paul morley - c/d

For his Talking Heads appearances on C4 List Programmes, dud!

This should be an s/d qn I reckon.

Destroy: late-90s reviews for Uncut weren't much cop. Actually I think C/D does work better - most people who don't like Morley don't like his style at all but once I did like it I found it didn't really matter what he was saying, I'd enjoy it anyway.

It's Another Music Press Question

I thought about emailing him but that address does not look very kosher.

I always like seeing him on TV anyway and get excitable and Isabel teases me about it.

he doesn't only say she was rubbish. he gives his reasons and is able to be funny and entertaining about it at the same time. he is the best of these talking heads you get on 'nostalgia' type shows like top ten (not difficult, i know). i wish he had a blog as well.

he is also really funny on late review. he does seem to come up with musical connections to things. once they reviewed a book, in a victorian type setting, and he described the sex in it to be like 'a throbbing gristle' album. I don't think the other two got that reference and so they ignored that.

''late-90s reviews for Uncut weren't much cop.''

read a couple. one on a velvets singles comp and another on the van der graaf generator box set. both were fine.

I really want to read Ask but i've never found it (I think its out of print, which is a shame really).

i think he's surprisingly good at soundbyte quotes which reverberate a bit beyond a merely reactive "Oh gosh, yeah, Sade. She was rubbish" (ie i've never actually seen him embarrass himself on one of these progs, or sell himself short — which given that he has no control over the teenytiny clips they use interests me)

(but i can't give an example)

(i wd say much the same abt andrew collins but not maconie: haha i don't know what j.robb wd have to do to "sell himself short", but anyway i don't think "i live xx" flies that low)

then again my boss was also prominently featured on the same programme hah!

''i mean he's on royalties from frankie gth and the art of noise and even a cut of the royalties from "firestarter"''

er...firestarter?!

great!

I think he should be on ILM more. one appearannce on a thread isn't enough. we can ask him to post for an hour a day and leave him to his fiction work or whatnot (and then ILX sucks him in...he won't do much work ever again).

''Now, Reynolds on the other hand...''

seen him once on telly: a 10 minute prog abt steve reich, where he tries to make connection between minimalism and dance. I didn't like that contribution.

also saw edwin pouncey on a 10 min prog on SY: where he atlks abt the yoof and grebtful dead. much better.

I have never really 'got' him, but other people I respect do so I keep meaning to read the copy of Nothing I bought in a remainder shop. Wearing ones reading heavily on ones sleeve, which is deemed a bad trait with other writers, is somehow forgiven, or even encouraged in Paul Morley (is it because it is funny, or ironic?). Quirks like repeating himself over and over (eg. adding 'his greatest song' in parenthesis after every mention of A Girl Like You in his Edwyn Collins piece in Uncut) I find a bit annoying rather than cute.

But he's great on I heart the 80s, always managing to set himself apart from the gibbering fools around him. And his piss taking of Robert Elms never wears thin.

so i'm wrong abt him not getting in on BBC2 then.

''And his piss taking of Robert Elms never wears thin.''

yes, when he talked abt sade he started off by talking abt the time elms took him to see her.

I emailed him at that address and received a very bizarre, confusing and elliptical reply. I don't think anyone else could've written it.

I mentioned a particularly interesting ILM thread to draw to his attention: one which some woman did about Elvis vs JXL and "A Little Less Conversation..." ;-)

I used to think he was a goon, a depressant, a Tony Parsons with better puns. But my friends told me otherwise, and I believed them. Now I think he's important, and talented, and exemplary.

I ought really to *read* him some day. (I won't split that infinitive.)

the best thing he ever said was about how, on jukebox jury
(circa 1981) the way that lydon stared at
noel edmonds from the panel,
would eventually be the way the whole
country would begin to look at him.
i laughed for about an hour at that.

greatest-living-englishman-on-the-telly contender.
who else have we got ?

I hope this is sarcasm. Life In A simple Mind was an interesting way of going about things. Tom Wolfe pulls off that first person thing in Radical Chic but Morely blows it by using 'a through the eyes of Jim Kerr' style and then refering to Paul Morely. Bringing himself into the piece ruins the effect. It makes you too aware of the interview situation and that what you are reading is Morely's projection of Jim Kerr's thoughts.

Perhaps best of all: Morley's Telecide columns in Blitz. I remember something about an accidental video collage of snooker matches winning him third prize at an Austrian Art Festival. Oh, and his "The Thing Is..." C4 progs... (Motorways, Boredom). "A Paul Morley Show", JG Ballard startled and Bob Holness confused... interviewing Mark Moore and Philip Glass on "The Late Show" around the time of the "Hey Music Lover" remixes.

He's a very funny man.

can someone point me to something he wrote that is indicative of how good he is? not something I have to pay money for, mind.

and you'll let me borrow it afterwards as if it wasn't for my post earlier N. would not have posted the amazon link. *winky face*

DV: i'd point you to "nothing". you'll be able to find it in a library somewhere, i'm sure, thus saving you from having to shell out any cash.

But can someone explain the cultural theory name dropping to me? No one on ILE does it the way he does.

No shit, Sherlock.

I well remember his articles for Ikon magazine, I particularly liked the 'History of Cool' and '1995 and all that' pieces for their perversity.

He does need to be represented on the Web in some capacity, a site with archive material would be ideal. Thanks.

i struggle to achieve any kind of opinion on him. his neworder best of sleevenotes weren't very good. but neither was the best of.

Kogan managed to manage mark s' influence bear trap by switching feet: I won't: this Morley is mine but he is wholly Morley.

and you know what? his writing there is indeed pretentious twaddle devoid of meaning.

maybe it was an off day.

Paul Morley, author of the acclaimed memoir Nothing (2000), takes us on a mesmerising journey into the mysterious heart of sound and words, of music and pop, being and nothingness.
This is a book about music from the second century BC to 2003, from before then to after now, from the Italian Futurists to ‘File Under Futurism’, from the human voice to the processed vocoder, from 78 RPM to MP3, from the heat of early twentieth-century modernism to the chill-out of early twenty-first century lifestyling.’

Our guide on this obsessive journey is non other than Kylie herself, as she drives through an industrial landscape in the video for ‘I Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, morphing through time and space, meeting strangers with interesting stories to tell, and personifying the pleasures of pop. For after Tangerine Dream and Pete Waterman, Kraftwerk and Phillip Glass, Alvin Lucier and Jarvis Cocker comes the cynical commercial glitter of ‘Kylie’, who shimmers in the spaces between innocence and sensuality, between the natural and the artificial. But the future of pop remains firmly in our hands, as Morley reminds us that without the listener, there can be no music.

