Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get The Christmas Present That I Want

Post by The Smiths in Posters.

Autobiography by Morrissey (Penguin Classics 2013)

Johnny Marr was born in Ardwick in a Victorian dwelling not dissimilar to my own. Blocked in by dye works and engineering works, timber yards and iron foundries, the Ardwick of the Avis Bunnage era was an area of seasoned street fighters such as the Little Forty Gang, whose dapper style was well known when there was nothing nice to rest the eye on. Johnny was also of Irish parents, who would eventually inch their way south of the city center (for north is not the road that anyone ever travels). In 1982, Johnny appears at Kings Road immaculately be-quiffed and almost carried away by his own zest to make meaningful music. He reminds me of Tom Bell in Payroll, an early 1960s film set in Newcastle yet minus one single Geordie accent. Johnny despairs of things as they are and wants to change them, even if, beneath the grit and growl, his favorite group of all-time is Pentangle.

‘We’ve met before, y’know,’ he says, ‘I’m glad you don’t remember.’

Ooh, but I do.

It had been in the foyer of the Ardwick Apollo, where Patti Smith had displayed her radiant stallions gradually lapping into seahorses nervousness. I stood in conversation with Philip Towman (another Wythenshawe musicologist), when Johnny first shoved his face in, and he said, ‘You’ve got a funny voice.’ The comment contained an oblique confession, which said: you don’t talk as shockingly bad as I do. In fact, Johnny later confessed that prior to meeting me he had pronounced the word ‘guitar’ without the t, so Ardwick-mangled the parlance. I couldn’t imagine how this would be possible, or how he could be understood. I am shaken when I hear Johnny play guitar, because he is quite obviously gifted and almost unnaturally multi-talented. Since he shows an exact perspective on all things, I can’t help but wonder: What is he doing here with me? Formulating writing systems and mapping out how best to blend our dual natures – here, against the hiss of the paraffin lamp, and me wrapped in the sanctity of an enormous overcoat acquired in a Denver charity shop for $5. Why has Johnny not already sprayed his mark – elsewhere, with others less scarred and less complicated than I am? It seemed to me that Johnny had enough spark and determination to push his way in amongst Manchester’s headhunters – yet here he was, with someone whose natural bearing discouraged openness. Stranger still, we get on very well. It is a matter of finding yourself in possession of the one vital facet that the other lacks, but needs.

30 Day Song Challenge - day 11

day 11 - a song from your favorite band

I'd be kidding myself on if I picked any other band for day 11.

One of their less celebrated songs from the fag end of their career:

Noel Gallagher gets it right again and again when discussing The Smiths.

April means the 30 Day Song Challenge

From the other place.

A music meme with a difference. Thirty days, thirty musical taste questions. If I had my blogging mojo switched on, I'd have activated a file sharing account but, in these blocked times, You Tube is my friend.

day 01 - your favorite song

Christ, kick off with the hard one. How can you have a favourite song? . . . or novel, film or Socialist Standard front cover, for that matter. If you're anything like me, you have 20 or 30 favourites, and you flip between them from month to month suiting the mood, the season or your angst level.

Favourite song? How's my angst level? Ask me next week and it'll be something different but, at this moment in time, this old standard still does it for me every time. Probably listened to it over a thousand times, and I've never got sick of it.

I'm cheating myself a bit with the embedding of The Tube video when, in truth, I first discovered the song via this performance on Top of the Pops.

But surely you can watch both?

That joke isn't funny anymore

Johnny Marr took his bastard time.

Louder Than Bombs (2001)

Strange Friday headline, here it comes

The Smiths set for comeback?

I can't see it happening myself.

Mozzer's already belting out the songs from The Smiths back catalogue on the solo tours; Johnny Marr can't pick up a guitar at the moment because he refuses to put down his blackberry for a second in fear that he will miss the email informing him that the critical tide has finally turned with regards to his 2003 album, Boomslang. (Rolling Stone has taken his petition into account and revised the review up to 2.5 stars); and the Other Two? Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler are fully booked for autograph signings at Smiths Fan Conventions for the next three years (see them tomorrow night at Apsley Village Club . . . entrance fee 75 pence).

But as far-fetched as this particular one-off reunion sounds, it would be a nice bookend to this book. Real life so rarely imitates fiction . . . unless you take into account that time I borrowed Jimmy McGrory's old football boots and scored seven goals in a double period 5 a side game as the gospel truth.

Today, and only for today, let a hundred Smiths song titles bloom as post titles on a thousand blogs.

