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No, I hate you MORE: The decades-long feud between Morrissey & Robert Smith of The Cure
06.11.2018
07:58 am
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A fantastic photoshop of Robert Smith and his arch enemy Morrissey.
 
To be fair, Morrissey doesn’t seem to like anyone or anything very much including his old bandmates from The Smiths. He also doesn’t like Siouxsie Sioux, either. According to Sioux, the pair haven’t spoken since they collaborated on the 1994 single “Interlude” after a dispute involving of all things, a fucking bulldog. He’s called Kate Bush “unbearable” noting her voice was utter “trash.” Moz hates meat, roller coasters, rain, cold weather and dance music, most likely because it’s too hard to be morose when someone is laying down a sick beat. He detests Stevie Wonder and even hates his birth name of Steven as it reminds him of Colonel Steve Austin as played by actor Lee Majors in the television series The Six Million Dollar Man, which also means he probably hates Lee Majors as well. It’s hard to say if Moz likes anything aside from animals—although his ire is particularly strong when it comes to hating on perpetually glum Cure vocalist, Robert Smith.

The vicious word volley between Smith and Morrissey (downplayed by Moz in 2004 on CNN), has been documented to an extent by a timeline thanks to author and blogger Andrew Barger. The feud started after Smith had been told about comments Morrissey made in a 1984 interview with UK mag The Face. During the interview, journalist Elissa Van Poznak asked Moz if he had a loaded gun and was in a room with Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Robert Smith, who would be “the first to die.” Moz must have been feeling extra cranky on this occasion as he coldly answered he’d “line them up so one bullet penetrated both simultaneously.”

Here’s Robert Smith recalling his reaction to Morrissey’s wild threat in an interview with NME which would kick off years of verbal sparring between the two:

“When I was told that at the time I kind of took umbrage, ‘That’s fucking nice, cunt.’ I felt it was a bit unnecessary. I’d never said or done anything. So that engendered one of those tedious feuds. I’ve never met him, I’m not even sure we’ve been in the same room. I’m sure it’s the same for him, he got really aggravated at my response. I was very over the top, but I felt justifiably so, having just been shot in print. It was one of those things, a mini Blur/Oasis thing. I don’t think I played along with it enough for it to become anything more. It kind of got resurrected from time to time, I think on his fansite it got reinvigorated, and there have been various attempts to reignite it, but I think he’s actually said something really nice about us recently, about the fact that I’m a little bit wayward. Honestly, I’ve never really had a problem. I felt it was unfair that he would shoot me. If you asked him again, he might choose to shoot himself rather than me and whoever else it was.”

 

Another fun photoshopped image of Moz and Robert Smith.
 
In light of wanting to get right to the good stuff in this post, here are a few of the best of the worst things Smith and Moz have said about each other since the early 80s:

In an interview to NME in 1989 (the NME is another thing Morrissey hated by the way), Moz accused The Cure of giving “a new dimension to the word crap.” Upon hearing of Moz’s latest dig, Smith responded to Morrissey’s insult saying at least The Cure had “added a new dimension in crap, not built a career out of it.” He would later slag Moz calling him “so depressing” and “if he doesn’t kill himself soon, I probably will.” Far from done Smith continued to rail on his sworn enemy with this gem:

“If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I’m going to eat meat; that’s how much I hate Morrissey. He’s a precious, miserable bastard. He’s all the things people think I am.”

In the November 1993 issue of Spin magazine, Smith went after Morrissey again admitting he “never liked him, and still didn’t.” At some point during their insult fest, Morrissey allegedly referred to Smith as a “fat clown with makeup weeping over a guitar.” Ooof, now that’s cold blooded even for Moz. I’ve posted an amusing animated video below of Morrissey and Smith recounting much of this tale because no such real-life footage of this epic battle exists. Yet…
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Miserable in Manchester: Amusing letters and music reviews from a young Morrissey
Robert Smith responds to fans about death, dreams & his tombstone in ‘The Cure News’
Three Imaginary Boys: The Cure back in the 1970s when they were still teenagers
Heaven Knows He Was Miserable Then: Morrissey’s first postcard to a pen-pal from 1980

Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.11.2018
07:58 am
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Turns out, it’s crazy easy to write a Morrissey song
09.22.2017
09:00 am
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Who knew how ridiculously easy it is to write a song in the style of Morrissey?

