Strange/unexpected Moz references?

I saw a trailer for Maria last night. The film stars Angelina Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas, and follows the seven days before her death in 1977 Paris as she reflects on her life and career. The trailer shows Maria declaring "My life is Opera" at 2 minutes in.

 
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REVIEW: Just For One Hour by John Kennedy.

Contains some Smiths' material.
Another episode of putting myths to the slaughter is the tale of Mike Joyce. Joyce was the backbeat to one of the 80’s most charismatic bands The Smiths featuring tunesmiths Johnny Marr and Morrissey. For years the latter duo had been what was thought to adopt the lions share of the songwriting duties. Joyce however wanted a bigger slice of the 10% pie he was earning, enter John Kennedy. Kennedys words to Joyce were ‘are you ready to go to war’ against Morrissey and to a lesser extent Marr. Joyce was more than up for the challenge ahead as seemingly was Morrissey. There’s a fascinating exchange in court which did or did not happen, you make up your mind when reading, which basically ended up with Morrissey echoing these words ‘’if I was driving a car and I saw Joyce crossing the road up ahead then I would put my foot on the accelerator and run him over.”

www.gigslutz.co.uk

REVIEW: Just For One Hour John Kennedy review - Gigslutz

this book is the real deal for the names that appear in the book but also for an example of keeping your cool under pressure.
www.gigslutz.co.uk www.gigslutz.co.uk
 
Salford Lads’ Club features in a “wild” new music video

“It was such a fantastic experience for the Club, and it’s always a privilege to be part of projects like this that highlight the connection between music and our community.”
The club has a deep connection with the music community, becoming a “site of pilgrimage” for fans of The Smiths.
A photo of themselves and the Club featured on the inner sleeve of ‘The Queen is Dead’ album. This inspired their dedicated Smiths Room, which draws in fans from around the world.
Frank Turner said that Leigh-born band The Lottery Winners are “big fans of The Smiths,” which inspired the location. He said that filming was “wild” and “intense.”
“We had a good time, and we got to be a bit silly here and there,” said the singer-songwriter.

The music video for Dirt and Gold from The Lottery Winners and Frank Turner is out now on YouTube.

salfordnow.co.uk

Salford Lads’ Club stars in "wild" new music video

The historic Salford Lads' Club was the scene for The Lottery Winners’ and Frank Turner’s music video for their new song, Dirt and Gold.
salfordnow.co.uk
 
Screenshot_20250122-130339~2.png


Recording his lead vocal in two passes on 16 April and 17 May, Bowie is on spectacular form as he yelps, shrieks and croons his way through an artfully peculiar lyric steeped in the arcane lingo of times past. “The lyrics are wacky,” noted Tony Visconti, “but a lot of British people, especially Londoners, will get every word.” As is David’s wont when evoking times past, there’s a hint of nursery rhyme (“I’m sitting in the chestnut tree”), but the principal anchors are two distinct varieties of counter-cultural slang which were current during his youth. From 1965-8, the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne was responsible for popularizing palare (also spelt polari), the clandestine patois of London’s gay scene, derived from snatches of Romany, Italian and fairground slang: every week the show’s frontman Kenneth Horne would encounter Julian and Sandy, a duo played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, whose palare patter enabled outrageous innuendo to be smuggled under the BBC radar at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Later commemorated by Morrissey’s 1990 album Bona Drag (“nice clothes”) and its single ‘Piccadilly Palare’, Julian and Sandy’s legacy also crops up in Todd Haynes’s film Velvet Goldmine, in which an entire scene is conducted in palare with accompanying subtitles.
Bowie himself had occasionally dipped into palare over the years, dropping it into his interview patter during the Ziggy period (in 1973 he remarked that Russian audiences might freak out when they “varda what we look like”). The sense of “bitch” conveyed by ‘Queen Bitch’ comes straight from palare, as do “traders” (‘The Bewlay Brothers’), “trolling” (‘Looking For A Friend’), “butch” (‘Candidate’) and “drag” (‘Teenage Wildlife’). In ‘Girl Loves Me’ the derivations are rather less mainstream, including “omi” (man), “nanti” (none), and “dizzy” (foolish); but most of the lyric derives from a second underground argot coined during David’s teenage years. Published in 1962, Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange is narrated by 15-year-old Alex in “nadsat”, a youth dialect created by Burgess for his imagined near-future setting. Concocted from various sources including rhyming slang, modified Russian and Slavic vocabularies, and a dash of pure invention on Burgess’s part, nadsat captivated Bowie, particularly after he had heard it spoken aloud in Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated film adaptation. “The whole idea of having this phoney-speak thing,” David recalled in 1993, “mock Anthony Burgess Russian-speak, that drew on Russian words and put them into the English language, and twisted old Shakespearean words around … it was like trying to anticipate a society that hadn’t happened.” Within days of seeing Kubrick’s film in January 1972, David had incorporated the nadsat word “droog” (Russian for “friend”, and the term given by Alex to his fellow hoodlums) into the lyric of his latest song ‘Suffragette City’.

