Ashley_TakeABow
Well-Known Member
My dreams.
Strange/unexpected Moz references?
- Thread starter still I cling
- Start date
My dreams.
NealCassidy
FREE SPEECH #FBPB
Malarkey
no pasarán 🌹
Joey has nothing better to do with his time than be a shock jock.
Morrissey should get back to the music industry.
Ashley_TakeABow
Well-Known Member
TheSmiths_1985
Hello, honky tonks 💋
Raphael Lambach
Well-Known Member
Alain looks very tired and skinny here.
Older book, but seems relevant given ongoing discussion. Sourced the digital version.
John Robb: "The Stone Roses And The Resurrection Of British Pop"
Smiths/Morrissey mentions:
"And, as ever, getting a drummer was a problem. Their old drummer, Si was branching out in town, making good connections, getting some good work together. He was busy taking his kit round various bands. Si was still jamming away with Andy Rourke, looking at getting that funk thing together. It was going well. They were sounding good.
Johnny Marr had asked him back into his latest band, an outfit built around a lanky bequiffed singer that he was putting together. During the summer of 1981 they went into Decibel studios and recorded two songs with their new singer, a right proper character with a quiff called Morrissey who had a way with words.
They recorded two tunes ‘Suffer Little Children’ and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’. With the demo in the bag the group, now calling themselves The Smiths, had their first gig booked, supporting Blue Rondo A La Turk at a fashion show at Manchester Ritz on 4 October. Marr asked Wolstencroft if he wanted to join the band permanently and play the show.
But Si was still jamming away with Andy Rourke at their Britfunk style project and they had finally found their own singer. Si told Marr that he would help him out but that was as far as he could go.
The Smiths’ new manager Joe Moss wasn’t happy with this temporary situation and Si was out and Johnny Marr went in search of a proper full-time drummer.
All this didn’t really help the new Squire/Couzens band. They needed a drummer quickly. Getting a drummer is always so damn tough in a band. No one wants to play drums. All that lugging around of gear and then disappearing to the back of the stage. All the work and no glory!"
"Phone calls were made. Everyone was up for it.
Si was back in. His band with Andy Rourke was now finally over as Rourke had left to play bass with The Smiths full time. A full line up! Pete Garner on bass; John and Andy on guitars, and finally Ian on vocals.
After four years The Patrol were back together."
"Six months in, though, and they were dealt a bombshell. Si was leaving. He had been drumming for years and through his various contacts he was a known face about town. After all he had turned The Smiths down! He was the most successful and known musician among them. Getting back into the cellar after being on the verge of joining the band that was now dominating the guitar pop scene with a string of hits, was certainly something.
They kinda knew that trying to keep hold of Si was going to be difficult. He had been auditioning for bigger bands for the past six months and he finally got the job in Terry Hall’s ex Specials new outfit The Colourfield. Adds Si, ‘I was in The Colourfield with Terry Hall for a while, along with Craig Gannon on guitar. (I also got Craig the job with The Smiths.) I appeared on The Tube with him performing three songs, including Kim Fowley’s “The Trip”.’
Si got the Colourfield job and then drifted round the local scene playing drums with the Manchester hairdresser to the stars Andrew Berry (he used to cut everyone’s hair in the basement of the Hacienda). Berry’s band was The Weeds who had a couple of releases on In Tape. The Weeds supported The Fall on tour in 1986 and Berry was asked to join Mark Smith’s outfit."
"Ian Brown was working in the dole office or cleaning dishes at TFI Fridays in Didsbury. John Squire was working on ‘Chorlton And The Wheelies’ in Chorlton’s Cosgrove Hall. Pete Garner had been selling magazines in Paperchase in the city centre right back to the days when he was The Patrol’s roadie. He was the lank, long-haired, friendly dude behind the counter who always took your fanzines off you, a friendly easy-going soul who quickly got to know all sorts of people who drifted through the shop.
‘I remember Morrissey coming in with the James Dean book asking if you could buy the lyrics for the New York Dolls albums. I thought he must live in a dream world if he thought such a thing existed for such a small group …’
The band that Si hadn’t joined, The Smiths, was fast tracking its way to indie dominance and then to the grown-up charts beyond. And in Manchester itself New Order were critics’ raves and hitting the charts regularly and The Chameleons were the biggest home-town draw."
"While the Roses were toiling away in the rehearsal room, fellow Mancs The Smiths were well on their way.