My excitement at the prospect of this book is only tempered by the fact that Bloomsbury list Morley's phantom volume, '77: a story of punk', among his previous works.

'Was just talking to PM about the Momus blog and he agreed it's by far one of the best and most insightful... '

My site isn't exactly a blog, but then again, if you will, why not, he asked with a shrug? I'm quite used to finding that things I've been doing for years without naming them suddenly have a handle and are getting written about in the Grauniad.

I believe the conversation was in relation to Penman's blog, and how people who get to grips with the whole look and feel of a website -- who code it and do all the visuals themselves -- inevitably have the edge over people who just pour verbal content into a readymade blog-shaped vessel.

Why settle for a slice of life when you can have a slice of life and a cup of tea?

I fully realise that this can be construed as an excuse for technical incompetence.

'Just because we fall for things in a non-cerebral way doesn't make the matter any less "complex" - the opposite, if anything. Just because we fall for a sonic whole - and may even never get further than that spectral non specific impression - doesn't make the song any less valuable for us. There is a world of slur and swoon and sonic whisper that more properly accounts for how most of us FALL for music.'

But IP doesn't allow that this might also apply to websites; his is an unappealing skgrumple of plain text slapped down on the screen like porridge.

I mean: it remains an interesting issue, but hardly one on which to take sides. Possibly Penman is trying to avoid doing so, but from your post it doesn't sound much that way.

this is based on the fact that my editor (in her early 50s) thinks the idea of txting is kewl

Pinefox, I don't think anyone who named himself PEN MAN could fail to take sides on this issue. An alter ego called PENTAX MAN or PAINT MAN might sugar the pill box, though.

Maybe IP just hasn't go to the level of technical competence (or interest) required. Certainly his recent description of the sort of film he'd make if given the resources read too like a description of some sort of dream website (Markerish maze of memory, politics, desire). But the above description -- "plain text slapped down..." -- also reads like, well, a *book*, and sometimes that's a glorious (and complex) relief. Same with "The Church of Me": surely there's room for *essayists* too (god knows this sort of thing doesn't get *published* easily)? WWW Addisons and Steeles, just as welcome as the Hogarths? Whatever: right now, as usual come lunchtime, I'm flitting between IP's text and Momus's pics.

http://www.nesta.org.uk/inspireme/think_while.html

Now it definitely does.

Or did I just witness it?

Have a look and see what I must probably mean.

I still don't get Paul Morley bah.

I was watching a tape of MORRISSEY, GEORGE MICHAEL and TONY BLACKBURN on Eight Days A Week, a sort of pop version of the Late Review from 1984. It was a fascinating document all round. At one point they were discussing a new book about Joy Division and George Michael revealed himself to be a huge fan of Closer (esp. side 2) but hated the book. He said "I gather a certain man called Paul Morley had a big hand in it, which explains a lot." He then bit his lip and and said something like "That man has so many issues I don't know where to start". Morrissey ummed and ahhed and didn't like it much either.

PM's interview with Wham!, included in 'Ask' is memorably vicious, which probably explains GM's response.

Morrissey and Michael: both anti.
Blackburn in contrarian Tom Paulin role: ferociously pro.

Sincerest, Cozen.

I am still reading Nothing. Don't rush me now. Around p.330 it is starting to take a dive into prose and thought of dull normality. I slightly fear for the book's sparkle. I am no longer sure that he's better than Proust.

I have now finished Nothing. It picks up in part 5 some of the style it has lost in parts 3 & 4. The material about driving around Gloucestershire and its winding back lanes is fine. Even the thing about Laurie Lee was effective.

On balance the book remains close to magnificent. Sentence for sentence, I think it might be better than Proust. Though it contains fewer sentences.

Tom is still the best music writer alive. Which feels kinda weird saying, seeing as how I consider him a 'friend', of sorts, (I mean if someone asked I'd say I 'know' you).

"Against the Kingdome of the Beast,
We witnesses do rise..." Leveller Marching Song, 2003. Get me?

(I'm weak, I'm weak, I know but I had to de-lurk. Cold turkey is harder than you'd think).

Obviously, I'll have to sit with it a little more.

'Too many sentences' is either a joke or a criticism too obscure for me yet to fathom.

I think that you may well be overreacting to your current feelings. But perhaps that's what feelings are for. What do I know?

I don't think I understand about Levellers and stuff.

I don't think that I think that Ewing is the best music writer alive. I have said many flattering things about him, but I don't think I could go that far.

he's certainly the best music writer in his age bracket. i can only think of a possible handful better than him that are younger or older. (nearly all of which have posted to ilx at one time or another. coincidence?)

'Too many sentences' is a joke, at my expense. I was just trying to tickle out the possible silliness in me being angry at a writer for writing.

About the Levellers and stuff: it's time that Morley was displaced. I want a new hero. A wonky guru from my own generation. But, without going too far into why this all matters I will say, I care a lot about 'music writing'.

I don't want to embarrass Tom, so we should probably stop talking about this. (But, for me, him and Kogan run a very tight race.)

it doesn't hurt that tom has great taste. morely may have had great taste at some point, but comparing britney 12"s to cab volt ones (as he did one time in uncut) for uh "cred" strikes me as someone who is probably slipping on that front.

(I'm very flattered by that David but I've got to agree with the Pinefox. I have written a few things I'm very proud of though so thankyou.)

(Actually it makes me want to write something about music now so if that was the intention thankyou doubly.)

(The people saying I'm good here tend to be the people I think are better, or more talented, than me. This makes me think that a coincidence of tastes in writing is what's going on here.)

Hey, you'll be hurting John D. in his heart next.

I mean what I said Tom, and you know how much I care about all this 'nonsense'.

I liked his rant on Zappa and the article on buckley as well. And I started reading Jim thompson's pulp bcz of an article on there.

I think that Morley's critics here are forgetting just how fine some of the pages of Nothing really are. The density of thought in some of that book's turns of phrase is as admirable as that of many 'major writers'.

Gareth - try hunting down the Duran Duran interview from 'Ask'.

I haven't read Nothing.

(I really must form an aesthetic. You need one of them to get girls, right?)

Taste doesn't matter so much as what you think abt the record. I share little of tom's taste but I've enjoyed lots of what i've read.

''Penman on Zappa is good - but you can detect a lot of the things in his writing that he criticises Zappa for''

sure. I didn't necessarily agree with what he said (when he said that he couldn't listen to much of it I stopped taking much of what he said seriously, but it worked very well as a rant).