I KNOW IT’S GONNA HAPPEN SOMEDAY (Morrissey/Nevin)
• Album: Black • Video: Black
“I always thought of Morrissey as a sort of sexual Alan Bennett,” said Bowie in 1993, “because of his attention to detail. He’ll take a small subject matter and make a very grandiose statement of it.” His peripheral relationship with Morrissey, whose narcissistic kitchen-sink melodramas had long inherited aspects of Bowie’s legacy, began when the two met backstage at David’s Manchester gig in August 1990. The following February David joined Stephen on stage in Los Angeles to perform an encore of Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’, while 1992 saw the release of Morrissey’s pseudo-glam album Your Arsenal, produced by none other than Mick Ronson. As David later recounted, “It occurred to me … that [Morrissey] was possibly spoofing one of my earlier songs, and I thought, I’m not going to let him get away with that. I do think he’s one of the best lyricists in England, and an excellent songwriter, and I thought his song was an affectionate spoof.”
The song in question was ‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’, co-written by Morrissey and ex-Fairground Attraction guitarist Mark E Nevin. Morrissey’s version, which echoes any number of Bowie’s early 1970s ballads, culminates in a blatant lift from the climax of ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, although in a characteristically perverse twist this is the one element Bowie chose to excise from his own version. Instead, as he explained, “I thought it would be fun to take that song and do it the way I would have done it in 1974-ish.” The result is a breathtakingly overblown gospel treatment, complete with heavenly choir and big-band climax. It’s an endlessly incestuous joke: Bowie covers Morrissey parodying Ziggy Stardust in the style of Young Americans. “A window-rattling rendition,’ wrote Q’s David Sinclair, “which Bowie takes over so completely that it’s hard not to think of it as one of his own compositions.” The Black Tie White Noise video includes studio footage of Mick Ronson playing the riff from the original Morrissey arrangement.
“There’s something terribly affectionate about the idea of the lyric,” said Bowie. “You know, don’t worry, somebody will come along if you wait long enough. I mean, it’s very weepy and silly, so I did it very grandly with a gospel choir and horns … It’s a bit silly, but it’s done with affection.” In the NME he revealed that when he played his recording to Morrissey, “it brought a tear to his eye and he said, ‘Oooh, it’s sooo grand!’” Suede’s Brett Anderson, meanwhile, found Bowie’s rendition “very fifties, very Johnnie Ray.”
‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’ features a plangent guitar solo by Wild T Springer, a Trinidadian blues player who met Bowie in Canada during the second Tin Machine tour. “I think he got quite a surprise when I called him up and asked him if he’d come down to New York and do a session,” said Bowie. “He was an absolute delight.” Describing Springer’s playing as “sort of a lilting take on Hendrix’s guitar style”, Bowie revealed that Wild T’s “real name is Anthony. I find it very hard to call him Wild T.”
A mimed studio performance was recorded by David Mallet for the Black Tie White Noise video. Bowie mimed the song alone before a set of curtains and Christmas lights, holding a cigarette lighter aloft, Barry Manilow-style, in the pursuit of what he described as “a totally camp” cover version.

On 21 November 1971, mere days after the release of Hunky Dory, Tony Defries sent a copy of the album to A&M Records with the suggestion that ‘Kooks’ would make “a tremendous single for The Carpenters”. Although that offer was not taken up, ‘Kooks’ would later be covered by numerous artists including Smashing Pumpkins, Tindersticks (on their limited-edition 1993 ‘Unwired’ EP), Danny Wilson (whose 1987 B-side version was later included on David Bowie Songbook), Robbie Williams (on his 1997 single ‘Old Before I Die’), Brett Smiley (on the 2008 Uncut compilation Rebel Rebel), Anna Faroe (on her 2010 album Because I Want To), and Kim Wilde (as a duet with Hal Fowler on her 2011 album Snapshots). The Smiths’ 1987 hit ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ finds Morrissey affectionately paraphrasing Bowie’s lyric: “Throw your homework onto the fire / Come out and find the one you love”.

