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sooo depressing” dimwits.
Simpson shows that bright teenagers know long
after they’ve packed away their last Dr Martens’ that
Morrissey’s self obsession is anything but depressing;
it’s a life-affirming blood-pact of strength against the
stupidity of the world;
“In assaulting pop’s nostrums and clichés in his own
image, Morrissey made it about the one thing both
parents and pop music had been united against: intelligence.
Forget drugs, forget promiscuity. Thinking
Too Much was undoubtedly the most degenerate, most
anti-social habit any teenager ever picked up.”
With the added get-out clause in the grand tradition
of having your cake and eating it that, while
you were vicariously living through the man’s emotions,
you were never really as depressed as he quite
genuinely seemed to be, even through all the wit and
charm. He was doing it for you in Christlike fashion
(although this particular Messiah was Mancunian,
camp, quiffed, flower fixated and more inclined to
call for people’s deaths than turn other cheek). Lured
pied-piper-like by the first incandescent chimes of
‘This Charming Man’, this is an adolescent antifantasy
world which still has enough acolytes of all
ages to sell out the Manchester Evening News Arena
this May in less than an hour.
Simpson shows with aplomb the disparate influences
that made the mental make-up of “this alarming man”.
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and
Pop, punk and glam rock (which “called for and for
a brief moment seemed to actually offer escape from
the humdrum by becoming your own glamorous creation”).
The feminine-centred northern drama of the 60s
which at once embraced and damned the working-class
background he came from, and its lighter modern day
offshoots like the comedy of Alan Bennett and Victoria
Wood: (“Morrissey’s ‘voice’ is that of the Northern
Woman, a certain intensity mixed with a certain breeziness,
a certain desperation mixed with a lot of self irony
…strong, but touchingly vulnerable … a queer fish.”)
Morrissey’s two greatest idols were Oscar Wilde
and James Dean. Wilde for his wit and, in the proper
sense of the word, perversity: “an idealist, yet the
Queen of Cynics, he was a romantic, but was frighteningly
realistic; he was a moralist yet completely
dissolute, Morrissey of course is an immoralist who is
scandalously virtuous.” James Dean for personifying
adolescent rebellion: “Jimmy reflected back as Morrissey
would like to see himself: a creature who may
have been tortured and full of self doubt but always
managed to look comfortable in his own skin and to
radiate an animal magnetism.” And both, of course, for
the romantic doom of their exit from this world.
Simpson goes a bit more out on a limb in proclaiming
his parents break-up was the biggest influence on
his world outlook, totally siding with his book librarian
mum against his porter dad with all the Oedipus conno-
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