marksimpson.com

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

Until last year I thought pop was a completely spent force.  Oh, there were some nice bands around with nice tunes and some nice haircuts, but pop as a total art form was pooped.  Along with pop culture.  It was just another Facebook app.

And then along came the New York songwriter-turned-singer that the press loves to dub ‘bizarre’.  2009 was indubitably The Year of Gaga, and not just because she had a string of blockbuster international hits, but because they were the instantly unmistakable product of a ‘kooky’ young woman who is actually completely in control of her work and vision.  And her own aesthetic.  Hence perhaps the wishful-thinking sightings of a penis.  This chick doesn’t need a dick – she has a real one.

Last night at the Brits (where she performed acoustic versions of ‘Telephone’ and ‘Dance in the Dark’, styled by Miss Haversham saluting Marie Antoinette ) she won a rare three gongs.  She deserved much more.  And a much longer set.  (It was rumoured to have been cut down by anxious Brits producers because she kept changing her plans.)

Gaga has, almost single-handedly, resurrected mainstream, High Street pop music – or at least made it seem like it’s alive again.  She’s even made postmodernism seem almost… modern again.  That she does it with a look and startling pop promos that play so entertainingly with the deathly, garish iconography of fashion and contemporary celebrity culture is all the more remarkable.  Yes it’s a kind of galvanic motion – those promos often look like Helmut Newton zombie  flicks – but boy, this is shocking fun.  Besides, that’s the nature of the twitching/tweeting human subject in a mediated, hyper-consumerist age.

Sorry to go on, but Gaga manages to be truly pop, and yet is a true artist.  She churns out crowd-pleasing dance-floor tracks that stomp on the competition, but there’s also a winsome melancholy and vulnerability behind the… Poker Face.

Some hasten to mention the ‘M’ word to put Gaga in her place.  But aside from moments of hilarious brilliance such as ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Vogue’ I was never much of a Madonna fan, even before she found the Kabala and I’m-not-Gay Ritchie.  Maybe it’s early-onset dementia, but I feel differently about Gaga.  Rather than see her as a Madonna knock-off, I see her as a more fully-realised Madonna.  She’s the Madonna Madonna wanted us to take her for (and legions of gays did).

And it’s not as if Gaga doesn’t pay homage.  ‘Dance in the Dark’, which Gaga performed at the Brits, is probably my favourite track from The Fame.  It’s very 1980s HiNRG – with a talky bridge that is a touching tribute to Madge’s Vogue.  It’s actually gayer than Vogue, which is quite something.  You can almost smell the poppers.  And I don’t even like poppers.

Gaga, a dedicated follower of fashion, dedicated her Brits performance to her friend Alexander McQueen, who died last week.  I don’t like eulogies, but I did rate his work.  He was a genuinely free spirit, a gay bohemian of the kind that almost died out in the 1980s (and which Gaga is clearly inspired by).  That he seems to have taken his own life suggests that it wasn’t easy fighting history, or fashion houses.

I never met Lee, but we did have a flirty fax correspondence in the late 1990s when I was still in my thirties.  His opening gambit was ‘we met once in DTPM a couple of years ago’.  DTPM was a London gay techno club where all the muscle boys went and took off their shirts and downed masses of drugs, dancing the night away, so of course I should have met him at DTPM – and forgotten about it.  But I never did because I never went there.  Or anywhere, really.

In the course of our thermal-paper correspondence (which I think I still have somewhere, now fading away into blankness)  he asked me, in a handwritten scrawl on Givenchy headed notepaper, to marry him. I don’t know how serious he was, but I declined, pointing out I wasn’t really the marrying kind.  This was true, but it was even truer that he wasn’t really my type.  Which is a sad reflection on me, and perhaps on male homosexuality.  I suspect Lee was often told by gay men he wasn’t ‘their type’.

Either way, I could have done much, much worse.  And of course, I did.

By Mark Simpson

(Edited from a piece that originally appeared the Independent on Sunday in July 1997, titled ‘Now the end is near’)

Only a Michael Jackson gig could begin with a ten-minute computer-generated sci-fi video which obviously cost more than most artists can muster for an album.

