Linder Sterling

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From the Linder interview by Morrissey from Interview Magazine (2010): "The two met in Manchester in the mid-1970s and quickly became friends."
Released Morrissey Shot in 1992.
Invited by Morrissey to be part of 2004's Meltdown Festival.

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Linder Works 1976-2006

Morrissey's essay and postcard featured in "Linder Works 1976-2006" posted by nightandday in the Morrissey-solo thread "Morrissey in Linder's monograph:

LINDER AND MORRISSEY:
WE ARE YOUR THOUGHTS
I first saw Linder as she introduced Buzzcocks onstage at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester during the summer of 1976. A few months later, I would spot Linder sitting on a table during the soundcheck for the Sex Pistols third Manchester gig. I was 17, and biologically inferior to everyone else. Linder was a bit older, with terrifying hair. I decided to approach her, specifically to prove to her that I had no viewpoint whatsoever about anything. Some 30 years later, that conversation has yet to pause.
Most tormentedly aware, Linder seemed to know something that I knew. We both spoke in cinematic language, and we both somehow knew that our presence on earth was trouble enough for those around us. How had we endured?
From a rented room in Whalley Range Linder's art supplied the unspoken. She led me by the lapel to Janice G. Raymond's The Transsexual Empire, Calvin C. Hernton's Sex and Racism, and to Philippe Ariès' Western Attitudes Towards Death. To me, her life, then, was messianic. Linder took up the pen, the brush, the chalk, and stood as if behind a machine gun, perceiving danger swiftly and more keenly than the shell-suited mutants of surrounding Manchester.
In 1980, Linder's art spoke of the delusions of possession, your life - your body! - does not belong to you. She seemed to have a need to sing that went further than revenge.
I did not know or hear anyone at all across human civilisation who was like Linder. The vital centre of Linder's songs was the failure to find personal gratification, for which the singing of these songs momentarily restored the balance. In live performance, Linder carried tales that allowed us to glimpse the abyss, against a backdrop of tough and boyish bog-water guitars and thunderous drums. Linder tore the lyrics out with her teeth, every song addressing the self, or asking: Is your life enough?
The first single by Linder zapped into the then hollowed independent chart in March of 1980 at number 32. All of our suffering seemed to be temporarily over. Although the songs read as screams, Linder moved smoothly like a brooding Julie London. The women of punk sang in clipped and chopped no-moral-code regional accents, while Linder's angry voice was soft and soothing. However, the musical mood throughout England during this time was of sociability and savage ignorance. Post-punk major labels had reinstated the blank aspect that would protect them, as if to tell us that we had had our fun, after all.
Squeezing through, Linder's Single Of The Week status in the reasonably respected Sounds magazine, was chased a week later by the most hateful and paranoid rail against her very being; concern with female desire was seen as a sexual transgression (of some kind). The bad killed the good.
Visually, Linder's protean quality suggested a female Eugen Sandow; the body a vehicle of... unwillingness; a naturally beautiful woman with the ideal of everything, who physically embodied the ideal, yet who sang in temporal terms of forces of containment. 'Would you like to unlock me?' Houdini provided source material for Linder's live presentations.
In 1982, her best album, Riding the Rag, was buried without ceremony by the press. One triumphant review on the NME battleground could not quite provide enough oxygen. Late in 1983, Linder stopped singing. 'I'm by nature / soli-tary'.
The Linder of the Second Period intensified her artistic endeavours. 'A bag of tricks / is my poli-tics.'
In my view, Linder's life is a docudrama, potent and therefore lethal. She is aware of the inevitable punishment for those who seek to kick against the enforced limitations of their lives, and she is aware of the price you pay for exposing restraints. The 1990s had Linder and me replacing the dead white greenish cast of unforgiving Manchester with the bright catacombs of El Paso, Los Angeles and Phoenix; Linder armed with her cameras, and me with a despair long past explaining.
In time a tale will be told.

Morrissey, correspondence, 2000, Photograph and marker pen

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English visual artist, performance artist and musician, born 1954 in Liverpool, Lancashire, England. Mother of Maxwell Sterling.

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Linder Sterling (born 1954, Liverpool), commonly known as Linder, is a British artist known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage and confrontational performance art. She was also the former frontwoman of Manchester-based post-punk group Ludus. In 2017, Sterling was honoured with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. For her solo shows at the Hepworth Wakefield and Tate St Ives in 2013, Sterling collaborated with choreographer Kenneth Tindall of Northern Ballet for a performance piece, The Ultimate Form (2013), inspired by the artist's research into the work of Barbara Hepworth. Recent solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, Kestnergesellschaft, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, and Museum of Modern Art PS1, and Sterling's work has been included in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Britain, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

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

Related Forum Threads

CRASH Magazine: New Interview with Linder - several Morrissey mentions (April 7, 2023) - Morrissey-solo (Apr 08, 2023)
[Morrissey Central] "SOMEWHERE THERE'S A FEATHER" (June 26, 2024) - Morrissey-solo (Jun 26, 2024)