisation of who she was talking to dawned on her. Morrissey, I mean, not me. Her face froze in a kind of delighted horror. She began to babble.
‘It’s you, it’s you, isn’t it. You. You’re him. You’re you …’

Morrissey smiled at her, and with just the briefest of glances in my direction, said, ‘I’m not the man you think I am.’
It’s a line from ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’, one of the less well-known songs on their generally overlooked first album. A good joke – one that you would only get if you’d studied his career in detail. And, as we’ve established, he knew I had.
But even Morrissey had started to lose his way in the early Nineties. It was a thin time all round. Useless scruffy grunge acts whose songs roughly translated as ‘Oh mom, do I have to tidy my room?’ filled the rock press. It was time for something new, something with a bit of of pep, vim, British, humour and savvy. Something that celebrated the virtues of the mods, of Sixties pop, Northern Soul, glam rock. Proper pop, the stuff that we were good at, the mood abroad in the songs and style of groups like Blur, Suede and Pulp. But what to call it, this new British pop.
I’ve got it.
Lion Pop!
No, tried that. Stupid name.
Oh, well, something would occur to me, I’m sure.

Like the rest of the departing class of ’93, I left the NME quickly and without ceremony. The day I left I took something and left something behind. As a leaving present Kevin Cummins framed an enlargement of one of his classic shots of Morrissey. It was a sweet thought, and a terrific picture. On my last day I thought I had it with me in the car. When I got home it wasn’t there. It was still in Danny’s office, or rather the new editor’s office.

I waited until the end of the day, till everyone had sloped off to the pub or a gig and then went back, showing my IPC pass for the last time. I couldn’t find it. Maybe someone had moved it for safekeeping or I’d misremembered where I’d hidden it. But it wasn’t there. I never took the Morrissey picture home. I’m as ashamed of this as anything I’ve ever done. Mentioning it now is a small, belated attempt at assuaging the guilt I still carry around about it. No act of kindness is ever forgotten they say. Well, maybe the same goes for acts of thoughtlessness and ingratitude. Sorry, Kevin.

Standing there a little drunk in the gathering gloom, unable to find my Morrissey picture, I decided to take something else instead. Two, maybe two and a half years previously, Bernard Sumner of New Order had donated the Gibson Les Paul junior he had used in Joy Division as a competition prize. As was often the way at NME, the competition had never run and the guitar, in its battered case, had lived since then, gathering dust, above a wall cupboard in the editor’s office. I glanced up. It was still there. I couldn’t stand the thought of it staying there for another two, three, five, ten years, unplayed, unloved. Or worse, being swung around at Christmas parties as a superannuated prop.

A few interesting bits - whole book is worth a read.
Regards,
FWD.
Click to expand...

Great excerpt which must have been time consuming. Much appreciated.
 
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Generally, the kind of artists who hankered after a cover feature in Smash Hits weren’t normally the types you would expect to see braving a crowd at the crumbling Ambulance Station, but the Mary Chain were nothing if not perverse. But they also wanted to be stars, something most indie artists were not ready to admit.

Neil Taylor was in attendance that night. ‘The problem was,’ he recalls, ‘that following the review in the NME and the word-of-mouth excitement, masses of people turned up, far too many. I seem to remember you had to climb through a hole in a door that someone had bashed open to get in, and you took your own alcohol and whatever. There were quite a few drunk people there. The June Brides played first, and played very well.’
Bobby Gillespie says: ‘I think Morrissey and Johnny Marr were at that gig. I remember being upstairs in the squat and someone giving us some speed. I don’t remember that gig being that musical, but that was the one where you felt like, Right, this is going to take off.’ The tension levels at the gig were high from the start, but the audience’s expectations, extreme inebriation on the part of the band, and the general air of violence that pervaded the Ambulance Station all added to the thrilling sense of unpredictability around the Mary Chain.

As well as Morrissey and Johnny Marr, Lindy Morrison and Robert Forster from the Go-Betweens were in attendance, because Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade Records (who distributed for Creation) and Warners imprint Blanco Y Negro, had invited them down. This was the first time Travis had seen The Jesus and Mary Chain play live, and this exhilarating, amphetamine-fuelled appearance cemented his decision to sign them himself. ‘It was incredible,’ he says. ‘A mind-blowing gig. It was a bit heavy, though. When I came out, all the windows on my car were smashed.’
There’s a picture that certainly portrays the scene inside the makeshift venue as utter mayhem, with punters seemingly falling face-first.

Beers, however, were always necessary for both Mary Chain and journalist. The band found it hard to relax in company at the best of times, and this, often interpreted as chilly indifference, meant it would take time for any kind of fruitful exchange to develop. But still, this helped to stoke their reputation for being enigmatic. Paradoxically, they seemed more in control as a result, no matter how nervous they actually were.
‘What they had,’ says former NME writer Neil Taylor, ‘and what all great groups tend to have, was a distinct air of being a sealed unit against the world, and you’re not always allowed into the inner sanctum. It was a similar thing with Morrissey and Marr from the Smiths.’

Mick Houghton observes that, while Sonic Youth, who were certainly allies of the Reids, were branded as the ‘US Mary Chain’, the two groups just couldn’t be compared. ‘Sonic Youth were middle-class Americans, very art-school,’ Mick says. ‘The Mary Chain never had pretension or artifice. And they were working-class.’ The other problem for the Mary Chain, Mick observes, was that The Smiths were increasingly stealing the Mary Chain’s thunder as the decade wore on. ‘People began to see The Smiths as the band of the 1980s,’ he explains. ‘But I still think Psychocandy was one of the albums, if not the album, of the 1980s.’

Mentions in Barbed Wire Kisses: The Jesus And Mary Chain Story by Zoë Howe (2015).
 
The New Statesman resorts to stereotypes for France's elections.

With a French national election imminent, this young right could help propel the RN into government for the first time.

To understand this unlikely political uprising, on a grey Sunday I set off to attend a National Rally demonstration at the Porte de Versailles in the south of Paris. The star billing comprised Le Pen herself, the RN’s parliamentary leader, and the party’s president and France’s likely next prime minister, Jordan Bardella. As I queued to get in, and busloads of supporters arrived from the provinces, the atmosphere was excited and expectant, with spontaneous chants of “on va gagner!” (“We’re going to win!”). With a jolt, I remembered that the last time I had been at this venue was almost exactly 40 years ago to see a Smiths concert and then, with another jolt, I noticed that much of the queue here was as young, if not younger, than I had been in 1984.

With this in mind, as the rally began my first thoughts were of Morrissey’s 1992 song “The National Front Disco” – all strobe lights, flags, fist-pumps in the air, and a mild frenzy created by the RN-approved techno soundtrack...

https://www.newstatesman.com/international-content/2024/06/how-the-far-right-seduced-frances-gen-z
 
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