Musician Andy Wood reveals the “one weird trick” in this brief three-minute tutorial.

Wood demonstrates that Morrissey’s melodies tend to be one note—the major third of whatever key you are playing in. He demonstrates this by playing chords in the key of E, while singing in the major third, G sharp.

Wood says that in order to sing like Morrissey you must always avoid singing the root note, because to do that would give the melody a beginning or an ending and a Morrissey song “starts in the middle, ends in the middle, and in the middle it has more middle.”

Even more “middle” after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Christopher Bickel
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09.22.2017
09:00 am
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The Smiths trash Trump with Record Store Day gag


 
The Smiths’ 2017 Record Store Day 7-inch release came with a not-so-secret message to the U.S. inscribed on the record’s A-side: “Trump Will Kill America.” While I can’t say enough great things about this awesome stunt, it is a rather depressing reminder that this becomes truer every goddamned day. The 7-inch itself is a mix of two previously unreleased demos for “The Boy With the Thorn In His Side” and the flipside features “Rubber Ring” recorded at Drone Studios in Chorlton where the band recorded a bunch of demos back in the 80s. Actor Albert Finney, seen in the “Angry Young Man” phase of his long career, is pictured on the cover.

The news was widely spread across social media by Record Store Day shoppers who discovered the etching on the run-out groove on the A-side and deservingly dragged Donnie on his favorite communication vehicle, Twitter. In case you missed all of that, I’ve included a few posts from Smiths’ fans showing off their records at the expense of our current “president.”
 

The etching on The Smiths’ 2017 Record Store Day 7-inch release.
 

 

 
HT: Slicing Up Eyeballs

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Love Bites’: A charming documentary on Morrissey super-fans from 1995
Heaven Knows He Was Miserable Then: Morrissey’s first postcard to a pen-pal from 1980
Miserable in Manchester: Amusing letters and music reviews from a young Morrissey
Nothing lost in translation: The ‘acute malevolence’ of Morrissey

Posted by Cherrybomb
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04.24.2017
07:07 am
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‘We’re going mad’: The Smiths young and miserable on a bus with a bunch of kids in 1984
02.27.2017
10:17 am
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The Smiths have two enduring legacies. Their music is the first, of course, particularly their run of perfect early singles, a collection of gloomy, fragile, almost hilariously depressed bummer-pop songs. The second is their singer’s gloomy, fragile, almost hilariously depressed public image. So, what’s the least likely place to find Morrissey in the summer of 1984? How about frolicking in a park with a gaggle of excitable children?

We are so far away from the time and place this video was first produced that it now seems like a warped parody of itself, like a hip late-night comedy sketch from some obscure corner of cable TV or a surreal dream you had after spinning all your Smiths albums and drinking straight gin all night.

This clip is from ITV’s breakfast television franchise TVAM in Britain, presumably from 1984. It aired during their Saturday morning kid’s line-up, SPLAT. “Charlie’s Bus” was a recurring segment on the program. It allowed kids to interview and interact with various celebrities. On this particular day, a bunch of bemused pre-teens mixed it up with The Smiths, who they have clearly never heard of. And why would they have? They weren’t exactly a kid-friendly band. I mean there’s a song on their first album about notorious kid-killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, for chrissakes. But here we all are, on Charlie’s Bus on a sunny afternoon.

The kids want to know how The Smiths got their name. Johnny Marr explains that he wanted to call the band the Rolling Stones, but Morrissey thought that was too much of a mouthful.

Kid: “Where are we going?”
Morrissey: “We’re going mad.”
Kid: “I thought we were going to Kew Gardens.”

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ken McIntyre
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02.27.2017
10:17 am
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‘I find them very depressing’: 80s pop tart Samantha Fox reviews The Smiths and The Fall in 1986
07.19.2016
11:53 am
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Samantha Fox and Lemmy Kilmister.
 
