MARK SIMPSON .com

[Originally appeared here 10/1/07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnny Morrissey was runner-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To salute Take That’s reformation this year, their new single ‘Patience’, and tonight’s airing on British TV of their UK reunion tour I thought I’d republish this feature I penned about their Wembley Arena ‘Lulu’ gig at the height of their popularity twelve years ago. 

I’m in two minds whether to actually watch tonight’s broadcast.  I worry that Manchester’s Village People, the boy-band that changed the world, or at least encouraged it to wear a leather chaps and slap its buttocks more, have turned into Westlife.

(If you’re American you’ve probably never heard of TT - in which case I suggest you watch this, ‘if you like’)

A little bit of give and take

by Mark Simpson (originally appeared in Attitude magazine, October 1994)

In Greek mythology, Maenads were “frenzied women,� worshippers of Bacchus who were apt to “rend to pieces� unfortunate men who passed their way.  They were known by their unearthly shrieking howl and wail – often the last thing a man might hear.  Tonight the ancient noise floods the auditorium and makes my knees knock.  Tonight a cyclone of screaming, whistling, whirling teen-girl frenzy is surging around me and quite unmanning me. 

Tonight Take That play Wembley Arena.

The entrance of the ‘lads’ is still some time away, but that doesn’t stop the girls exercising their vocal cords and advertising their appetite.  They are hungry for masculine meat.  Their banners proclaim their ravenous intentions: GIVE US A SNOBG, ROB, and A QUICKIE IN THE DARKIE, MARKIE.  To quote someone else from Manchester: They want it now and they will not wait, for they are too lovely and too delicate.  I sink even lower into my seat.  But I flatter myself – these girls aren’t interested in stringy old steak like mine; they want prime, pumped, waxed, tanned, moisturised boy-flesh.

Nevertheless I can’t help looking around for another male to cling to.  I spot a middle-aged steward guarding one of the exit doors.  ‘I’m to seasoned to be scared, ‘ he says.  (I think he means ‘experienced’ rather than ‘flavoured.’)  ‘I’ve seen it all before with The Beatles.  Now that was real hysteria.  You had to stretcher out hundreds of fainting girls in those days.  We hardly get any now.’

But isn’t that just it?  Isn’t that exactly why we should be scared?  I mean, these girls are ball-busters; they’re in control.  They’re not keeling over they know what they want and they’re gonna stop at nothing to get it: it’s the men who are fainting now.  ‘Well, some of their banners can be a bit explicit,’ admits the steward.  ‘Some of them are too obscene to allow into the auditorium and we have to confiscate them.’  What sort of things do they say?  He flushes red.  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ he demurs hurriedly.  ‘You’ll have to use your imagination.’

Unfortunately my imagination is already working overtime.  From my lofty vantage point in the gallery, the arena looks just like the inside of the wrecked spaceship in Alien.  Those rows of teeny-boppers look like the cute pods in the vast cargo bay that John Hurt got a little too close to.  Lurking within each one of those diminutive schoolgirls is a ruthless appetite to consume the world just waiting to burst out.  These girls – with their flashing red plastic horns (symbol of the ’94 tour), TT scarves, key-rings and slurpees – know that the teenybopper juggernaut of boy bands is just a lipsmacking taste of things to come.

The multimillion pound Take That road-show, bringing joy to thousands of young girls, is the prototype future economy of the Western World.  Making these girls happy will become the economic imperative of the Twenty First Century.  They are the consumer queens of tomorrow and capitalism will organise men, material and technology to pleasure them as long as they have cash to spend.  These are girls who are becoming women in a world whose only use for men who don’t sing, dance, and flash their pert buns is lifting the amps on and off stage.

Lucy, Jane, Trish, and Caroline are demure sixteen-year-olds who have travelled from Swindon to see their heroes.  They are chaperoned by Samantha, Lucy’s mum.  ‘I can’t wait to see them get their kit off – PHWOOAAARRRRRRRRR!’ shouts Lucy into my ear.  ‘What I wouldn’t do to them if I could get my hands on them!’  What about the other boy bands?  What’s so special about TT?  ‘They’re just the best,’ yells Trish.  ‘They really know how to make you feel good; they really try.   Plus none of the others have got their sex appeal.  They can dance, wiggle their bums, and sing – plus they’re VERY SHAGGABLE!’

Who’s your favourite?  ‘HOWARD!’ ‘ROBBIE!’ ‘MARK!’  ‘JASON!’ they all scream at once.  ‘Mark’s brill ‘cos ‘e’s so short an’ sweet an’ lovely an’ ‘e looks like you could do anything you like to ‘im.’  Howards’ ace ‘cos ‘e’s gorgeous, ‘cos ‘e’s got pecs, and ‘cos ‘e’s got a BIG PACKAGE – ‘e’s REALLY, REALLY, WELL-ENDOWED!’  How do you know?  ‘You can’t miss it when ‘e comes on stage!’  they hoot.  ‘It just about pokes yer eye out!,’ adds Lucy’s Mum, helpfully.  Pardon me, but didn’t The Sun tell us that mums were shocked by the new saucy TT show?  ‘I am shocked,’ admits Samantha.  ‘I expected them to get their kit off!!’  And what does your husband think of all this?  ‘Oh, he’s quite into it.  He does TT numbers in a thong after the pub on a Sunday.’

But the key question has to be, what do TT have that Swindon boys don’t?  ‘MONEY!’ shouts one lass.  ‘TALENT!’ another.  Meanwhile Mum offers: ‘All the good-looking boys round our way are either married or gay.’

At last the boys make their much-anticipated entrance and the crowd ululates, trills and whoops, rising to a maelstrom of sound matched only by natural disasters or a squadron of Concorde’s taking off and exploding.  The boys rise up from beneath the stage on a platform, clad in tech-noir army uniform – boots, grey tunics, and silver helmets – singing ‘We’re gonna make you feel so good.’  Toy soldiers played by toy boys.  Perfect.  A salvo of cuddly toys lands on stage, beginning a bombardment that lasts all night.  (I can’t decide whether this is a sign of the girls’ initiation into womanhood, a putting away of childish things, or merely an exchange of one fluffy comforter for another.)

Like the troopers they are, the munchkins from Manchester skip, jump, and shuffle their way through their back-catalogue.  The air is heavy with sweat, oestrogen, and Lily of the Valley.  Girls are ignoring official exhortations not to stand on their seats, bopping their backsides off with a determination and energy that makes you wonder how much TT have to do with it.  Yes, the boys are nice little movers, they do have some very catchy numbers, and they promise to ‘make you feel so good,’ but it looks like these girls are the sort who can take care of their own orgasm, thank you very much.

Halfway through the show the boys leave the stage for a costume change.  A giant metal walkway covered in flashing lights descends.  The boys re-enter in powder blue Sgt Pepper suits.  The salute to the Beatles shows the boys’ determination never to disappoint their audience and grow up.  They wont make the mistakes the Beatles made – they won’t desert pop for rock; they wont take drugs; they won’t get political and expect to be taken seriously; they won’t get married (OK, so Gary might run off with Elton John).  TT are the Beatles as your Nan would like to remember them – all McCartneys and no Lennons.

Time is the greatest threat to passion and to boyhood.  So the next number, ‘Babe,’ underlines TT’s postmodern mastery of it.  A projection screen shows black-and-white film of VE Day celebrations and returning troops.  Little Markie steps out of the screen (through an ingenious slit) in an RAF greatcoat with a kit bag slung over his shoulder, singing ‘Babe, I’m back again.’  Doesn’t it just make you want to hug him hard till his little ribs crack and puncture his lungs?  The message is clear: TT were always here, are always here, will always be here to ‘make you feel so good’.

Sentimentality dealt with, the boys turn their attentions to ‘sex’ in the second half of the show, changing in to black net shirts and hot pants – well, everyone except Gary, who’s still wearing trousers.  What’s the matter with his legs?  Are they just fat or do they betray signs of – God forbid! – secondary sexual characteristics?, i.e. hair?  Can’t he shave them like Howard?  Alas, Gary’s shyness about showing a bit of legs spoils the effect of the black net shirts.  They look less ‘sexy,’ more a carefully contrived compromise that allows you to glimpse Gary’s flesh but breaks up the lines enough to prevent you deciding whether he really is a pudding or not.

That the lyric they’re singing is ‘Give good feeling to me’ is not without significance.  Now that ‘sex’ has replaced romance, the boys sing a passive version of their initial promise to ‘make you feel so good’.  The girls do their best to satisfy the boys.  They gasp like a cracked steam piston as TT offer themselves.  They roar like Niagara in flood when TT thrown themselves down on the stage.  They thunder their feet like stampeding buffalo as the boys slowly grawl to its edge and wail like a missile attack when TT stand up and thrust their hips at the crowd.  When Howard takes of his shirt, the screaming melts my earplugs.

As an encore, the boys perform ‘Pray’ in white smocks, looking very angelic with their hands pressed together and heads bowed.  But after the song finishes they are dragged into ‘Hell’ by little devils.  Then out of the pit comes Lulu in red, followed by the boys who have now been Satanised, wearing red horns – and, everyone except Gary, very little else – for ‘Relight My Fire.’  Howard is ‘wearing’ a black leather jockstrap and a pair of red chaps with his bum poking out the back, which he generously sticks out at the audience and slaps repeatedly.  Gary, meanwhile, is clad in a blazer and flannels.  Thus TT negotiate all the key dilemmas of girl teendom: virtue and sin, love and sex, rough trade or rich fat boys in blazers.

The grins on the faces of the TT boys are convincing and suggest that they might be enjoying themselves even more than the fans.  ‘Ree-light my fi-yer/Your love is my only dee-zeyr/I need your love/I need your love!’ They croon sincerely to Lulu, cavorting around her like kinky acrobats.  It’s only fitting that the nearest thing to heterosexuality that these future mothers of our nation have witnessed all evening is pretty boys in bondage gear singing a gay disco classic to a middle aged camp icon.

So what do the Swindon mob make of the rumours that TT are gay?  ‘That’s just bollocks,’ they all agree.  ‘People are just jealous of their success and want to bring them down,’ says Caroline. 

And, hypothetically speaking of course, if they were gay, would it stop you chasing them? 

‘No’,’ she says, unphased, and looking straight at me.  ‘I’m into gay men.’

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

(Originally appeared in Attitude magazine, October 1994)

Interviewed by Mark Simpson in Pride magazine, 2005

The man who has been described as the ‘Joni Mitchell of his generation’, lionised for his genius by such as the Scissor Sisters, Elton John, Neil Tennant and Michael Stipe, is changing onstage from jeans and shirt into a blue glitter thong, red pumps - and a hairy chest. He’s singing a song from his new album WANT TWO called ‘Old Whore’s Diet’ - “Gets me goin’ in the mornin’” - as the finale to his show in Reading, England, the first of his UK dates. Rufus Wainwright, the rockstocracy son of folk legends Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, keeps turning round and showing us his thirty-one-year-old decidedly, commendably non-circuit-party ass. A little later he turns into the Wicked Witch of the West from THE WIZARD OF OZ, before ‘melting’.

Rufus may or may not be referencing British Music Hall, but he’s definitely channelling Monty Python and Judy Garland. He may or may not now be teetering on the edge of global domination after years of critical praise and modest sales, but he’s clearly teetering on some kind of edge. Bless ‘im.

M: WANT ONE had you dressed as a knight in armour, apparently dead. Your new album WANT TWO has you dragged up as a kooky, drowned Ophelia figure. This is horribly Freudian, but it occurs to me that you have now enacted the deaths of both your parents - your distant, armoured father, and your ethereal, spiritual mother.

R: [laughs I haven’t heard THAT before! But I’m willing to go there. I’m going to see Bella Freud tomorrow, so I’ll ask her! I’ve had a real yin and yang existence: my mother’s very bohemian and Irish Catholic; my father is quite rigid and a disciplinarian and logical. Both of those forces have been necessary for my survival. I’ve had to learn to accept my parents for who they are, taking what you need, and not blaming them for it.

M: And, besides, you have your own gay daddy now, don’t you?

R: Yeah, I’ve got several actually, Elton John, Neil Tennant, Michael Stipe..

M: It could be argued that you’ve found another kind of daddy now in the ‘higher power’ of AA, now that you’ve kicked alcohol and crystal meth.

R: I don’t like to talk about whether I’m in that or not. Once I went to rehab, that was where it ended. My drug using and alcohol became a very private issue. Just because if I say, ‘Oh, I don’t drink’, then people see you drinking. What I will say is that I was spiritually bankrupt. And I needed God, really, in some form.

M: Were you looking for discipline?

R: It was just like surrender really. The thing about show business is that you spend so much time being in such control you think you can really rule the world. And that’s maddening - because you can’t! I wish you could. At some point you have to admit that there is something greater than myself.

M: I understand that Quentin was your fairy godmother.

R: I was thirteen when I was introduced to Quentin. Was that specific Summer when I came out to myself about my sexuality. I had a lot of sex that Summer but I definitely do believe there’s something called statutory rape. I was just too young to be in that world, but I wanted to go there so I went there! And both of my parents, understandably, just really kinda freaked out and didn’t know what to do, so my father called up Penny Arcade. She was a friend of the family and had been involved with the Warhol Factory and all those drag queens and was now Quentin’s babysitter so she had a lot
of experience of handling gays! My mother and father aren’t particularly homophobic, but my mother was not happy and my father just didn’t do anything really. He didn’t want to talk about it at all.

M: Would you perhaps have preferred a passionately negative response to one of apparent indifference?

R: I got what I got - and that’s what I have to work with. [laughs. I think he handled it in the only way he knew how to. Sending me to hang out with Penny and Quentin was a pretty good option. I think I fared pretty well.

M: Did Quentin offer you any advice?

R: Gee, I don’t think he every really acknowledged me, to tell you the truth! I was in the same room with him many times. I noticed that the way he operated was that there was the audience and there were the servants. And I chose to be an audience member. But then, he deserved servants!

M: Your work seems to own that melancholy that contemporary gays have disowned. I have a theory that your music is what’s playing in the heads of circuit party boys when they’re coming down. But they don’t want anyone to know.

R: [laughs Right, right! I would say, that it’s definitely not the sound in their heads when they’re going out! I have had a difficult time with the gay press in the US. It seems to be coming around now. I don’t think that they have a choice but to acknowledge me. They’ve tried their damnedest not to in the past.

M: Well, you’re a movie star now, you did that rather wonderful cameo as the strung-out lounge singer in THE AVIATOR.

R: Yeah! They’ve got to notice me now! I think it’s due to this limited aspect of gay life that is worshipped and publicised - one of FUN!, y’know, style, SEX!, nice physiques, and all that, which you know I’m prone to as well, I’m prone to the same fucking disease, the obsession with the middle of the body, and so forth, but I have always tried to illustrate the other side of the rainbow and be the Sunday morning music, the alone time. It’s very difficult to get that across to certain gay people. I remember a long time ago doing my first show in London. It was a real cross section of fans, young women, middle aged women, my father’s fans, gay people - gay people were the first ones to leave. Most people stayed to the end, but the gay people had somewhere better to go, something way better to do.

M: Today’s gay culture seems to be in denial of the ‘alcoholic homosexuals’ you sing about in ‘Hometown Waltz’ on the new album - The Judy Garland factor. Someone who I understand was a friend of the family..

R: It’s true! She made my grandfather’s school sandwiches! Look, given the amount of kind of treachery tragedy that the gay male community has gone through for the last 2000 years, not to mention that the worst of it has been in the last 25yrs with AIDS, there is no kind of bouncing back fast from this. Homosexuality right now is really enemy No1 whether it’s Islam, or Catholicism, or even Judaism in my opinion, look at the Kabala. I don’t think you should live your life under constant awareness of oppression, but I think that you have to accept a certain amount of sorrow, and realise that
in a certain way it’s how we’ve survived.

M: You’ve suggested before that gay men take drugs because they’re oppressed. Is that really true? Don’t they just take them because they like them?

