MARK SIMPSON.com

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

By Mark Simpson,  Nerve.com, February 22, 2001)

Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers, may have won only a few consolation prizes at the Grammys yesterday [2001, but clearly the white rapper behind “The Marshall Mathers LP” has created the Album of the Year in every other sense. Em is the hottest property not just in the music business, but in pop culture itself, and, like Big Gay Al, aka Elton John, who sang a duet with him on stage, no one - the fans, the press, the critics, the police, the Vice President’s wife - can leave him alone.

Especially, of course, the gay rights activists, two hundred of whom picketed the Staples Center in protest at his “violently homophobic lyrics” (and what they saw as gay Elton’s “betrayal”).

Afterwards, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation solemnly expressed “gratitude” that Em was not awarded Album of the Year, but complained that the three minor Grammys awarded Eminem showed that “Academy members were willing to place their stamp of approval on lyrics that promote hate, prejudice and violence.”

Amen. But the rather important point that the protestors appear to have overlooked is, Sure, Em’s music is violently homophobic. It also happens to be violently homosexual. The two facts are not necessarily in contradiction of each other. Actually, in the world beyond the Care Bear sexuality of GLAAD, they’re inseparable. It might even be the case that the Grammy didn’t go to Em precisely because his lyrics are too queer.

To understand this you just have to pay attention to the music instead of the press releases. Sodomy never sounded so seductive, or seditious. When fellow Detroit rapping duo Insane Clown Posse ‘wittily’ renamed Slim Shady “Slim Anus” on their last album, the squeaky blond bombshell responded quickly and explicitly. “Slim Anus? You damn right Slim Anus / I don’t get fucked in mine like you two little flamin’ faggots,” he retorts on a track on “Marshall Mathers,” the CD that lost the Grammy. But then in the track “Ken Kaniff,” he all-too-enthusiastically impersonates the voices of the ICP frontmen engaging in lip-smacking fellatio complete with very convincing grunts and groans and backed by cheesy porno Muzak: “Fuck yeah! Suck it! That’s good!” (ICP have since placed a downloadable track on their website featuring an Eminem-on-poppers-soundalike getting reamed by his hip-hop producer, Dr. Dre.)

Am I the only one who got aroused by all this “homophobia”? I suspect not. After all, sodomy - and graphic sodomy at that - is really the only sex you’ll find on Em’s record-selling CD, whether in the form of invitations to the listener to “suck my fucking dick, you fucking faggot” or dismissing his critics as bitter queens: “He’s just aggravated because I won’t ejaculate in his ass.” If Em really is the “New Elvis,” it seems that “Jailhouse Rock” is his starting point (which would at least explain his prison punk look). Even when he leaves the violent sodomy alone for a moment and turns to romance, it’s of a rather queer kind, as in the hit single “Stan,” in which a fan sends a series of unrequited love letters to his rap-star hero - the song Eminem chose to duet with Elton John with at the Grammys.

Em himself “comes out” and acknowledges his obsession/passion in another skit on “Marshall Mathers” in which a furious record exec complains that he can’t sell his records because instead of rapping about his wide-screen TV, Eminem is “rapping about homosexuals!” (Of course, the joke here is that Eminem’s records “about homosexuals” could hardly sell better.)

Now, if all this “fuckin’ homo” stuff seems adolescent, that’s probably because it is. It’s meant to be. Adolescence is a time of hormonal anxiety about identity for boys, but nowadays it’s not just a phase, it’s a career. And what is it that boys are supposed to grow into these days? Masculine certainties have vanished, in many cases, along with dad, family and blue-collar jobs. The only certainty left to bastard boys like this is that they are “not a fag.” It’s a negative identity that can’t sustain a sense of self, let alone sustain one in a world which has made boys useless - i.e. faggots - by making mature masculinity redundant.

Rapismo like Eminem’s articulates that frustration, then soothes the anxiety the articulation produces. Eminem’s own story (now the stuff of legend) is instructive. A poor, pretty, blue-eyed white boy growing up in a depressed black area of Detroit without a dad, he left the house the definition of “different.” He claims that he was neglected by his mother, which she vigorously disputes. Perhaps the truth is that, like many sons of single mothers, he was spoilt and fussed over and then ended up hating his mother for turning him into a sissy: “I used to be mommy’s little angel at twelve” he sings in “I’m Back.”

To avoid complete emasculation, he rebelled against his mother and chose to be fathered by pop culture, in the form of hip-hop and the humongous phallus of black street culture. To Eminem (and other “shady” white boys of uncertain paternity from better homes) the world seems like a post-feminist nightmare where Mom is the law - and political correctness is merely “wash your mouth out with soap” writ large. He’s South Park’s Kyle, ten years down the line plus plenty of drugs and disappointment. In this world, homosexuality isn’t only emasculation and weakness, it’s also the ultimate machismo, and the ultimate rebellion against “bitches” - as well as a contradictory solution to the problem of being fatherless, easing as it does the ache for male intimacy. But easing that ache means acknowledging it. And that means weakness. So homosexuality has to be constantly “stabbed in the head,” to use one of Em’s more infamous lines, even as it is constantly being evoked.