In following the highs and lows of the eighteen-month tour that swept Bowie to stardom, a recurring feature has been the snowballing catalogue of celebrity doorsteppers attending the various openings and closings. But perhaps the most significant attendees were to be found not in the hospitality suite but in the audience, for there were unknown faces in the teenage crowds who would one day aspire to their own successes. We have already heard the testimonies of Neil Tennant and Marc Almond; among the other youngsters who attended the Ziggy Stardust concerts were Holly Johnson (who saw the same Liverpool gig as Almond, although the two were then strangers), George O’Dowd (who was among the fans who camped outside Haddon Hall in 1973 – he would later recall the day when “Angie opened the window and said, ‘Why don’t you all f*** off?’ – we were thrilled!”), Ian McCulloch, Pete Burns, Pete Shelley, Stephen Morrissey, Ian Curtis, and Kate Bush. The tour regarded by many as Bowie’s finest hour was also a potent breeding ground for the music of the future.

Bowie’s first live appearance of 1991 was during the encores at a Morrissey concert in Los Angeles on 6 February, when the two performed a duet of Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’. They had first been introduced backstage at David’s Manchester gig the previous August, marking the first in a series of encounters over the next five years.

The UK tour opened at Wembley Arena, where Bowie’s backstage visitors included Bill Wyman, Bob Geldof, Glen Matlock, Tony Blair and his 73-year-old former manager Kenneth Pitt. The support slot was filled by Morrissey, now promoting his album Southpaw Grammar. British critics were distinctly underwhelmed, the Times branding the show “an uphill slog”, while the NME declared that “It is thunderous, but sadly not thunderously good,” going on to admit that “a sweetly mysterious ‘My Death’ displays grace and subtlety” but dismissing the show overall as a “grinding, grime-laced farrago.”

After Paris the tour resumed in Dublin before returning to the UK. There was a minor sensation when Morrissey, whose support sets had been uncharacteristically lacklustre and occasionally ill-tempered (a sulky aside to the Wembley audience – “Don’t worry, David will be on soon” – only succeeded in raising a mass cheer), disappeared before the Aberdeen gig and never returned. The support slot was filled on later dates by a variety of local bands. Five years later, Morrissey hinted at a falling-out with David, remarking that “I left the tour because he put me under a lot of pressure and I found it too exhausting. He wouldn’t even phone his mother without considering the impact on his career status. Bowie is principally a business. He surrounds himself with very strong people and that’s the secret of his power – that everything he does will be seen in a certain light.” Not exactly renowned for his readiness to forget a grudge, Morrissey’s bitterness over the episode seemed to increase rather than dwindle over the next few years. In Channel 4’s 2003 documentary The Importance Of Being Morrissey he claimed that he had left the tour because he objected to Bowie’s suggestion that his support set end with a crossover duet (as the Nine Inch Nails set had done on the American leg), adding that “You have to worship at the temple of David when you become involved. He was a fascinating artist in 1970, ’71, ’72, but not now.” In March 2004, as he prepared to follow Bowie’s footsteps as curator of the Meltdown Festival, Morrissey told GQ magazine that David was “not the person he was. He is no longer David Bowie at all. Now he gives people what he thinks will make them happy, and they’re yawning their heads off. And by doing that, he is not relevant. He was only relevant by accident.” However, a decade later Morrissey was striking a more conciliatory tone, claiming during an online question-and-answer session in 2014 that his attacks on Bowie had been “just for fun”, and that Tony Visconti, who produced Morrissey’s 2006 album Ringleader of the Tormentors, had tried to bring the pair together in the same year to record a cover of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’. “I loved the idea, but David wouldn’t budge,” declared Morrissey. “I know I’ve criticized David in the past, but it’s all been snot-nosed junior high ribbing on my part. I think he knows that.”

All the larger Morrissey mentions in Pegg's (excellent) book.
FWD.
 