R: Let’s not underestimate the power of chemistry. It’s a very potent combination: gays and drugs! I strongly believe in that romantic idea that in primordial time gay people were shamans. I think we’re spiritually destined to have to dig a little deeper. And that is a role, a tougher role. Some people just don’t’ want to go there. Which is understandable.

M: You dedicated your performance of ‘Gay Messiah’ tonight to the Pope. I take it you didn’t go to see him lying in State?

R: Oh, no. I’m here, protesting in Reading.

M: Is there any religious background to your family? Your music is very Catholic.

R: My mother is kind of a latent catholic, she doesn’t really go to church, but she has Catholic ways. So, yeah, I was brought up in a very Catholic environment. But I’m actually not baptised. In an odd way she tried to send me to church, but I could never take the sacraments or do confession. That was an interesting road to take.

M: If you’d been born in an earlier age would you have been a priest?

R: I think I would have been a priest. For sure. I’ve often thought that. And I mean a priest who has sex.

M: There are quite a few of those.

R: [laughs Yeah, but with men. With other priests.

M: Not with the altar boys.

R: Well, maybe with the altar teenagers!

M: If you were made Pope what would your first Papal decree be?

R: I’d ban the folk mass and bring back everything in Latin so we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006
 

 

In honour of Robbie Williams’ current World Tour - and also of the recent ‘Wank Week’ - here’s my 2003 Salon.com loving tribute to him:

Why doesn’t America love Robbie Williams? Especially when he love-hates himself so much?

by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared on Salon.com, April 2003)

It’s tough growing up British. Not just for all the obvious Austin Powers-esque reasons, such as our medieval dentistry, endemic mold problems and epidemic dandruff, but for something much more existential. The British are great and enthusiastic believers in Original Sin. In Britain, would you Adam and Eve it, we devoutly accept that we are all Fallen, all doomed before we are born, that no child however lovely and chuckly and pink-skinned is born innocent.

Of course, since we liberated the monasteries, Coalition-style, back in Henry VIII’s time, and became nominally Protestant for tax reasons, we don’t call it Original Sin anymore. We call it the class system (though in New Labor Britain you will be reported to the police if you mention it). And we don’t talk about sinners any more, just wankers. You see, whichever class you happen to be born into in Britain, it will be the wrong one. Granted, some are wronger than others, but even the most privileged classes are the wrong ones — to everyone else. Moreover, whatever class you are born into, your destiny, your happiness, your salvation, is not your property and certainly not your right. If you try to escape your British birthright by becoming something you’re not, then you will be Found Out, and everyone will point and laugh and call you a wanker.

Probably the biggest wanker in Britain today is cheeky chappie popster Robbie Williams, or simply “Robbie,” as we like to call him here in that affectionate, familiar way we handle tossers (another word for wanker; we have as many as the Inuits have for snow — and “Robbie” is fast becoming another). Robbie is the biggest onanist in Britain, mostly because he’s one of the biggest success stories. Since going solo in 1996 after leaving Brit boy-band Take That, Robbie, who was expected at best to become a kids’ TV presenter, has had 15 solo U.K. top-10 singles, 13 Brit Awards — more than anyone else in the award’s history — and has sold 15 million albums worldwide. Robbie is British pop today. He is also the bragging, self-publicizing, self-flagellating, self-loathing symbol of the lifestyle every young person in Britain is supposed to aspire to and despise at the same time. As he puts it with characteristic modesty on his new album, he’s “the one who put the Brit in celebrity.”

Unfortunately for the British pop industry as a whole, Robbie is also a symbol of its pathetic failure, in the post-Spice Girls era, to export much more than Kylie’s bottom and Coldplay’s runny noses across the Atlantic. EMI, the ailing British record giant famously swindled by the Sex Pistols (and probably looking back fondly now to those halcyon days), recently paid a sweaty-palmed sum reported to be as high as $120 million for Williams’ next six albums — at approximately the same time as the company was laying off 1,200 employees. A sum that could only be earned out by Yank-side success. Oh dear. Best string out those final installments on that advance: Robbie’s new album, “Escapology,” debuted in mid-April at number 43 on the Billboard charts, selling an anemic 21,000 copies in its first week. (By the end of the month, Amazon was already selling the album at a “Super Saver” price of $9.98.). For a record industry wallowing in deep water after its worst year in memory, this was nothing short of a Titanic disaster. Robbie could be the cheeky iceberg that finally sinks the British record business. Now that’s quite a wanker.

One reason why Robbie is such a popular wanker over here is that he was born chuckly and lovely and pink-skinned in Stoke-on-Trent, an ugly post-industrial nowhere place in the Midlands, a part of the country that everyone in the north and south of Britain can safely look down on, a place that might be described as the arse-end of the U.K. except that this would suggest (a) that there was a point or at least some kind of function to Stoke and (b) that you might if you were that way inclined, or just very drunk and confused, have some fun there.

Then there’s the fact that in Take That Robbie used to wear leather chaps and slap his arse end while singing covers of disco hits such as “Relight My Fire” for the amusement of early teenage girls, 40-year-old gay men and Lulu. There are no more humble origins than that.

As for his performance style today, I could say that he thinks he’s David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust but just ends up being Norman Wisdom (a 1950s British equivalent of Jerry Lewis, though more pathetic). Or, if I wanted to be crueler, I could say that his stage performance and chatter are like Tourette’s syndrome with pantomime movements. Or simply that he’s a selfish, self-pitying, self-seeking fool who has no opinions on anything other than himself — and they’re all terrible. But if I did, I’d merely be repeating what Robbie has already said about himself on national TV, beating me, the British tabloids, and Man in Pub to the punch. Robbie has told us many times that he’s “bored” with Robbie Williams and wants to “kill him off.” But Robbie’s eagerness to beat himself up for his public, although it is appreciated, is just another reason why he’s a — you guessed it — wanker.

