The blog has been a neglected allotment for a while. Life takes up time without creating incident.
An easy distraction comes in the ‘pineapple’ shape (i.e. not waisted like a small guitar) of a new ukulele hand-made for me by Prof. Chris Reed. It was his second ukuluthiery excursion and I wonder if his is the first ukulele made by a Professor Of Law.
The lead that injects camera images into my hard-drive is still packed somewhere, so photos of the object will appear in time. Some indication of the project is this inventory of woods selected and ordered:-
“Top and neck: English Yew (“figured” Yew if you’re showing off)
Back and sides: Cherry
Nut and bridge: Laburnum
Fretboard: Tiger oak
Scale length: Ooh, thereabouts, definitely soprano-ish”
It strums a treat with a warm ringing tone, and a common initial reaction is how loud it is for such a small instrument. It’s those characteristics that have sent me into a spate of finding scales, so picking up the uke to while away five minutes can easily turn into a tuneful half -hour with no discernible tune to show for it. As so often, this has carried back to the guitar, particularly the electric.
Tunes, I guess, will emerge as a by-product. For the moment I’m happy to hear runs of notes that fit together. It seems improbable, shortsighted, lazy, dim, not to have put in time to learn my way around the frets before; now at last I discover why you’re encouraged to practise them. Like so much technique, you take the time to learn it to remove obstacles and prepare the way for intuition. Learning scales and variations extends the possibilities for useful mistakes. Creativity is rarely a lightbulb inspiration, most often a result of spotting useful accidents and keeping them. Many guitarists will have stories of accidents that stop them in their tracks and require close attention to recreate – what did I do just now that made the difference?
I was left with a tape of The Smiths’ ‘important’ album Hatful Of Hollow in the car recently and drove a good many miles listening to a band I’ve only really heard in snatches. I must have spent more time listening to fans rhapsodising about main-man Morrissey’s lyrical flair than listening to the music.
A few plays round I can easily see why Johnny Marr’s guitar lines made other guitarists halt and listen but dearie me, I’d hoped for more from the lyrics, sung in a limited, predictable scale apparently independent of the band arrangement.
Kill The OED
I own a dictionary
And in Manchester that makes you la-di-da
La-di-da-di-da
La-di-da-di-da
-Di-da-di-da-
So I sit here with my diary with its lock
Opened
Up
With my gel pens and my thoughts…
Blah-di-blah-di-blah
-di-blah-di-blah-
Some say my words don’t rhyme, but I don’t give a hoot
I haven’t got a thing to say-ee-ay, anyway-ee-ay-ee-ay
So while the band cast nets
Of chiming chrome complexity
It’s easy to forget the spotlight’s trained on little me
Singing the same song, all along
Again
And again and again and again
Oh no-oo-o!
So you can sing along.
Am I the genius they say I a-a-am?
I dunno-o-o-oh
Perhaps I am, you never know
Woe-oo-oh oo-oh
So I’ll yodel through the solo
Yippy-aye-oh oo-oh oo-oh
The poetic virtues of Morrissey: The singer is fit to stand beside Larkin and Betjeman
Morrissey is the most literary singer in British music. His lyrics allude to Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Graham Greene, Keats and Yeats, to name but a few. He has begun concerts with readings from John Betjeman, and performed in front of a 40ft portrait of Edith Sitwell. So it is worth considering his work in a wider context than just pop music.
This is not to say we should call him a poet. He is a singer and songwriter, and his music, voice and appearance are important. But his lyrics bear comparison with other writers and Morrissey himself courts such a view. He has a song entitled Sister, I’m A Poet, and when asked who he admired lyrically, he replied: “Nobody in rock and pop. Elsewhere, the poet John Betjeman.”)
His subject matter has much in common with Philip Larkin and Betjeman. With these quintessential poets of Englishness, he shares a love of the “unpoetic” and a tendency to mix elevated and colloquial idioms (Everyday Is Like Sunday begins with the evocative assonantal drawl of “Trudging slowly over wet sand” and ends with an ironic invitation to “share some grease-tea with me”).
