MORRISSEY UP YOUR ARSENAL AGAIN

Morrissey's album Your Arsenal has been re-released over twenty years after its first appearance. Here's what I wrote about it not long after that initial release (for a talking-head piece on the BBC World Service):

The spokesperson for the young, fey dispossessed was already 33 years old, and had been a solo artist longer than The Smiths survived, by the time he made Your Arsenal, his fourth solo album, released in 1992. This was made with the late British guitar ace Mick Ronson as producer: a curious, possibly beguiling choice. Ronson was a Mormon and a generation older than Morrissey, a 1960s rocker in appearance yet with a CV dominated by his time with the very 1970s David Bowie of The Man Who Sold The World. He had also co-produced Lou Reed’s Transformer album, been lead guitarist on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revues and prominent on Dylan’s Hard Rain album.

The upshot, on Your Arsenal, is a Morrissey with a heavier sound and an almost perverse denial of emphasis on the lyrics.

From ‘You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side’ you might think punk has won out, after all, over the shy postmodernist who had spent the 1980s espousing celibacy, telling us “Meat Is Murder” and generally voicing the luxuriant romanticism of the lonelier and purer than thou.

He hasn’t really changed. “I wanted,” he said, “to make as physical a record as I possibly could, instead of constantly being curled up in a little ball at the foot of the bed” - but asked if the cover shot of him, shirt open to the waist, is meant to be sexy, it’s typical that he should reply “Really, what would be the point?” Most of the album captures the Morrissey of that retort.

It also captures his lovely voice, the one that seems to come from having his head in the clouds, up in a forlorn and plaintive ether. Morrissey sings like the thinking person’s P.J.Proby, while evoking a T.S.Eliot England of foggy streets and unrequited love endured in grimy rooms with mugs of tea.

Rarely has angst been so sumptuous. Even on a track as vaudeville-jolly as ‘Certain People I Know’, Morrissey still expresses his gloomy absolutes: singing, for instance, that “They’d sacrifice all, all their principles for anything that’s cashable”, to which, typically, he adds the deliberately feeble line “I do believe it’s terrible”  -  a wry self-mockery parading his feeling of helplessness in the face of these people he’s up against.

A reviewer in Q magazine claimed that this album “easily stands comparison with the best of The Smiths”, adding that at least he's no longer “whingeing about having to go to the launderette.” Nonsense. We value the side of Morrissey that whinges about going to the launderette: it’s the slice of life rock music forgets. And this album does not compare with the best of The Smiths.

There is nothing to match the intensely personal rendering of time and place and struggle found in the 1985 song ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’: “End of the pier, end of the bay / You tug my arm and say ‘Give in to lust, / Give up to lust, oh heaven knows we’ll soon be dust”. Nor is there any equal to individual lines like “I’ve called to wish you an unhappy birthday” or “Well I was looking for a job and I’ve found a job and heaven knows I’m miserable now”. Nothing matches the first solo album’s ‘Late Night, Maudlin Street’, nor the second’s ‘Interesting Drug’.

But the Morrissey of Your Arsenal still comes drooping into your room like some elegant young wastrel who should make you tell him to pull his socks up. You don't  -  because he remains the first to confess his own hopelessness, and because underneath, there just might still shine his stubborn, intelligent ardour for a better world.

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Mick Ronson died of liver cancer the year after Your Arsenal. Morrissey kept on keeping on.

DO CROCODILES EAT PIES?

After a walk yesterday with our dog Mavis, a friend of ours and her 6-year-old granddaughter, we came back to the house. The small girl noticed the 1995 Hutchinson's Encyclopedia on our bookshelves and pointed out that the spine was peeling off. This led to my telling her that books like these were what people looked things up in before the internet. I asked her to suggest something we might look up in this vast book.
     “Well," she said, “how do rubbers rub things out?"
     Good question. Too good. The encyclopedia had no answer.
     I suggested we might try, instead, to find out all about crocodiles, and showed her how we search for things in alphabetical order. We arrived at crocodiles and found a colour illustration of a large one lying down - a classic pose with belly spread out to the sides:

     “That crocodile is very fat," the little girl declared. “He's eaten too many pies."
     I said I was fairly sure crocodiles didn't eat pies - that they mostly ate raw fish, animals and birds.
    “Yes," she said, “but sometimes maybe a person walks past and gives him a quiche."

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HERE'S AN AUSSIE RAP SONG ABOUT AN ASTHMA ATTACK

This is Courtney Barnett. She's caustic, contemporary, and - inevitably - knowing. There's a wily quote from ‘All Shook Up' in here. It's pretty close to rap, and I hate rap. It's usually aggressive multi-millionaires posturing in horrible clothes while singing boastful, sulky diatribes about ghetto life and ladies. This isn't. I like this:

ALLEN GINSBERG DOES HIS TAI CHI

BUDDY HOLLY - 55 YEARS DEAD

Extraordinary that he's been dead more than twice as long as he was ever alive, and how important he remains. He more or less created the rock group. And with such snazzy lead guitar, such songwriting, so intimate a voice.

I remember not hearing the news of his death but just knowing about it soon afterwards, and thinking about it a great deal, sitting alone in the front seat on the top deck of a green Crosville bus in Heswall bus station on the Wirral, waiting for it to start, and then it pulling out past the other buses and bus-stops, while I was hearing ‘It Doesn't Matter Anymore' in my head. I wasn't thinking “Oh that's ironic"; I was just subsumed by the sadness of his being dead and its perfection as a record: those shivering stings, the panache of its sprightly pace and that rich and vulnerable voice.

I was 13. That year, 1959, turned out to have that rarity in Britain, a long hot summer. (There wouldn't be another like it until 1976.)

My friend Peter, who loved Buddy Holly above all others, had all the singles he could get hold of, and we'd play them over and over, mostly at his house rather than mine, on more or less every Saturday of our early teenage lives, interspersed with mysterious 45s he'd somehow acquired like ‘You Talk Too Much' by Joe Jones & His Orchestra (we'd laugh at its forlorn monotony) and Slim Harpo's ‘Rainin' In My Heart' - not the same song as on the B-side of ‘It Doesn't Matter Anymore'.

We had no problem with Buddy deserting the Crickets and singing with an orchestra on tracks like these and ‘True Love Ways'. Nor with the posthumous overdubs on records that started being released soon after his death, though enormous debate centred around which versions were best, the undubbed or the dubbed - hampered, as we were, by their being drip-fed to us by the record company. (Undubbed wasn't always best.)

We liked everything: the raw and tinny brashness of early work like ‘Midnight Shift' and ‘Rock Around With Ollie Vee'; the big hitters like ‘Rave On', ‘Oh Boy' and ‘That'll Be The Day'; those beautiful quiet tracks like ‘What To Do' and ‘That's What They Say', in which he invoked a tender nostalgia at the time, let alone in retrospect; and the weird ones - all weird in different ways, too:  ‘Fool's Paradise', ‘Reminiscin''; ‘Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie' (so bizarrely old-fashioned a girl's name in the early 1960s). So many.

Yet unlike with Elvis, or Van Morrison or Bob, with Buddy Holly I can say what my absolutely favourite track is. He didn't write it, and it was a B-side (to ‘Words Of Love'). It's this: