The following is the review of the autobiography of Morrissey by AA Gill in
the Sunday Times.
The review won the Hatchet Job of the Year Review 2013
It is worth a read
A A Gill on Autobiography by Morrissey
THE SUNDAY TIMES
AS NOËL Coward might have said, nothing incites intemperate cultural
hyperbole like cheap music. Who can forget that the Beatles were once
authoritatively lauded as the equal of Mozart, or that Bob Dylan was dubbed
a contemporary Keats? The Beatles continued to ignore Covent Garden, and
Mozart is rarely heard at Glastonbury; Dylan has been silently culled from
the latest edition of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English.
The publication of Autobiography was the second item on Channel 4’s news on
the day it was released. Krishnan Guru-Murthy excitably told the nation that
Morrissey really could write — presumably he was reading from an Autocue —
and a pop journalist thrilled that he was one of the nation’s greatest
cultural icons. He isn’t even one of Manchester’s greatest cultural icons.
This belief in high-low cultural relativity leads to a certain sort of
chippy pop star feeling undervalued and then hoitily producing a rock opera
or duet with concert harpsichord. Morrissey, though, didn’t have to attain
the chip of being needily undervalued; he was born with it. He tells us he
ditched “Steve”, his given name, to be known by his portentous unimoniker
because — deep reverential breath here — great classical composers only have
one name. Mussorgsky, Mozart, Morrissey.
His most pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing is
having this autobiography published by Penguin Classics. Not Modern
Classics, you understand, where the authors can still do book signings, but
the classic Classics, where they’re dead and some of them only have one
name. Molière, Machiavelli, Morrissey.
He has made up for being alive by having a photograph of himself pretending
to be dead on the cover. The book’s publication was late and trade gossip
has it that Steve insisted on each and every bookshop taking a minimum order
of two dozen, misunderstanding how modern publishing works. But this is not
unsurprising when you read the book. He is constantly moaning about record
producers not pressing enough discs to get him to No 1. What is surprising
is that any publisher would want to publish the book, not because it is any
worse than a lot of other pop memoirs, but because Morrissey is plainly the
most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being
who ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities.
The book falls into two distinct passages. The first quarter is devoted to
growing up in Manchester (where he was born in 1959) and his schooling. This
is laughably overwrought and overwritten, a litany of retrospective hurt and
score-settling that reads like a cross between Madonna and Catherine
Cookson. No teacher is too insignificant not to be humiliated from the
heights of success, no slight is too small not to be rehashed with a final,
killing esprit d’escalier. There are pages of lists of television programmes
he watched (with plot analysis and character criticism). He could go on
Mastermind with the specialist subject of Coronation Street or the works of
Peter Wyngarde. There is the food he ate, the groups that appeared on Top of
the Pops (with critical comments) and the poetry he liked (with quotes).
All of this takes quite a lot of time due to the amount of curlicues,
falderals and bibelots he insists on dragging along as authorial decoration.
Instead of adding colour or depth, they simply result in a cacophony of
jangling, misheard and misused words. After 100 pages, he’s still at the
school gate kicking dead teachers.
But then he sets off on the grown-up musical bit and the writing calms down
and becomes more diary-like, bloggish, though with an incontinent use of
italics that are a sort of stage direction or aside to the audience. He
changes tenses in ways that are supposed to be elegant but just sound camp.
There is one passage that stands out — this is the first time he sings.
“Against the command of everyone I had ever known, I sing. My mouth meets
the microphone and the tremolo quaver eats the room with acceptable pitch
and I am removed from the lifelong definition of others and their opinions
matter no more. I am singing the truth by myself which will also be the
truth of others and give me a whole life. Let the voice speak up for once
and for all.” That has the sense of being both revelatory and touching, but
it stands out like the reflection of the moon in a sea of Stygian
self-justification and stilted self-conscious prose.
The hurt recrimination is sometimes risible but mostly dull, like listening
to neighbours bicker through a partition wall, and occasionally startlingly
unpleasant, such as the reference to the Moors murderers and the unfound
grave of their victim Keith Bennett. “Of course, had Keith been a child of
privilege or moneyed background, the search would never have been called
off. But he was a poor, gawky boy from Manchester’s forgotten side streets
and minus the blond fantasy fetish of a cutesy Madeleine McCann.”
It’s what’s left out of this book rather than what’s put in that is
strangest. There is an absence of music, not just in its tone, but the
content. There are emetic pools of limpid prose about the music business,
the ingratitude of fellow musicians and band members and the lack of talent
in other performers, but there is nothing about the making of music itself,
the composing of lyrics, the process of singing or the emotion of creation.
He seems to assume we will already know his back catalogue and can hum along
to his recorded life. This is 450 pages of what makes Morrissey, but nothing
of what Morrissey makes.
There is the peevishness at managers, record labels and bouncers, a list of
opaque court cases, all of which he manages to lose unfairly, due to the
inherited stupidity of judges. Even his relation with the audience is
equivocal. Morrissey likes them when they’re worshipping from a distance,
but he is not so keen when they’re up close. As an adolescent he approaches
Marc Bolan for an autograph. Bolan refuses and Morrissey, still awkwardly
humiliated after all these years, has the last word. But then later in the
book and life, he does exactly the same thing to his own fans without
apparent irony.
There is little about his private life. A boyfriend slips in and out with
barely a namecheck. This is him on his early sexual awakening: “Unfathomably
I had several cupcake grapples in this year of 1973… Plunge or no plunge,
girls remain mysteriously attracted to me.” There is precious little
plunging after that.
There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn’t be written. Some to
protect the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In Morrissey’s
case, he has managed both. This is a book that cries out like one of his
maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no
stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or
likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and
logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn’t diminish
Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is
a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.
This article originally appeared in The Sunday Times on 27/10/13
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Briggs
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 10:10 AM
To: Ian Murray
Cc: Leeds List
Subject: Re: [LU] Fwd: RE: LUST lose credibility in one fail swoop
Well, obviously you do as you sprang so quickly to his defence when I added
an opinion from someone he knew.
Is there a bromance we should know about, after all it is valentines day ;o)
(Obviously I know that you will take this in good humour and not sulk)
Sent from my iPhone
On 14 Feb 2014, at 09:59, "Ian Murray" <ianjamesmur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Who cares? Amazing music and funny persona.
I'm not mentioned in his autobiography.
Sent from my iPhone
On 14 Feb 2014, at 17:53, "Chris Briggs" <c_bri...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
I have it on good authority from someone who has known him since they
were teenagers that he is a complete knobhead, in fact my mate Simon is
mentioned many times in his autobiography.
Sent from my iPhone
On 14 Feb 2014, at 09:24, "n...@6haroldplace.co.uk"
<n...@6haroldplace.co.uk> wrote:
when they come to write the definitive list of over-rated,
self-important twats
of the twentieth century, dear Stephen will be in the top 3.
Morrissey is a legend.
He says controversial things to wind people like you up, and it works.
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John 'Grampa' Sykes
Rest In Peace old lad
28th Oct 1938 - 12 Nov 2013
MARCHING ON TOGETHER
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John 'Grampa' Sykes
Rest In Peace old lad
28th Oct 1938 - 12 Nov 2013
MARCHING ON TOGETHER
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John 'Grampa' Sykes
Rest In Peace old lad
28th Oct 1938 - 12 Nov 2013
MARCHING ON TOGETHER