Every stab just leads to another target. After all, homos are everywhere nowadays in pop culture. And the blatancy of male passivity in a world where males are sex objects only makes this “stabbing” more imperative - even when you’re not, like Eminem, a pretty bottle-blond boy with “cock-sucking lips” (to quote ICP) and more than a passing interest in having your picture taken. “All I see is sissies in magazines smilin’” groans Eminem. “Staring at my jeans, watching my genitals bulging / (Ooh!) That’s my motherfucking balls, you’d better let go of ‘em / They belong in my scrotum, you’ll never get hold of ‘em.” Look at the pictures of him in his book Angry Blonde (interesting spelling, that), skim past the one of him in blond pigtails to the ones where he is surrounded by a crowd of Shady clones looking at him with shining, hungry eyes. Has pop culture ever looked more disturbingly queer?

Slim Shady is famously a character Em invented to express his “dark thoughts.” But maybe Slim is himself just a screen. This is not to say that Mr. Mathers is “really gay” (just as he clearly isn’t “really straight”), but just “really fucked up.” Perhaps the “real” Em is as neurotic, mother-identified/mother-hating, homeless, vulnerable, narcissistic and passive (aggressive) as the lyrics and the picture of him on his album cover suggest. In other words, all the things that make a great star, from Elvis to Lennon to Cobain.

And, alas, he’s all the things that can make young men these days who will never be stars sad and sullen, and sometimes suicidal. A seventeen-year-old white Eminem fan in Devon, England recently threw himself in front of a train. Apparently he was depressed by the “dissing” he’d experienced from friends after a gay boy said he fancied him at a party. The liberal coroner thought the lad’s anxieties foolish and misplaced: “He appears to have been unusually worried over his sexual orientation which really should not affect people a great deal either way.”

Maybe. But Eminem and the sexually shady, not to say confused, world of white hip-hop show that such a preoccupation is anything but trivial for many boys today. It’s all they have left.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

BearForce1, Holland’s answer to Take That - which in turn was the UK’s answer to the Village People - have landed.

And make the Village People look, like, totally straight. Not to mention well-dressed.

Suddenly millions of straight men realise with horror where their studied furry ‘retrosexual’ ‘real guy’ look came from….

Gran Canaria.

Whitney had it all. The looks, the heritage and that elemental voice. So where did it all go so wrong? Mark Simpson on the diva who fell to earth

(Originally appeared in the Independent, 15 September 2002)

I was never a fan of Whitney Houston - it wasn’t necessary.

Whitney was something that simply happened to you, whether you took notice or not, like the weather - though if Whitney was the weather, it was always very, very sunny. Whitney was so blindingly, scorchingly successful in the 1980s and early 1990s, that she was pop music. She was the mainstream air that we all breathed, or at least the air that MTV, car and workplace radios conducted into our heads. Her debut album went double-platinum overnight. She then collected seven consecutive US number ones, outstripping the Beatles and Elvis. Not bad for a skinny 22-year-old black girl from New Jersey.

But then, as we were told over and over again, Whitney wasn’t just any skinny black girl from the wrong side of the Hudson: she was Soul Aristocracy, the daughter of Cissy Houston (acclaimed singer with The Sweet Inspirations, backing vocalist for Elvis), goddaughter of Aretha Franklin and niece of Dionne Warwick. But for all this pedigree, her Nefertitian looks and a voice like a fifth element that made earth, wind, fire and water seem insubstantial by comparison, the most striking, and possibly most irresistible, thing about Whitney has always been that it is very difficult to believe that she bothers to mean any of the words she sings, however well she sings them.

Except, that is, for one word: “I”. When Whitney sings the personal pronoun you are left in no doubt that this word means something very special indeed. Which is why her ballads are so funny and so terrifying all at once: “The grea-test love of all is hap-pen-ing to MEEEEEEEEEE!”. This is also why the country singer Dolly Parton’s earlier interpretation of “I Will Always Love You” with its delicate, charming, make-believe masochism had more soul than Whitney’s bullet-proof Kevlar version used in The Bodyguard (1992), the massive popularity of which confirmed her status as the world’s No 1 superstar (and favourite taped singer at funerals).

Mind you, the supersonic nuclear blast-wave of Ms Houston’s version - “IAEYAEYAEYEA!!!!!” - just flattens everything before it. Whitney’s voice didn’t need any soul; it was pure Will. Whitney is speaking a frightening truth here about romantic love: it’s a form of egotism. “I will always love you” is a stalking, psychotic declaration of a love for one’s own ability to love, regardless of all obstacles, such as, say, the beloved’s indifference. In fact, next to Ms Willpower’s transcendent egotism, that other bullying Mistress of the 1980s, Ms Blonde Ambition, is just a goofy backing dancer who got lucky.

But now, 10 years on, Whitney’s ego isn’t quite what it used to be. Nor is she, it turns out, quite so invulnerable. In the last decade she has suffered a legion of personal and professional disasters as messy as she used to be squeaky clean, and appears to be struggling with an alleged drug habit that many worry could overwhelm her completely.

