MARK SIMPSON.com

…asks OUT in a preamble to an interview with the falsetto pop singer who dodges labels:

The musician, whose debut single, “Grace Kelly,” earned him comparisons to Freddie Mercury, has made a fine art of dodging the question of whether he’s gay, straight, or something in between, but the more he ducks and weaves, the more pertinent-and persistent-the question becomes. Is he being coy or calculating? Is he part of a new generation of artists who feel able to divorce their sexuality from their music, or does he reflect a more typical (and dispiriting) scenario? George Michael, Morrissey, and Elton John have all been here, coming out only after their careers had peaked or when events forced their hand. Is Mika just the 21st-century version of Mozza?

She should be so lucky.

More to the point, I wasn’t aware that Morrissey had ‘come out’ as Elton John. Or gay, for that matter.

It’s precisely because Moz’s career hasn’t ‘peaked’ that people think he’s ‘come out’. Actually, all that’s happened is that he’s come back. The commercial success of his return in the last few years - much greater than any he had with The Smiths - has led to people paying him attention who never took the time before. Oh look! ‘Ringleader of the Tormentors’ has some saucy lines in it that seem to suggest bumming! Hold the presses! Morrissey has come out as a big gayer!

As anyone who’s been paying attention since the early 80s can tell you (if they’ve got their teeth in), Morrissey was never ‘in’. His lyrics and his album sleeves and his sensibility were, from the very beginning, outrageously, molestingly direct. Much more so, arguably, than if he had announced he was ‘gay’ on John Craven’s Newsround.

His blatantly non-straight, highly sexual, non-specific sensibility led to all kinds of problems for The Smiths and helped to prevent their crossover into the mainstream - particularly in the US market. In interviews Morrissey never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. He simply refused, heroically, to come out (with his hands up) and say ‘yes, you’re absolutely right, I’m GAY- that’s me in a sequinned nutshell that is’ - despite repeated attempts to get him to do just that. It’s a heroic refusal that, as far as I’m aware, he continues to make.

The point of much his art - and its genius - has been to try and escape the tedious, literal-minded and terribly un-sexy discourse of ’sexuality’. He’s come closer to doing that than almost any artist. It’s why I’ve dubbed him - only slightly hyperbolically - possibly the greatest lyricists of desire ever.

Though this isn’t necessarily something that’s made him terribly happy.

As I put it in ‘Celibate cries’ in Saint Morrissey:

Perhaps, as many people appear to be convinced, Morrissey is simply lying. Perhaps secretly he is the life and soul of Elton John’s hot-tub parties, has his own booth at Heaven nightclub, possesses Europe’s largest collection of peaked caps, and has a live-in boyfriend who is Kylie Minogue’s personal stylist and colonic-irrigationist. (Funnily enough, no one ever seems to think that Morrissey’s “really” covering up a life of secret heterosexual bliss, even though being outed as straight, i.e. post-Seventies Bowie, would probably be much more embarrassing for him).

But if Morrissey is just fooling us, just “living a lie,” how do you explain his work? How do you explain the obvious, undeniable, massive, throbbing sublimation not just of eros but life into his songs? Why, in other words, would this pathologically, paralytically, criminally shy creature bother to get up on the stage and sing at all?

Maybe Moz will one day do what everyone appears to want him to do so much they are pretending he already has - and marry Graham Norton.

But if/when Moz does, like the outlaws in the old cowboy movies, make it easy on himself and turn himself in, it will almost certainly mark his retirement as an artist.

Saint Morrissey has been published in Finland by rather tasteful, rather arty publisher Sammakko.

Proving that the Moz-virus is no respecter of national boundaries St Moz has also been translated into Greek, Bulgarian and American.

‘That’s all very well,’ I hear you mutter at the back, ‘but when will it be translated into English?’

[Originally appeared here 10/1/07

First the Tory party, now the BBC. Is there any daggy British institution that isn’t scrabbling for a sweaty piece of Mozza’s gold lamé shirt, like an especially wild-eyed fan at the end of a gig?

You can hardly have escaped the news that, after last year’s grinding nadir of Daz Sampson, the rapping metalwork teacher, BBC Eurovision was “in talks” with rap-loathing Morrissey about writing (but not performing) this year’s UK entry.

Which is probably the point. Like Tory leader David Cameron’s incessant Moz-mentioning last year, it’s the perfect way to rebrand. Tired? Boring? Totally lacking in credibility? Call Morrissey! It can’t be long before Prince Charles beats a path to Morrissey’s door pleading to use Irish Blood English Heart as the new national anthem.

Why is Morrissey’s star riding so high? Why is the man once so reviled and mocked, banned from daytime Radio 1 and pilloried in the tabloids, now so vaunted he was recently voted Britain’s Greatest Living Cultural Icon That Doesn’t Work With Small Furry Animals? (He came second after David Attenborough in the BBC’s “cultural icons” poll.)

