Okay. I did receive an email request regarding Morrissey earlier in the week. This was after I had announced my intention to do something with the Guardian “Great Lyricists” booklet, I hasten to point out. But then I never had a chance to do it. (And like, what was it, Monday??)
“I really think you should blog about our Stephen, he’s a national treasure,” wrote my correspondent. This is an interesting epithet, especially as that other great National Treasure Alan Bennett is invoked in the same email.* (By the way, I don’t think Morrissey is at all the ‘Alan Bennett of pop’. He just isn’t.)
The email goes, referring to the booklet’s intro: “Tim Lott is right, of course, in stating that the lyrics just make you sing the songs in your head – so how much of a convert reading the lines cold will make of anyone I’m not sure.” This is directed directly at me. Oh, dear.
The thing is, right, I never thought the Smiths really mastered that key element of a song, the melody. I know Leonard Cohen himself has that drony, singsong thing going on, but the Smiths songs always seemed to me kind of, oh, talky. I mean, the tunes (or whatever they are) always seemed to me more like that kind of making-it-up-as-you-go-along singing that little kids do, and this rendered their lyrics LESS effective for me.
That and the National Treasure’s hair.
Another friend has written (more quickly, and on Facebook): “i was baffled by the smiths when they were current, but i think i was too young. the penny dropped (and rolled down the drain in which i got my hand caught trying to rescue it) when i was about 25, and now i glory in the misery! how can you listen to ‘last night i dreamt somebody loved me’ and not feel chipper?”
This feels more compelling. I did the research. I listened to Morrissey, both Smiths and beyond, for two days. I realised that I have never actually disliked “Every Day is Like Sunday”. I started to hear more of the words. And I did experience something like the joy my friend refers to when listening to the song I quoted the other day: “I was happy for an hour in a drunken haze…” To be brutally honest, it made me laugh with happiness. And as for that talkiness, some of them do rhyme, though I was just beginning to get the concept of a pop song in free verse.
(Even this point is spurious, as I’ve been listening to all sorts of people for years, like Patti Smith etc – but then, she never set herself up as Miss Everybody USA, or even Miss Everybody New York…)
I missed that Patti Smith booklet, by the way; the two copies at work were whipped by others, and I never managed to get out of the building at all that day till long after the newsagents have done their returns. So the greatness was not to be.
But there has been some chat, as the subject seems to be like boy catnip. It turns out that the mere mention of the bequiffened one is enough to draw people out of the woodwork. Even if they have nothing to say they just want, somehow, to be part of it. One person said to me, quite engaged with the whole topic, “you know, the thing is, they’re great lyrics. But I don;t think they’re poems. I think if Morrissey wanted to write poems he could always just write a book.”
Anyway, the first email gets into its stride, clearly written from the heart: “Also, the selection seems to focus on the gloomier songs (like the one about the Moors murders) rather than the funny, joyous ones – in particular, I was sorry to see they’d left out ‘This Charming Man’, which has some great imagery and is one of The Smiths’ most positive numbers. But at least they print ‘Everyday is like Sunday’ with its nod to Betjeman and peerless evocation of the bleakness of an English seaside town (Southport, apparently).”
A note here: I think it’s more like Larkin. And note how the “bleakness” is evoked as being “funny, joyous.” Only in England, I tell you.
“Morrissey’s England (continues the email) is that of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, early ‘Coronation Street’, ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘Billy Liar’, etc.: he’s interested in that period in the 1950s and early 60s when working class northern-ness acquired its own cachet and glamour.” (My friend of the poetry book remark says of this, “I think that England never really existed, it was a wishful construct in Morrissey’s mind, and a lot of other people’s minds.”) This in turn has reminded me of one of the things that really drove me nuts about the Smiths, back in the day when they were the best thing since sliced Hovis. Their name. Oh, Smith! Geddit? That faux everyman nobodyness of it. Lord. It struck me as so attention-seeking. And not even original. In a nice little twist, which would have annoyed all of them, I always used to get them confused on some level with those other anonymously-named popsters, the Thompson Twins. Ha! (Mind you – their hair…)
Anyway, I’ve read the booklet. It just takes a few minutes. Now the thing is, if this is poetry it’s pretty thin stuff. (Though I do really like this bit: “The dream is gone/ but the baby is real”). Because he IS a good songwriter, our Stephen has done this thing of leaving enough space between the words for the music to sit. So song lyrics are still not poetry, even if they are ‘poetic’. (Of course, I have yet to do the side-by-side comparisons of the ouevre of that other aforementioned Smith, the otherwise-suburban-sounding Patti: her lyrics published as lyrics against her poems published as poems. If she’s any good they’ll be different.)
My email ends, however, with a wonderful telling detail of the kind that only ever comes straight from the REAL Alan Bennett – one that sheds a light that Morrissey could not even quite muster the wit to shed on himself: “When he lived in Primrose Hill he had Alan Bennett as a neighbour, who said that whenever Morrissey came round for tea all he wanted to do was discuss the career of northern dwarf comic Jimmy Clitheroe.”
Okay. A grudging convert; maybe it’s all these years of New Labour. Or like my facebooking friend, maybe I had to grow into Morrissey’s peculiarly English brand of youthful angst. Oh, I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.
* This expression, National Treasure, is something that gave me great happiness when I first heard it all those untold aeons ago when I came over here. America does not have National Treasures. Over there they like National Heroes, Great American Novels, things like that. The idea of a National Treasure, like something you would keep in a cigar box under your bed just because you LOVED it, would never occur to them.
Baroque in Hackney 