marksimpson.com

3:AM Press and James Maker have parted ways. From James’ blog:

Due to unforeseen events at 3:AM Press which are not connected directly to either my book or to me, we have decided to annul the contract in an expeditious and amicable fashion.

Therefore, I have decided to serialise some chapters of the book, at this dedicated blog, while I look for an alternative publisher. Enjoy.

It’s a crime of global proportions that a book as funny and sharply written as this should be currently without a publisher. But then we’re living in an age of global crimes a-go-go — and the printed word is looking a bit… fucked. Frankly.

All James’ posted chapters from Autofellatio are shockingly well-written and criminally funny, but because of its content the one titled ‘Morrissey: Gide the Ripper’, a taster of which appeared on marksimpson.com last year, is probably going to generate the most attention, offering as it does inside insight like this:

I feel that Morrissey has achieved the impossible. It is the straightforward that eludes him. He had to become famous because although he is a savant in the auditorium, he is a dead loss in a launderette.

And anecdotes like this:

It was at Morrissey’s Cadogan Square apartments in London’s Chelsea that I met Sandie Shaw when she was enjoying a return to the stage and to television performing Morrissey and Marr compositions. I have always thought of Sandie Shaw as the ‘Nico of Dagenham’ and, to this day, I still feel a pleasurable shiver at Long Walk Home, released in 1967. With the mild success of Hand In Glove and Please Help The Cause Against Loneliness she was naturally keen to consolidate her comeback. So keen, in fact, that she contrived to enter his apartment building, without a key, and proceeded to ring the doorbell. She is an Essex girl and there is nothing like the direct approach.

But with Morrissey, the direct approach or the approach without charm, rarely works. One must learn to play canasta. We were in the sitting room listening to the musical score of her doorbell chiming when we decided to move across the hallway to the adjacent kitchen for some much-needed refreshment. Adopting the ‘Leopard Crawl’, a military manouevre designed to advance oneself with the smallest silhouette possible, the body close to the ground, we chanced our luck and stealthily crept towards the kettle. Halfway across the hallway, the letterbox flapped open.

“I can see you. Open up.”

The printed word may be in a bad way, but I think it’s just a matter of time before Autofellatio finds its way onto vellum.

For the record, I didn’t meet James until after Saint Morrissey was published. So, as I maintained at the time, everything in that outrageously unprofessional biography — or, as I dubbed it, ‘psycho-bio’ –was sheer guess-work and none of it was based on anything so sensible as speaking to people who actually knew him. Nor of course, speaking to Morrissey himself, whom I’ve never met. But I have spent most of my life listening to him.

I still haven’t met my subject, thankfully. Although there was a dicey moment when I travelled to Manchester’s Move Festival in 2004 in James’ Winnebago (he and Noko 440 were supporting Morrissey). I heard M was popping in to say hello to James so I went for a walk and admired The Ordinary Boys’ tight jeans on the?main stage for a while. Cowardly? Possibly. But definitely tactful. How embarrassing it would have been for the both of us to actually meet.

After all we’ve been through together.

Marksimpson.com is delighted to offer you an exclusive peek at ‘1976′, a chapter from James Maker’s forthcoming eye-wateringly agile memoir ‘Autofellatio’, revealing for the very first time how the punk summer of 1976 really began: with his suspension from grammar school for impersonating his mother…. (Jon Savage eat your heart out.)

‘Now exposed as an architect of tissue-thin deceit, I squirmed on a Jacobean ébéniste as Dr Friskney began to recite my letters to Mr Potter.

“Dear Mr. Potter
Unfortunately, James is unable to attend school for one week because he has been diagnosed by the doctor as suffering from advanced impetigo of the lower lip which, as you may be aware, is highly contagious.”

Mrs Maker.”

“Dear Mr. Potter

James’ impetigo has now rapidly spread to the upper lip and its immediate environs. The medicated cream is being applied thrice daily but, at this time, we feel it inadvisable to allow him to return to school for at least another week. We are concerned for his nose.

Mrs Maker.”

My mother asked, “What does ‘environs’ mean?” Unwisely, I laughed. Three pairs of eyes shot up and drilled me with stony censure.’

You can read the hilarious chapter in full here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both ends.

‘Only stone and steel accept my love…’

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

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

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

Which is two more than on Ringleader of the Tormentors.

James Maker, former lead singer with cult 80s Indie band Raymonde and 90s drag metal sensation RPLA, and one of Morrissey’s longest-serving friends, is writing a memoir.

And what a memoir. It has one of the best, and unquestionably the most honest title for an autobiography ever: ‘Autofellatio’.

Maker recently posted a very short excerpt from it, recounting his first meeting with Morrissey in 1977, titled ‘Gide the Ripper’, on his MySpace webpage. Inevitably, despite the profile being set to ‘Private’ and only having two and a half authorised friends, the excerpt ended up on a Morrissey fansite in less time than it takes to read most Morrissey song titles.

Now that the excerpt is ‘out there’ Maker’s given permission for it to be posted it on marksimpson.com. As you can see, Maker’s prose more than lives up to the promise of his memoir’s title.

I’ve been given a peek at several chapters, and can report that this is one of the funniest, sharpest pieces of writing I’ve come across: a veritable comedy of aphorisms. A very English rock and roll memoir, with nary a wasted or ill-chosen word: Ronald Firbank meets the New York Dolls, has a sweet sherry or three and causes a scene on the night bus home. In court shoes.

But when will it be published? James says that he’s ‘broken the back’ of his Autofellatio, but wants to be entirely happy with his technique before showing it to agents….

Here’s Mr Maker in 1994 performing RPLA’s court shoe-tapping stonker ‘Absolute Queen of Pop’ (and no, it’s not about Guy Ritchie’s husband), kindly affording us a look at his agile tonsils:

And here, in Raymonde in 1988, in a nice fur hat and lippy belting out the irresistible and ineluctable ‘Destination: Breakdown’: