Who Reviews The Reviewers? Me. Sometimes. . .AA Gill's Attack On Morrissey's Autobiography

I'm still not convinced by the cream denim jacket

There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn’t be written. Some to protect the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In Morrissey’s case, he has managed both. This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn’t diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim

The above is a portion of AA Gill's review of Morrissey's memoir Autobiography which was published in The Sunday Times. Gill's review has just been awarded The Hatchet Job Of The Year, a British journalism prize for the best bit of negative criticism in a British newspaper. The prize got front page coverage on the Guardian and the New York Times blog and has been lauded by cultural critics such as Andrew Sullivan as an example of the best of British journalism. Who doesn't love it when someone takes down a self important pop star a peg or two? To make it easier for everyone Morrissey really had it coming in Autobiography because he certainly dishes it out to his enemies and his perceived enemies (boy does he ever) and if you dish it out you should be able to take too.
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But if you read all of Gill's review you start to get a queasy feeling that Morrissey's real crime isn't his literary pretensions or his style, but the fact that he grew up poor and Irish and came from Manchester. How dare an oik, a pop star no less, sully the good name of Penguin Classics which publishes Virgil and Aristotle by talking about his own grubby little provincial life. Morrissey's Autobiography is no unvarnished masterpiece but the first 100 pages about his schooling in Manchester is utterly brilliant. A devastating and funny indictment of lazy and cruel teachers and a wrenching portrait of northern England in the 1960's. Only Morrissey could singularly fail to mention England winning the 1966 World Cup but remember who won every Miss World contest. Morrissey's streets are haunted by the Moors murderers and bewitched by the genius of George Best (when he sees Best in real life he faints, much to the mortification of his father). Its wonderful stuff: caustic and self mocking and funny. Gill's attack is so off base and bizarre it reminded me of those nineteenth century Times cartoons about the stupid Irish or Punch's hilarious 'things the servants say' columns. The idea of all those clubby London literary types slapping AA Gill on the back for a job well done putting a working class upstart in his place doesn't really sit that well in the age of Cameron & Johnson. Perhaps if Gill had been raised in the north of England and been a social class or two lower he would have appreciated Morrissey's book a little more, as Terry Eagleton did in the Guardian. Eagleton loved Morrissey's first 100 pages too and any British kid of that era who didn't grow up posh, like Gill, will be able to identify with Morrissey's childhood. 
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I am not attacking The Sunday Times (over the years The Sunday Times has had nothing but kind words for me and my work) nor am I attacking "literary London" ad hominem, but I am attacking AA Gill's motivations and sincerity. He found nothing worthy in Morrissey's entire book? On my blog I cut and pasted Morrissey's incredible 1 page review of the TV show Lost in Space. As a TV critic I would have thought Adrian Gill would have at least appreciated that little piece of genius.
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Perhaps I'm overreacting - when members of Britain's posh boarding school educated ruling elite go after working class writers it gets my back up - you can read his full review here and if I'm wrong let me know and I'll get down off my high horse and admit it.  But I don't think I am wrong. Morrissey and Adrian Gill have both written memoirs about their childhood, 1 of them is self serving, spoiled and tedious and surprisingly that one aint by Moz. And anyway the real reason to be angry with Penguin Books is not for publishing Morrissey but for pulping a book on Hinduism because it offended some Hindu nationalists in India.  Not cool. 

Autobiography - Morrissey

Morrissey trying to conquer the world of literature and attempting to bring back the cream
denim jacket look; only one of these goals is hubristic...