Samantha Fox was technically still a very popular topless Page 3 girl in The Sun and not yet an 80s pop star when she was asked for her opinions on two new singles by The Smiths and The Fall for UK music magazine Smash Hits in July of 1986. Apparently she was not terribly impressed by either single and took them to task using insightful words like “crappy” to tear apart The Fall’s “Living Too Late.” When it came to Miss Fox’s thoughts on The Smiths the target of her disdain would of course be directed at moody vocalist Morrissey. Here’s Fox dissecting Moz as only a misguided 20-something could in 1986:

I’m sorry to say but I find them very depressing. The lead singer’s voice sounds like he’s in pain—is that Morrissey? He can’t sing and it gives me a headache. In all his interviews he’s “Mister Nasty” too and goes moan, moan, moan.

Well, at least Samantha got one thing right here because of COURSE Morrissey is in pain. Anyone who writes songs about how getting mowed over a ten-ton truck being a “heavenly way to die” or wishes you an “Unhappy Birthday” then proceeds to note that he’s going to “kill his dog” is clearly in pain. But I digress. If you’d like to read Samantha Fox’s thoughts in full on The Smiths, The Fall as well as Prince, Julian Lennon and Bryan Adams, I’ve posted a few of her amusing reviews for you below. You can also read all of Fox’s deep thoughts during her brief stint with Smash Hits as a record reviewer over at the fantasitc online archive for the magazine, Like Punk Never Happened run by the excellent Brian McCloskey.
 

Samantha Fox on The Smiths and The Fall from Smash Hits magazine, July, 1986.
 

 
Keep reading after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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07.19.2016
11:53 am
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Electrifying early-80s footage of The Cure, Bauhaus and The Smiths on the ‘Oxford Road Show’


Morrissey and Johnny Marr performing on the ‘The Oxford Road Show.’
 
A recent post that featured two-hours of “mind melting” high quality footage of Siouxsie and the Banshees performing on various music television shows such as the The Old Grey Whistle Test, Rock Goes to College, The Oxford Road Show as well as the ever popular, Top of the Pops was unsurprisingly very popular with our readers. As I was not familiar with The Oxford Road Show, I decided to take a deep-dive into YouTube land to see what other vintage delights the BBC show might have to offer.  I was not disappointed—and you won’t be either.
 

Robert Smith of The Cure in a still from ‘The Oxford Road Show.’
 
Once allegedly parodied as “Nozin’ Aroun’” on “Demolition,” the pilot episode of cult British sitcom The Young Ones, The Oxford Road Show (later known as “ORS”) was around for about four years until it marched off into the sunset. While not every band performed live (as you will see with the video of The Smiths below), many of them did and early on in their emerging careers. I cherrypicked a few highlights from The Oxford Road Show that I found most compelling such as The Cure’s 1983 appearance on the show performing “One Hundred Years” from their 1982 album, Pornography and Bauhaus in 1982 doing two of their early 80s singles, “Passion of Lovers” and an absolutely balls-out performance of “Lagartija Nick.” But what really killed me was The Smiths’ lipsynching 1984’s “What Difference Does it Make” while Moz sashays around on stage looking like he wishes he was home dancing in front of his mirror while giving zero fucks. In other words, what you are about to see is pure 80s vintage goodness that once again proves that the much maligned decade was actually pretty great.
 

The Cure performing ‘One Hundred Days’ on ‘The Oxford Road Show’ in 1983.
 

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.13.2016
11:45 am
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The creepy fantasies that inspired John Fowles’ novel ‘The Collector’

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John Fowles was a 37-year-old school teacher when his first novel The Collector was published in 1963. Though Fowles had been writing for fifteen years completing two novels and an early draft of his second book The Magus, he considered himself “unpublishable.” Then he started work on a dark and disturbing tale about a man who kidnaps a young art student and keeps her imprisoned in the basement of his home.  Fowles wrote the book in about a month, and thinking he had nothing to lose sent the manuscript off to his agent, Michael S. Howard who liked it and passed it on to the publishers Jonathan Cape. Tom Maschler at Cape thought The Collector a powerful and impressive debut, but was concerned that Fowles (who thought of himself a “serious writer”) may damage his reputation with such a lurid and disturbing tale. Fowles was adamant—he wanted the book published under his own name.

Anyone familiar with The Collector may have wondered what inspired Fowles’ twisted tale. In a letter written to Maschler in July 1962, the author explained his sources when writing the novel:

...all this came from a newspaper incident of some years ago (there was a similar case in the North of England last year, by the way). But the whole idea of the woman-in-the-dungeon has interested me since I saw Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which was before the air-raid shelter case.

