WORD MAGAZINE #23
(Jan 2005)
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WORD #23 (Jan 2005)
Transcribed by Vu
www.wordmagazine.co.uk
"Prodigal Son or Conquering Hero?" (6 pgs)
writer:
photo:
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Stuart Maconie
Norman Jean Roy
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"Prodigal Son or Conquering Hero? The latter, I think."
He was becalmed in Los Angeles for six years - "time flows quickly when you're asleep".
But Morrissey saved his triumphant return for the moment he was needed the most.
The day that I speak to Morrissey, one Charles Windsor is in the news again. The ageing job-seeker of whom our boy once ask "Oh Charles, don't you ever crave to appear on the front of the Daily Mail dressed in your mother's bridal veil" has this time delivered himself of an extraordinary outburst. It concerns the upstart nature of the great unwashed - or you and I if you prefer - viz: "What is the matter with these people… wanting to be pop stars … aspiration above talents… harrumph."
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Given Morrissey's past pronouncements (he did once sing rather fetchingly of wanting to drop his trousers to Charles' mummy after all) and also given that Chas seems to be railing against the jumped-up pantry boys of England, I wonder what Morrissey makes of it all.
"Well, it's a very silly thing to say. But then he's a very silly man, isn't he? Aspirations in excess of talent? Well, doesn't he have aspirations? After all, doesn't he aspire to (fruity chortle) occupy his mother's seat."
Welcome back, old chum. We've missed you. We really weren't getting answers like that from David Sneddon.
David who?
Exactly.
At the height of the weekly music press's tortured, doomed, obsessive love-hate affair with Morrissey, the story went that more people bought the paper when his face and torso was splashed across the cover than sometimes bought Morrissey had fans who were as keen, maybe keener, on his interviews than his records. This was said not so much to belittle his work, but rather to point out how Morrissey had turned the interview into an art form, into a devastating weapon in his artistic armoury, as important as his alluring voice or his unique lyrics.
Lou Reed and Van Morrison were rude in interviews, Brian Eno was clever. Brian Wilson was damaged. But Morrissey was the first musician, at least since the Beatles or Bowie, to charm, to delight, to dazzle.
Of those three weekly music papers that fed voraciously and somewhat ungratefully on him, two are gone and one is ailing. Morrissey however is bigger than ever. Opinion is one thing but the facts cannot lie. This year he has played to the biggest audiences of his career, had his biggest hit single ever, sold almost a million aabums and gazed in that wry, yet strong-jawed '50s film star way from every magazine and TV show imaginable. Forget 1983 - he certain has - this has been Morrissey's annus mirabilis.
"Yes, it's been very amusing hasn't it. Prodigal Son? Or Conquering Hero? The latter I think."
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