But all this means she’s now interesting! And for something other than the sheer scale of her success and the preternatural power of her voice (which, it is rumoured, may anyway not be what it used to be).

A Channel 4 documentary, Whitney Houston: The True Story, broadcast this Tuesday, examines the rise and fall and rise - and possible final fall - of the Whitney Empire of the Ego, though, as you might hope, the programme focuses rather more on the fall, which pride seems, rather satisfyingly, to have gone before. The photographer for the cover of I’m Your Baby Tonight recounts how Whitney kept her the rest of her staff waiting on set 12 hours, and when she finally showed there was no apology, explanation or even embarrassment. A promoter recalls how a concert was cancelled 15 minutes before it was due to start. “There was no explanation and no suggestion of it being rescheduled,” he whines, like the mere mortal he is.

However, for those prone to the German vice (i.e. most of us) there’s plenty of shameful joy to be had. We hear about the jeers she received at the Soul Train Awards in 1989 from a black audience who felt she was too “white”. The violent, co-dependent but enduring marriage to “bad-boy” rapper Bobby Brown. The marijuana drug-bust in 2000 and her reported indignation that the drug laws might apply to her. The persistent accusations of lesbianism, even from her own husband. Her wraith-like appearance at the Michael Jackson anniversary concert in 2001. Her removal from the Academy Awards Ceremony in the same year by her old friend Burt Bacharah for allegedly forgetting the words to her songs (including “Over the Rainbow”?).

And perhaps most poignant of all, the Spin magazine journalist who witnessed a dazed-looking Ms Houston playing the piano - in a room which had no piano, and who opines that “the general consensus seems to be that she’s a complete junkie… There are [false stories every day about her having died, being on the brink of dying, having just checked in to hospital…”

Alas, with the exception of Whitney’s make-up artist who is touchingly loyal, there is a shortage of members of her inner circle dishing the dirt or anything at all. But then, as one forthright American female journalist puts it, “She’s the cash cow. Nobody wants to upset her.” The producer Sam Kingsley explains: “A number of people close to Whitney, including Whitney’s former manager, did agree to be interviewed but when they realised she hadn’t given her royal assent they quickly withdrew.”

Real revelations about Whitney’s private life are much more likely to appear in the tabloid press which possesses a chequebook large enough to wean embittered confidantes off Ms Houston’s monetary udders.

Perhaps no one has more stories and kisses to tell than Robyn Crawford, the childhood girl friend and close business associate assumed by many to have been Whitney’s lover since the early Eighties. “She wouldn’t speak to us at all,” says Kingsley. “She’s rumoured to have been given a big payoff, post Bobby Brown, which includes a silence clause.”

While Whitney may at her peak have come to represent a will even purer than her voice, it wasn’t purely her own. “Whitney” was a product of the ambition and determination of several people. Robyn, an intelligent, shrewd and imposing woman. Her mother Cissy, who never got the recognition for her own talents she felt she deserved (when Whitney’s career took off at the stripling age of 22, she reportedly told friends over and over again “and to think we’ve waited so many years for this to happen!”). And one flamboyant white man - the Svengali president of Arista Records Clive Davis.

Clive signed Whitney when she was just 19. He realised that Whitney possessed a great talent and could be a very successful recording artist but he also realised that she could be much more than that. She could be the biggest recording star in the world.

In Whitney Houston: The True Story, Kenneth Reynolds, marketing director at Arista Records, recounts: “Clive had a formula already. Whitney was just a talent to mould. She had to lose the gospel roots. The early version of ‘Saving All My Love’ sounded like the new Aretha Franklin. But Clive didn’t like it - ‘No, it’s too black’. Clive also complained that the cover of Whitney’s first album made her look ‘too ethnic’. He wanted her to look more like everyone else.”

So Whitney was put in blond wigs and colourful make-up that made her light-black skin look even lighter (in the video for “How Will I Know” she looks as if she is wearing a basket of dyed poodles on her head). But Clive Davis was proved right - Whitney became huge instead of just successful. She became pop music.

But by the end of the 1980s tastes were changing. Hip hop and R ‘n’ B, black music that wore its “ethnic” and “street” credentials on its sleeve, was the new pop - in other words, it was what white kids wanted.

Meanwhile, the US black community itself was beginning to resent Whitney’s success and what they saw as her “betrayal”. Hence her humiliation at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards, where she was called “Oreo” (an American biscuit which is black on the outside and white on the inside).

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that she ended up marrying the very next act up - rapper Bobby Brown - who had a reception as rapturous as hers had been the opposite. Bobby, known for his partying, seemed an unlikely match for Whitney. But perhaps that was the point. Rather than the nice girl seduced by the naughty Bobby from the Boston projects, “soul aristocracy” Whitney saw Bobby as her ticket to “ghetto fabulousness”.

Whatever the truth of this, Whitney began to become known as a party girl and the successful 1998 comeback (sometimes almost singalong) album My Love is Your Love, with guest appearances by a new generation of R ‘n’ B stars - and a promo video which depicted a 1970s party in the streets of Harlem - succeeded in relaunching Whitney’s credibility. However, it seems that there has been a price to pay for Whitney’s new fashionability and “improved” blackness - but then, suffering is supposedly good for the soul, and, now it seems, sales.