Famous when dead said:
View attachment 151075

Recording his lead vocal in two passes on 16 April and 17 May, Bowie is on spectacular form as he yelps, shrieks and croons his way through an artfully peculiar lyric steeped in the arcane lingo of times past. “The lyrics are wacky,” noted Tony Visconti, “but a lot of British people, especially Londoners, will get every word.” As is David’s wont when evoking times past, there’s a hint of nursery rhyme (“I’m sitting in the chestnut tree”), but the principal anchors are two distinct varieties of counter-cultural slang which were current during his youth. From 1965-8, the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne was responsible for popularizing palare (also spelt polari), the clandestine patois of London’s gay scene, derived from snatches of Romany, Italian and fairground slang: every week the show’s frontman Kenneth Horne would encounter Julian and Sandy, a duo played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, whose palare patter enabled outrageous innuendo to be smuggled under the BBC radar at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Later commemorated by Morrissey’s 1990 album Bona Drag (“nice clothes”) and its single ‘Piccadilly Palare’, Julian and Sandy’s legacy also crops up in Todd Haynes’s film Velvet Goldmine, in which an entire scene is conducted in palare with accompanying subtitles.
Bowie himself had occasionally dipped into palare over the years, dropping it into his interview patter during the Ziggy period (in 1973 he remarked that Russian audiences might freak out when they “varda what we look like”). The sense of “bitch” conveyed by ‘Queen Bitch’ comes straight from palare, as do “traders” (‘The Bewlay Brothers’), “trolling” (‘Looking For A Friend’), “butch” (‘Candidate’) and “drag” (‘Teenage Wildlife’). In ‘Girl Loves Me’ the derivations are rather less mainstream, including “omi” (man), “nanti” (none), and “dizzy” (foolish); but most of the lyric derives from a second underground argot coined during David’s teenage years. Published in 1962, Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange is narrated by 15-year-old Alex in “nadsat”, a youth dialect created by Burgess for his imagined near-future setting. Concocted from various sources including rhyming slang, modified Russian and Slavic vocabularies, and a dash of pure invention on Burgess’s part, nadsat captivated Bowie, particularly after he had heard it spoken aloud in Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated film adaptation. “The whole idea of having this phoney-speak thing,” David recalled in 1993, “mock Anthony Burgess Russian-speak, that drew on Russian words and put them into the English language, and twisted old Shakespearean words around … it was like trying to anticipate a society that hadn’t happened.” Within days of seeing Kubrick’s film in January 1972, David had incorporated the nadsat word “droog” (Russian for “friend”, and the term given by Alex to his fellow hoodlums) into the lyric of his latest song ‘Suffragette City’.

I KNOW IT’S GONNA HAPPEN SOMEDAY (Morrissey/Nevin)
• Album: Black • Video: Black
“I always thought of Morrissey as a sort of sexual Alan Bennett,” said Bowie in 1993, “because of his attention to detail. He’ll take a small subject matter and make a very grandiose statement of it.” His peripheral relationship with Morrissey, whose narcissistic kitchen-sink melodramas had long inherited aspects of Bowie’s legacy, began when the two met backstage at David’s Manchester gig in August 1990. The following February David joined Stephen on stage in Los Angeles to perform an encore of Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’, while 1992 saw the release of Morrissey’s pseudo-glam album Your Arsenal, produced by none other than Mick Ronson. As David later recounted, “It occurred to me … that [Morrissey] was possibly spoofing one of my earlier songs, and I thought, I’m not going to let him get away with that. I do think he’s one of the best lyricists in England, and an excellent songwriter, and I thought his song was an affectionate spoof.”
The song in question was ‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’, co-written by Morrissey and ex-Fairground Attraction guitarist Mark E Nevin. Morrissey’s version, which echoes any number of Bowie’s early 1970s ballads, culminates in a blatant lift from the climax of ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, although in a characteristically perverse twist this is the one element Bowie chose to excise from his own version. Instead, as he explained, “I thought it would be fun to take that song and do it the way I would have done it in 1974-ish.” The result is a breathtakingly overblown gospel treatment, complete with heavenly choir and big-band climax. It’s an endlessly incestuous joke: Bowie covers Morrissey parodying Ziggy Stardust in the style of Young Americans. “A window-rattling rendition,’ wrote Q’s David Sinclair, “which Bowie takes over so completely that it’s hard not to think of it as one of his own compositions.” The Black Tie White Noise video includes studio footage of Mick Ronson playing the riff from the original Morrissey arrangement.
“There’s something terribly affectionate about the idea of the lyric,” said Bowie. “You know, don’t worry, somebody will come along if you wait long enough. I mean, it’s very weepy and silly, so I did it very grandly with a gospel choir and horns … It’s a bit silly, but it’s done with affection.” In the NME he revealed that when he played his recording to Morrissey, “it brought a tear to his eye and he said, ‘Oooh, it’s sooo grand!’” Suede’s Brett Anderson, meanwhile, found Bowie’s rendition “very fifties, very Johnnie Ray.”
‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’ features a plangent guitar solo by Wild T Springer, a Trinidadian blues player who met Bowie in Canada during the second Tin Machine tour. “I think he got quite a surprise when I called him up and asked him if he’d come down to New York and do a session,” said Bowie. “He was an absolute delight.” Describing Springer’s playing as “sort of a lilting take on Hendrix’s guitar style”, Bowie revealed that Wild T’s “real name is Anthony. I find it very hard to call him Wild T.”
A mimed studio performance was recorded by David Mallet for the Black Tie White Noise video. Bowie mimed the song alone before a set of curtains and Christmas lights, holding a cigarette lighter aloft, Barry Manilow-style, in the pursuit of what he described as “a totally camp” cover version.

