on morrissey (originally, and rushed)

irish blood, english heart, this i'm made of
there is no-one on earth i'm afraid of

i've been called (or is it accused of being?) a west-Brit with some frequency of late

i'm not entirely sure what this comment is supposed to mean, in 2006 and in relation to me, but it's amazing what reading the guardian and planning a very practical move to london will do to people's opinion of you

granted, you briefly but inadvertently found yourself working for the Tories in Brighton in 2004... but you checked your soul at the door when you took that tele-marketing job, showered at least twice daily during those dark days and also confided in as many cold-call recipients as you could that you agreed... they are a blight on this country... you mean their country, of course... what can you say... you were doing the honourable thing and supporting your happy, little and now lost household...

anyway, for the moment i've decided to adopt the above lines from moz as sort of a personal statement on things...

just for the hell of it

hey, you think it anyway

and besides, we're neighbours

right, back to the original point of this - it all has to do with the most exquisitely rolled R's i've ever heard

it was always gonna be good

morrissey in the olympia

how could it not be?

a small beautiful room full of sexually ambiguous, reformed, semi-reformed or hopelessly irreformable depressives and look-alikes not spitting distance from their idol, just a man, on one hand their saviour and long-term co-dependent in the strangest relationship of all, and on the other hand the thorn in their side, the soundtrack to adolescent oblivion, a maze in which many of us still languish

but then, "the past is a strange place"...

oh, and not all his fans fit the above description

certainly not that bolloxed drunk bald fucker that only friends and the intro to how soon is now? saved from having his face part company with his lower jaw

why he was there, or how he got a ticket, i just don't know

some things you just don't do to me, ever, and slap me dismissively in the face is one of them

your fuse is getting worryingly short and frayed

overall though, there was a huge amount of love in the olympia two nights ago

and that, surely, is what going to see music is about, whatever your taste

morrissey/smiths fans have a bad rep, mood-wise, and sitting in the backyard of the oak tree afterwards, some girl from stoneybatter kept calling us "the suicide brigade"

missing the point in the extreme, but i expect she was referring to lyrics like the following

so you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die
(how soon is now?)

on the face of it, that's a pretty bleak lyric

but lyrics, generally, aren't suicide notes

they're words to which (musical) notes are written

big difference, stoneybatter

you write words and music not because you've been beaten by the thing but because you want to find a productive way to work through it... and you listen to the music of others for the same reason... you want to turn the darkness in to light, turn a bad experience in to something new, in to something that tips the scales a little more in your favour... you want to meet the fucker down an alley on your terms, not his... or hers... you want to listen to times when others have done the same... and won... you wrote before about the role of catharsis and it applies here, too...

take me anywhere, i don't care, i dont care, i don't care
(there is a light that never goes out)

anywhere except stoneybatter

that's a literal, idiotic, one-dimensional world you just couldn't live in

if you did, you might, say, get the wrong idea and kill yourself

morrissey is still very much alive, as am i, and his voice - both physical and artistic - are as strong as they were 20years ago

he might not ordinarily write protest songs, but he's socially relevant in that he communicates - stories, emotions, ideas, whatever

he speaks to people and with a turn of phrase he, and others like him, can reach the hearts and minds of his audience

if either morrissey or his fans were suicidal - and by that i mean willing to be defeated by this one world of ours - both the stage and the auditorium would have been, well, empty last weekend

we'd have been sat at home, grippred with a strange fear, and neither of us would ever have asked in the darkened underpass

yes, there are times when we didn't, and this is largely how and why we met, but you, or most of you, is now passed that, and listening to this kind of music is a kind of strange, never-ending requiem to what was and might forever be

we've grown, thanks in part to listening to music like this, alone and with friends

and that, stoneybatter, is what this means to me, and what you'll maybe never understand if you're not willing to break out of that insular little world you blindly managed to paint so vividly in the space of a few ill-formed sentences

incidentally, the lines from how soon is now?, quoted above, came second in a poll to decide the nation's (oh, sorry, england's) favourite lyric

granted it was also reported today that 5million (10% of) Britons drink on a daily basis to mask feelings of depression...

5million and one, eh?

but then, maybe we shouldn't take anything from this poll... robbie williams is in there (angels, number seven), as are (is?) coldplay (yellow, number five)... both beat the who's semi-unfulfilled rock'n'roll wish, hope i die before i get old...

what a telling moment it was, in terms of the mindset of much modern music, when robbie williams reversed that line and sang i hope i'm old before i die... and went to number one...

eminem is in there... good lyric, the intro to lose yourself, but not top-ten good... not better than i'm a creep, i'm a weirdo, what the hell am i doing here? i don't belong here

feeling stupid, contagious, explaining that you're here, now, and demanding entertainment is still a great idea, but maybe not number 3 great

maybe on a different night

funnily enough, i never really knew what marvin gaye was on about (or rather didn’t really listen) when he sang what's going on?, but now that i do, fair play, marv

if i'm honest, i never really got too worked up about bob marley, though his ideas on redemption and emancipation are nice

which brings us to number one

which is, inevitably

one

one life, with each other, sisters, brothers

which - although it's far from the best lyric i've ever heard - wouldn't have bothered me all that much if U2 weren't currently whoring their way through the charts with a new version of one, some 15years after they wrote it

it’s not the 15years that's a problem

it’s not the regurgitation of old songs when the new ones are patently shit

it’s not the video, which adds further weight to the image cult they’ve become

it’s not bono pretending to play guitar

it’s not edge not playing guitar like we know he can

it's... her

what is the fucking point of this version, beyond the kind of egotistical self-indulgent bullcrap that it gets more and more difficult not to associate with U2?

i've tried

i've tried to find something in it, even considered buying it to this end

i've tried to compare it to the harlem gospel choir's version of 'still haven't found what i’m looking for'

but you just can't, even for old time's sake... it's nothing, it's worse than nothing, it's the death knell for their credibility in any uncompromised mind... you've finally given up on them... their musical legacy is falling lower and lower in to the circles of hell and they can blame their own arrogance, their deluded sense of musical infallibility that is fatally betrayed and neutered by a mortal fear of criticism, a fear of falling out of the mainstream… walk away walk away, walk away walk away… because at this stage, i just want to see the back you…

well

it seems two posts have become one

one idea that spread to two

a sprawling mess

this one, this post, this world… it looks a little beyond salvation right now so maybe i'll just go listen to the smiths and kill myself

no, maybe on a different night