Whether that price includes, as some maintain, that elemental voice, will become clear with her new album, Just Whitney, scheduled for release at the end of the year. If it turns out that she has finally squandered her talent, it will be sad but perhaps understandable. Such a vast “gift” is undoubtedly also a curse. Squandering it might be the last act of will available to a very wilful lady called Whitney.

© Mark Simpson 2007

…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.

By Mark Simpson

(Independent on Sunday, 22 April 2007)

Of all the terrifying new weapons developed in the Second World War and unleashed upon an unsuspecting planet, the teenager was by far the most powerful. The supersonic shockwave of Fat Man and Little Boy was as nothing compared to that caused by dropping the teenager on Japan, Italy and Germany after their surrender - or Britain after her victory. American post-war global hegemony was guaranteed not by the Bomb but by the Teen.

Forget the Nuclear Age; the second half of the 20th century was the Teen Age.

Like the bomb, the teenager was an American invention. The Cold War might have turned out very differently if, instead of Los Alamos, Soviet spies had been installed at the offices of Seventeen magazine. Launched in a booming USA on the brink of global victory in 1944, the same year as the word “teenager” was coined, Seventeen was aimed at the consumer queens of tomorrow with disposable income to spend today. “Seventeen is your magazine, High School Girls of America - all yours!” proclaimed the first issue. “It is interested only in you - and everything that concerns, excites, annoys, pleases or perplexes you…” Features on Harry James, Frank Sinatra, a Hollywood gossip column, record reviews, a “First Date Quiz” and a regular slot called “Why Don’t Parents Grow Up?” did their best to prove it.

We’re all self-centred, celeb-struck American high school girls now (I certainly am). No one, least of all parents, is in danger of growing up. The dominant “adult” culture is teenage, and Seventeen’s 1940s editorial policy has been adopted by national newspapers. We all expect - nay, demand! - to be addressed intimately by a mass consumerism that is only interested in that wonderful unique thing that is YOU - and everything that concerns, excites, pleases or perplexes YOU. Teenitis, or deliberately, profitably arrested development, is the modern sensibility. In the doom-laden words of the curmudgeonly German Marxist Theodor Adorno, who fled Nazi Germany and found himself in 1940s Los Angeles, the satanic laboratory of consumerism: “All will be provided for, so that none may escape.”

The teenager was perhaps the first subject to be created almost entirely by marketing. Little wonder that in a post-war world built on the ruins of fascism and out of the American Dream of marketing and consumption (the Marshall Plan didn’t just fight the spread of Communism, it provided the US with vital markets for its consumer goods), the teenager became the master race. But if we’re all teenage now, is anyone a teenager any more? Particularly young people? Perhaps the teenager, at 63 years, is pushing retirement? Is there in fact anything “hot” or “cool” or even interesting, let alone rebellious, about teenagers any more?

Professor of Punk Jon Savage, perhaps wisely, doesn’t directly ask or address these questions in his scholarly new book on youthful excess, Teenage: the creation of youth 1875-1945 (Chatto), but proffers an answer of sorts by offering a history of the Teen Age not from 1945 to the present day, but from the late 19th century to 1945. Maybe it’s merely a way of allowing for another two or three volumes, but it seems to suggest that you now have to dig deep into the past to unearth something… alive. Savage claims convincingly enough in his introduction that while the teenage may have been a product invented in 1944, he/she was in development for at least half a century before that and that this is what his book aims to profile.

Savage begins with the 1870s teen Adam and Eve, Marie Bashkirtseff and Jesse Pomeroy. Marie Bashkirtseff was a dreamy 16-year-old girl in Nice whose blog-like diaries detailing her daily hopes and fears (before her youthful death) gained her world fame. Jesse Pomeroy of Massachusetts (whose plate looks alarmingly like Robbie Williams) gained fame aged 15 by killing and mutilating several young boys (a proto-Cho, though without semi-automatics and Quicktime). Savage, as befits his own punk moniker, argues that youth is about the eruption of the hormonal Id into the repressed adult world: “Bashkirtseff and Pomeroy symbolised the twin poles of youth: genius or monster, creator or destroyer of worlds… At stake was the future; would it be dream or nightmare, heaven or hell?”

This is also the question you find yourself asking of the huge 576 page volume in your hands. Along with, how much older will I be when I’ve finished it? Perhaps it’s another sign of my own incurable teenitis, but Savage’s book drags for much of the first half like a triple history class on a hot summer’s day, and doesn’t pick up speed, or open the classroom windows, until between the wars when the first “modern” kind of youth culture begins to emerge, with drink, drugs, sex, flappers and frantic dancing. Savage consummately conjures up a pre-1945 world of youth culture and mass hysteria that is both fresh and familiar, exciting and vaguely annoying, robbing us as it does of our own sense of specialness.