On 21 November 1971, mere days after the release of Hunky Dory, Tony Defries sent a copy of the album to A&M Records with the suggestion that ‘Kooks’ would make “a tremendous single for The Carpenters”. Although that offer was not taken up, ‘Kooks’ would later be covered by numerous artists including Smashing Pumpkins, Tindersticks (on their limited-edition 1993 ‘Unwired’ EP), Danny Wilson (whose 1987 B-side version was later included on David Bowie Songbook), Robbie Williams (on his 1997 single ‘Old Before I Die’), Brett Smiley (on the 2008 Uncut compilation Rebel Rebel), Anna Faroe (on her 2010 album Because I Want To), and Kim Wilde (as a duet with Hal Fowler on her 2011 album Snapshots). The Smiths’ 1987 hit ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ finds Morrissey affectionately paraphrasing Bowie’s lyric: “Throw your homework onto the fire / Come out and find the one you love”.

In following the highs and lows of the eighteen-month tour that swept Bowie to stardom, a recurring feature has been the snowballing catalogue of celebrity doorsteppers attending the various openings and closings. But perhaps the most significant attendees were to be found not in the hospitality suite but in the audience, for there were unknown faces in the teenage crowds who would one day aspire to their own successes. We have already heard the testimonies of Neil Tennant and Marc Almond; among the other youngsters who attended the Ziggy Stardust concerts were Holly Johnson (who saw the same Liverpool gig as Almond, although the two were then strangers), George O’Dowd (who was among the fans who camped outside Haddon Hall in 1973 – he would later recall the day when “Angie opened the window and said, ‘Why don’t you all f*** off?’ – we were thrilled!”), Ian McCulloch, Pete Burns, Pete Shelley, Stephen Morrissey, Ian Curtis, and Kate Bush. The tour regarded by many as Bowie’s finest hour was also a potent breeding ground for the music of the future.

Bowie’s first live appearance of 1991 was during the encores at a Morrissey concert in Los Angeles on 6 February, when the two performed a duet of Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’. They had first been introduced backstage at David’s Manchester gig the previous August, marking the first in a series of encounters over the next five years.

The UK tour opened at Wembley Arena, where Bowie’s backstage visitors included Bill Wyman, Bob Geldof, Glen Matlock, Tony Blair and his 73-year-old former manager Kenneth Pitt. The support slot was filled by Morrissey, now promoting his album Southpaw Grammar. British critics were distinctly underwhelmed, the Times branding the show “an uphill slog”, while the NME declared that “It is thunderous, but sadly not thunderously good,” going on to admit that “a sweetly mysterious ‘My Death’ displays grace and subtlety” but dismissing the show overall as a “grinding, grime-laced farrago.”