You can probably understand, then, why our Robbie is so keen to make it in America. Why, in fact, he already spends most of his time and his European royalties in America, relaxing American-style in his big American house in L.A., sunbathing by his big American pool pulling fuck-off/come-to-bed faces at the British tabloid helicopters ceaselessly hovering over him. Why the U.S. and L.A. are mentioned — nay, incanted — often in a charming faux-American drawl, on several tracks on his new, American-targeted album, and several times in one song in the case of “Hot Fudge”: “I’m moving to L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.!” — a place where success really can save you and where no one is ever Found Out, just found overdosed and badly decomposed at the bottom of their pool.

All this might also help you understand why his album is called “Escapology,” why the artwork for the album features disturbing-absurd pictures of our Robbie trapped at the bottom of giant tubes of water or suspended upside down hundreds of feet in the air, and why the lyrics talk rather a lot about self-loathing, especially when they’re bragging and crowing about his fame.

While Robbie clearly needs the U.S., it’s by no means clear why the U.S. needs Robbie. In the U.K. Robbie is a the king of karaoke pop, when the charts full of karaoke pop acts, but in his adopted home of L.A. every schmuck waiting their turn in a karaoke bar on a Tuesday evening is a better singer. In Britain his lack of great talent is seen as democratic and reassuring; in America it’s probably just uninspiring. It’s a shame, because as Robbie tells us on the AOR power-ballad “Feel,” probably the best track on this album, “There’s a hole in my soul/ You can see it in my face/ It’s a real big place.” Well, we know America’s a real big place, and since Britain is apparently no longer touching the sides, maybe the Big Country will oblige and fill Robbie’s aching hole?

The problem for us Brits is that as Anglican lapsed Catholics we still believe we’re all Fallen, but we no longer believe that we can be redeemed. Oh yes, now we have to pay lip service to the American religion of success — thanks very much for that, by the way — but we don’t really believe in it. We may, like much of the rest of the world, be crap-Americans now, but we’re agnostic crap-Americans; we still have hundreds of years of feudalism to negotiate. It’s why our tabloids, which exist solely to torment our celebrities, frequently with flattery, sell millions every day. It’s why our boy Robbie is so “ironic,” why he goes on and on and on about His Fame Hell.

For all his transatlantic suckface on this album, I suspect that tabloid-fodder Robbie, who is very crap-American (and also Catholic: “I’ve slept with girls on the game/ I’ve got my Catholic shame”), doesn’t really believe America can redeem him, either. He’s paying lip service, too, though it’s not the kind of lip service you might enjoy. (Note: “On the game” is British slang for being a prostitute.)

One of the reasons “Feel” is the best track here is that Robbie doesn’t deliberately sabotage the professional songwriting of his (now former) musical collaborator Guy Chambers as he does in practically all the other tracks, penning glib, flip lyrics which would be inoffensive and meaningless in a pop-Muzak kind of way except that they are also teeth-gnashingly, eye-gougingly crass. Robbie’s lyrics are hyperactive doggerel that won’t lie down, doing anything and everything to draw attention to themselves, including licking their balls and chewing off their own head. “Come Undone,” a big James-ish anthemic number, is utterly undone by the vain, self-obsessing lyrics full of mirrors and razor blades: “Such a saint but such a whore/ So self aware, so full of shit …/ Do another interview/ Sing a bunch of lies/ Tell about celebrities that I despise …/ I am scum.”

This perverted narcissism would be almost admirable in such a crowd-pleasing entertainer if it weren’t for the fact that Robbie is apparently singing to his drugs and rape counselor mom (yes, really) again: “Pray that when I’m coming down you’ll be asleep …/ I am scum/ Love, your son.” Robbie gives matriarchy a bad name. Another track, “Nan’s Song,” is dedicated to his deceased grandmother. This is the first song he’s penned entirely himself and he has said, “It’s only appropriate that my first song should be about someone I love.” In fact, the song is all about how much his Nan loved him.

Once again, the problem with selling this shtick in the U.S. is that few people apart from some aging gay men in San Francisco have heard of Robbie Williams. So how are Americans expected to relate to his problems with his “massive” fame, which is all his songs are about these days? Robbie is Eminem without the hip-hop, without the wit, and without, finally, the (global) success. Robbie tried and failed to crack the American market a few years ago with a compilation album called “The Ego Has Landed” — which once again appears to be putting the apologetic cart before the career horse, “wittily” referencing a mediocre 1960s British film, “The Eagle Has Landed,” that his target teen audience has never heard of. As one American critic’s daughter said when Robbie Williams’ face popped up on MTV: “Daddy, why is that guy being so goofy?”