It’s a world where swing “raves” attract ecstatic crowds of thousands, where 80,000 inconsolate men dressed as dandy sheiks and starlet-styled women mob Valentino’s pretty young corpse in New York. A world of pitched battles between American servicemen and the Mexican-American Zoot-Suiters in the 1940s, and, most terrifying of all, gangs of “Khaki-Whacky” 14-year-old hussies trawling down the street arm in arm, breaking for civilians, but ensnaring any male in uniform.

The Second World War provides the global climax for this book, portrayed by Savage as a clash between fascism and consumerism, totalitarianism and teenagerdom, Hitler Youth and American youth. We know of course who won, but the Pétain-defying early New Romantic Zazous in France, and the Hitler Youth-baiting activities of the punkish young Edelweiss Pirates in Nazi Germany, who later linked up with escaped concentration camp inmates and deserters to form an anti-Nazi partisan movement, make for gripping reading, not least because the stakes of this cultural war were so high (13 of the Edelweiss Pirates were hanged in the centre of Cologne).

This book makes it clear that the two world wars of the 20th century exhausted European ideas/ideals of youth. The hedonistic, frivolous, slightly solipsistic New World teenager untroubled by ideology was the perfect antidote to the failure of Old World notions, whether romantic or patriotic, socialistic or fascistic.

However terrifying the destruction wrought by the tantruming tornado of the teenager on Western Civilisation, it was the vital vulgarity of America that saved Europe from its own murderous seriousness.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

As BBC4 are having a New York Week, and given my recent piece dissing musicals (or at least the hairy-chested Rogers & Hammerstein variety), I thought it appropriate to post this piece from a few years back about a ‘musical’ visit to New York.

On the Town

by Mark Simpson (First appeared in Attitude, July 1998)

‘Yoo can’t stop the moo-zik/No-body can stop the moo-zik/Take the cold from snow/Tell the trees “don’t grow?/Tell the wind “don’t Blow?/’coz  it’s ee-zee-er to doo!’

I’m singing a cappella, out of tune and fighting against a Pet Shop Boys ditty whining and clattering on the PA in this tiny, pre-Stonewall retro New York fag bar with the fabulously cheesy name ‘IC Guys’, the big show-stopping, pull-out-all-the-stops-and-wear-something-glittery big finale number from Nancy Walker’s epic Village People movie ‘Can’t Stop the Music’.

I’m trying to infect my native New Yorker friend Glenn Belverio, the artist formerly known as Glennda Orgasm, with my out-of-towner enthusiasm for that 1980 box-office bomb and show why it is my cultural compass for my first visit to New York since the Eighties. 

He’s not impressed.  In fact, he’s looking at me with a textbook rendition of ‘askance’, with a side-order of wariness and concern, and says dismissively, ‘It’s just a bad movie Mark’.  I put this down to my singing, and embark on an intellectual exposition instead.

‘Look,’ I plead, trying to ignore the skinny, queeny barman-cum-go-go-dancer (I told you this place was small) who is coquettishly counting his ribs for us, ‘��?Can’t Stop the Music��? is a tour-de-force!  The “music” that “can’t be stopped” is clearly desire - something that vibrates in everyone, choreographing them to its own plan.  One that has little rhyme or reason.  The opening number alone, with it’s kooky collage of the technicoloured, steamy street-life of Manhattan - roller-skating, boom-boxing, jogging in leg-warmers or just showing off their baskets - is so exhilarating, so chaotic, so… VITAL.  Even the giddy contrast between the high camp of the big production numbers and the low-rent bathos of the terrible script is movingly apposite to…..’

‘Yeah right,’ interrupts Glenn, staring openly in disbelief at our skinny stripper who is now jiggling his bones in time to Sylvester’s ‘Mighty Real’ like something escaped from a Ghost Train ride, wearing nothing now but a thin, lascivious, slightly vengeful smile (in any other bar in New York no one would even see him; here you can’t avoid him).  Glenn finally manages to tear himself away from the Skeletor harpie, ‘Whatever.  All I can remember is that I wasn’t able to sit through that film.’

‘But, but,’ I burble, disappointed that Glenn of all people - the Glenn who once told me that ‘old movies are all I have’ - isn’t with me on this one, ‘the “YMCA��? Busby Berkeley pastiche!  With the young men falling into the pool like a line of muscular dominoes!  Even more perfect when you learnt that apparently they were actually handpicked serving US Marines loaned by the US Navy who had been led to believe that this musical would be a great recruiting sergeant….’  But Glenn isn’t paying any attention.

So I try another tack.  ‘Well, my other New York reference point is “On the Town��?, 1949, starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors determined to have a good time on 24hrs shore-leave in Manhattan – the energy, and sheer… SPUNK in that film is breathtaking: ‘Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk, is a wonderful town/the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down’

Glenn winces at my rendition and looks even more bored.  ‘Just because it’s got sailors in it.’ 

‘But,’ I protest, ‘Gene Kelly’s bell-bottomed thighs are historic.  An exquisitely curvaceous, “cheeky” counterpoint to the rigid phallicism of the Forties Manhattan skyline…’  But Glenn has decided I’m being ironic.