Partly, it’s because he survived. Even Moz-loathers respect the fact that he hasn’t been defeated by them. Partly, it’s generational. Whether they know it or not, whether they admit it or not, Morrissey keeps the keys to the hearts of the 80s generation under his silk pillows. The generation that is now listening to Radio 2 (or is the voice of it in the case of famous Moz-fan Jeremy Vine), watching Question Time - and editing newspapers.

But mostly it is because Morrissey has never sold out - in a world where selling out is now the whole bloody point. Which makes him an object of enormous curiosity. He is a superbrand that has never realised its “potential” - so others want to do it for him. Oh, and he writes brilliant pop songs. Unlike most in the limelight today, he just HAS earned it yet, baby.

But will he write “a song for Europe”? Well, it’s not impossible. Not only is this little Englander now something of a Europhile (he recently fell in love with Rome), Morrissey himself was the first to suggest the idea of Eurovision, quipping last year: “I was horrified but not surprised to see the UK fail. Why don’t they ask me?” After all, for much of his childhood he wanted to be Sandie Shaw, Britain’s first Eurovision winner in 1967 with ‘Puppet on a String’, and he bombarded her with fan letters. Eerily, the first Smiths first single was called ‘Hand in Glove’. (Even more eerily, this was a song Morrissey then persuaded Shaw to cover - resulting in Shaw imitating Morrissey imitating her on Top of the Pops).

Either way, Morrissey is probably the last person in Britain who really, really cares about pop music enough to really care about Eurovision.

Johnny Morrissey was runner-up.

Which is, along with ’sixteen clumsy and shy’, the story of his life.  Always running-up, never quite arriving. 

All things considered, it’s probably just as well no one took any notice of me and he didn’t win.  David Attenborough’s acceptance speech made me realise - after I woke up - how wrong it would have been for Morrissey to have been handed such a gong.  It would have meant it was all over - that he now belonged to everyone and no-one.  That bearded unnaturalist Bill Oddie’s anti-Mozza outburst was worth a thousand such popularity awards. 

The main thing is: he beat McCartney and Bowie into third and fourth place.   

Moz is now officially Britain’s Greatest Living Cultural Icon That Isn’t a TV Presenter.  Britain’s Greatest Living Cultural Icon That People Queue Up To See Live.  Britain’s Greatest Living Cultural Icon That Doesn’t Perform With Small Furry Animals. 

Britain’s Greatest Living Cultural Icon That Actually Is Iconic.

Morrissey is one of the three finalists in BBC2’s ‘Living Icon’ middle-class popularity contest.

He’s up against David hush-we-don’t-want-to-frighten-the-gorillas Attenborough and Sir Paul twist-and-shout McCartney.

Now, all such contests are silly by definition, even and perhaps especially when they appear on BBC2.  But given the strategic use of the word ‘icon’ I think it needs to be pointed out that the competition is already over as only one of the finalists actually meets the competition’s stated criteria.

David Attenborough is a lovely chap that has taught us so much about creepy crawlies and humming birds over the decades and everyone likes him and everyone is in favour of small furry creatures and big blue planets.  But this is why he shouldn’t win.  He’s our extremely nice, very concerned posh elderly uncle in safari shorts that knows a great deal about zebra-dung and how to make us excited about it, but he’s not an icon. 

As for Sir Paul, whatever his importance forty years ago, he’s now merely a celebrity going through a spectacularly messy divorce involving flying prosthetics.  I suspect that even he occasionally forgets what he actually became famous for.  Icons have to inspire not affection but devotion.  And can you imagine anyone invading the stage to throw themselves at Macca now?  Aside from a paramedic, an accountant or someone serving a writ from his ex.

Which leaves us with Mozza.  Someone whom people do still regularly throw themselves at onstage, in their own time, despite the onset of middle-age and a middling last album.

He’s self-evidently the only finalist who is and was deserving of the term ‘icon’.  In fact, he’s the only performer around anywhere today who commands the kind of devotion that dead stars achieve, or deserve.  It doesn’t matter whether you think his voice sounds like someone having their legs sawed off, or whether you hate his dated hairdo – whether you like it or not Morrissey is an Iconically Iconic Icon.  So there.

Why?  Well, I could tell you to go and see him in concert or borrow a copy of ‘Saint Morrissey’ (which is at least a way of declaring my interest), but I suspect you don’t have the time or the neuroses, so instead I’ll just say that he’s the only person mad enough to have spent his whole life, nay his whole being, becoming an icon – and once he managed that, actually remaining one.  Unlike Bowie (who didn’t make it to the final three) he never cashed in his chips.  He never clocked off.  He never became a ‘brand’.  He stayed true to the myth.  Imprisoned in it.  It was a great, epic, very foolish, very costly sacrifice. 

So the least you could do is let him win this bloody ‘icon’ contest (by voting here by Monday). 

Mind, if Moz did win he’d probably peevishly turn it down on the grounds that he’s not actually ‘living’.