The Smiths were in their ascendancy. Much has been made of the Roses’ dislike of The Smiths, but this isn’t totally true. Ian told Record Collector, ‘I liked the fact that The Smiths came from our home town and I knew Andy Rourke when I was a kid, so I was happy for them. I liked “What Difference Does It Make?” but after that, no, not really.’
Andy will admit, when pushed, to some respect for The Smiths. ‘We had this song, “Boy On A Pedestal”, it was very Smithsy, the title and the lyric. We sort of hated them but had a secret adoration as well for them …’
The Smiths were not an influence for the Roses. They may have both had a jangling guitar framework and idiosyncratic charismatic lead singers and the Roses would eventually take a huge chunk of The Smiths’ crowd as Morrissey and Marr’s outfit collapsed just before they broke through, but the Roses always liked to keep their distance from them. Despite this there were the odd musical parallels between the bands: the very English atmosphere that surrounded both bands’ musics and some of the Roses’ early songwriting reflects not a wholesale take-off from The Smiths, but a definite flavour of the outfit."
Lesser Smiths mentions omitted.
FWD.
BookishBoy
Well-Known Member
The Observer today does its annual thing of picking the 10 biggest debut novels (in the UK) for the year, and one of them in particular (from the title onwards) sounds like it might be of interest to some frequenters of this site...
England Is Mine, by Nicolas Padamsee (Serpent’s Tail, 11 April)
A politically engaged, urgently plotted coming-of-age thriller with a wicked satirical streak, England Is Mine – the debut novel by Essex-raised writer Nicolas Padamsee – digs into the grim world of online neo-nazism via the story of David, an Anglo-Iranian A-level student and music lover at odds with his right-on peers over his loyalty to a Morrissey-ish singer-songwriter, cancelled after a bigoted rant.
The book sends up Twitter-era controversies over free speech while keeping in sight the emotional stakes of a subject often dominated by bad-faith argument. David’s terrifying, heartbreaking descent – from seeking solace in first-person shooter game Call of Duty to wielding an actual gun – was, for Padamsee, a nightmarish thought experiment by which he pictured losing the hard-won sense of identity that music gave him as an unrooted teenager from a German-Indian household.
“Probably the strongest sense of belonging I’ve ever felt has been in the sway of a Libertines concert, hugging strangers, falling on the floor, being picked up by them,” says Padamsee, 33. “For someone [in that position], the stakes can be very high if mainstream society says you should stop listening to this artist. For David’s friends, it might only be like swapping Adidas for Nike, but he’s built his identity around this [singer] – if they take it away, what’s going to replace it?”
The radicalisation of a second-generation immigrant was, he knew, the territory of names such as Hanif Kureishi, Guy Gunaratne and Kamila Shamsie, but Padamsee spied a gap for exploring the internet’s role in 21st-century extremism. Signed within days of his agent submitting it to publishers, the book was drafted over three years of study at the University of East Anglia; hoping to appeal not only to his well-read supervisor but also the friends he’d made over the years playing video games online, Padamsee sought the tang of early Michel Houellebecq (“some people might sympathise with the ogreish elements of his characters, others see them as total satire”) as well as Irvine Welsh’s ability “not to speak over his characters”.
Behind everything lay the memory of a few days Padamsee spent in his mid-teens in the uneasy company of Raskolnikov, the murderous antihero of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. “I wanted you to come along a few steps, then be pushed away, then come along again; for the reader, and myself, to be questioning herd thoughts.”
Did you ever want to be a singer yourself?
I’d have loved it. I wrote a lot of lyrics in my teens, but I absolutely cannot hold a tune! After a while I had to accept it’s not happening.
What was the hardest thing about writing England Is Mine?
Making video gaming interesting on the page to somebody who’s not in the moment frenziedly racking up kill streaks. Getting those scenes right required a lot of chiselling – and actually a lot of playing Call of Duty again.
Now that you’ve written it, do you find yourself anxiously looking at the headlines?
I try not to think about it. There can be that confluence when you’re engaging with dangerous ideas; Houellebecq’s Submission came out on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. But there’s a serious challenge in these waves of radicalisation. To counter it, we need to understand it. Psychologists and sociologists have data and statistics but entering into the head of a far-right radical is something they can’t do. There’s an irresponsibility in the medium of the novel and for novels to have their own terrain in society, they need to exploit that.
England Is Mine, by Nicolas Padamsee (Serpent’s Tail, 11 April)
A politically engaged, urgently plotted coming-of-age thriller with a wicked satirical streak, England Is Mine – the debut novel by Essex-raised writer Nicolas Padamsee – digs into the grim world of online neo-nazism via the story of David, an Anglo-Iranian A-level student and music lover at odds with his right-on peers over his loyalty to a Morrissey-ish singer-songwriter, cancelled after a bigoted rant.