I can't find Nothing, PF, but I am looking.

I still love Morley because he dramatises the process and fact of thought and writes it out all so well, but I don't need / want a deity anymore.

(I want an ordinary girl, who'll make the world alright.)

also, perhaps a lobster on a lead.

Cozen is right about Morley does well.

His last lines sound like a cop-out. But isn't that what life's for?

this sounds like the greatest thing ever (apart from taking caddies to raves)

Paul Morley had his 15 minutes of true glory with the sudden and short-lived flowering of talent at ZTT Records in the early 1980s, with the brilliance that was Frankie Goes To Hollywood and The Art of Noise. Now that he's an all-purpose journalist and media pundit, few would stop to credit him with an inner life. But with Nothing he corrects that picture. And how. Morley's life story provides the perfect recipe for long-term angst. Born on the Isle of Wight, son of a prison guard, raised in a stifling Stockport, apparently tortured throughout his adolescence and beyond by a complete absence of self-worth, he tracks most of his problems to the suicide--unexplained, perhaps unexplainable--of his father in the summer of 1977. Nothing is not always an easy read--the first dozen pages comprise Morley's meditation on a dead body, and that dense pondering fairly much sets the tone. For father was not alone-Morley explores his obsessed, obsessive reaction to the deaths of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, Marc Bolan, Elvis and it's clear that this tragedy has structured his entire life. On virtually every page there's a reference to Morley's previous attempts to write this book--with its myriad working titles (Sing A Song of Suicide, Death In The Family, you get the idea)--you soon realise that this is a life project. Of course there's a blacker-than-black comedy at work here too--from his father's orgasm in 1956 ("after the war and just before rock and roll") to the suicide-friendly discography he thoughtfully provides to help readers along. Self-indulgent? Yes. Fancy an evening down the pub with him? Not unless you come. But it is a sincere, intensely personal self-exploration that--oddly--speaks for a generation of angst-ridden, and borderline-suicidal, young men.

[I can't find much reference to the new book.]

http://www.bloomsbury.com/BookCatalog/Author.asp?sku=22042240

No, it shouldn't matter whether he has good taste or not. I don't particularly like dismembered corpses, but they are good to read about.

Part of the development of the column will be an essay that carries off from where the original sentence began, and then completely grows and grows into a piece of writing that entirely lasts forever. Part of the development of the column will be the way links move off from that original sentence to create an ordered, perpetually revised chaos of meaning and marking.

Sometimes the essay, as it moves away from the original sentence, fires off new links and reaches out. Eventually, once the column has split and shredded and spread and twisted and travelled, depending where and how you click on the original sentence - the beginning of it all, the home of homes - you will be sent out into all the up-to-date ordered chaos, or sent out to where the essay has just reached, or sent out randomly to make your own way around the thing.

I think I'll go and see morley in glasgow even though I haven't read nothing.

Frank - I think you would like the introduction to his first book, 'Ask'. I'll see if I can scan it and post it sometime this weekend.

Proust should once have been described, possibly by the New York Times, or the Beezer, as 'a man who writes too much'.

I am surprised that I didn't see that piece in the Guardian yesterday. I mean: I am surprised that just when the Guardian had something in it I would have wanted to read, I didn't buy it, or even look at it.

Glancing at Morley's argument it looks like he's on the same technology trip as so many others, and liable to be saying things that I can't go along with because I don't occupy the same historical space as them. Perhaps that is one way of naming one curse that afflicts me.

This thread has grown quite long, if not actually substantial.

There *is* a plus and minus sign before the title. Does it not form part of the title? What is it doing there?

I'm heading down to that thing on Thursday, Morley and Wilson clashing horns, should be ace.

actually i suspect a *lot* of writers do something very like this, but morley is the only one i'm aware of who uses such nakedly useless stretches of deliberately(?) tiresome "literary" playfulness to mark the Three Chilling Dots (like [INSERT REALITY HERE] , and not using words which merely divert or move or distort to do so...])

(i didn't "get" this till i read ±nothing, whgere it's unavoidable)

so the tension is something like: clearly very able and literate writer who is also very extremely unusually perceptive abt ppl's motivations and feelings, deliberately choosing a style which contantly occludes and gets in the way of the blunt of expression of same....

Surely this is one of the wankiest sentences ever written?

content-wise, it doesn't much matter if you agree with me or not, bcz the fact that i get this out of it proves i'm right and the fact that you get what you get out of it proves you're right (ie "content" = result of chemical contact between writer and reader)

the "writing simply and clearly" theory is based on the idea that a write is totally in control and at one with his/her own understanding of where there going with something => since i'm arguing that morley isn't, and that this is the strength and the frustration of his approach, it's kinda moot

i like clear writing, but i don't trust it: like any art-technical fetish, it's a trap as well as a tool

i. it has terrific rhythmic poise, and.
ii. is pitch-perfect in its invocation of mockable faux innocence, as a mask for actual genuinely (silly but knowingly silly) belief

Agreed, clear writing can become just as much a mannerism as anything else, I think wha**i like clear writing, but i don't trust it: like any art-technical fetish, it's a trap as well as a tool**

Agreed, clear writing can become just as much a mannerism as anything else, I think what I like is writing that doesn't attract attention to itself, or if it does, it does in a quiet way that doesn't try to hit you between the eyes like that Joy Division guff I quoted back there.

I don't know, Morley wants us to be moved by yelling: "I'M MOVED, I'M MOVED!!" - but I don't think it works that way. The old show not tell axiom. Jon Savage writes so much better about Joy Division.t I like is writing that doesn't attract attention to itself, or if it does, it does in a quiet way that doesn't try to hit you between the eyes like that Joy Division guff I quoted back there.

I don't know, Morley wants us to be moved by yelling: "I'M MOVED, I'M MOVED!!" - but I don't think it works that way. The old show not tell axiom. Jon Savage writes so much better about Joy Division.

(yes i think on the whole savage does write better abt JD)

No no, wherever you stand on the style issue, we've all gone way beyond the realist notion that words are just windows to the world. And you're wrong to conflate a "clear" style with clichéd one. Actually I think almost the reverse is true: those who go for an over-the-top style are often covering up the fact that they don't really have anything interesting to say - and the Morley text I quoted is a case in point since it really doesn't say anything more interesting than your summation.

I think it's more about the aesthetics of economy and restraint. If you write, for instance, "the rain cried down the window pane", that might quite a nice image if left alone. If you then went on to complicate it - "the rain cried and melted its way down the window pane, leaving dribbly rivulets that bifurcated into tiny translucent webs that scarred the hard surface bla bla bla..." then you've ruined the image through exaggeration and hyperbole. It's also about letting the words speak for themselves without forcing their meaning down people's throats and having confidence in your writing. My two cents anyway.