After Paris the tour resumed in Dublin before returning to the UK. There was a minor sensation when Morrissey, whose support sets had been uncharacteristically lacklustre and occasionally ill-tempered (a sulky aside to the Wembley audience – “Don’t worry, David will be on soon” – only succeeded in raising a mass cheer), disappeared before the Aberdeen gig and never returned. The support slot was filled on later dates by a variety of local bands. Five years later, Morrissey hinted at a falling-out with David, remarking that “I left the tour because he put me under a lot of pressure and I found it too exhausting. He wouldn’t even phone his mother without considering the impact on his career status. Bowie is principally a business. He surrounds himself with very strong people and that’s the secret of his power – that everything he does will be seen in a certain light.” Not exactly renowned for his readiness to forget a grudge, Morrissey’s bitterness over the episode seemed to increase rather than dwindle over the next few years. In Channel 4’s 2003 documentary The Importance Of Being Morrissey he claimed that he had left the tour because he objected to Bowie’s suggestion that his support set end with a crossover duet (as the Nine Inch Nails set had done on the American leg), adding that “You have to worship at the temple of David when you become involved. He was a fascinating artist in 1970, ’71, ’72, but not now.” In March 2004, as he prepared to follow Bowie’s footsteps as curator of the Meltdown Festival, Morrissey told GQ magazine that David was “not the person he was. He is no longer David Bowie at all. Now he gives people what he thinks will make them happy, and they’re yawning their heads off. And by doing that, he is not relevant. He was only relevant by accident.” However, a decade later Morrissey was striking a more conciliatory tone, claiming during an online question-and-answer session in 2014 that his attacks on Bowie had been “just for fun”, and that Tony Visconti, who produced Morrissey’s 2006 album Ringleader of the Tormentors, had tried to bring the pair together in the same year to record a cover of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’. “I loved the idea, but David wouldn’t budge,” declared Morrissey. “I know I’ve criticized David in the past, but it’s all been snot-nosed junior high ribbing on my part. I think he knows that.”

All the larger Morrissey mentions in Pegg's (excellent) book.
FWD.
Click to expand...
I imagine the Moz bitchiness hurt because it was kind of true. Bowie did become a shadow of his former self for some time, roughly from the mid 80s to the mid 90s. Bowie admitted that himself. Heathen was released in 2002 though, and by then his artistic credibility was fully restored. So Moz's criticism in the Importance Of documentary was very backwards looking and unjustified. I remember at the time watching it and thinking it was a bit petty. I don't blame Bowie for turning down any attempt at a reconciliation - much as I would have loved to have heard Bowie and Morrissey doing Loving Feeling. That would have been special.
 
Famous when dead said:
View attachment 151075

Recording his lead vocal in two passes on 16 April and 17 May, Bowie is on spectacular form as he yelps, shrieks and croons his way through an artfully peculiar lyric steeped in the arcane lingo of times past. “The lyrics are wacky,” noted Tony Visconti, “but a lot of British people, especially Londoners, will get every word.” As is David’s wont when evoking times past, there’s a hint of nursery rhyme (“I’m sitting in the chestnut tree”), but the principal anchors are two distinct varieties of counter-cultural slang which were current during his youth. From 1965-8, the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne was responsible for popularizing palare (also spelt polari), the clandestine patois of London’s gay scene, derived from snatches of Romany, Italian and fairground slang: every week the show’s frontman Kenneth Horne would encounter Julian and Sandy, a duo played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, whose palare patter enabled outrageous innuendo to be smuggled under the BBC radar at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Later commemorated by Morrissey’s 1990 album Bona Drag (“nice clothes”) and its single ‘Piccadilly Palare’, Julian and Sandy’s legacy also crops up in Todd Haynes’s film Velvet Goldmine, in which an entire scene is conducted in palare with accompanying subtitles.
Bowie himself had occasionally dipped into palare over the years, dropping it into his interview patter during the Ziggy period (in 1973 he remarked that Russian audiences might freak out when they “varda what we look like”). The sense of “bitch” conveyed by ‘Queen Bitch’ comes straight from palare, as do “traders” (‘The Bewlay Brothers’), “trolling” (‘Looking For A Friend’), “butch” (‘Candidate’) and “drag” (‘Teenage Wildlife’). In ‘Girl Loves Me’ the derivations are rather less mainstream, including “omi” (man), “nanti” (none), and “dizzy” (foolish); but most of the lyric derives from a second underground argot coined during David’s teenage years. Published in 1962, Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange is narrated by 15-year-old Alex in “nadsat”, a youth dialect created by Burgess for his imagined near-future setting. Concocted from various sources including rhyming slang, modified Russian and Slavic vocabularies, and a dash of pure invention on Burgess’s part, nadsat captivated Bowie, particularly after he had heard it spoken aloud in Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated film adaptation. “The whole idea of having this phoney-speak thing,” David recalled in 1993, “mock Anthony Burgess Russian-speak, that drew on Russian words and put them into the English language, and twisted old Shakespearean words around … it was like trying to anticipate a society that hadn’t happened.” Within days of seeing Kubrick’s film in January 1972, David had incorporated the nadsat word “droog” (Russian for “friend”, and the term given by Alex to his fellow hoodlums) into the lyric of his latest song ‘Suffragette City’.