The film beamed on to the three giant screens at Wembley, the first leg on MJ’s current tour of Britain, show a golden android getting into a capsule and then riding a big-dipper track at high speed through pop culture, art and the last thirty years of history – the moon landings, little Michael performing ABC, Nixon, hunger and war in Africa, tall skinny Michael in ‘Wannna Be Startin’ Somethin’’, the Berlin Wall coming down, macho Michael in Bad. And then, on the vast stage with a large bang and a flash, out steps the android and takes off his mask. It’s the King of Pop!

Michael Jackson, you see, is the present, the past and the future. He’s our connection with the looking glass world of media: he is the man in the mirror. His-story is our story. Michael Jackson is all human culture. Moondancing.

All the same, few things could be as uncool in Britain today as admitting you like Michael Jackson. You can wear slip-on shoes. You can watch A Question of Sport. You can even drink lager and black – but don’t ever, ever admit that you like Michael Jackson. American, inauthentic, corporate, sincere, tacky, irony-free and no sense of modesty whatsoever, MJ is the antithesis of Britpop – the great Satan to Britpop’s fundamentalism.

When uber-cool Jarvis Cocker made his now legendary stage invasion at last year’s Brit awards, interrupting the King of Pop’s ascension into heaven serenaded by a choir of angelic children during a vast performance of ‘Earth Song’, he was supported not so much by revulsion at the (dropped) child-abuse allegations but by a much stronger feeling: revulsion at an American taking themselves so seriously at the Brit Awards.

And yet, Jarvis’ mooning might possibly have been inspired by  jealousy. MJ’s performance of ‘Earth Song’ (containing probably the best and most bathetic pop lyric ever: ‘And what about the elephants?’) did steal the show and really was a religious experience. Yes, it was astonishingly arrogant, tasteless, blasphemous and doolally, but then the best pop always is.

Brit-pop – despite its much-heralded demise – still has a stranglehold on British pop music, and is a highly reactionary music form, harking back to the Sixties sound of all-white bands like the Beatles, but surgically removing any of the R&B sound that informed so much of the ‘Fab Four’s’ music. Oasis are not the Beatles again: they’re the Beatles minus Chuck Berry. And MJ, despite his kabuki-mime pallor, is very ‘black’ in the sense that most of his music is rhythmically orientated.

Though of course the basis of MJ’s brand that he mixes his American blackness with American whiteness until you can hardly distinguish the two: ‘Black or White’ is as much a question as a statement – like asking how you like your coffee. (Funnily enough, it was probably precisely because his skin-colour changed that many white British critics felt able to attack Jackson.)

So I’d love to report that the latest show is brilliant – but in fact it’s an epic, grinding disappointment. The intro video was by far the best part of it. Anti-climax is probably inevitable when you go to see the most famous man in the world. But there’s also a kind of pointlessness to it. MJ is so fantastically plastic, so extravagantly synthetic that there is nothing really added by going to see him ‘live’ and watching him on a giant video juke-box with thousands of others in a sports arena. In fact, something is taken away. MJ is a simulacrum, a copy for which no original exists. The image is the man, not the tiny imposter jigging around on stage between the video screens the size of football pitches – and beneath the towering Stalinist statue of himself.

It’s precisely because MJ is so phoney, so artificial, so mass-produced, processed and pre-digested that he has been so popular. MJ is the Big Mac of pop music – scorned by faddists and know-betters but very popular with people who want something fast, fun, and nutrition-free that gives them a buzz. Most people are uncool, thank god, and quite happy that way.

But for all his popularity with the masses, the MJ brand, like Big Macs, is clearly in decline. This tour has failed to sell out and there isn’t anything approaching the ‘Jacksonmania’ that has greeted previous ones. His last couple of albums have been less than impressive and the kiddie-fiddling charges can’t have helped. But perhaps the real problem for MJ Inc is beyond the MD’s control. The world’s love affair with Americana has peaked. When the Cold War ended and the Stalinist statues were pulled down and replaced with McDonald’s golden arches, people stopped dreaming the American dream. It had become an inescapable reality.

Michael Jackson, the greatest embodiment of that dream, the creature of consumerism, individualism and aspirationalism, the most famous man who never lived, is also a victim of his own success. Hence the hubristic use of that blockbuster intro video and Ceaucescu-esque statues on the cover of the History album and next to the stage on this tour is eerily apt. Those who try to embody history usually end up victims of it: toppling over beneath the weight of their own contradictions. And besides, Jacksonism isn’t much of a replacement for Jacksonmania.