But I’m not.  Actually, like IC Guys, I’m being nostalgic.  I feel that both those films capture something about New York that has been lost; something that made New York the centre of the world in the forties and again in the seventies - before the election of a fifties film star as President in the eighties saw the West Coast eclipse the East, private spaces eclipse public ones, safe sex eclipse the dangerous variety, and shallow visual values eclipse lyrical ones.  Until that time New York – the City of cities - was synonymous with a crazy, edgy exuberance: otherwise known as ‘song and dance’ or just ‘life’.  As ‘The Sound of the City’ the opening number in Nancy’s Village People meisterwork has it:  ‘Listen to the sound of the city/Listen to the sound of my town…’. 

Even this much was clear to me as a whiny sprog visiting New York in the early seventies with my suffering parents on holiday from my home town of (Old) York, England.  The smell, the heat, the dirt, the noise, the steam escaping bafflingly from the street, the perpetual motion of six million driven souls and the giddy grandeur of the sky-scrapers.  New York was literally a city where you couldn’t crick your neck enough trying to take it all in.  Everywhere you looked, including heavenwards, there was human vanity.  In hindsight I can see that New York was the key to the Seventies: funk, disco, Kojak, punk, leg-warmers, ‘The Godfather’, bankruptcy, bisexuality, hip hop, the last gasp of liberalism and, of course, the band who changed the world or at least persuaded it to wear leather chaps more, The Village People, all had their origins here.  New York even invented the end of the seventies - AIDS.  But back then, both me and the seventies were in short trousers and it was a confusing, terrifying experience for a small-town boy, perhaps all the more so because it bore clearly and garishly the traces of something rarely seen in suburban Yorkshire.  Passion.

A quarter of a century on, I’m ready to embrace that confusion and passion - at least for a couple of days.  But New York, damnit, has gone and cleaned up its act.  As everyone knows, the drugs, the disease, the debt, the crime, the scandal and vice are all on the wane.  The Disney Corporation has been stomping all over Manhattan, flattening Times Square, biting the heads off street hustlers and scaring away more interesting monsters.  Everyone is now very sensible in New York.  Even the junkies have pension plans and gay leaders like Larry Kramer and his earthly representative Michaelangelo Signorile call for gay men to abandon the messiness of promiscuity, public sex, and shameful shags with straight men, and go for hygienic, orderly, proud gay monogamy (i.e. celibacy).

At the gay nostalgia bar, IC Guys, Glenn and I are joined by the decadent novelist and connoisseur of bohemia Bruce Benderson, Camille Paglia’s early inspiration and the author of a book advocating downward mobility called ‘Toward a New Degeneracy’.  He thinks that artists have a duty to live with the people of the streets (a duty his yen for street hustlers makes less onerous a burden than for most).  Bruce wears a placid, congenial expression, but appears to have a cheeky smile perpetually playing around his eyes.  I complain to him that Glenn is blind to the genius of ‘Can’t Stop the Music’.

‘Oh,’ he says, matter-of-factly, ‘there is no question but that it is a MARVELLOUS movie.  Its surrealism borders on high art.  It conveys the absurdity of life very well.’ Bruce has a voice which seems to be perpetually threatening, albeit ironically, to add ‘Mary’ to the end of each sentence but never actually does.

‘I love you, Bruce,’ I say, hugging him and directing gloating looks at Glenn.  ‘But what,’ I ask, disentagling myself and studying him carefully, ‘about ‘��?On the Town?��?’

Bruce’s eyes cloud slightly, almost imperceptibly.  ‘Well now, “On the Town��? is more… difficult.  I was never much of a fan of Gene Kelly’s dancing.  I’ve always preferred the French school myself.  I have little time for that, that…’ Bruce tails off.

‘Clean-cut, large-thighed vigorous virility?’ I offer.

‘Precisely.’

‘Ah, I’m afraid I have little time for anything else,’ I confess.  ‘I wish it weren’t so.  But then, that’s what a Northern English public school education does to you.’

In an attempt to rescue me from my lack of sexual imagination, Bruce whisks me and Glenn off to one of his favourite haunts, an Upper Upper West Side Latino hustler bar: ‘One of the last, sadly.’ he laments during the long, long Yellow Cab journey.  ‘There used to be many more.  But the clean-up of Manhattan and the pillage of Times Square has banished them.’ He sighs folornly.  Inevitably, Bruce now searches for illicit, lyrical, messy sex on the Internet.  He’s just written a book about cybersex, which is only being published in French.  He researched it with a video camera atop his computer monitor.  ‘I spent weeks sitting naked in front of that computer having a whale of a time before I realised that it wasn’t only the people I was talking to on the Net who could see me.  I really should have drawn my curtains.’  (Of course, the internet has been another kind of ‘curtains’ for public sex in NY.)

As we stagger out of the cab and into the hustler bar, I mention out loud that Glenn walks like a puppet who has had two strings cut.  ‘Do I really?’ he demands of the assembled group.  Silence.  ‘Well,’ he says, resignedly, ‘I guess it must be true.  Omigod!  I walk like a puppet whose strings have been cut!  Not one but TWO!’

‘Well,’ I say, putting on my best talk show voice, ‘In our own way, we all walk like puppets who’ve had two strings cut.’