I KNOW IT’S GONNA HAPPEN SOMEDAY (Morrissey/Nevin)
• Album: Black • Video: Black
“I always thought of Morrissey as a sort of sexual Alan Bennett,” said Bowie in 1993, “because of his attention to detail. He’ll take a small subject matter and make a very grandiose statement of it.” His peripheral relationship with Morrissey, whose narcissistic kitchen-sink melodramas had long inherited aspects of Bowie’s legacy, began when the two met backstage at David’s Manchester gig in August 1990. The following February David joined Stephen on stage in Los Angeles to perform an encore of Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’, while 1992 saw the release of Morrissey’s pseudo-glam album Your Arsenal, produced by none other than Mick Ronson. As David later recounted, “It occurred to me … that [Morrissey] was possibly spoofing one of my earlier songs, and I thought, I’m not going to let him get away with that. I do think he’s one of the best lyricists in England, and an excellent songwriter, and I thought his song was an affectionate spoof.”
The song in question was ‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’, co-written by Morrissey and ex-Fairground Attraction guitarist Mark E Nevin. Morrissey’s version, which echoes any number of Bowie’s early 1970s ballads, culminates in a blatant lift from the climax of ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, although in a characteristically perverse twist this is the one element Bowie chose to excise from his own version. Instead, as he explained, “I thought it would be fun to take that song and do it the way I would have done it in 1974-ish.” The result is a breathtakingly overblown gospel treatment, complete with heavenly choir and big-band climax. It’s an endlessly incestuous joke: Bowie covers Morrissey parodying Ziggy Stardust in the style of Young Americans. “A window-rattling rendition,’ wrote Q’s David Sinclair, “which Bowie takes over so completely that it’s hard not to think of it as one of his own compositions.” The Black Tie White Noise video includes studio footage of Mick Ronson playing the riff from the original Morrissey arrangement.
“There’s something terribly affectionate about the idea of the lyric,” said Bowie. “You know, don’t worry, somebody will come along if you wait long enough. I mean, it’s very weepy and silly, so I did it very grandly with a gospel choir and horns … It’s a bit silly, but it’s done with affection.” In the NME he revealed that when he played his recording to Morrissey, “it brought a tear to his eye and he said, ‘Oooh, it’s sooo grand!’” Suede’s Brett Anderson, meanwhile, found Bowie’s rendition “very fifties, very Johnnie Ray.”
‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’ features a plangent guitar solo by Wild T Springer, a Trinidadian blues player who met Bowie in Canada during the second Tin Machine tour. “I think he got quite a surprise when I called him up and asked him if he’d come down to New York and do a session,” said Bowie. “He was an absolute delight.” Describing Springer’s playing as “sort of a lilting take on Hendrix’s guitar style”, Bowie revealed that Wild T’s “real name is Anthony. I find it very hard to call him Wild T.”
A mimed studio performance was recorded by David Mallet for the Black Tie White Noise video. Bowie mimed the song alone before a set of curtains and Christmas lights, holding a cigarette lighter aloft, Barry Manilow-style, in the pursuit of what he described as “a totally camp” cover version.

On 21 November 1971, mere days after the release of Hunky Dory, Tony Defries sent a copy of the album to A&M Records with the suggestion that ‘Kooks’ would make “a tremendous single for The Carpenters”. Although that offer was not taken up, ‘Kooks’ would later be covered by numerous artists including Smashing Pumpkins, Tindersticks (on their limited-edition 1993 ‘Unwired’ EP), Danny Wilson (whose 1987 B-side version was later included on David Bowie Songbook), Robbie Williams (on his 1997 single ‘Old Before I Die’), Brett Smiley (on the 2008 Uncut compilation Rebel Rebel), Anna Faroe (on her 2010 album Because I Want To), and Kim Wilde (as a duet with Hal Fowler on her 2011 album Snapshots). The Smiths’ 1987 hit ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ finds Morrissey affectionately paraphrasing Bowie’s lyric: “Throw your homework onto the fire / Come out and find the one you love”.

In following the highs and lows of the eighteen-month tour that swept Bowie to stardom, a recurring feature has been the snowballing catalogue of celebrity doorsteppers attending the various openings and closings. But perhaps the most significant attendees were to be found not in the hospitality suite but in the audience, for there were unknown faces in the teenage crowds who would one day aspire to their own successes. We have already heard the testimonies of Neil Tennant and Marc Almond; among the other youngsters who attended the Ziggy Stardust concerts were Holly Johnson (who saw the same Liverpool gig as Almond, although the two were then strangers), George O’Dowd (who was among the fans who camped outside Haddon Hall in 1973 – he would later recall the day when “Angie opened the window and said, ‘Why don’t you all f*** off?’ – we were thrilled!”), Ian McCulloch, Pete Burns, Pete Shelley, Stephen Morrissey, Ian Curtis, and Kate Bush. The tour regarded by many as Bowie’s finest hour was also a potent breeding ground for the music of the future.