Put another way, Michael’s audience has grown up while he, valiantly has not. At Wembley, while MJ cavorted with some female dancers on-stage, a fan behind me shouted out: ‘They’re a bit old for you, aren’t they Michael?’ You really know the world’s changed when MJ fans get cynical.

© Mark Simpson 2009

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.

Mark Simpson ponders the trouble the two Georges, Boy and Michael, have been getting in lately in this month’s Out:

What is it about middle-aged queer British pop stars from the ’80s? Why can’t they settle down, keep their noses clean, their peckers zippered, and their faces out of the papers? More precisely, what is it about middle-aged queer British pop stars from the ’80s named George?

George Alan O’Dowd, slightly better known as Boy George, former Culture Club front/frock man, starts 2009 being “banged up” — as we call prison sentences in the U.K. — for attacking and imprisoning a Norwegian male escort he’d invited to his home.

Read the article in full here.

So I’m a year late.  Not bad going for someone in their forties.

Every now and then, you will need a friend for… Love Reaction

A distinctly not-for-profit tribute to dance genius Bobby O, the late great Divine, synth-scallywags New Order, and my American writer pal and former alt-pop star Steve Zeeland, recorded late-night in his living-room in Bremerton, WA a couple of years back.

For all Steve’s production skill, there’s no disguising that the vocalist isn’t as talented as Divine.

But he’s almost as scary.

Mark Simpson shines a light on The Rolling Stones’ smart stupidity

‘I refer to certain objects of no use to farmers,” said Judge Block, speaking at the Horsham Ploughing and Agricultural Society’s annual dinner in 1967 (a wild affair, no doubt). “I may say they are of no use to man or beast, unless they are otherwise dealt with by being ground very small to surface roads or being cut down in size for other uses. I refer to the stones. I looked up what Shakespeare had to say about these things, and in Julius Caesar I found, ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things.’”

Judge Block had presided over Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ first but certainly not last drugs court case that summer. Perhaps because of his apposite surname, he was right in his judgement about the Stones but so wrong in his sentence and valuation of them that he will always be remembered as a silly old git.

It’s one of the conundrums of the Rolling Stones that it is impossible to work out whether their lack of anything much to say is their greatest strength or the greatest weakness. Certainly their intellectual and emotional anomie has helped them stay unfeasibly cool for most of the last four decades, especially in the last few years. It’s as if the insolent, senseless things ground and cut down not just blockish judges but the entire culture to size and turned it into merely a royal road for their bandwagoning career. Watching footage of them from the mid-Sixties today the most shocking thing about them is how modern they look; how much the world around them has changed and how little they have.

Hence one of the more charming aspects of Mark Paytress’s The Rolling Stones Off the Record (Omnibus), a chronological history of the Stones in the form of a collection of quotes by and about the band from the early Sixties to the early Noughties, is that “the unprecedented, incontestable, inexhaustible purveyors of spontaneous combustion The Rollin’ Stones” (as an early small ad in Melody Maker described them) themselves are, on paper, rather tedious. Even in their rebellious heyday of the Sixties, in which they became the definitive rock ‘n’ roll band and also, as a careless afterthought, invented glam, punk and pop promos, they appear surprisingly lacking in insight or interest either in their own phenomenon or the world they have forced to fellate them – and who thanks them for the privilege.

Like judge Block, the squarest bit-players in the narrative of the Stones have the most interesting and prescient things to say here. Michael Jagger’s headmaster at Dartford Grammar wrote a school report in 1960 which turned out to be a prophecy of what was in store for us all for the next 40 years: “Jagger is a lad of good general character though he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something… he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing and Music.” Sir Michael Jagger would persist into the 21st century in his musical camping, social climbing and sexual canoeing.

You can’t get much squarer than mothers, and Mrs Eva Jagger knew a thing or two about her son: “He was a very adventurous boy when he was younger, but then later he became interested in money. It always struck us as odd. Money doesn’t usually interest little boys, but it did Mike. He didn’t want to be a pilot or an engine driver – he wanted a lot of money!” (Michael studied accountancy at the LSE until he hit on another, much better, way of getting his hands on lots of dough.)