Exactly. Something like Camus's L'Etranger is a good example of the simple yet not simplistic.

Sorry, RJG, err, I'm just not sure. I mean I have two tickets 'cos I thought I'd have reconciled with Katy by then but that's all gone a bit pear and I don't have anywhere to stay in Glasgow so am a bit reluctant to stay in town past 5 O'Clock (1.5 hour commute = not much time left to do stuff when I get home if I leave beyond then). So, yeh, it might be busy but I'm not sure if I'll be there though I'd like to. I might, we'll see.

(*i'm being a bit devil's advocate here in the sense that i think this device quite often fails w.morley, who uses it A LOT, risking catastrophe on a routine basis... i approve of this w/o always being convinced by it...)**

(**it's like football or something: a goal is better if it looked like it was a real mad thing to try but still goes in)***

(***i know fuck all abt sport)

I like Miller's comment about looking at the studio lights.

I see that Cozen is talking in terms of 'love'... again.

I think that one Morley interview this week has gone unremarked here.

It wasn't very long.

-

I hate Paul Morley.

*I do not know Ally C.

I'm halfway through "Words and Music" now and I have mixed feelings. Obviously it's possible to have mixed feelings in a good way or in a bad way, and I think my mixed feelings are a mixture of good and bad. That's all I have to say on the matter for now.

The sort of stuff Mr. Sinker is talking about above seems to crop up again and again in the first thirty pages of Words And Music but gets very notable because Morley keeps, uh, falling off the tightrope or whatever. I think it's something to do with the shift of focus from [insert nifty plus/minus sign here]Nothing to this: what feelings about Kylie Minogue does he have that he'd have to mask, exactly?

(it gets a lot better further in and I haven't finished it yet, though.) (possibly it might get a lot worse again.)

I've read this book 5 times now (I say this as an indictment of my saddishness rather than as any kind of boast) and I keep changing my mind about it. I will try and write something about it this weekend.

Morleyphiles should rush to their local branch of FOPP! because they are flogging a Morleytastic Art of Noise DVD for three quid. He interviews his bandmates apparently. I suppose most of you will have bought it at full price, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I have a JtN book, but I've never seen it in a bookshop. Unlike 'Young and Foolish' which does mention me.

Nice to finally meet RJG though, who is a lot softer spoken than I imagined, under that architect's hair-do.

He batted off the Now one pretty slickly ('as a rock critic, you're like a nurse, always dealing in deaths and births') and can't actually remember his answer to the other. Maybe RJG does?

when we left, though, I shouted "thanks, paul," to him and he turned and said "see you later!"

cozen seems very nice, in person, etc.

I am drunk.

120pp in one shop.

5 times in one week.

Love and hate, like tattooed palms.

Steiner's name training in vain in a shop near JtN.

The (PM) voice - yes.

The RJG voice? A lad on CBBC reminds me of RJG. Do you know the one I mean?

'Tim did me see'.

A new definition of mixed feelings. (Mark Simpson to thread, to explain his weird mixture in the IoS?)

Nurses and births - yes, that's slick, and maybe stimulating, though what about... midwives?

The Nipper absently present in Sauciehall Street, for goodness' sake.

Thom W is surely right: not much about Minogue needs masking.

I still don't think the sentence(s) quoted above are daft. Sometimes I can't very well believe how clearly and well he clearly writes.

the picture I'm getting from this book is basically how the avant-garde (well merzbow is a bit shit really) and pop are related. A journey in sound. and its reminding me of David toop 'ocean in sound' book. that kind of thing is 'interesting' but it can be disastrous and embarassing.

risk taking is good.

No, that would be a stupid point.

Discussions about pop should be discussions about pop, in the pub, or wherever. Things have to be two-way (a smattering of questions at various points does not count). Plus, does explaining what you've written defeat the purpose of writing?

he says something very like this on p. oh i can't be bothered about halfway through you look it up

I vote for death.

(Problem with everything quoted/linked so far in this thread is that none of it makes him seem intelligent. He must have some good ideas. What are they?)

(this being 274 pages after the book starts by drawing various lines between Lucier's 'I Am Sitting In A Room' and 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head.', and 268 pages after a couple dozen other couplings the book could have started with are listed.)

All through Morley is drawing connections (sometimes spurious, sometimes not at all, sometimes more interesting than others): "the true story of popular music from [x] to [y]"; "the missing link between [x] and [y]"; anyway in one bit on Metal Machine Music he refers to the book as "a story about the history of modern music from fucking who knows when to wherever".

The bit about MMM is several pages long and does not mention Lester Bangs.

so, uh, a history of (popular) music which goes out of its way at all points to suggest other, perhaps equally valid, histories of (POPULAR?) music, at all points. (makes me think in some ways of ILM as it was at some point before it is the way it is now. in fact it'd seem more interesting if it were produced in isolation from the existence of the internet writing he likes, because on a grand-ideas level it doesn't seem to deal with anything which isn't already implicit in the structure of blogspot or of message boards or of the whole sort of talking-about-music-on-the-internet thing..)

As a collection of bits of writing about particular bits of music, some of it (so far) is good, and a couple of bits are very good, and a couple of bits are awful. Some of it seems to fit into a greater structure very well, and some of it seems shoehorned in to fill space. (those Human League sleevenotes are in there, i'm not sure which they'd come under..). I don't see why these bits of writing warrant this particular book, or why they wouldn't have been better off as part of a blog or website (other than, you know, needing to eat and pay the rent, and all that sort of thing).

is that good or bad?

Frank is correct: celebrating music is so terribly dull.

Some might feel Morley's editor has been snoozing on the job, but I'd be preparing a P45 for whoever proofed it. So many errors! I've got an uncorrected proof of Nothing (no plus/minus sign on that) and I remember that being OK. Perhaps the corrections are the errors and vicey versey. It's a conceptual jokelet; the creases in the fabric of PM's yearning churning gurning tale are typoes, nudging their way through the linen.

Top of the pops

Paul Morley's brilliant disquisition Words and Music may be eccentric, pretentious and exasperating, but Steven Poole defies anyone to dismiss it

Saturday August 16, 2003
The Guardian

Buy Words and Music at Amazon.co.uk
Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City
by Paul Morley 360pp, Bloomsbury,
£12.99

After 20 pages, I was convinced that Words and Music was the best book about pop I had ever read. After 280 pages, I was at least convinced that it was the weirdest book about pop I had ever read. But that too is a kind of recommendation. Most books about pop are simply products of glossy merchandising, or obsessive-compulsive histories of studio minutiae for prog rock or gangsta rap aficionados: they are essentially tribal credos, written by insiders for insiders, a sort of comfort reading whose sole purpose is to reassure the audience of the importance and heroism of their discrimination.