Bowie’s first live appearance of 1991 was during the encores at a Morrissey concert in Los Angeles on 6 February, when the two performed a duet of Marc Bolan’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’. They had first been introduced backstage at David’s Manchester gig the previous August, marking the first in a series of encounters over the next five years.

The UK tour opened at Wembley Arena, where Bowie’s backstage visitors included Bill Wyman, Bob Geldof, Glen Matlock, Tony Blair and his 73-year-old former manager Kenneth Pitt. The support slot was filled by Morrissey, now promoting his album Southpaw Grammar. British critics were distinctly underwhelmed, the Times branding the show “an uphill slog”, while the NME declared that “It is thunderous, but sadly not thunderously good,” going on to admit that “a sweetly mysterious ‘My Death’ displays grace and subtlety” but dismissing the show overall as a “grinding, grime-laced farrago.”

After Paris the tour resumed in Dublin before returning to the UK. There was a minor sensation when Morrissey, whose support sets had been uncharacteristically lacklustre and occasionally ill-tempered (a sulky aside to the Wembley audience – “Don’t worry, David will be on soon” – only succeeded in raising a mass cheer), disappeared before the Aberdeen gig and never returned. The support slot was filled on later dates by a variety of local bands. Five years later, Morrissey hinted at a falling-out with David, remarking that “I left the tour because he put me under a lot of pressure and I found it too exhausting. He wouldn’t even phone his mother without considering the impact on his career status. Bowie is principally a business. He surrounds himself with very strong people and that’s the secret of his power – that everything he does will be seen in a certain light.” Not exactly renowned for his readiness to forget a grudge, Morrissey’s bitterness over the episode seemed to increase rather than dwindle over the next few years. In Channel 4’s 2003 documentary The Importance Of Being Morrissey he claimed that he had left the tour because he objected to Bowie’s suggestion that his support set end with a crossover duet (as the Nine Inch Nails set had done on the American leg), adding that “You have to worship at the temple of David when you become involved. He was a fascinating artist in 1970, ’71, ’72, but not now.” In March 2004, as he prepared to follow Bowie’s footsteps as curator of the Meltdown Festival, Morrissey told GQ magazine that David was “not the person he was. He is no longer David Bowie at all. Now he gives people what he thinks will make them happy, and they’re yawning their heads off. And by doing that, he is not relevant. He was only relevant by accident.” However, a decade later Morrissey was striking a more conciliatory tone, claiming during an online question-and-answer session in 2014 that his attacks on Bowie had been “just for fun”, and that Tony Visconti, who produced Morrissey’s 2006 album Ringleader of the Tormentors, had tried to bring the pair together in the same year to record a cover of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’. “I loved the idea, but David wouldn’t budge,” declared Morrissey. “I know I’ve criticized David in the past, but it’s all been snot-nosed junior high ribbing on my part. I think he knows that.”

All the larger Morrissey mentions in Pegg's (excellent) book.
FWD.
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Pretty poor that they can’t even spell Morrissey’s first name, Steven, correctly …
 
Mary McCartney released a new cookery book last year, promoting her vegetarian recipes with various famous folks - and Johnny and Chrissie are featured in it. Poor photo stolen from Insta but interesting crossover for me as a Beatles fan. I love that Chrissie is the bridging link between my two favourite bands. Mary asked Johnny about why they'd asked Linda to play keyboards on TQID etc.

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Amy said:
Mary McCartney released a new cookery book last year, promoting her vegetarian recipes with various famous folks - and Johnny and Chrissie are featured in it. Poor photo stolen from Insta but interesting crossover for me as a Beatles fan. I love that Chrissie is the bridging link between my two favourite bands. Mary asked Johnny about why they'd asked Linda to play keyboards on TQID etc.

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What if she had secretly invited Morrissey as well? That would've have been something.
 
Gray Fruit said:
What if she had secretly invited Morrissey as well? That would've have been something.
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And then immediately locked them all in a room and ran away? Genius idea, opportunity missed :ROFLMAO:
 
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