I was half way through writing my review of Morrissey's Autobiography (which as you can see from a couple of posts ago (below) is already one of my favourite books of the year) when I read Terry Eagleton's review, here, in the Guardian and decided not to finish mine because his was so much better. Eagleton noticed many of things that struck me: the devastatingly brilliant evocation of 1960's Manchester, Moz's curious devotion to AE Housman (its hard to take Housman seriously after reading the classic essay Inside The Whale by George Orwell) the odd ad hominem attack on Julie Burchill, the 50 pages devoted to the contract dispute with The Smiths (about 40 pages too long)  etc. etc. Unlike all other Englishmen who were born in the 1950s and have written memoirs Morrissey - wonderfully - never mentions England's 1966 World Cup victory but he does recall fainting at the sight of George Best and watching every single Miss World contest with his mother. And he savages the sadistic dollards who seemed to be in charge of the British educational system from its beginnings right up until the 1980's. Anyway in lieu of a full review I'm giving you the first half of Eagleton's review instead. I've always liked Terry Eagleton, he was one of my philosophy tutors, and his course on literary theory at Oxford was the best series of lectures I've ever attended.
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Terry on Moz: 

Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess". Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. 

He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.

Some of his bloody-mindedness springs from a damaged childhood. Born into a working-class Irish-Mancunian family, Steven Patrick Morrissey sang his way out of what struck him as a soulless environment, as other working-class Irish Mancunians have written or acted their way out. The vitriol started to flow early: his bleak mausoleum of a Catholic primary school was ruled by Mother Peter, "a bearded nun who beat children from dawn to dusk", and by the time he was 17 he was already emotionally exhausted. Manchester, still in its pre-cool days, was a "barbaric place where only savages can survive … There are no sexual guidelines, and I see myself naked only by appointment." His eloquent contempt for his fellow citizens is terrifying: "non-human sewer-rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester's armpit." The final indignity is to be turned down for a job as a postman at the local sorting office. At the hour of the birth of the Smiths, which gave him the exit from Manchester he craved, he felt himself dying of boredom, loneliness and disgust. "I would talk myself through each day," he writes, "as one would nurse a dying friend."

Not long afterwards, hordes of young people throughout the world are wearing his face on their chests. He returns to the streets where he grew up, now with a police escort, to sing to 17,000 fans from a stage overlooking an odious Inland Revenue office where he once worked. Having failed to find love from one man or woman, he can now find it from thousands. Mick Jagger and Elton John are eager to shake his hand. He enjoys his celebrity, but the sardonic self-irony of the book seeks to persuade us otherwise. There is a relish and energy about its prose that undercuts his misanthropy. Its lyrical quality suggests that beneath the hard-bitten scoffer there lurks a romantic softie, while beneath that again lies a hard-bitten scoffer. Implausibly, he claims to be "chilled" by road signs reading "Morrissey Concert, Next Left". It's true, however, that having spent years yearning to be seen, he now spends years longing to be invisible. Living in Hollywood is hardly the best place for that. He deals with his own egocentricity by being wryly amusing about it: his birth almost killed his mother, he comments, because even then his head was too big.

Even so, he remains for the most part icily unillusioned, like a monk passing through a whorehouse. His contempt for the music industry is visceral, and he prefers to spend his time reading Auden and James Baldwin. (Spotting Baldwin in a Barcelona hotel, he decides not to approach him, since even the mildest rejection would apparently mean he would have to go and hang himself.) The solution to all problems, he tells us, "is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books". David Bowie tells him that he's had so much sex and drugs that he's surprised he is still alive, to which Morrissey replies that he's had so little of both that he feels much the same. Tom Hanks comes backstage to say hello, but Morrissey doesn't know who he is. The press lie that he is a racist, that he opened the door to a journalist wearing a tutu, that he hung around public toilets as a youth and that he would welcome the assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The Guardian runs a disapproving piece on him adorned with a photo of somebody else. When he discovers that a Smiths record released in Japan includes a track by Sandie Shaw, he begs the people around him to kill him. "Many rush forward," he adds.

You can read the rest of the excellent review, in the Guardian, here. I'd say that I was a little bit more criticial of the book than Terry who practically gushes towards the end of his piece. I mean there are flaws in Autobiography. Because of Morrissey's somewhat baroque style for example I'm still not clear what his dad for his living and whether his parents are still alive. Is he gay? Bisexual? Celibate? Moz thinks that's none of our business and maybe he's right but why not just tell us that instead of being so coy about it. I wonder too if the last 100 pages of the book couldn't have been a little more tightly edited. Yeah it can't be easy to edit Morrissey but that's why they pay you the big bucks at Penguin isn't it? And finally a book like this is crying out for an index, indexers don't charge that much so why Penguin Classics didn't pay for one is beyond me. Still, these are quibbles, I rated this an A in my books journal and it goes next to David Peace's Red or Dead as one of my favourites of the year. 

