Okay. I did receive an email request regarding Morrissey earlier in the week. This was after I had announced my intention to do something with the Guardian “Great Lyricists” booklet, I hasten to point out. But then I never had a chance to do it. (And like, what was it, Monday??)
“I really think you should blog about our Stephen, he’s a national treasure,” wrote my correspondent. This is an interesting epithet, especially as that other great National Treasure Alan Bennett is invoked in the same email.* (By the way, I don’t think Morrissey is at all the ‘Alan Bennett of pop’. He just isn’t.)
The email goes, referring to the booklet’s intro: “Tim Lott is right, of course, in stating that the lyrics just make you sing the songs in your head – so how much of a convert reading the lines cold will make of anyone I’m not sure.” This is directed directly at me. Oh, dear.
The thing is, right, I never thought the Smiths really mastered that key element of a song, the melody. I know Leonard Cohen himself has that drony, singsong thing going on, but the Smiths songs always seemed to me kind of, oh, talky. I mean, the tunes (or whatever they are) always seemed to me more like that kind of making-it-up-as-you-go-along singing that little kids do, and this rendered their lyrics LESS effective for me.
That and the National Treasure’s hair.
Another friend has written (more quickly, and on Facebook): “i was baffled by the smiths when they were current, but i think i was too young. the penny dropped (and rolled down the drain in which i got my hand caught trying to rescue it) when i was about 25, and now i glory in the misery! how can you listen to ‘last night i dreamt somebody loved me’ and not feel chipper?”
This feels more compelling. I did the research. I listened to Morrissey, both Smiths and beyond, for two days. I realised that I have never actually disliked “Every Day is Like Sunday”. I started to hear more of the words. And I did experience something like the joy my friend refers to when listening to the song I quoted the other day: “I was happy for an hour in a drunken haze…” To be brutally honest, it made me laugh with happiness. And as for that talkiness, some of them do rhyme, though I was just beginning to get the concept of a pop song in free verse.
(Even this point is spurious, as I’ve been listening to all sorts of people for years, like Patti Smith etc – but then, she never set herself up as Miss Everybody USA, or even Miss Everybody New York…)
I missed that Patti Smith booklet, by the way; the two copies at work were whipped by others, and I never managed to get out of the building at all that day till long after the newsagents have done their returns. So the greatness was not to be.
But there has been some chat, as the subject seems to be like boy catnip. It turns out that the mere mention of the bequiffened one is enough to draw people out of the woodwork. Even if they have nothing to say they just want, somehow, to be part of it. One person said to me, quite engaged with the whole topic, “you know, the thing is, they’re great lyrics. But I don;t think they’re poems. I think if Morrissey wanted to write poems he could always just write a book.”
Anyway, the first email gets into its stride, clearly written from the heart: “Also, the selection seems to focus on the gloomier songs (like the one about the Moors murders) rather than the funny, joyous ones – in particular, I was sorry to see they’d left out ‘This Charming Man’, which has some great imagery and is one of The Smiths’ most positive numbers. But at least they print ‘Everyday is like Sunday’ with its nod to Betjeman and peerless evocation of the bleakness of an English seaside town (Southport, apparently).”
A note here: I think it’s more like Larkin. And note how the “bleakness” is evoked as being “funny, joyous.” Only in England, I tell you.
“Morrissey’s England (continues the email) is that of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, early ‘Coronation Street’, ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘Billy Liar’, etc.: he’s interested in that period in the 1950s and early 60s when working class northern-ness acquired its own cachet and glamour.” (My friend of the poetry book remark says of this, “I think that England never really existed, it was a wishful construct in Morrissey’s mind, and a lot of other people’s minds.”) This in turn has reminded me of one of the things that really drove me nuts about the Smiths, back in the day when they were the best thing since sliced Hovis. Their name. Oh, Smith! Geddit? That faux everyman nobodyness of it. Lord. It struck me as so attention-seeking. And not even original. In a nice little twist, which would have annoyed all of them, I always used to get them confused on some level with those other anonymously-named popsters, the Thompson Twins. Ha! (Mind you – their hair…)
Anyway, I’ve read the booklet. It just takes a few minutes. Now the thing is, if this is poetry it’s pretty thin stuff. (Though I do really like this bit: “The dream is gone/ but the baby is real”). Because he IS a good songwriter, our Stephen has done this thing of leaving enough space between the words for the music to sit. So song lyrics are still not poetry, even if they are ‘poetic’. (Of course, I have yet to do the side-by-side comparisons of the ouevre of that other aforementioned Smith, the otherwise-suburban-sounding Patti: her lyrics published as lyrics against her poems published as poems. If she’s any good they’ll be different.)
My email ends, however, with a wonderful telling detail of the kind that only ever comes straight from the REAL Alan Bennett – one that sheds a light that Morrissey could not even quite muster the wit to shed on himself: “When he lived in Primrose Hill he had Alan Bennett as a neighbour, who said that whenever Morrissey came round for tea all he wanted to do was discuss the career of northern dwarf comic Jimmy Clitheroe.”
Okay. A grudging convert; maybe it’s all these years of New Labour. Or like my facebooking friend, maybe I had to grow into Morrissey’s peculiarly English brand of youthful angst. Oh, I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.
* This expression, National Treasure, is something that gave me great happiness when I first heard it all those untold aeons ago when I came over here. America does not have National Treasures. Over there they like National Heroes, Great American Novels, things like that. The idea of a National Treasure, like something you would keep in a cigar box under your bed just because you LOVED it, would never occur to them.
