Meetings With Morrissey by Len Brown

Author:Len Brown [Brown, Len]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-240-7
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2010-03-14T05:00:00+00:00

* PETA is the world’s largest animal rights organisation. Its slogan is “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment”.

9. Napoleon Solo — The Political Animal

“Any pop journalist who wishes to do a savage critique of anything I’ve done is wasting their time, because I get there before they do.”

– Morrissey, November 1992

I LEFT Hook End Manor near Reading in October 1990 reflecting on Morrissey’s strange position in pop music. Despite his chart successes between 1988 and 1990 perhaps even he had begun to believe that he’d never regain the heights of artistic success, acclaim and influence he’d achieved with The Smiths. Despite all the cleverness and all the craft of his quartet of 1991 singles – ‘Our Frank’, ‘Sing Your Life’, ‘Pregnant For The Last Time’ and ‘My Love Life’ – none of them broke into the UK Top 20. He didn’t seem defeated – the bubble hadn’t burst – but two and a half years on from his remarkable rehabilitation with Viva Hate, Morrissey temporarily seemed somewhat deflated.

The release of his second studio album, Kill Uncle – within six months of the HMV stop-gap compilation Bona Drag – hardly altered the perception that he was treading water. It sounded oddly-out-of-place in the context of the passing Madchester/rising Rave scene that dominated British music in the late Eighties, early Nineties, and deliberately different from Johnny Marr’s debut LP with Electronic, which had been critically acclaimed earlier in 1991.*

Written mainly with Mark Nevin of Fairground Attraction, with additional tunes from producer Clive Langer, Kill Uncle would come to be regarded as something of a transitional album for Morrissey. It’s not that bad, just nowhere near as good as Viva Hate or several of Morrissey’s later solo works. True ‘Our Frank’ wasn’t his cleverest or most controversial single – after ‘November Spawned A Monster’ and ‘Piccadilly Palare’ the subject matter seemed weirdly safe – but ‘Sing Your Life’ was a strong song and another fine riposte to those who constantly claimed he couldn’t sing. He’d laughed back at earlier criticisms on The Queen Is Dead, when he broke into the palace and HRH also told him he couldn’t carry a tune.

Elsewhere on Kill Uncle there’s the Roxy Music/Mott The Hoople-influenced piano-led track, ‘Mute Witness’ – possibly inspired by Rita A Taste Of Honey, The Leather Boys Tushingham’s performance as mute wife Eve opposite Oliver Reed in The Trap (1966) – plus the throwaway, oddly-unfunny ‘King Leer’ and the strangely hopeful sounding ‘Found Found Found’.

‘Driving Your Girlfriend Home’, with additional vocals from his closest friend Linder Sterling, is among the few highlights; a melancholy follow-on from The Smiths’ leave-taking track ‘I Won’t Share You’. But it doesn’t really lift the lyrical mood of unhappiness and defeat that permeates an uneven collection of songs. Perhaps appropriately, ‘The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye’ suggested he’d prefer to be blindly loved than judged.

The album would be more remembered for Morrissey’s latest attempt at dealing with issues of racial tension and cultural integration (or disintegration) through the track ‘Asian Rut’.

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