‘Oh, SHUT UP!’

In another hustler bar, a grubby little shack perched on some disused dockfront, there turns out to be rather more hustlers than punters.  Which is especially bad news on a Friday night when a working boy is hoping to pay off the subs he’s chalked up during the week.  Four of them in their skimpy shorts and press-on goatees stand in a line on the small stage facing the oval bar in the centre, go-going in their decidedly un-clean-cut Latino way.  Everyone recognises Bruce and they are clearly happy to see him; hardly surprising since he is probably single-handedly responsible for keeping this place open. 

One in particular, a short, bleached-blond number, exquisitely beautiful, hops off the stage and prowls towards us in that swishy-but-not-faggy cat-like - highly ‘musical’ - walk that Latino boys can do, something very alarming bouncing underneath his shorts, tenting them out.  He smiles easily and convincingly as he allows us to pull his waistband out far enough to get a glimpse of his salami-sized penis, which is somewhat purplish as it is tied off at the base.  ‘Oh,’ exclaims Glenn nonchalantly, ‘that’s where one of my puppet strings got to.’

We stuff some dollar bills down the boy’s waistband and he smiles even more easily and convincingly.  As he rhumba-sashays off back to his perch the back of his neck passes under my nose and I smell a sudden, all-enveloping sweetness.  I ask Bruce about this.  ‘Yes, Latino hustlers have that nutmeggy smell even when they’ve been on the streets for days,’ he explains authoritatively.  ‘Whereas white boys, well, they just have this really acrid, ammonia smell.’

‘Is it diet or temperament?’ I ask, as if we were discussing a breed of dogs.

‘Oh, I think diet has a lot to do with it,’ ventures Bruce, scanning the chorus line.  ‘But,’ he adds, ‘maybe Catholicism has something to do with it too.  The marvellous thing about Southern Catholics is that they have very poor memories.  They forget.  Which always makes the next morning so much easier.’

‘Ah yes,’ I concur.  ‘There’s nothing more off-putting than eau de regret.  Which is why I should really get into the Latin groove instead of the anglo-celtic schtick I’ve got going.  I have enough ammonia in my life to clean kitchens with.’

Glenn, who is a little worse for wear now, is pointing at one of the hustlers on stage.  ‘HE’S NO LATINO!’ he shouts.  ‘HE’S JUST SOME MUSCLE MARY FROM CHELSEA WITH AN INSTANT TAN!’  (Glenn is very proud of his own authentic Latino heritage.)

Another Bruce we’ve been expecting, the Canadian film-maker Mr LaBruce, someone who definitely isn’t in denial about his love for camp movies, finally shows up.  ‘Are you Catholic, Bruce?’ I ask him as he joins us.

‘Certainly not.  I’m of Celtic Protestant stock,’ he says proudly, but won’t allow Mr Benderson and I to sniff him.  After a quick round of drinks, we bid our farewells to Bruce #1, leaving him happy as Larry in Latinoland.  Bruce #2 then whisks Glenn and me away to another hustler bar, one which he promises will be ‘less “Night of the Iguana��?’.

On the way there Glenn bursts out laughing and points at Bruce #2 who is trotting ahead of us: ‘Well, I may walk like a vandalised puppet, but Bruce walks like she thinks she’s Jean Shrimpton in platforms on Carnaby street wearing a big floppy hat!’  (I make sure that I walk behind everyone else.)

The second hustler bar isn’t quite so Latino.  More Northern European and black, with just a smattering of Hispanic.  As I’m talking to Bruce #2, one of the black dancers walks up to him and nonchalantly flops his penis in his pocket.  Bruce tips him ten bucks.  (Well, what else can you do?).

Much, much later, over blueberry and cream cheese blintzes in some SoHo diner, Glenn tells us he has a confession to make.  He looks at us anxiously.  ‘Promise not to laugh.  OK?’

‘Confess away, my child.’

‘OK.  Here’s the thing.  My Dad was a big fan of the Village People.  He even joined the YMCA.  And bought poppers.’  Glenn grimaces at the memory.  ‘I was very worried about him for a while.  What made it worse was…’  He tails off.

‘Yes, Glenn?’

‘He was in charge of a factory making uniforms.’

Bruce and I break our promise.  Loudly.

‘Yoo can’t stop the moo-zik….’

[Update: Glenn no longer walks like a marionette that has had two strings cut - it was probably the cheap martinis he was downing that night - and is no longer in denial about liking camp movies. Remarkably, he still returns my calls.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

by Mark Simpson

(Independent on Sunday, 18 February 2007)

During a long car journey with a slightly older gay friend, I suggested he put on one of his CDs. I said this knowing full well that he liked showtunes. Sorry, LOVED! show tunes. It was a warm sunny day, the top was down, and I was feeling reckless. “I can deal with this,” I told myself. “After all, how bad can this be? It’s only music.” But I was wrong. So wrong. Musicals are not in fact musical. They’re much more than that. They’re vocalised, choreographed insanity. Hoofing hysteria.