Refreshingly, mothers don’t have much invested in feeding the rock ‘n’ roll myth. Mrs Doris Richards: “With six aunts he [Keith was a bit spoiled… He was a bit of a mother’s boy really. When he started school, he used to get panic-stricken if I wasn’t there waiting for him when they all came out.” When Keith claims that “rock ‘n’ roll got me into being one of the boys. Before that I just got me ass kicked all over the place,” Doris hilariously corrects him: “Actually, he was too sensitive to be a Ted.”

Mrs Kathleen Perks (mother of Bill Wyman): “I can’t remember him ever losing his temper. We found out later that when something annoyed Bill, he would go up to his bedroom and read the Bible. He was closely connected with our local church, and a member of the choir for 10 years.”

Sometimes prescience can border on tragicomedy. Miss Louisa Jones, mother of Brian Jones: “When he was 12 Brian joined the school orchestra and learned clarinet… one thing he really excelled at was diving, although he wasn’t particularly interested in swimming itself.” Jones was to drown in his own swimming pool in 1969 shortly after leaving the group, disillusioned.

Brian Jones was the nearest thing the Stones had to an intellectual, which of course was why he had to go. Like Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, he was the band’s founder, ideologue and bad conscience. In 1964 he offered the Evening Standard an extremely sharp analysis of why the Stones provoked “gibbering rage” among so many adult males: “They seem to have a sort of personal anxiety because we are getting away with something they never dared to do. It’s a sexual, personal, vain thing. They’d always been taught that being masculine meant looking clean, cropped and ugly.”

The Stones’ UK TV debut provoked a bulging mailbag: “The whole lot of you should be given a good bath,” wrote one apoplectic viewer, “then all that hair should be cut off. I’m not against pop music when it’s sung by a nice clean boy like Cliff Richard, but you are a disgrace. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country.” This assessment proved to be entirely correct.

Jones had a clear understanding of the cultural importance of the Stones and the revolution – inversion, in fact – of social values they represented. “Our real followers have moved on with us – some of those we like most are the hippies in NY, but nearly all of them think like us and are questioning some of the basic immoralities which are tolerated in present-day society: the war in Vietnam, persecution of homosexuals, illegality of abortion and drug taking. All these things are immoral. We are making our own statement – they are making more intellectual ones.” Guess who lasted longer?

Marianne Faithfull offers the most interesting emotional insight: “The day I was introduced to them I thought to myself, ‘What a shame.’ I didn’t feel a thing except sorrow for the Stones.” Of course, this proved near-fatal for Marianne who was sucked into their senseless, sensual world. (According to Tom Driberg, W H Auden sidled up to Marianne Faithfull and blurted: “When you’re smuggling drugs, d’you pack them up your arse?”)

Mick Jagger offstage has not really been able to articulate the spellbinding, Satanic personality that could be seen onstage; he is no Morrisseyan wit. He certainly had his moments though. In 1964, when the Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s TV show, Hollywood Palace, Martin sent them up with some cheap scripted gags: “Their hair is not that long. It’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows…”. Jagger retorted: “It’s nice to have you on our show, Mr Martin.”

He has denied however that he feels any disappointment that he isn’t regarded as an intellectual. “It’s very nice to be just a body,” he said in 1978. “I feel like a stripper when I go on stage. I have a great sympathy for girls that are sex objects. There’s nothing more sleazy than an old stripper!”

Certainly it’s a cunning strategy. Asked how he had managed to do the same Mick Jagger act for so many years: “It’s a very English approach. We were brought up to believe that everything you do is a joke, that you’re only an amateur and you don’t ever claim to be any good at it. And that if you do get success, it’s only by luck.” A shrewd formula for surviving British resentment.

Hence his impatience with seriousness. On the Falklands War: “It’s really none of my business.” On The Smiths’ album Meat is Murder going straight to No 1: “I’m not sure I wanna hear a whole album about meat.” On his abandoned biography: “It was just boring trying to remember everything. It was just… ‘Euchhh’.” Arguably Jagger’s most famous and telling line is the one delivered to a protesting East London petrol station attendant in the early hours of the morning: “We’ll piss anywhere, man.”

But the last word should be left to Keith Richards, original punk rocker and probably the “real” Stone: “We certainly didn’t wanna be rock ‘n’ roll stars. That was just too tacky.”

(Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 21 September 2003)

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008