In truth, “Escapology” is a kind of 21st century Brit Band Aid album, a “Do They Know It’s Christmas in Stoke-on-Trent?” where the needy continent is Robbie’s self-esteem (and EMI’s bank balance), but where Robbie is impersonating almost every Brit artist who has made it to drive-time radio in the U.S. In “Something Beautiful” he’s Marty Pellow of Wet, Wet, Wet, pre-heroin; in “Monsoon” he’s post-mustache, pre-AIDS Freddie Mercury (even the tune owes more than a little to “Radio Ga Ga”); “Love Somebody” is pre-wig Elton; “Revolution” is post-Wham, pre-men’s-room George Michael (Robbie’s first solo single was a cover version of “Freedom”). “Sexed Up” could be Oasis, post-talent. There’s some Rod Stewart in here as well, but I can’t be bothered to find out where. For good measure, and to show how versatile and deserving of a green card he is, Robbie also throws in some Steve Tyler, some retro-soul and some college radio rawk.

No, I lied. “Escapology” isn’t Band Aid. It’s an entire season of “American Idol,” where Robbie is the only contestant and also plays the part of Simon Cowell. Somehow, though, he manages not to win.

Robbie may be a wanker, and he may be doomed, but he’s not an original sinner. Not only is he a karaoke pop performer (his last album, “Swing When You’re Winning,” was a bunch of covers of Frank Sinatra songs), he’s a karaoke human being. After leaving Take That he thought he was Oliver Reed for a while. Then he thought he was Liam Gallagher. Dressed as Frank Sinatra on the cover of “Swing When You’re Winning” (which includes a duet with Nicole Kidman on “Somethin’ Stupid”), or as James Bond in the video for “Millennium,” he looks like an unconvincing if alarmingly hirsute drag king. By the same token, persistent rumors that secretly he’s “really gay” miss the point that Robbie isn’t really anything.

Where Sinatra was radio, Robbie is a radio. Robbie’s voice, although versatile, is strangely constricted, nasal and distant — as if he has a cheap transistor radio stuck somewhere up his nose. Frankie had a voice that, if radio didn’t exist, would have willed it into existence. Robbie has a voice that is merely an echo of broadcasts that dissipated into the ether long before he was born.

On “Escapology,” Robbie desperately wants us to believe that he has problems. Perhaps because he thinks this will make him likable. Or interesting. Or human. And perhaps because it will make people forgive or forget the fact that he’s a wanker. Actually, Robbie’s problem is much more serious than his wankerdom, more serious even than being British. Robbie’s problem is that he’s a ghost. A ghost that has no story of his own, no life to commemorate or haunt, and no point — other than drawing attention to himself and the pantomime of life that he has become. We’re supposed to listen to the clanking chains because they’re “really professionally put together” and harken to the moaning because it’s “so ironic.”

Mind you, Robbie’s insubstantiality may be the most modern, most sympathetic thing about him. As he sings on “Feel”:

Come hold my hand
I wanna contact the living
Not sure I understand
The role I’ve been given

Is there an exorcist in the house?

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

Tailor to the desert stars: a tribute to Nudie

Mark Simpson

(Originally published on SHOWstudio.com, 2002)

Oscar Wilde famously donned cowboy duds for the Western leg of his tour of the US in 1882, after discovering that his usual dandy garb didn’t go down quite so well in the hard-bitten cattle and gold-rush towns as it had in the metropolitan East.

Unfortunately for Oscar, Nudie wasn’t around back then to run him up some of his inimitable, peerless, altogether aristocratic Western-style clothing.

Granted, couturing our Oscar in the manner that he did Hank Williams, Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley might have cost Nudie a few score more rhinestones and a few miles more gold thread, but it would have presented no technical problem for him: after all, he also styled Cadillacs. And if Oscar had been given the Nudie makeover, he might have had a few more Chart successes - and a better calibre of groupie than Stephen Fry.

Nudie was a late Twentieth Century not late Nineteenth Century phenomenon, but clearly there is a line of dreamy, romantic aestheticism which runs like a snagged glittery thread between them. It may have been Oscar Wilde who prefigured glam rock and David Bowie who personified it - but it was indubitably Nudie Cohen, the Jewish tailor émigré from Kiev, Russia, who stitched,seamed and patterned it. Whether or not, as legend has it, he was actually the first person to sew the rhinestone onto cloth, is somewhat beside the point.

Not only do his mesmerising creations alchemise rhinestones into rubies and diamonds, making the notion of rhinestones as clothing his own, the other-worldly-yet-worldly nature of the workwear-turned-playwear clothes, hats and boots he made for Country and Western Stars created a look which became the template of working class/hillbilly aspirationalism - the Cowboy Dandy, aka the Desert Knight, later known as the Rock Star: perhaps the most romantic and enduring figure of the Twentieth Century.

Nudie Cohen took the denim-clad mythology of a Nineteenth Century West which was already receding into nostalgia and immortalised it, literally turned it into gold, embroidering that dream into a walking mirage of down-home gorgeousness, laidback sumptuousness. The ‘tastelessness’ of Nudie’s creations is exquisite - like great rock and roll it transcends taste; its bravura is the source of both its virility and androgyny. Perhaps as a reminder that in the Old West ladies were few and far between - and somewhat costly - the Nudie-wearing dandy cowboy appropriates female glamour to himself: a peacock display that seems to be less of a mating call than an explosion of self-sufficient narcissism.
 
Perhaps this is also why in Nudie, virility turns into fecundity: the desert after rain: impossibly bright and vital flowers, grass and spiders‚ webs heavy with dew, stars glistening promisingly, gazing down benignly - all underscored by the bittersweet, happy-sad sentimentality which is the melancholic heart of Country and Western. This is the romance within the romance of the cowboy: instead of Wilde’s gutter, the real cowboy lies in the dirt, head on his stinking, steaming saddle, bathed in the rapidly chilling sweat of the day’s ride, looking up at the stars and dreaming of a better life. Or maybe just a better shirt.

