“Michael, if this was a proper blog, you’d have one of those link-baiting personality tests everyone loves so much.” You’re right. Again. That’s why I love you so. Let’s get to it… Just answer the three simple questions below to discover which Smiths album sleeve you are...
1. Do you have a favourite colour? (I don’t want to know the actual colour - it will have a negligible impact on the end result, believe me.) 2. Have you ever watched a television show? (You have? Excellent. This is going well, isn’t it?) 3. Something random about fruit. Erm… Do you believe in bananas?
Ok, that’s it. And I’ve decided that you are…
Yep, ‘The World Won’t Listen.’
Make of that what you will. It could mean you’re terribly introverted. Or then again, perhaps incredibly extroverted. Who am I to say? Try doing it again if you’d like another album. You won’t actually get one, but it will reconfirm your first choice.
Back to our regular programming tomorrow. Probably.
Songs about walking home alone. Those are my favourite songs. (He says, with the right to change his mind at any time, so don’t hold me to it.) See also The Smiths’ ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ (“Though I walk home alone, my faith in love is still devout”) and The Wedding Present’s ‘My Favourite Dress’ (“A long walk home in the pouring rain, I fell asleep when you never came”).
Can’t get enough of them. 'Now That’s What I Call Some Good Songs About Walking Home Alone.’ I’d buy that album. (Are you listening record companies?)
Of course, this is because I’ve spent far too much time traipsing around on my lonesome. Let’s just say it’s through choice and there’s a certain romanticism to it. (Except it’s not always. And for ‘romanticism’ read ‘bitter sting of rejection’.)
New Order’s ‘Temptation’ remains one of the most perfect songs to me. And marries my favourite theme of long walks home alone, with my second favourite theme of not being able to remember the colour of people’s eyes (“Oh, you’ve got green eyes; oh, you’ve got blue eyes; oh, you’ve got grey eyes”). It’s another of those songs that seems to capture one Saturday evening in March 1989 quite perfectly. The answer was she had grey eyes. Well, kind of more silver, but let’s not ruin my memory of the song.
Classic enigmatic Peter Saville cover.
With the band's name nowhere to be found.
P.S. If you like your indie frontmen in white shorts, you'll love this performance from the archives...
Is the Summer
over? Can I come out of hibernation now? What did I miss?
So… we were
talking about The Smiths. "Oh no, Michael. Let’s move on to something else." Ah, but we can’t. We need
to wallow in the 25th anniversary of "Strangeways…" and The Smiths splitting. The
news that Johnny Marr had left the group had broken in the NME a month back. It
almost ruined my week on holiday in Swanage with my grandparents and cousins. Above the Mary Chain on the cover was a big ‘Why I Quit’
headline. Oh, here it is…
My copy of this is in the loft somewhere, so thank you vinylonthe.net.
Come on, you
know you’ve missed these stupidly detailed musings. Heartbroken by the seaside,
there was at least one final studio album on the way. Though the cloying absurdity
of their current single ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ didn’t bode well.
Morrissey has
often claimed ‘Strangeways…’ is his favourite album. Marr too. I can’t agree as
‘The Queen Is Dead’ remains their glistening pinnacle for me. But they bowed
out in their own inimitable style with some wonderfully intuitive paeans to the
loveless, witless and, er, spleenless. And no-one rolls an ‘r’ quite like
Morrissey.
Morrissey
wants you to hang out of a car door. Speeding down a motorway. With a video
camera. Sounds like a dream job. This was the brief given to an old work
colleague of mine called Chris. (No, not that Chris. Or this Chris. There are
too many people called Chris in my life.)
In 1986, The Smiths
commissioned a short film from director Derek Jarman to support the release of ‘The Queen Is Dead’. The agreement seems to have been ‘you can do what you like, just don’t expect the band to appear’. Chris was the cameraman on the wildly expressionistic results – and he appears
briefly in the background to the playful video for ‘Ask’ that was recorded the
same year.
When I met
Chris, nearly a decade had passed and he was a salesman at the video production
company where I got my first job. You could tell his heart was elsewhere. And most
days his body was elsewhere too, as he continually called in with increasingly
inventive excuses as to why he wouldn’t be coming in to the office. Two favourites
were… "I slept in a
graveyard."
"I’m chained
to a bed and haven’t got the key."
But I think
he topped both of these the day he sent us a fax from his local library: "Can’t make
calls today. Lost my voice."
Deciding to
write today’s post was a very difficult decision for me. But it’s something I
felt I had to do. For two years now, I‘ve been sharing my record recollections
with you. Hiding behind rare indie imports and obscure gothic gatefolds. While
all the while recoiling in shame from a shadowy figure from my past. A figure
that holds an unearthly dominance over The Smiths and Sisters of Mercy in the ‘S’
section of my archive. Yes, today I must face you all and reveal that I was
once a Shakin’ Stevens fan, and own everything he released between 1978 and
1983.
I have no
excuses. But if I did have some, they would be things like… It was a long time
ago. I was hanging out with a bad crowd. And I never really thought about the
consequences.
I’m not going
to blame anyone else for giving that first Shaky record to me, or even say who
it was. I take full responsibility for my own actions. But I know now it was dangerous
and can destroy lives. I just hope this hasn’t caused you too much upset.
“And so I broke in to the Palace, with a sponge and a rusty spanner. She said, “Eh, I know you and you cannot sing.” I said, “That’s nothing; you should hear me play piano.””
I’m not sure if inflicting ‘The Queen Is Dead’ on to a largely uninterested Fifth Form English class is still part of the National Curriculum, but it certainly should be. It’s why I always looked forward to Ms Taylor’s classes twice a week – she was quite simply the most inspiring teacher in the school. In her classes, English wasn’t just about essays on the classics. It was alive and all around us in music, films and the NME (well, that’s how I interpreted it). If the town had put a ban on dancing, she’d have been the one encouraging us to go all Footloose.
When you’re at school, it’s hard to imagine your teachers share anything in common with you. (It's often hard to imagine they’re even real people – hence that shocking moment when you see your teachers in a pub for the first time.) But Ms Taylor liked The Smiths. More than that, she’d seen The Smiths live in Manchester. I was in awe.
I like to think that her idea to bring our favourite records in to English was set up knowing I’d choose some Morrissey to entertain the class. I don’t think we won over many new fans – no-one appeared to be defacing the Five Star stickers on their notebooks or writing Moz on their arm with a fountain pen. Spirits noticeably lifted when the title song came to an end. But were quickly deflated when it became apparent that Ms Taylor had decided we should listen to the whole first side of the album. The best twenty minutes I ever spent in a classroom.
I’d like to see Ms Taylor again. She truly is one of those wonderfully spirited teachers who make you want to stand on your desk and seize the day.