Morrissey On Lost In Space

One of the delights of Morrissey's Autobiography is his TV criticism. Precious novelists from the Iowa Writer's Workshop can write memoirs with titles like "When I Was Young I Read Books" but working class British kids either played in the street when it wasn't raining or watched TV when it was. All British kids watched the same shows because there were only 3 channels and the BBC and ITV repeated their programmes endlessly; no American I've ever met has heard of, say, Champion The Wonder Horse, but every Brit over a certain age, including Morrissey, has memories of rainy Saturday mornings watching dreary 50's fare like that. One of Morrissey's more entertaining spiels is about the much more familiar show, Lost in Space. I wasn't a huge fan of Lost in Space and when I watched it it was mostly because of Penny Robinson but for Morrissey the gratingly sane Robinsons
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                 















Pretty good, eh? And don't get him started on Captain Pugwash...  

Morrissey and The 10 Greatest Rock Memoirs

I've been reading Morrissey's memoir, Autobiography, published by Penguin Classics (!) and I have to say that so far it's been pretty great. I'll do a full review when I'm done but what I like about the opening chapters is Morrissey's voice and his beautiful evocation of the Irish diaspora community in 1960's Manchester. There have been several negative reviews of the book, one by Stuart Maconie in The Guardian which I respect and a silly and typically unfocused one by The New Yorker's pop music critic, Sasha Frere Jones that I completely discount. Frere Jones has annoyed me for years because he's an aristocrat who - I reckon - only got his job through influential connections, in hundreds of articles he's evinced no understanding of pop music at all, and by a long way he's the New Yorker's dullest writer. Of course maybe I'm biased, I've always liked Morrissey, and I've done a few oblique shout outs to his music and his prose skills over the years in my books (you may have noticed several mentions of The Cramps' Fanzine Legion of the Cramped in at least two of my novels: Legion of course was edited by Morrissey and was his first prose work.) 
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If it continues to be this good Autobiography could get into the unofficial top 10 list of rock memoirs, which is the kind of thing Morrissey would hold in utter contempt. What are the greatest rock memoirs? Well, there's a list on Rolling Stone Magazine, here, but its a bit of a dodgy effort as you'll see if you go over there. (It really took a ghost writer of genius to make Steven Tyler's life incredibly boring and to include his memoir on their list proves that a) they haven't read the book or b) they have no literary compass at all.) I reckon that you need 3 elements to produce a really great rock and roll memoir: 1) Solid music credentials. 2) Good anecdotes. 3) Good writing. You can be missing or weak in one of these elements but if you're missing in 2 its fatal. Morrissey has all three working for him so far in my read (but the Guardian says the book declines after the midway point).  
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So what are the best rock memoirs? I'm not going to pretend to be some big well read music guy. I'm not. I haven't read a lot memoirs period and I certainly haven't read everything on the Rolling Stone list (or would want to) but for what it's worth here's my little list of the 10 best rock autobiographies which I have actually read. I'm putting Morrissey in at number 7 for now...My number 1 memoir is John Lydon's Rotten: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs and coincidentally if you look at my list it turns out that being black, Irish or Jewish is a big plus when it comes to rock memoir writing...

10. Touching From A Distance: Deborah Curtis
9. Twisting My Melon: Shaun Ryder
8. The Hacienda - How Not To Run A Club: Peter Hook
7. Autobiography: Morrissey
6. The Tao of Wu: The RZA
5. Take It Like A Man: Boy George 
4. Chronicles: Bob Dylan
3. Rat Girl: Kristin Hersh
2. Just Kids: Patti Smith
1. Rotten - No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs: John Lydon