 
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Film poster for ‘The Collector’ starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, 1965.
 
The news story Fowles mentioned concerned “a man who had kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for several weeks in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden.”

While the musical reference Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) told the story of Duke Bluebeard who warns his new bride Judith not to open any of the seven doors in his castle. Impelled by curiosity, Judith opens each of the seven doors finding behind the first a torture chamber and behind the last, the ghosts of Bluebeard’s previous wives.
 
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Terence Stamp as butterfly collector Frederick Clegg.
 
However, there was far darker, more personal and deeply troubling inspiration for the novel, which Fowles explained in his journal entry for February 3rd, 1963:

The Collector. The three sources.

One. My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground.

I think I must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used to be famous people Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course, there was a sexual motive; the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has also been constant. The imprisoning in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned.

Variations I can recall: the harem (several girls in one room, or in a row of rooms); the threat (this involves sharing a whip, but usually not flagellation—the idea of exerted tyranny, entering as executioner); the fellow-prisoner (this by far the commonest variation: the girl is captured and put naked into the underground room; I then have myself put in it, as if I am a fellow-prisoner, and so avoid her hostility).

Another common sexual fantasy is the selection board: I am given six hundred girls to choose fifty from and so on. These fantasies have long been exteriorized in my mind, of course; certainly I use the underground-room one far less since The Collector.

Two, the air-raid shelter incident.

Three, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle.

 
3collectoreggar3.jpg
Samantha Eggar as art student Miranda Grey.
 
Fowles separated The Collector into three sections, where the captor (Frederick Clegg) and his prisoner (Miranda Grey) describe the events of the book. It begins with Clegg describing the subject of his obsession:

When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like, When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind her once in queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose, and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.

 
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Clegg (Stamp) and Miranda (Egggar) in William Wyler’s film version of ‘The Collector.’
 
Fowles’ intention was not just to write a horror story, but to use the characters of Clegg and Miranda as conduits for his own analysis and critique of modern society, in particular his contempt for the lack of intellectual rigor in contemporary fiction—the Angry Young Men who had so forcefully invaded with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger—and for the failure of socialism to bring equality and change to Britain:

The plot of the novel was:

1. present a character who was inarticulate and nasty, as opposed to the “good” inarticulate hero, who seems to be top dog in post-war fiction and whose inarticulateness is presented as a kind of crowning glory.

2. present a character who is articulate and intelligent—the kind of young person I try to make Miranda Grey—and who is quite clearly a better person because she has a better education.

3. attack the money-minus-morality society (the affluent, the acquisitive) we have lived in since 1951.

On its publication, The Collector was a best-seller. The paperback rights were optioned for “probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel”.  The film rights were sold and a movie starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar was made in Hollywood and London directed by William Wyler.
 

 
In 1984, The Smiths used a still of Terence Stamp as Clegg from The Collector on the cover of their single “What Difference Does It Make?” As the actor had not given permission for the image to be used, the single was quickly reissued with Morrissey copying Stamp’s original pose—though a glass of milk had replaced the chloroform. Stamp later relented to his image being used.
 
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Terence Stamp as Clegg on the cover of The Smiths single ‘What Difference Does It Make?’
 
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Morrissey as Clegg on the reissued single.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.02.2014
10:17 am
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Pop Stardom is Murder: Early Smiths interview by Tony Wilson, 1985
04.28.2014
12:55 pm
Topics:
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Tony Wilson was a multi-media Renaissance man, a co-founder of Factory Records, a TV reporter, journalist and host, and the man who helped make Manchester a city of cultural and musical importance during the seventies, eighties and nineties with such bands as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column and Happy Mondays. Wilson may have been Manchester’s “Mr. Music” but he was also known as the man who didn’t sign The Smiths.

Like all tales of regret and lost opportunity, there are multiple versions as to why Wilson didn’t sign “the ultimate Indie band,” and this is the one he gave to Ian Watson in 2003:

Watson: Did you ever try and sign The Smiths?