6 Comments
June 28, 2008 at 11:36 pm
References, references . . . The Thompson Twins were named after the detectives in the Tintin books, and (I read somewhere that) The Smiths are named after the police surveillance code name for Brady and Hindley. My authority for the latter is a little shaky, but Morrissey is on record as saying that his obsession with the Moors murders is in no small part due to the fact that he grew up on the same streets as their victims, and was the same age as those hapless children when they vanished.
It seems to me that what separated The Smiths from all other 80s bands was Morrissey’s engagement with the recent past: you see this in his choice of ‘cover heroes’ for their vinyl releases – Shelagh Delaney, Alain Delon, Joe Dallesandro, Viv – “Spend, spend, spend” – Nicholson, Charles Hawtree, Truman Capote, etc. The Smiths are as distant from us now as those figures were from them then.
(It should also be noted that Morrissey has been highly fortunate in his choice of musical collaborators: Johnny Marr’s guitar drone on ‘How Soon is Now’ remains – to this correspondent anyway – one of the most inspiring and evocative sounds of that unsatisfactory decade.)
What remains endearing about Morrissey is his ability to distil the essence of a certain kind of Englishness – as opposed to Britishness – which stood out then and still seems authentic now. It’s no wonder he’s buggered off to foreign climes in high dudgeon. (Discuss.)
June 29, 2008 at 12:04 am
slash at whim ms B: and for allowing me space at yr lampost, on the rounds..
thank you very much — gra agus
~
Mozzer the ooh, armed with flowers. Love’s gladiator away with the faeries..
he lived in a house like all the rest on the estates around him, any number of inner city council swathes, the child of irish immigrants, and ooher Stepens initial blooming to national prominence came several yrs after Ian MacCullough’s Echo and the B men, Teardrop Explodes, Wah and B4 all that, The Cricial Three — cope, macca and mister peter wiley of Wah…
..scouse legends and instigators of west NW punk and New Romantic vibrance, back in the day before MAged beckoned ms b..
..then after mozza, it was Stone Roses, proper NW scamp manc drug addicts and musical godfathers, ultra cool swaggery ian Brown…the stack of stories this rocker’s holding as his own personal pop chart lore, imagine that…but he was only warming up, imploded and never crossed over to mass cultural consciousness and held the youth power as two bro’s just being themselves did.
One the genius of s/he in no hell outfit, of here comes a chap who imitated brown and surpassed his bar of attainmentgoal, out-imitated ian and wrought his own lone style of roaring into a mic,
.. static sibling tension, the flight of rock executed sound sculptures thrashed from strings with the ruthless artistic combination that united the GB nation last, by their sonic vision alone, two irish mancs, taking the mick, the britons most connected to, said, that’s Us 2 of the me too inclusional lot, reared by a single mah, and yet all thought, these are just like we are, Human,
..and not since these chaps came, has another like them been..
~
…the greatest thing for the children of these madchester mobs, is to reconnect, live in their mother culture only an absence unless life’s within it: become wholly who we are, Noh construction, tilted into parody by too much Concrete time and cash,
come, come home, a prince will swagger down to the LUAS and let us travel to Southport again,
June 29, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Its easy to forget, in these days when indie bands are everywhere, what the musical wasteland was like when the Smiths arrived. From the start they were willing to be a big band, but without compromise; and the lyrics were only (a big) part of that. For those of us who were around at the time, the fact that they so polarised opinions was part of the fun. If people called them humourless, we knew they weren’t reading the lyrics, and if they called them tuneless, then they’d clearly not been listening to Johnny Marr’s guitar. They’ve stood the test of time – and, despite the infamously tinny Rough Trade productions/pressings, have grown in stature as the years go on. Morrissey solo – and I’m seeing him in Hyde Park on Friday – has had some great moments, but is more for the fans, at least partly because he has never since been willing to match his voice and lyrics with a musician/songwriter as good as Marr. Someone once said that the Smiths were “our (generation’s) Beatles” and in many ways they were right, though its perhaps a sign of the times that they never sold anywhere near the number of records as, say, Wham! or Def Leppard.
June 29, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Hi Adrian, you say “those of us who were around at the time” kind of as if I hadn’t been… but then fandom isn’t my best trope anyway.
Des, what? though I quite like “Mozzer the ooh, armed with flowers. Love’s gladiator away with the faeries”.
Banquo, why hello. Well I heard somewhere that the Smiths were named after what I said in the post. I could be wrong; you sound very well-informed. Thanks for the reminder re the T Twins – of course – but I’m just saying, I did used to get them mixed up in the 80s. It was indeed a very unsatisfactory decade in so many ways; no wonder so many people were reduced to listening to Richard & Linda Thompson. And no amount of Pet Shop Boys revivals will persuade me otherwise. (I’m also not missing those parrot earrings all the ladies with cropped hair used to wear, remember those?)
April 9, 2009 at 10:18 pm
“The idea of a National Treasure, like something you would keep in a cigar box under your bed just because you LOVED it, would never occur to them.”
that’s rather funny, since we’ve an awful movie starring Nicholas Cage with the very title “National Treasure.” of course the treasure there is of a more literal sort. I think, however, when all is said and done, you’re all too bloody English for your own good.
April 25, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Being only 15, I clearly wasn’t around when The Smiths were, so i’m puzzled to here you say thatyou never really liked them! The Smiths have become a major part of my day to day lfe. I listen in the morning afternoon and evening, and there is never time when i’m not in the mood. Each time I hear a song, I discover a purpose, either with Marr’s guitars or Mozzers gloomy and enlightening lyrics. They are symbol of my youth, though it is not yet finished. “How Soon is Now”, what amazing lyrics! “Theres a club if you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you” , I would find it hard to believe that these lyrics don’t affect you ins ome way or another.