The book sends up Twitter-era controversies over free speech while keeping in sight the emotional stakes of a subject often dominated by bad-faith argument. David’s terrifying, heartbreaking descent – from seeking solace in first-person shooter game Call of Duty to wielding an actual gun – was, for Padamsee, a nightmarish thought experiment by which he pictured losing the hard-won sense of identity that music gave him as an unrooted teenager from a German-Indian household.
“Probably the strongest sense of belonging I’ve ever felt has been in the sway of a Libertines concert, hugging strangers, falling on the floor, being picked up by them,” says Padamsee, 33. “For someone [in that position], the stakes can be very high if mainstream society says you should stop listening to this artist. For David’s friends, it might only be like swapping Adidas for Nike, but he’s built his identity around this [singer] – if they take it away, what’s going to replace it?”
The radicalisation of a second-generation immigrant was, he knew, the territory of names such as Hanif Kureishi, Guy Gunaratne and Kamila Shamsie, but Padamsee spied a gap for exploring the internet’s role in 21st-century extremism. Signed within days of his agent submitting it to publishers, the book was drafted over three years of study at the University of East Anglia; hoping to appeal not only to his well-read supervisor but also the friends he’d made over the years playing video games online, Padamsee sought the tang of early Michel Houellebecq (“some people might sympathise with the ogreish elements of his characters, others see them as total satire”) as well as Irvine Welsh’s ability “not to speak over his characters”.
Behind everything lay the memory of a few days Padamsee spent in his mid-teens in the uneasy company of Raskolnikov, the murderous antihero of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. “I wanted you to come along a few steps, then be pushed away, then come along again; for the reader, and myself, to be questioning herd thoughts.”
Did you ever want to be a singer yourself?
I’d have loved it. I wrote a lot of lyrics in my teens, but I absolutely cannot hold a tune! After a while I had to accept it’s not happening.
What was the hardest thing about writing England Is Mine?
Making video gaming interesting on the page to somebody who’s not in the moment frenziedly racking up kill streaks. Getting those scenes right required a lot of chiselling – and actually a lot of playing Call of Duty again.
Now that you’ve written it, do you find yourself anxiously looking at the headlines?
I try not to think about it. There can be that confluence when you’re engaging with dangerous ideas; Houellebecq’s Submission came out on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. But there’s a serious challenge in these waves of radicalisation. To counter it, we need to understand it. Psychologists and sociologists have data and statistics but entering into the head of a far-right radical is something they can’t do. There’s an irresponsibility in the medium of the novel and for novels to have their own terrain in society, they need to exploit that.
Malarkey
no pasarán 🌹
No. But, you'll love it.
TheSmiths_1985
Hello, honky tonks 💋
goinghome
you must not tamper with arrangements
Neville Brody, The Face graphic designer compiled this imagery with Morrissey:
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print) interviewed Brody in great detail for their recent podcast. He doesn't mention Morrissey or The Smiths but articulately evokes the era and his acclaimed role. The conversation is transcribed, interspersed with a variety of images like those above - https://printisdead.co/content/neville-brody
Print Is Dead (Long Live Print) interviewed Brody in great detail for their recent podcast. He doesn't mention Morrissey or The Smiths but articulately evokes the era and his acclaimed role. The conversation is transcribed, interspersed with a variety of images like those above - https://printisdead.co/content/neville-brody
Camila:
Who Rattled Your Cage
Active Member
Moz mention, first song, from this mad Glaswegian punk band:
TheSmiths_1985
Hello, honky tonks 💋
Forgotten it had a title:
"Mon Coeur ne bat que pour Morrissey"
~ My Heart only beats for Morrissey.
As shown at The Victoria & Albert Museum via:
Linder, Mon Coeur ne bat que pour Morrissey, 2003
Linder Mon Coeur ne bat que pour Morrissey, 2003 Silkscreen on Somerset satin tub sized 410gsm, diamond dust. 50.5 x 75 cm Edition of 60
FWD
goinghome
you must not tamper with arrangements
a very weird shallow essay on a 5 year old rap song hatin' on Moz; burn after reading - https://www.songmeaningsandfacts.co...-dive-into-modern-dissent-and-raw-expression/
Also, passing mention of Morrissey's latest message about being deleted
https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/random-music-news-for-monday-january-15-2024/
Also, passing mention of Morrissey's latest message about being deleted
https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/random-music-news-for-monday-january-15-2024/
Similar threads