And perhaps this dream-like quality is why Nudie’s extraordinary cars reference not so much the horses of cowboys, as knights‚ chargers, or fantasy Spanish Galleons (the West, of course, was Spanish before it was American).

That $10,000 gold lame suit Nudie wove for Colonel Tom Parker’s golden boy, Elvis Rockin’ Hillbilly Presley in 1957 was to become the ultimate fetish and relic of rock and roll, its Holy Grail and Turin Shroud woven into one. Over on this side of the Atlantic, its influence can still be felt, effectively defining the Seventies, coveted and referenced in their own stage apparel and gestures by Marc Bolan, Bowie, Bryan Ferry, and early (pre-Disney) Elton John.

In the Eighties and Nineties, reflections of it could be detected in the gold lame shirts of glam rock devotee and Elvis fan Morrissey, England’s last great rock/pop star, and considered by some to be Oscar Wilde, the deceased leader of the Aesthetic Movement reincarnated - albeit in a rather more ‘aesthetic’ body.

The legacy of Nudie is by no means secure, however. Fake downward mobility is now the order of the day, even ‘Nudie Jeans’, a brand which claims to be a ‘homage’ to the great Nudie Cohen, looks like the antithesis of Mr Cohen’s aspirational romance. Their products are certainly more affordable, but democratisation has translated yet again into blandness and uniformity. Instead of emphasising the gap between dream and reality and affirming the dream, the Vegas glitter, we have the tedious fetishising/accessorising of ‘authenticity’. Hiphop without the Tiffany jewellery.

The gutter without the stars.

 
© Mark Simpson 2006

 

Nudie Cohn 1902-1984

Helen ‘Bobbie Nudie’ Cohn (wife and creative partner) 1913-2006 

Click here for the family website

 

 

Rather fabulous 2004 book on Nudie by the rather lovely Mary Lynn Cabrall

‘Sorry, Bono, you’re too doubting’ 

Review of ‘Body Piercing Saved My Life’, Andrew Beaujon (Da Capo Press)

by Mark Simpson

Independent on Sunday, 27 August 2006

Americans are insane. The proof? Well, there’s a host of clinical evidence confirming this self-satisfied Old World view of New World nuttiness, from the invasion of Iraq to American Football (which looks much like the invasion of Iraq, but less conclusive and with more pom-poms).

However, the real clincher, the cast-iron proof for us that our colonial cousins are mad as soft cheese past its sell-by is the way so many of them can’t stop shouting about mysweetlordjesuschrist! and how He diedonthecrossformeee! And that’s just their President. Americans are at their bug-eyed barmiest when they are banging on about Gawd. After all, everyone knows that He is actually British and hence he doesn’t like to make a fuss.

But Americans at their fruitiest are also usually at their most entertaining. At least from a safe, smug distance. How many mediocre media careers on this side of the Atlantic have been made out of pointing at yonder Yankee craziness and smirking? Which reminds me, here’s another example: Christian rock music. It’s booming, apparently. Christian rock bands such as Mute Math and Resurrection Band are selling faster than hot cross buns and almost as fast as, well, sin - along with a whole “spiritual” parallel pop culture Universe of “extreme teen Bibles”, skateboarding ministries, Christian tattoo parlors, Christian coffee houses and nightclubs. Hey dude! Being Christian is, like, way cool! Look, man, my bitchin’ skateboard is made from the Cross of Jesu!

Perhaps because he’s an American living in America, Andrew Beaujon, author of Body Piercing Saved My Life (a piously punning slogan on T-shirts popular with Christian rock fans), isn’t smirking, though his wife seems worried.

“My wife is British,” writes Beaujon. “And it kind of freaks her out how vocal people here are about their faith, but I love it. There’s something so beautifully American about this country’s crazy-quilt religious landscape, where you can find a hundred different views of God within a five-minute walk.” Well, yes, “crazy-quilt” sounds about right. Though I wonder how fast he’s walking, and what kind of population density there is in his neighbourhood.

Beaujon of course doesn’t mean the word “crazy” in the way that you or I might. He may not, unlike the vast majority of his fellow Americans, believe in God, and I suspect he’s something of a liberal, but he seems, like our liberal RE teacher premier Tony Blair, to believe very much in religion. Richard Dawkins might never forgive me for saying this, but he does have a point. America may have given the world a very secular pop culture, but America itself is anything but secular. God may be dead in the Old World, or at least living in a retirement bungalow in Rottingdean, but in the New World he’s going skateboarding - and running the country.

The “craziness” of American religiosity, the “legion” of millenarian voices in America’s head that helped build that great country, and to make Americans as optimistic and generous, as spontaneous, as creative, as industrious and as weird and as finally unknowable as they are is not something that should be smirked at. Probably. Without it, American secular culture - like rock music - wouldn’t be what it is and we in Britain would still be buying skiffle records. So it’s perhaps not so strange that non-believer Beaujon, a writer at Spin magazine, would want to “celebrate” America’s religious mania in its musical form. Especially since, as he points out, no one else has written a book about Christian rock before - and, being economically realistic (the flip-side to American religious psychosis), believers are most likely to buy it.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t succeed in making it sound very appealing. I don’t know what it’s actually like to attend a Christian rock concert, or chat to Christian rock stars, or to be saved for that matter, but reading about it is perfectly hellish, when it isn’t so tedious that it makes you want to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