How Soon Is Never? by Marc Spitz (Three Rivers Press 2003)

We were all a little high-strung. "Hand in Glove" had been elusive. For nearly two weeks, we'd been obsessing about it like only teenagers can. I wanted to hear it because John wanted to hear it. Jerome, Maria and Richie wanted to hear it because I wanted to hear it. And everybody wanted to be the first one to get it on tape and make themselves a hero to the rest. The days of sitting by the radio for hours waiting for the DJ to play one song are long over for me (and you too, thanks to shit like downloading) but damn if it wasn't a perfect, temporary existence for all the frustration it put us through at the time. That rush of anticipation when the ad ends and the start of a new half-hour block of music takes over was amazing. I didn't even know what I was listening for. Just something called The Smiths. I told myself if I'd know it when I heard it. You know, I can't listen to the radio for ten minutes now. It's all ads and no rush at all.

These Charming Men

A must have for every Smiths devotee out there.

Spinster's Rock has a 'This Charming Man' track for every day of the week (and one left over for just good measure).

The original single version will always be the definitive version for me, but if you love The Smiths that means you are a sad bastard completist. And Spinster's Rock post even includes the only ever official release of Troy Tate's production of 'This Charming Man'.

As I am in New York, I guess I should pass comment on the two extended 'New York' remixes of 'This Charming Man'? Mmm, not necessarily my cup of tea but now you know where the ideas for the Meat Is Murder track, 'Barbarism Begins At Home', came from.

They Talk About The Smiths, So I Don't Have To #2

'This Charming Man': The greatest pop song of all time?

Quite possibly. It depends what day you catch me when asking that particular question.

Professional irritant Paul Morley tests my patience to the limit with his trendy sixth form English teacher deconstruction of the lyrics of 'This Charming Man' on his BBC4 programme, Pop! What is it good for? Simon Armitage is excused from my bile, as I love his prose - though I do wish he wouldn't go to the same barber as Stuart Maconie - and Mike Joyce? . . . well Mike Joyce has the best line of all in the clip.

Hat tip to Urban 75 for bringing the programme to my attention.

They Talk About The Smiths, So I Don't Have To

UNLOVABLE

Ian Bone reports on Smiths fans in Salford getting spikey at the thought of David Cameron securing a photo-op outside the Salford Boys Club.

Doesn't matter if Cameron claims it's his favourite album of all time, it restores my faith a tad.

Manchester, So Much To Answer To

Found via the SPGB discussion list, Manchester Branch's mini-quiz for the end of 2007:

1. ‘Rise like Lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number —/ Shake your chains to earth like dew/ Which in sleep had fallen on you —/ Ye are many —they are few.’ Which poet, which poem?

2. When was Bolton Branch founded?

3. Who wrote 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda'?

4. In which city was Jim Finnie for many years the Party contact?

5. What was Shengwulian?

6. Where is Edgeley Lane?

7. What does OBU stand for?

8. When did Jack Fitzgerald die?

9. Who was Samuel Bamford?

I'll post the answers in the comment box when I get the answers myself.

Pete and the Dud

Of course he wrote 'Michelle'. It was the only bum note on what is, otherwise, my favourite Beatles album. Paul McCartney and Pete Doherty take time out from the tabloid life to stroke each other in this month's Observer Music Monthly.

And naturally they have things in common: the Barat/Lennon comparisons and trade offs; both being seen as the well dressed good-looking sensitive ones who the fans wanted to take home to meet their mums; Doherty born in '79, Macca dying in '79.

It all adds up to a bit of journalistic fluff, but I did like McCartney's anecdote about meeting Penny Rimbaud at the height of punk in the seventies, and fingers crossed that the late Linda McCartney's reported love for The Smiths didn't begin and end with 'Meat is Murder'.

I'm not sure that these type of music magazine blind dates ever work. Wasn't there that case of the NME covering Paul Weller meeting Pete Townsend at the height of The Jam's fame? I seem to remember reading - maybe in The Beat Concerto? - that they hated each other on sight. But that was nothing in comparison to that time at the height of mullets and militancy on Merseyside that the now sadly defunct Record Mirror covered The Redskins meeting Derek Hatton within its pages.

Sure the pictures of the meeting looked cheery enough, but the gossip is that afterwards it took seven copies of the Militant International Review to mop up the spilled egos. Any advancement for a unified vanguardist left at that time = via the SWP's recent Open Letter to the Militant Tendency - was squandered over an argument as trivial as who played bass on the originally recording of Wilson Pickett's "Ninety Nine and a Half (Won't Do)".

Damn those petit-bourgeois Bolshevik-Centrist-liquidationist types . . . those completely demoralized elements, wearing button down Ben Sherman shirts, sporty number one haircuts and knocked off shiny Pierre Cardin suits.