marksimpson.com

…for the shoplifters’ price of £3.69.

(American readers can download it here for $5.74.)

The critically-acclaimed, innovative – and egotistical -  ‘psycho-bio’ of pop’s most elusive, most adored, most charming and most alarming front-man is now available for instant download on Amazon Kindle.

“The most incisive biography of Morrissey yet published” – James Maker, “The Fifth Smith”

“Simpson is funny, clever, honest, irreverent and egotistical: quite the match for Morrissey. More biographies should be written this way.” – Independent on Sunday Books of the Year

“Saint Morrissey is a cracking read, almost an instructional handbook on how to develop, deal with, and finally escape an obsession.” – The Boston Phoenix

“A provocative and precocious read…. Smiths fans will love it, and even Morrissey himself might arch an eyebrow in appreciation.” – Time Out

“Like his subject, incurable super-fan Simpson is constantly amusing and provocative…. A book Morrissey will claim to hate, but secretly love. – Mojo

“The erudite Simpson gives a compelling account his youthful – and adult – fascination with the bard of Whalley Range/Beverly Hills… A nimble essay which gives fandom a good name.” – Guardian Books of the Year

There’s a naked man standing laughing in your dreams.
You know who it is, but you don’t like what it means.

A number of people have forwarded Morrissey’s pubes to me. (For which, many thanks.)

I thought I could get away with not discussing the Moz minge, but this Red Hot Chili Peppers pastiche, nostalgic vinyl taking the place of stuffed socks, which appears on the inside sleeve of Morrissey’s new single ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’, has generated a lot of commentary, some amused, some not, and some, such as Paul Flynn in the Guardian, citing it as ‘the latest sign of artistic decline’.

But all of it suggesting Morrissey’s curlies cannot be ignored.

It’s funny how Morrissey manages to repeatedly surprise people with his consistent, insistent coquettishness. Only last year, legions were scandalized when that picture taken in the early 90s of His Mozness’ naked hairy arse with ‘YOUR ARSE’N'ALL’ scrawled across it in Magic Marker appeared in a booklet for his Greatest Hits collection. Some fans (mostly Americans) complained, ‘So gross! This must mean he’s, like, totally gay!’

But Morrissey, odd, reclusive creature that he is, has never exactly been a shrinking violet. His work has always had a naughty, ‘cheeky’, exhibitionist side. As he sang in The Smiths: ‘I’d like to drop my trousers to the Queen – every sensible child will know what this means’. His first single featured a close-up of naked male gay porn star’s bubble-butt. His first album had a shot of the torso of a naked male hustler on it. (Like all the artwork during his Smiths period, it was all selected and directed and probably even pasted up by him.)

After The Smiths split, he became his own cover star and was to be found hugging his topless solo self on his 1997 ‘Best Of’ collection.

And while he may have once criticized her shamelessness, Moz’s outrageous ‘November Spawned a Monster’ promo in 1990 out-Madonna-ed Madonna, featuring him writhing in the desert in a skimpy see-through mesh blouse that somehow keeps slipping off – perhaps because he appears to be being bummed by an odd-shaped boulder.

On-stage he pole-dances around his songs often ending on his back with his legs in the air, obligingly lifted towards the auditorium, while yodelling. Even today, it’s still an absolute and legal requirement of all tickets sales that Moz strips off his sweat-soaked shirt at least once every show and throw it into the crowd, who instantly rend it to tiny fragrant shreds, which they then appear to eat. If Morrissey doesn’t get his tits out for the lads and lasses you’re fully entitled for a full refund, I believe. It’s always been a flagrantly, probably pathologically sexual thing between Moz and his fans. Though as he’s got older and thicker around the midriff the pole-dancing, (though apparently not the yodeling) does get a bit more awkward.

Oh, and the naked Moz showing us his shaved armpit shot by Eamonn McCabe (which seems to be an update of the famous Narcissus statue by Cellini) used on the jacket of Saint Morrissey – partly to undermine the title – originally appeared on the cover of the NME in 1988 and on a big, fold-out, blue-tac-to-your-sweaty-teen-boy-bedroom-wall poster inside.

Today’s naked Moz looks very different, which is only natural since he’s now nearly 50 – though of course ageing naturally is the height of unnaturalness these days. But the boyish exhibitionism is largely unchanged. Yes, he has the body of a middle-aged male celebrity who scandalously refuses to hire a personal fitness trainer (even if one or two of the chaps in his employ look as if they’d rather be on a ten mile run). But he’s also showing us that inside the body of a pub landlord from County Mayo is still a skinny lonely boy from Stretford, nakedly demanding our love. With a seven inch pop single where his manhood should be. That’s how people don’t grow up.

If you look closely – and clearly I have – this jokey pic isn’t really very funny.  Like ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’, it’s sadly, proudly defiant. It’s Morrissey’s family portrait.  This is what his love-life looks like.  It’s all here: Pop music. His band-mates. His fans (we’re looking at him again – he’s that naked man laughing and crying in our dreams). And, centre of shot, perhaps his most enduring relationship of all: the one he has with his hair.

Both ends.

‘Only stone and steel accept my love…’

Or can handle it.  ‘Throwing My Arms Around Paris’ is the swooning new single from the (Moz-cara wearing) old groaner, full of his curiously uplifting despair throwing its empty arms around… his audience again. The perfect companion piece to last year’s bottom-spanking ‘All You Need is Me’, a song that seems to address his lovers and detractors at the same time.

Because of course, they’re one and the same: ‘You don’t like me but you love me, either way your wrong’. (In the vid he briefly uses his tambourine as an arch halo.)

That’s two good tracks from the forthcoming Years of Refusal album already.

Which is two more than on Ringleader of the Tormentors.

[youtube n6oJALmdgJE

…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.