Beaujon’s “accentuate the positive” ethos may be very American, it may be shrewd, but it’s a literary and critical disaster of near-Biblical proportions. It’s only two thirds of the way through the book when writing about “worship music”, a praisethelord! genre of Christian music strictly for the already converted, (which, if I was the Lord, would incline me send a plague of toads and locusts by return heavenly post) that he allows himself to say something nasty - something worth reading:

“Worship tunes tend to evince an adolescent theology, one that just can’t get over how darn cool it is that Jesus sacrificed himself for the world,” he writes. “Our God is an awesome God.” “O Lord, you are glorious.” “How can it be? That you, a king, would die for me?”‘

The problem for Beaujon and for Christian rock is that that while, yes, quite a few of the people buying Christian rock in the US are not that Christian, and some Christian bands are not without critical merit, essentially all Christian rock (as opposed to rock made by Christians) is by definition a form of worship music, when it’s not screeching about how gay marriage is legalised bestiality and abortion is a holocaust. All monotheistic religious belief is slightly adolescent - my daddy is bigger than yours. Of course, rock music is itself very adolescent (praise God), but the point is that “proper” rock music doesn’t pretend to be grown up and respectable and going to heaven. Unless you’re U2.

Actually, as Beaujon points out, U2 are banned by Christian radio stations because of their “doubting” lyrics - and Bono’s criticism of grasping American tele-evangelists. Though they will play cover versions of their songs. And that, I’m afraid, despite Beaujon’s protests, is what Christian rock seems to be: a lame cover-version of the real thing. One that for all its piety, strangely lacks conviction.

In the end - or at the last trumpet - the problem is that Christian rock isn’t bonkers enough. It’s too wordly. It’s Christian consumerism: a holier-than-thou but essentially second-rate XstianTM lifestyle.

Mark Simpson interviews Mark E Smith for Arena Hommes Plus, Summer 2006

‘’avin’ been around the world I reckon we’re very lucky,’ says Mark E Smith, pop genius and (usually) loveable curmudgeon in a moment of uncharacteristic optimism.  ‘They don’t realise what they’ve got, English people.’  And what have we got?  ‘Well,’ he says, eyeing me and sensing a trap, ‘you don’t know until it’s gone do you, Mark!’

Mark E Smith, is 49 years old this year.  It’s part of the mythology of the man who put ‘front’ in ‘frontman’, the lead-ranter for the longest-serving pre-post-punk band The Fall, that he looks much older than his years.  Maybe it’s because those heady days when pop and art and literature and, well, everything worth caring about, seemed to intersect, and everything seemed possible, especially after a line of dodgy speed and a can of Special Brew, now seem much further away than they actually are.  Due to an odd trick of the 21st Century light, the late Seventies, when The Fall was founded after Mark E Smith and most of the English working class was laid off at Salford Docks, is now much, much further away than, say, the early Sixties.

Or maybe it’s just because he’s generally reckoned to have consumed enough sulphate and Special Brew to give ICI indigestion.  ‘A tooth fell out this morning, at 2am,’ he tells me with a grin, ‘I thought that’s fookin’ typical!  Just before I’m due to meet the press!’, he orders a pint of lager and a whiskey and lights up, eyes narrowing in the smoke.

It’s clear that Mr Smith has had, ahem, a few late nights, and isn’t going to make the cover of Mens Health anytime soon but to me he looks younger than his years.  No, honestly.  Maybe it’s a trick of the iconic light on this Sunday afternoon in this postmodern Manchester hotel, or maybe it’s because he doesn’t care about his looks in the way you’re required by EC edict these days, but the man behind 25 studio albums and 24 live albums looks as scampish and defiant as ever.  A slightly shop-worn Kes with a merciless Mancunian motor-mouth.

How does he feel being an icon?  ‘It don’t bother me,’ he says with a shrug.  ‘Though, being a Smith I prefer not to be noticed and to just get on with it.’

Smith’s style is anything but anonymous.  Lyrically, he’s a cross between William Burroughs, Philip Larkin and Ena Sharples.  Above all else, he is distinctively, eccentrically English.  In the true sense of the word.  That’s to say Northern.

‘London’s sealing itself off with its prices and its attitudes,’ he moans.  ‘London is fookin’ surreal.  It’s like: you can’t come in here. And what is London, that collection of villages, for? Fook all.  Compare it to cities like Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester, great cities which changed the world.  I don’t wanna get too northern here…’

Please do….

‘After 11 o’clock you still can’t get a pint!’  He grins.  ‘But we can’t say this Mark coz this is going in a London-based magazine!’

Albert Camus, who penned the novel Smith named his band after, described a rebel as  ‘A man who says ‘no’.  Smith has turned ‘no’ literally into an art-form – always placing himself apart from the latest trend, the latest bleating herd-instinct; it’s made him a lot poorer and a lot less celebrated; but it has made him a hero. One of the last.

He isn’t impressed by the current renaissance of Northern English pop, even those bands which owe rather a lot to The Fall.  ‘I think that the Kaiser Chiefs and Artic Monkeys should open a chain of chip shops in North Yorkshire’, he says, only half joking.  ‘I think the East Germans had it right, actually.  Every group used to have to have a permit.  Until they came up with anything culturally relevant, like a classical composition.  I think they should bring them in here.  I should start a musical Stasi.  If you can’t play in fookin time, then fook off back to the factory.’

What have the English got?  Mark E Smith, that’s what.

Let’s hope this is one thing they appreciate before it’s gone.

© Mark Simpson 2006