- I don't perform. That's not a performance.
A seriousness that means something (even if you don't agree with him), a presence, a resistance. Morrissey, a voice of rational misanthropy, of resolute idiosyncrasy, of the bloodymindedly cerebral. Someone who understands the difference between sensitivity and sentiment. So you still exist - it's a shock to realise it, because I'd vaguely resigned myself to your having disappeared, and somehow it even seemed right that you had. Now it suddenly makes sense that you're there on TV, for a few uncomfortable minutes. Managing to be real, because you've refused to exist in that painfully overlit world of grimacing obsequies for so long, perhaps.
That extraordinary face is ossified into a hard mask, I know you're hiding in there, peeping out through teeth constantly gritted in discomfort, squirming mouth petitioning tirelessly for escape. Body contorted and braced against something you know isn't going to agree with you, and inevitable disappointment.
You sing about England but won't live here, and you now have exactly the same curious facial and elocutionary tics as that other notorious northerner expat-in-LA (David Hockney), crossed with David Lynch, crossed again with one of his films' sinister woozy barroom crooners (the bright red jacket a giveaway); you're impossibility incarnate, so that while you prove that there's someone who's worth it in this murkiness you're a reminder of the necessity of remoteness and prudent solitude; so that whilst you're effortlessly showing what a trivial, coarse, vulgar, bitter, insensitive, braying, insincere, talentless, incontinent, half-dead nobody J*n*th*n R*ss is, you're nevertheless deigning to appear on his show and making me watch it...
Still, though it all attests to the indisputable fact that you - we - lost, and will always lose, you nevertheless still bother to speak, and even to sing, and for that you're forgiven, even if I don't like the new song (yet)....Thanks...
...
There is a place, a place in hell
Reserved for me and my friends
And when we go, we all will go
So you see, I'm never alone
All that we hope is when we go
Our skin and our blood and our bones
Won't get in your way, making you ill
The way they did when we lived.
Oh there is a place with a lot more time
And a few more gentler words
And looking back, we will forgive
We had no choice, we always did
Johnathon Ross is often unspeakably sycophantic and it was great seeing Morrissey make him look like a stumbling idiot. There was so much discomfort in the interview which is a strange thing for Friday night entertainment, it brings something wonderfully unsettling into your living room. I loved seeing Morrisey perform too, it's not often you see a performer on TV who has a serious message and who so obviously cares about it. It's just a shame that modern media forces people like Morrisey into solitude.
Posted by: siobhan at May 16, 2004 06:41 PMI don't think anything has FORCED Morrissey into solitude....
Posted by: mark k-p at May 16, 2004 09:33 PMPerhaps 'forced' is the wrong word to use. What I meant is that sometimes people find the world so ridiculous / hypocritical / pathetic / or whatever that they feel the need to cut themselves off from it.
Posted by: siobhan at May 17, 2004 12:36 PM
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