Wilson: “No. I was very close to The Smiths. I was very close to Morrissey. Morrissey was part of that little punk scene until 77 and there was a social whirl around a house called 35 Mayfield Road where Steven partially lived and where Linder lived, who was Howard Devoto’s girlfriend and also still today is Morrissey’s best friend. But I treated Steven, he was our genius writer. He was the speccy kid in the corner, the clever little swotty outsider boy, and very brilliant. My first contact with him was when he sent me as a schoolboy, a battered New York Dolls album sleeve and said ‘Dear Mr Wilson, why can’t there be more bands on television like this?’ so I knew him and I actually was encouraging his writing. He wrote a fantastic short play about eating toast and I think he gave it to me and I lost it.

“Then, at some point, whenever it was in 1980, he phoned me up and said would you come and see me. I drove out to King’s Road, Stretford, to his mum’s house, went to his bedroom upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed while he sat on the chair, surrounded by James Dean posters and he informed me that he’d decided to become a pop star. I sort of went ‘well Steven that’s very interesting’, and inside I was thinking ‘you must be fucking joking’. The least likely, you’re off your fucking head. Completely in my mind, absolutely, the least likely rock n roll star imaginable in the universe.

“So then obviously we were all part of a group of mutual friends and I can remember saying this same thing to Richard Boon, my mate who manages the Buzzcocks, and about four or five months later the two of us went to a gig in the Manhattan Club in Manchester. I think it was probably the Smiths’ first or second gig and as we walked out, I was blown away, it was fantastic, and he said ‘what do you think?’, and I said ‘I take it back completely, he’s amazing’.

“However, at that point in time Factory had gone through its wonder days of 78, 79 and we were now in late 1980 and into early 81. This is pre ‘Blue Monday’. We weren’t selling records, we were useless, we’d lost our plot and I was very depressed by the company. I had a band called Stockholm Monsters, I couldn’t sell Stockholm Monsters records and I thought fine and my honest approach was, I’m not going to saddle Steven with this pile of shit, with Factory when it’s shit. So I didn’t even pursue it. I said to him ‘I wouldn’t be any use to you’.

“That was my version of why I didn’t sign the Smiths. I know the Smiths have their version. Everyone has.”

Morrissey is not the kind of man to let a grievance go untended, and in his autobiography he relates how The Smiths had revenge on Wilson in 1986, when he asked the band to play on the bill of “Festival of the Tenth Summer” at the G-Mex in Manchester. This was a music festival to celebrate Manchester ten years after The Sex Pistols had played the city’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Having originally said “no” to playing the festival as the ticket prices were too high, Morrissey was swayed by a letter from Wilson urging The Smiths to take part, which they did.

In fact, the G-Mex event is a great day, and theatrician Wilson is at his best master of ceremonies scarf-flowing staginess. He calls everyone ‘dahling’, but it’s all a part of the public relations aspect of his showboat routine and not at all disingenuous. Before the Smiths go onstage, film-maker Derek Jarman is brought into the dressing room and is introduced. Johnny says ‘Hello,’ and then turns sideways to vomit. It is certainly a moment, but unfortunately it wasn’t caught on film.

Onstage, the Smiths are received as a life-giving source, and this begins to enrage Wilson so much that he flutters and fumes backstage, demanding to technicians that the Smiths’ power to be cut off. No backline crew will comply with Wilson, who is effectively gagged at his own festival. At the base of it all, general opinion assessed Wilson’s rage to be the blustering fury in realizing that the Smiths had meant more to the crowd than his nurtured proteges New Order. Suddenly Wilson’s divine right to be Mr. Manchester is scuppered, and he spends the remainder of his life with a Morrissey-Smiths wasting disease of the lower limbs, whilst oddly admitting that his big mistake in life was that he didn’t sign the Smiths to Factory.

Yes, well, there we go.

Back in the knife drawer, Miss Sharp.

Of course, history is always written by those who outlive their rivals, and Wilson sadly died in 2007, so we won’t hear his account of this supposed “blustering fury,” but so it goes.

Long before this, Wilson promoted as many bands as he was able through his show So It Goes and innumerable insert reports on Manchester’s evening news program. This then is Mr. Wilson dropping in on The Smiths as they rehearsed for a tour in 1985, during the week their second album Meat Is Murder went straight to number one in the UK album charts, and the band was voted “Group of the Year” in an NME poll. Wilson interviews drum & bass players Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, before strumming a few questions with Johnny Marr, and then there’s a minor clash of egos with Morrissey, when Wilson asks him why he ever wanted to become a pop star in the first place?