As we sped through the English countryside to a soundtrack of Liza Minnelli impersonating a dying llama, I began to lose the ability to change gear or focus on the road ahead. I had to ask my blissfully happy passenger pointedly if he had any other CDs. He reluctantly obliged and I found myself missing Liza already. Now my stereo was pumping out a gee-whiz-fellas Broadway male chorus that sounded like a battalion of Ned Flanders on happy pills. Every time we drove through a village, small children and stray dogs followed us. I sank below the wheel and steered by the position of the sun.

I don’t like musicals. That way unreason lies, hands on hips, drumming its fingers on its pink silk sash and tapping its emerald slippers. For a while I kidded myself that I was man enough to endure them because I liked the title song sequence of Singin’ in the Rain and quite enjoyed Calamity Jane when I was 12. But neither of these count, since Gene Kelly’s virile, carefree embrace of the elements transcends the musical genre and is in fact one of the pillars of Western culture, while Calamity Jane isn’t a musical at all but lesbianism in reverse.

Liking films like Grease, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Can’t Stop the Music, which single-handedly ended disco, the 1970s and the Village People, doesn’t count either. Campiness is cheating. Musicals are sincere. Terrifyingly, ruthlessly sincere. They block all your exits and breathe down your neck demanding you marry them forever and ever. Or else.

Phantom of the Opera is the only bona fide musical I’ve been to see (for a dare), instead of watching from behind the sofa. I cheated again: I slept through the whole smothering thing, waking once for the big chandelier crashing to the floor at the end of the first half and a second time for the final curtain. For me, all musicals are a scary night-mask.

Emma Brockes, author of What Would Barbra Do? (Bantam), subtitled “How musicals can change your life” is made of much sterner stuff however, and she likes - no, LOVES! - real, unadulterated, hairy-chested, five-alarm musicals like Phantom, Mary Poppins (which she has watched hundreds of times), Oklahoma, The Sound of Music and Guys and Dolls. And even - sharp intake of breath - Yentl. So she has my deepest respect.

She is also often rather more entertaining and witty, not to mention cogent and ironic, than most musicals. Brockes’s autobiographical advocacy makes a song and dance about musicals without actually making a song and dance. Perhaps this is because she has a keen awareness of how mad musicals appear to most men, and probably most women. She also knows that musicals are a disease usually passed down the maternal line, but for her it is a blessed, blissful one, and the book is peppered with affectionate, funny memories of her mother and the quirky passion for showtunes she passed on.

Despite the title, the book doesn’t really have much to do with Barbra; it’s mostly an attempt to persuade men to like musicals. Brockes hopes that musicals can melt the ice around the heart of men, just as hearing his children singing “The hills are alive…” in the parlour melted Captain von Trapp’s: “…tears spring to his eyes and he walks into the room crooning that he, the captain, also goes to the hills when his heart is lonely. The children stare at him as if a small mammal has just appeared through the curtain of his fringe, but, recovering themselves, come in with backing vocals to accompany their father… Maria has brought music back into the house! And that, my friends, is the magic of the musical.”

Yes, that’s what I was worried about. Brockes argues at one point that musicals disturb men because they’re not about them. But, as much of this book shows, and almost all musicals demonstrate, the audience for musicals may be women but the target for them is men, on and off stage. This is the main reason why men feel uncomfortable around them. Musicals are femininity mobilised and orchestrated against them.

To prove this, I only have to point out that the recent BBC series, How do you Solve a Problem like Maria, was presented by Graham Norton and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Brockes knows that “in these metrosexual times”, as she puts it, “straight men are getting gayer by the day,” but she also knows that for even for heteroflexible men, musicals represent a high-kick too far. Apparently, most homosexual men love musicals - a few don’t but this is only because they are in denial or afraid of cliché. Real gays know that they were born to be hag fags to girls like Brockes, sighing over Mary Poppins together.

Well, as a paid-up shirt-lifter who also happens to have been credited with/blamed for siring the term “metrosexual”, I can tell you frankly and openly that I’m not afraid of cliché, but I’m terrified of musicals. While the question “Are you musical?” may once have been a discreet way of asking if someone was a player of the hairy oboe, today it won’t get you many drinks bought in Old Compton Street. (Though it might get you a herbal tea from my car passenger.)

I identify with the experience of Brian, Brockes’ straight friend, who as a seven-year-old boy was taken by his mother to see South Pacific at the cinema. It’s recounted as an example of why straight men hate musicals. He was understandably troubled by the poster, which had too many girls and flowers in it for his liking. “Really, dear,” Brian’s mother said, “it’s about war.” Little Brian was quickly reassured, as I was, by the appearance of Rossano Brazzi, “built like a war hero, dressed like a war hero, and surrounded by all the exhilarating paraphernalia of the Second World War”, and “bare chested sailors”.

But then things started to go wrong. A strange expression crept across Brazzi’s face. “Sort of strained… then he opened his mouth and out came a sound that, at first, Brian couldn’t quite place. Hey; wasn’t that… singing?” Now he was singing into the face of a woman who’d materialised behind him who looked like “she, too, might be about to… yup, there she went. What was this?”

Heterosexuality, Brian. The real, unvarnished kind.

In other words: from the point of view of the dame.

[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.