Larkin once said Betjeman’s poetry was capable of “swallowing anything”. The same may be said of Morrissey’s lyrics, which refer to things such as a Frisbee, phlegm lapels, Churchillian legs and a Jensen Interceptor. Morrissey aims to produce pleasure by finding such incongruous things in the aesthetic realm. Everyday things are affectionately preserved, and elevated by their preservation.
Morrissey shares with Betjeman a camp lightness and self-deprecatingly gauche self-image (he sings “I am sick and I am dull and I am plain”, while Betjeman wrote “I am bald and old and green”.) Such lightness, unfortunately, tends to be viewed as a lack of seriousness, rather than as an effect in its own right. This is true of his three-minute “Carry On” vignettes, such as Roy’s Keen or Vicar in a Tutu. For Morrissey, as for Betjeman, the silly, the whimsical, the light-hearted and the gauche are all part of the show, and it would diminish human experience to exclude them
Perhaps the last word should go to Oscar Wilde, whom Morrissey has described as his greatest influence. and who wrote: “If life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.” Morrissey also makes a virtue out of adversity. As he turns 50, we should celebrate the life of someone who has devoted himself to troubling our celebration of life.
If you want to read more…. try
Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart by Gavin Hopps
Oooh, I want to see the new, handbuilt uke – more to the point, I want to hear it!
Here’s the uke:-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25287387@N05/4718066808/
A pity we shall never learn what Betjeman or especially Larkin might have to say about being placed on a par with Morrissey. I don’t think he stands comparison with Ian Dury, Billy Bragg or Ray Davis as a pop poet. He’s not as literate or verbally inventive as John Cooper Clark, who has the good grace to wear his references lightly.
Affectations are not the same as attributes.
The Morrissey defence, it turns out, is a cut-and-paste of a Times article so I’m freed to respond, as I thought: piffle.
Dr. Hopps trades on his Research Fellow status to punt his hagiography to fans by describing the singer as “greatest lyricist in the history of British popular music” while hedging his bets: “I am not trying to say that Morrissey is a poet – there are all kinds of things he does as a performer and singer which point to how he learned from Wilde, such as the sense of art and play. Morrissey himself said The Decay of Lying is his favourite Wilde text, a brilliant critical dialogue about the nature of art.”
So the singer reads; jolly good. Where does that Widean wit manifest itself in the lyrics? “Trudging slowly over wet sand”; “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job and heaven knows I’m miserable now”; “From the ice-age to the dole-age, there is but one concern, I have just discovered – some girls are bigger than others” .. yeah, right.
The author will no doubt get some interview gigs out of his publication. ‘The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart’ sounds like Morrissey-parody, a line the singer himself treads with variable aplomb.
Perhaps I should have acknowledged in print, my theft of Hobbs’ words as readily as I did in person, for as the Master himself so rightly sings
“If you must write prose/poems
The words you use should be your own
Don’t plagiarise or take “on loan”"
Lyrics taken from Cemetry Gates – The Smiths
Suffice to say, I doubt Mozzer would be unduly disturbed by your scorn of or indifference to both him and his lyrics. When Morrissey was asked about his views on those who interpret the intelligence he has expressed throughout his career as an excuse for cynicism and apathy, the following formed part of his response.
“I always get a strong reaction, and my critics are very dedicated – they will stick with me till the end. I seem to infuriate so many people. …..If you are an artist whose career is quite persistently and attentively followed and documented then many writers will deliver unnaturally venomous articles simply with the hope of earning a special place in that artists’ history. Praise is rarely shocking whereas maliciousness is, and the writers who burst the bubble are remembered forever, alas. For me personally, most album reviews tend to review me as a living entity – the actual songs or the singing or the musicianship is secondary compared to the writer’s personal feelings towards …….my face. And, of course, my face rarely goes down well…”
It matters not to those of us who appreciate Morrissey, what the unenlightened believe about his lyrics, or indeed himself. And to Morrissey I say:
“Fifteen minutes with you
Oh, I wouldn’t say no
Oh, people see no worth in you
Oh, but I do”
Lyrics taken from Reel around the Fountain – The Smiths
We take different positions on the Morrissey issue. I gather that the correct posture for the true fan is on your knees at his feet to get a better view of his navel, prepared to swallow whatever he comes up with. Not my idea of a great night in, but horses for courses.