Perhaps a similar question could have been asked of Mr. Wilson?
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.28.2014
12:55 pm
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Unknown Madonna opens for The Smiths, completely fails to impress them, New Year’s Eve, 1983
04.02.2014
08:29 am
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It was a clash of two future musical titans, New Year’s Eve, 1983 at New York’s legendary Danceteria.

Madonna, still the part-time coat-check girl at the nightclub, was chosen to open for, of all artists, The Smiths. This was the band’s first trip to the U.S. and they had just landed hours before. It was also on this trip that Morrissey worried about being thrown out of the band, and two days later Johnny Marr sweet-talked Sire Records’ Seymour Stein into buying him a new guitar: his iconic cherry red ‘59 Gibson ES-355.

smiths83
 
According to Marr, the jet-lagged band paid very little attention to the girl opening for them, and he personally didn’t think very highly of her. Of course, Morrissey has said a lot nastier things about her over the years.

Johnny Marr on the night Madonna opened for The Smiths:

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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04.02.2014
08:29 am
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Derek Jarman’s videos for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys
12.03.2013
12:57 pm
Topics:
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The Queen Is Dead
Still from ‘The Queen Is Dead’

I only recently learned that the singular British polymath artist Derek Jarman, director of Caravaggio, Blue, and Jubilee, directed a bunch of music videos in the 1980s, including several for The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, which is a perfect fit when you think about it.

The Smiths, “Ask”

 
This 12-minute short movie, already tackled for DM by Paul Gallagher in 2012, is called The Queen Is Dead—basically it’s three videos strung together for the title track, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic”:

 
Both of Jarman’s videos for Pet Shop Boys were for their second album, Actually
 
Pet Shop Boys, “It’s a Sin”

 
Pet Shop Boys, “Rent”

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee,’ a strange and essential punk era document
‘The Queen Is Dead’: Derek Jarman’s film for The Smiths, from 1986

Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.03.2013
12:57 pm
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‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’: The Smiths meet ‘First World Problems’
09.24.2013
11:51 am
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Youtuber Absolute Destiny created this hilarious montage of infomercials mixed with The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.”

Who knew this maudlin song was a paean to consumerism???
 

 
With thanks to Brian Braun!

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.24.2013
11:51 am
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While you wait for Morrissey’s ‘Autobiography,’ here’s The Smiths live, 1984
09.20.2013
01:03 pm
Topics:
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The recent Internet rumor that Morrissey: Autobiography was no longer to be published by Penguin Books (allegedly due to a “content disagreement”) has been finally quashed by the publishers, who claim the eagerly anticipated memoir will be published in the coming weeks. This has also been confirmed by the Morrissey fan site, True To You, which posted the following:

“The publication of Morrissey’s Autobiography remains with Penguin Books. This is a deal for the UK and Europe, but Morrissey has no contract with a publisher for the US or any other territory. As of 13 September, Morrissey and Penguin (UK) remain determined to publish within the next few weeks.”

So, it looks like American Morrissey fans may have to wait for a US publisher to pick up the rights. With the interest shown in this memoir, that shouldn’t take long.

Meanwhile, the former Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr, who released his debut solo album, The Messenger, in February of this year to overwhelmingly positive reviews, has been telling the press what he likes in music:

“...short, sharp, snappy songs with glamorous, sexy guitars and lyrics that sound like poetry that moves at the speed of light – that’s what rock or pop music should be about and it should come alive on the stage. Bands you can see and come away knowing they’ve put a lot into it. A lot of bands I saw when I was younger gave me that feeling of really wanting to be there. You feel like you’re having a unique experience with the band and they’re having a unique experience with you.

You’ll find a damn fine selection of short, sharp, snappy Smiths’ songs (all dressed up with poetry and guitars) on this classic edition of Rockpalast, from 1984. You’ll also note that the band repeat three of the set list as an encore—obviously they didn’t have enough songs back then—finishing on “Barbarism Begins At Home” which would feature on their 1985 album Meat is Murder.

Track listing

01. “Hand in Glove”
02. “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”
03. “Girl Afraid”
04. “This Charming Man”
05. “Pretty Girls Make Graves”
06. “Still ill”
07. “Barbarism Begins At Home”
08. “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”
09. “Miserable Lie”
10. “You’ve Got Everything Now”
11. “Handsome Devil”
12. “What Difference Does It Make”
13. “These Things Take Time”

Encore

14. “This Charming Man”
15. “Hand In Glove”
16. “Barbarism Begins At Home”

Johnny Marr tours the UK in October and the US October/November, details here.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.20.2013
01:03 pm
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This Charming Charlie: The Smiths meet the Peanuts gang
08.14.2013
02:50 pm
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Finally, a website after my own, cold, cold heart… This Charming Charlie.

The Tumblr is by San Francisco-based graphic designer Lauren LoPrete.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Nerdcore

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.14.2013
02:50 pm
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The Smiths: The last documentary made before they split-up in 1987
07.20.2013
07:46 pm
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Originally made for The South Bank Show, this documentary on The Smiths was filmed just days before the band went their separate ways in 1987. It’s a fitting testament to one of the most talented and influential bands of the 1980s. The film contains interviews with Morrissey, Marr, and the other two, as well as assorted fans, John Peel, and rock journalist, Nick Kent, who declared The Smiths were “the first English pop group,” who would be as popular as The Beatles in ten-year’s time. He was right to a point. And even 26-years later, middle-aged fans sigh at the thought of The Smiths.

Me? I’m listening to Diana Ross.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.20.2013
07:46 pm
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‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’: Johnny Marr explains how to write a classic song in one afternoon
06.18.2013
07:17 pm
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Johnny Fuckin’ Marr

Johnny Marr is the antithesis of a stereotypical hard rock or heavy metal guitarist. He is associated with unforgettable riffs but not endless guitar solos, whether as a solo artist, band member in The Smiths, The The, or Electronic, or as a session player for The Pet Shop Boys, Billy Bragg, Bryan Ferry or Modest Mouse.

Johnny was not camp and didn’t thrash around on stage like an attention whore but he was often quietly the center of attention anyway, regardless of what Morrissey was doing. Not only was he an amazing, awe-inspiring, seemingly effortless player, he always dressed stylishly.

It’s hard to sum up his style without using descriptors like “elegant” and “jangly” and “English.” His playing is similar to The Pretenders’ late, great James Honeyman-Scott’s and Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, with maybe some Johnny Thunders thrown in. His eclectic influences include, among others, T. Rex, Motown, Nile Rodgers, Bert Jansch, Rory Gallagher, and The Stooges’ James Williamson. He told Pitchfork:

I was pretty young when I bought my first record — nine, I think. I got “Jeepster” by T.Rex on a 45rpm 7”. It was a cool start and the band were my first love, but the truth is I got it because the label had a great photo of Marc Bolan and Mickey Finn on it, so I was snagged by that. I was really into the pop singles of the day, which were all the U.K. glam stuff: Roxy Music, Bowie, the Sweet, everything…

I got into Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges because a friend of mine who was a little older, Billy Duffy, now of the Cult, heard me playing a riff I’d written, and he kept saying that it sounded like James Williamson from the Stooges, who I had never heard. There were quite a few guys in my neighborhood who played guitar and hung out together, sort of competitive, but a very healthy scene. I was one of about five or six teenage boys, and we all had our own thing. One guy was really into Neil Young, another was into Nils Lofgren, another Pete Townshend and [Free’s] Paul Kossoff, and I was into Rory Gallagher, and then I discovered Johnny Thunders in a big way.

Marr used to appear to dislike doing interviews. I remember two dullard American journalists for Creem and Spin who just did not get Morrissey and Marr’s Mancunian sarcasm and humor. Marr would wear cool sunglasses and fabulous threads and let Morrissey do most of the talking, creating an aura of mysteriousness as well as Jimmy Page ever did. But these days, especially promoting his excellent first solo album The Messenger (the one we’ve waited for for a few decades) he is wonderfully open and chatty.
 

 
Above, NME’s 2013 Godlike Genius Award winner Johnny Marr recently told NME about the guitar he conned Sire Records’s head honcho Seymour Stein into buying for him in New York—a cherry red Gibson ES-355—and how he wrote The Smiths classics “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “Girl Afraid” on it in a single afternoon:
 

 
Bonus clip: Johnny Marr makes a cameo appearance on ‘Portlandia’

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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06.18.2013
07:17 pm
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