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[19.6.05] [Andrew Gallix]
THE RAVISHING BEAUTY OF THE ENGLISH
 Following my previous post, here's a link to a fairly recent article on The Smiths' literary legacy. Matt Thorne: "Everybody listens to Morrissey and The Smiths because they want to be a teenager again. When Morrissey came back last year, people wanted him to make them feel young again, but he had become a middle-aged man and so we all were forced to realise that we had grown up as well. . . . But for me, the person most worthy of academic study would be Mark E Smith from The Fall." * Mark Simpson: "To me, The Smiths mean cheap hair gel, unwashed sheets, damp walls, badly ventilated gas fires and impossible expectations. A beautiful fury with everything, because it isn't you. Rejection. Devotion. Tattooed, be-quiffed, soft-centred lads. Clever, slightly thwarted, determined girls. The understated but ravishing beauty of the English and their language. Being too smart for university. Being too smart for work. The North triumphant, at its moment of Thatcherite dejection. Working-class pride. The joy of misery. The splendidly chaste climax to the great and noble -- and now well and truly spannered -- tradition of English pop. A serious illness. Morrissey." * Jonathan Coe: "I once said that Morrissey and Marr were better songwriters than Lennon and McCartney. It's one of those things you say in a fit of enthusiasm but actually, I stand by it. People say that Morrissey's lyrics are miserable but what you really have is a deep melancholy shored up with wonderful wit, irony and bloody-mindedness. And the musical backing was always so inventive and complex. I loved those songs in the Eighties and have never stopped listening to them since. It seems entirely right to me that there should be a symposium -- although academia needs The Smiths far more than The Smiths need academia." * Will Self: "'Does the mind rule the body or the body rule the mind? I don't know,' is what Stephen Patrick Morrissey sang, thus encapsulating over 3,000 years of the Western philosophic tradition in a neat couplet. The Smiths brought to its zenith that tendency in English popular music which was more closely allied to the performative aspects of music hall than the beat-based hit factories of the US scene. Poseur, intellectual, English dilettante, Morrissey went on to have a distinguished solo career, but The Smiths were so very good because they counter-balanced his more pretentious flights of fancy with an almost pure expression of the four-piece rock band." (Picture: Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others at London's Lyric Hammersmith.)
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