The winner of the
Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award won't be announced until December - but with almost three months to go, the event is in danger of turning into a bit of an anti-climax (as it were). The problem is that
List of the Lost, the first novel by gay, vegan, egomaniacal, Tory-loathing popular music crooner Morrissey was published yesterday. One paragraph in particular seems to have decided the contest, because it's impossible to imagine that anyone could possibly produce a more fucking awful description of awful fucking than the one written by the tone-deaf tosser who spent so much of the '80s spoiling the brilliant guitar work of Johnny Marr by droning away tunelessly over the top of it on numerous recordings by the popular Mancunian beat combo, The Smiths. If you actually want to inspect Morrissey's passage, see below, but I warn you - you won't be able to unread it later:
Let's face it - the statuette already has the mononymous warbler's name all over it. In case you're wondering what the bequiffed miserabilist's book is about, he has provided the following insights:
"The theme is demonology ... the left-handed path of black magic. It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who accidentally kill a wretch who, in esoteric language, might be known as a Fetch ... a discarnate entity in physical form. He appears, though, as an omen of the immediate deaths of each member of the relay team. He is a life force of a devil incarnate, yet in his astral shell he is one phase removed from life. The wretch begins a banishing ritual of the four main characters, and therefore his own death at the beginning of the book is illusory."
One's excitement has rarely been more extravagantly extenuated.
I've always thought Morrissey was a git. Rather pleasing to see that I was right all along.
ReplyDeleteA.A. Gill reaches the same conclusion in a hilarious review of Morrissey's 2013 autobiography:
Delete"What is surprising is that any publisher would want to publish the book, not because it is any worse than a lot of other pop memoirs, but because Morrissey is plainly the most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities."
Morrissey is not just a git - he is evidently the grittiest git in the whole history of gitdom.
For confirmation, here's a bit from his autobiography:
“Against the command of everyone I had ever known, I sing. My mouth meets the microphone and the tremolo quaver eats the room with acceptable pitch and I am removed from the lifelong definition of others and their opinions matter no more. I am singing the truth by myself which will also be the truth of others and give me a whole life. Let the voice speak up for once and for all.”
FFS.
I quite liked the Smiths. One of my favourite of their tunes was Ask Me, and I had always admired the lines "Spending warm Summer days indoors, writing frightening verse for a buck-tooth girl from Luxembourg." So when I found myself on a plane to Luxembourg with Morrissey in the next seat, I asked in a friendly way whether he was planning a visit to a buck-toothed girl or two. Cue withering look and frosty silence. I was not in any way suggesting that he would be offering her a bulbous salutation, given that his tastes tend in the other direction, but he clearly took exception.
ReplyDeleteI am afraid Riley is right.
Typically graceless behaviour, apparently. Another quote from the AA Gill review of the autobiography:
Delete"Even his relation with the audience is equivocal. Morrissey likes them when they’re worshipping from a distance, but he is not so keen when they’re up close. As an adolescent he approaches Marc Bolan for an autograph. Bolan refuses and Morrissey, still awkwardly humiliated after all these years, has the last word. But then later in the book and life, he does exactly the same thing to his own fans without apparent irony."
Here's Peter Serafinowicz singing the opening page of the autobiography:
https://youtu.be/49lPGmnYDw4
A year or so ago Johnny Rotten was staying in a poncey hotel near to where I live. He was recording at the studios of Steve Winwood who lives nearby (one of the most delightful world pop musicians who could ever have drawn breath - more of him another time, perhaps).
DeleteA chum of mine, a retired army major in his early forties, and an imposing, tall, muscular, bony being with a face that could double for Yorick, saw Mr Rotten in the street and engaged him in conversation. Something on the lines of: 'Well, I just want to say what an amazing influence you had on me in my youth, I just loved.....' The Major's comments were stopped abruptly by Mr Rotten's pithy interjection:
'Fuck off'.
Says it all really.
I hope your friend horsewhipped the rebarbative, talentless little shit for his rudeness. (Mind you, it's alarming to hear that a former army officer was ever influenced by the Sex Pistols.)
DeleteBetween punks, 'fuck off' is a term of endearment.
Deletein this instance, I have been assured, it was not.
Delete