The best book about pop that I had previously read was Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, a masterpiece of musicological and sociological analysis concerning the songs and cultural context of the Beatles. Even so, MacDonald's writing is marred, in that book and elsewhere, by a kneejerk hatred of any music that is made using computers as tools. Such prejudice is still common among today's rock fans, who bleat that great pop can only be made by men with guitars and that "computer music" is by its nature soulless and inauthentic, even as they refuse to believe that their latest beloved fifth-generation Radiohead rip-off act has almost certainly had its "authentic" guitar 'n' drummery mercilessly converted into malleable computer bits and processed by studio boffins just as much as the latest slab of uplifting Eurotrance the DJs are caning right now in Ibiza. Paul Morley, refreshingly, doesn't agree, and swiftly dismisses such nonsense with a brilliantly compressed aside about "programmers, who are, after all, an emotional bunch": he adores the music of Kraftwerk as much as that of Lou Reed, so that his history of pop is extraordinarily generous and eclectic.

It begins as it means to go on, with a yoking together by violence of two heterogeneous things, which he claims are his current favourite pieces of music ever. One piece is Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room", a piece of 1960s experimentalism featuring spoken-word tape-loops: this confirms the author's intellectual status (as he disarmingly confesses: "I fancy myself for liking it"), and foreshadows one story the book tells of how pop music grows directly out of the experimental side of classical music, from Erik Satie to Steve Reich. The other piece of music is Kylie's hit "Can't Get You Out of My Head", and anyone who feels unable to acknowledge this song's genius had better look away now, because Morley's project is in part about stripping away the Nietzschean ressentiment that lurks in the dank indie bedroom and celebrating those rare moments when art can intersect beautifully with commerce; when, as he puts it, we can recognise pop's "occasional odd shine of mind-changing art".

As a practitioner as well as a critic of pop music (he was a member of Art of Noise), Morley has decided that the only way to write about his subject is to attempt to make his prose as strange and sensual as the music itself. So, naturally, the book's main structural conceit concerns a robot Kylie driving in a fast car towards a virtual city, which is of course the city of pop. Tattooed at the nape of this cyber-Kylie's neck is a microscopic prehistory of music. The author himself tries to persuade Kylie that he is qualified to ghostwrite her autobiography. And throughout the book various other characters appear in the passenger seat next to cyber-Kylie in order to conduct bizarre conversations with her: from Philip Glass to Ludwig Wittgenstein (at which point, of course, a unicorn appears in the back seat), Iggy Pop and Japanese noise terrorist Masami Akita.

Kylie's story is told in a language of acid-fuelled science-fiction euphoria. "She has her flesh-covered hand on the stupendously suggestive gear stick of her golden speedmobile as it slices through the landscape of a robot's imagination towards a city where she is queen," Morley assures us. Alternatively: "Somewhere in some universe down some wormhole on the edge of some supernova, Tangerine Dream were a time-travelling science-fiction boy band, and Kylie, as a coltish, bare-cheeked Barbarella, guested on their biggest hit, a song that went on for centuries and whose lyrics consisted simply of the sounds 'la la la la la la la la'." Such reveries are regularly punctuated by pitch-perfect drollery - "Kylie in a car crash might be a very commercial event".

In between these episodes, Morley does in fact tell an exhilarating history of pop that manages to encompass Charles Babbage, Ornette Coleman and John Cage, or that leads, as he has it, from "Stockhausen to Steps". His likeably looping, self-referential, elastic prose enables him to brake at will for an extended essay on whatever takes his fancy: the "bootleg" craze, in which disparate songs are mashed together; the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction"; the robotic ecstasy of Kraftwerk; or Lou Reed's notorious feedback album, Metal Machine Music. Morley can also be superbly angry: he constructs a tremendous rant about the malignity of Pop Idol impresario Simon Fuller, accusing him of being William Burroughs's "death dwarf ", and excoriates coffee-table samplist Moby for his appropriation of the work of 30s blues singers.

Almost every page of Words and Music contains some perfectly sculpted, apparently throwaway evocation: here is David Bowie, "glowing at the centre of some golden smoke pretending to know where he was"; over there is Xenakis's Metastasis, which "sounds like an aeroplane engine mutating into string orchestra, and sometimes even better than that"; yowling in the corner is "pole-dancing pop fiasco Christina Aguilera". One might nitpickingly suggest that Morley is over-fond of a trope by which he describes something as the missing link between X and Y; although one might also finally agree that its use is vindicated by the climactic celebration of Eminem as being "the ultimate American link between Bing Crosby and fucking fuck you".

As the book draws to a close, it performs a mimetic fracturing, dissolving into a forest of interlocked footnotes and a panoply of lists, including several different lists of the 100 greatest albums of all time. As Morley explains, with a dying fall: "It's a story full of lists. Some day music will only be air. There will be no objects to hold or fetishise and people will simply collect lists." These lists exert a hypnotic fascination even if, as is deliberately the case, you have never heard of most of the music on some of them. I certainly intend to seek out an album by Kid 606 entitled The Action-Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams .

I suppose I should acknowledge the sad possibility that there will be people who don't like this book. (In fact, it is possible that I only like this book so much because it agrees with me; or, if you insist, I with it.) Our aforementioned anoraky types who believe that good music can only be created by men with guitars, among whom we must regretfully count many contemporary rock journalists ("geography teachers", in Morley's hilariously considered view), will just sneak back to console themselves in their indie bedrooms.

There will also doubtless be those who object to the most well-chosen adjective in the whole book, when Morley refers to "Nirvana's holy 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'". Many people will prefer to reserve the word "holy" for denoting those massive slabs of explicitly hieratic music by composers such as John Tavener, without wishing to acknowledge that Nirvana and Tavener are actually working, if not in the same room, then certainly on the same floor in some multi-storey celestial studio.

And there will, finally, be readers who claim to find Morley's extravagant prose experiments "pretentious", but since anyone who can use this violently resentful, very English word with sincerity has already committed to the idea that it is better not to try than to try and fail, that clever and creative people should in general shut up rather than try to provoke an audience out of its aesthetic complacency, and that art overall has no business attempting to be transcendent, such readers may be well advised to stick with their grubbily thumbed Nick Hornby collection. In the end, Morley's exasperating, brilliant and joyous book about pop is tribal to this extent: that it excludes the chronically narrow-minded.

Steven Poole's book Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames is published by Fourth Estate

The choice is not between celebration and death, unless that's what the choice happens to be.

One sort of link that makes PM seem intelligent is the reference, frequently made, to his book Love Minus Nothing Plus, which is as tasty as Seven-up, and intensely fudges a sweet choice between intelligent celebration and intent death.

The Mitty comment, it has to be acknowledged, is just plain proof classic Miller, heavy or lite.

By the way, I like the piece by Steven Pool a great lot less than the reference above it to next door's paddling poole.

One thing that I was going to get around to saying was how much better the Nipper's rough draft of an imaginary review is than Pool's smooth page of an endlessly printed one.

(NB I read Trigger Happy on the beach on the 3rd best holiday of my life so I might be overrating it - I need to re-read it too I think.)

(I only ever had one holiday, when I was 20, it wz rub)

I think it goes up to 7.

I am here trigger-happy to judge him on his Guardian writing and for instance and in particular his review of Morley.

The more I looked at the Morley review the more I could see how hateful it was. It still is. It's hateful, horrible, stupid and arrogant. It's arrogantly stupid, stupidly arrogant, horribly stupid and hatefully horrible.

That doesn't matter. But for Tom E to say Poole is as important as Morley is possibly the maddest thing that Tom E has said, in years of saying things I strongly disagree with, as well as things with which I warmly agree.

Just baffling.

I once wrote in an article that I was talking to myself in and which nobody listened to or wanted to (I can't remember which, possibly tATu, I should resurrect that Article Response, maybe someone will respond) that 'I can't not emulate my object' (or somesuch). Maybe Morley feels the same way, or perhaps he is drawn in some way in some instances at some times to some-some-some-some some of that fun that's had in doing this (thing I, we, do). That is like a chameleon (I draw in muggy, loam browns, horrible shades from the trees' nest greens that I hug) my touch is transformative of me and creative of me and in me and from (or is it 'out of'?) me.

I don't know that what I just said makes any sense, and I don't want to concept-the-dots by saying that that little paragraph's object is Morley and that in a way I tried to turn into him but I just have haven't I? And I don't really know why I do this - or I do because it is an effective writing trope if your reader manages to de-squirrel it.

I dug out Trigger Happy and was afraid to read it so put it down and picked up The Cricket Sings (Lorca) - which is a name this thread needs.

290 Older Messages. Cripes.

I am annoyed with myself now. I think I'm projecting.

just baffled by pf's bafflement.

The hatefulness reaches its peak in the last few paras of the Poole. In truth, some of the rest is unexceptionable. There is even at least one moment of truth: "His likeably looping, self-referential, elastic prose enables him to brake at will for an extended essay on whatever takes his fancy". That's not great by Cozen standards, but it points to the *utility* of Morley's style. Yet such insight is coupled with monstrous arrogance, which breeds damaging stupidity, which breeds horrific arrogance, in a vicious little cycle. My difference with Poolse is not 'doctrinal', not a matter of nuanced opinions and views - it's about that cycle and the way it gradually infects his writing and makes it fester.

Cozen's thinking about the imitation of the object is important. Yet a question it raises is: what is really being imitated? I think we (me, for instance) may sometimes mistake stylistic flourish for 'imitative form' without being able to say how any imitation is going on. Example: does Morley on Joy Division really capture the way Joy Division sound? Not necessarily - though its extravagance makes it look as though that's what it's doing.

But I don't accuse Cozen of such an error. Possibly he knew precisely what he was talking about.

I knew the bafflement was at Tom E but he has read the Poole's book so if he wants to say he is 'important' then I think that's fine.

Saw Morley on TV yesterday: funny and entertaining as usual.

Perhaps the devil is in the quotation marks. But even if it is I can't make the claim sound convincing. Morley is 'important' as well as important.

I will say though that my ambivalence to Morley remains, still, and that I think these people suffer when squashed into the freedom of a book.

ok. its still fine tho' bcz he has read his writing.

I think Cozen should find or found the freedom of a book, or somewhere where we can appreciate him, a little like we do already.

Two things struck me about the Poole review:

1) In the accompanying picture of Kylie you can see a bit of fat. I'm surprised she hadn't undergone photoliposuction.
2) Poole seems to think there are still people who don't like Kraftwerk and Paul Morley is great for either adoring or worshipping Kraftwerk, I can't remember which. This makes Poole seem like an old fuddy-duddy because, with the possible exception of the Pinefox, everybody likes Kraftwerk nowadays. Or have I missed something?

I didn't think it was a very good review, but I did read it from start to finish, which is more than I can say for anything else in this week's Guardian Review.

For instance: I thought the same thing about the Kylie Minogue picture. Unlike most people, I call her 'Kylie Minogue'.

I liked Kraftwerk in about 1984. I don't know whether I like them so much now. I haven't really heard them for a long time. I remember once, a few years ago, finding it touching that one or two people could still remember this loser band that I liked, but apparently not many people liked, in about 1984.

So, Morley links Lucier and Minogue. So what?

Perhaps the Guardian frightens writers and doesn't bring out their best.

The piece of Morley's I called inane ("Part of the development of the column will be an essay that carries off from where the original sentence began...") didn't - and doesn't - strike me as whimsical humor but as self-destruction, as a man's desperate attempt to find philosophical importance in his putting one sentence after another. Poor guy, it's all excuses. (Such insecurities can produce good writing, of course; but not in that piece.)

it's inane = it's his "olé"?

the reason "nothing" was so great was that it was about how your father's suicide when you're a teenager made you hugely afraid of feeling deeply, so that all yr talk of emotional response became shallow and nervously evasive chatter: pretension — the language of metaphysics (its lack of content a given) — as the mark of careful self-protection in awful times, show not tell

and the endless grief continues to hammer in; it's a tic — like all tics it can be maddening, but he no longer minds being maddening

i haven't read the guardian piece

fair enough. No one who has read this book talked abt this link in detail (also how many here have heard the lucier piece) but what the Poole review does get across is the range of music covered and that it seems to be aimed at the pop listener.

No one who has read this book talked abt this link in detail (also how many here have heard the lucier piece) but what the Poole review does get across is the range of music covered and that it seems to be aimed at the pop listener.

and gives me no reason yet to want to read the book, since Poole can't be bothered to show us anything interesting that the book is doing. Making links is not in itself interesting, nor is aiming something at a pop listener.

Shows what? That he's shell-shocked? (And now you're admitting that it's his insecurity, not mine.) Inarticulateness now is not an interesting reaction to awful times then. Btw, I checked a couple of years ago, when you first mentioned Morley on ILX, and there's no Morley in the Denver Public Library. And I don't assume I'll dislike him (given the support he gets on this thread). But he's not yet coming into focus here.

"lack of content a given" is a lazy statement. His or yours?

Stop using the word "show" as a crutch. In the linked post above he does think he's making a point. I'd have even less respect for it if he didn't.

(for serious)

erm anyway it sed something like:
i. my post above has a core of something i wd defend BUT it reads needlessly aggressive to me this morning plus totally daft ("this paragraph is no way ___________ like you say: of course i have not read it" — logic i spurn thee!!)
ii. morley is a v.hard writer for me to think about clearly cz
a. no him no me
b. he has by far the worst rotten:good ratio of any writer i basically think is a good thing and defend
iii. i haven't read the new book and probbly won't for a bit

a lot of people were annoyed abt it bcz he didn't much address the "politics" of the redskins — the "reason they did what they did" — but i think he did something much more powerful, which was that he dealt with the humanity and absurdity of the exchange: if the politics couldn't survive that, then it wz not worth addressing, after all

(the redskins made a good single, then a fairly terrible LP, and folded: i think intuitively morley to hit on their weak spot, but instead of turning it into a demolition job, he opened up the possibility that they see that too and do somethintg abt it... they didn't)

(maybe he cd see and articulate all of this: i have no idea — i have no idea if my fondness is residual or live at this moment)

(as of "nothing" it was still live: i was caught up in the long-after-the-fact overlap explication of why i had been drawn to him in 77, say. when the meat of the affinity went unstated and not faced... "insecurity" is wrong for this, i think, bcz that suggest a conscious withdrawal and adaptation, and i don't think these were moves and reactions — the sublimation of destructive emotional responses in matter that was handlable, demotic, accessible, good for you etc — he was conscious of)

I do think that a pop book that has more types of music in it than that might be interesting compared to other pop books but I agree that if we are not shown what's so interesting abt the links then its no good. OK I think I'll buy it this week.

"Making links is not in itself interesting" reminds me of why I thought England Is Mine was so lame.

A reason why I for one seem to be proceeding no further than hhhmmmm page 136 is that the object he's imitating appears to be systems music, if not the Lucier piece in particular (no idea, never heard [of] it before).

There are expanses of text in which Morley's discursive drive gets overriden by his recursive tendencies, as he engages his inertia drive and rotates whatever motif or subclause he's fastened upon through a series of variations.

As a design, perhaps it's a means of negotiating presumptions that progression is preferable to, or independent of, digression.

It results in this pattern of (much) tension and (little if any) release (eg. the passages on The White Stripes & Tangerine Dream, so far, at which point things seem to, er, accelerate somewhat) which might well be mimetic of some of the music talked about, or at least of the way it's often experienced.

The book I am doing at the moment features Paul Morley quotations. I can't fucking wait to get to them.

You can listen to it online here.

It might be put in the 'listen again' archives, I don't know. It's repeated tomorrow morning, anyway.

ally cook just overreacts all the time.

I am in the live chat! it is crap!!

John Aizlewood is such a fool! I have to admit I loved Paul Morley's (obvious but very funny for how long he sustained it) interruptions when JA started his review with the words 'Texas are a great pop band' ("No" "No" "No they're not" "No - you're going to have to take another different tack because this isn't working").

is this the best line ever?

does this lucier piece realy realy actually exist?

and does it matter if it doesn't? (no)

there is a comical photo of lucier sitting in a chair performing it in 1969 or thereabouts: he is wearing some kind of sonic helmet and has an of-its-time tache also

haha yeah its not quite that one but its on the wire issue with the minimalism primer.

and thank you for the confirmation chaps (but would it have been better if it had been a made-up piece?)

He looked me in the eye and asked: "Which would you prefer?"

I said: "I suppose I would prefer not to know"

He said: "You're my kind of guy".

I am enjoying the book a great deal, perhaps I don't read enough outside of the papers and this may be the first good book about music I've bought. Can anyone recommend other rockcrit books which are like this? I find W&M inspiring in that it is testament to the value of writing about music but perhaps less so in that I can't imagine ever being that good.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,441400,00.html

Unfortunatley they are all Cooganspeak, so I can't translate them from Spanish and see how close my version is to Morley's, but the article is very good, I think. It only contains one small example of the 'wed fed bled' thing, which leads me to think that perhaps there are two Paul Morleys, one for the socially acceptable Guardian and one for the full-throttle 'wed bled fed' box set sleeve note freak-outs. Is this true? At one point this article reminded me of the Pinefox, but I can't remember which bit.

Anyway, I would gladly join the fanclub of *this* Paul Morley, but then I quite like 'Home Truths' on the radio.

Ronan Goes Morley

(Or: you would prefer not to know).

= close to the edit!

382.

(383).

384

The thing is I have absolutely no idea what it was (only what it wasn't). A long process of elimination begins.

It's interesting that as I skim around I notice several vitriolic passages pointed toward Simon Fuller...yet there's very little mention of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Hm.

I think that on this thread we should attend to morley's role as GUARDIAN QUIZMASTER.

I also wanted to say something about Morley's treatment of U2 c.1980 or so, but I have no more time in which to say it.

I remember being put off by people like Paul Morley in the late 1970s, all that now-pop wow-pop yow-pop kind of thing. Could never be bothered with all that. But then, I'm sure there's some very nice people among post-modernist rock critics. Isn't Steve Sutherland a post-modernist rock critic?

I think daddino got a copy of his latest from amazon (he did post abt it on either this thread or the other morley thread on ILM...in a hurry as i type this).

"For Meltzer/Tosches/Cohn/Kent/Murray/MacDonald/Smith/Bangs/Toop/Christgau/Penman/Ewing: Kurt Schwitter's 'Boo/Naa/bii bull ree' and Atmosphere's 'Party For The Fight To Write.'"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/presenters/andrew_collins/roundtable.shtml

Other writers had used the pop charts as a base for the jump-off into pop writing (Nik Cohn for instance) but Morley was the first guy to show how it could work after punk. He wrote a terrific piece on the charts in the NME (one of the ones I have read) which I'd scan if my scanner worked, otherwise I'll type it up one day (sorry Conor!!).

It's just an attitude thing, too. The whole Tight Fit 12" > Led Zeppelin business for instance - that's not *just* contrarianism, it's an honest reflection of a moment's feeling; it's an assertion of individual will; it's posing the question of what the world would be like if that were 'true'. I love all those things even if my writing usually fails to capture that.

Has anyone mentioned that (I think) he called NYLPM LNYPM?

haha my Archigram thing on NYLPM has one line which definitely wouldn't have come to me if I hadn't been reading Words and Music. I'm glad this isn't considered thieving, spicing rather, cheers Tom!

And I suspect that the book does something important and good with cultural history - something slightly too big to be worth attempting to describe here.

But still there are things about it that vex me. For instance: I don't like the way Kylie Minogue is driving down a road towards a city. I don't see a good reason for that conceit. I don't like the way the city isn't getting any nearer (or perhaps it is - see disclaimer), but keeps getting distantly described; or the way that the city sounds, really. I don't think I much like the promised inhumanity of the city. I don't suppose that Kylie Minogue is that inhuman.

I don't think that she's very 'intrinsically interesting', or 'culturally interesting', or whatever. I don't know whether her agreed beauty translates well here into prose fascination.

I also don't find convincing or compelling the portrait of her here. I don't like the blankness, which maybe mirrors a real blankness, which if it exists is not a promise of much that's interesting. And were I more worried than I am about things like Gender, Power and Subjectivity, I would probably be worried about the geezer Morley's way of writing about the lassie Minogue; exactly how and why would need working out.

I don't think that she gives him much to go on, as a writer. And I am not sure he is at his best going on this brand of nothing.

He has a lot to say about what I suppose is 'avant-garde music'. I am not sure that I am convinced about what he knows about this. I think that one or two people that I know might really and quietly know more than he more noisily does. But leave that aside.

His banging on about this music irritates me. I don't really like the unqualified praise that he always gives it, the sense that it can do no wrong for him, which may possibly be a clue to the thought that he doesn't really know it quite as well as he makes out. And I don't like the way he talks about 'sound' as 'music'. I think that some of the things that he describes sound more like interesting sound than music. The distinction could be worth maintaining.

But I am not really so bothered about this. I have to admit that I think this stuff is probably important somehow. I just can't bring myself to dismiss it, though I'm not sure I will be brought to hear it neither. But the avant-garde thing is kind of OK.

He describes Minogue's record 'CGYOOMHead' early on, and I don't think he does it that well. I am disappointed by his relative inability to do it. And I am annoyed by his overrating of it. I don't think it's a very interesting or moving record.

Early today I had a sudden desire to hear Lloyd Cole's 'No Blue Skies'. I put the vinyl on and swam in that record for 3 or 4 minutes. I thought among other things of how much better a place to start musical reverie this airy watery cruise is to me than Minogue's fairly obnoxious and overrated record. I suppose I thought: it's sad that Morley is more interested in the latter than in the former.

I went out, and came back, and flicking on R2 I heard the long penetrating vibrating notes of Mark Knopfler's guitar on 'Sultans of Swing'. I thought about the pleasures that a record like this gives (me). It was followed by the squashy keyboards and guitars of Paul Young's 'Every Time You Go Away'. I thought about how I liked this, too, and how the pleasures, at any rate the textures, are different. I wondered what those pleasures and textures really were and thought how interesting it would be for someone talented to try to describe them; and about their apparent absence from Morley's distant extra urban universe.

So I thought something I have lately thought a lot -- that some of these pop writers are very good at something like thinking and writing, and that they take pop thinking and writing well sideways from the duller places where it might have been, to where I don't much want it to return -- but that I cannot find the places they thus get to that interesting, because they don't apply their cool fascinating ways of original thinking and writing to the pop whose pleasures fascinate me, and indeed loads of other people. I am frustrated by the absence of what might be called 'ordinary pop pleasures', until I can think of a better phrase, in the firmament of pleasure that fascinates these people (that is, Morley and the Reynolds of, so far, Blissed Out). I feel like I need, or could do with, people of their calibre to talk about the pop things that move me, and all they want to talk about is other things that I don't like; and we are both missing out.

I mean, obviously I'm not saying he talks about previously unknown acts, but I think in the compiling and uniting of all these acts and songs and ideas he achieves something quite excellent. I suppose part of my enjoyment is also based on the fact that someone who writes so well writes about things I like, this is unusual, especially outside of ILM/FT.

I think really my enjoyment of Words and Music runs directly counter to your dislike. I too feel I need people of Morley/Reynolds calibre to talk about the things which I like, and Words and Music is a fairly good example of this.

I do sometimes think that this is not the best approach to a book like this, or at least if ones enjoyment of the book depends on liking the music discussed or not then maybe it is not such a good book. I'd hate to think it was irrelevent what Morley wrote as long as he wrote it about music I like.

I think perhaps you overestimate the level of acclaim and praise which Morley's favourites have attained. One of the great things about Words and Music, for me, was the sense of it being a description of an ultra urban environment, or the fact that it talked about Felix Da Housecat and Daft Punk as part of a grand continuum of pop and not as some new fad or trend. For me the idea of rural sounds being innately superior seems like it's been drilled into me my whole life. I think there is a major lack of clever writing about what you might describe as ultra urban music.

(As an aside, The main thing I really disliked about Words and Music was that it reminded me of Sophie's World)

'Sultans of Swing' is a record, not a band; as perhaps you know: I am just clarifying.

I don't know if I know what 'ultra-urban environment' means. I don't think I would ever describe something as 'ultra-urban music'.

I don't think of an urban / rural split being as very important in my thinking about pop. But perhaps I am missing something.

I think Morley perhaps does make that urban/rural split, it's one which feels natural enough, to me anyway. There's a paragraph which I can't seem to find where he goes on a long rant about certain acts being born from metal and lights and cities. Also as his case for electronic music he does say something about it being the natural rhythm of machines and urban life (though to be fair he does suggest heartbeats and footsteps and the natural rhythm of the world are some kind of primal reason for why people might like repetetive dance music etc).

I'm not sure whether I see why being like a machine is a good thing, for a piece of music. Of course lots of music is made on 'machines' of one kind of another, possibly including guitars. But perhaps that is an unhelpful extension of the term.

He does go on about driving towards a city; as already said, I find that irritating.

I imagine that the rural/urban divide is so vital to you because you are from Ireland. What we imagine sometimes comes true.

I will maintain that I think Minogue is an unfruitful sort of subject. When he writes about her it is sadly boring. I don't find that the idea of Minogue in a car is a great summary of pop.

However, I have just got up to the bit where he talks about himself as Rock&Roll Writer (why R&R, I'm not sure; I can't imagine anyone on ILM using that phrase re. themselves). This is a lot better than much of the rest of the book. Oddly I am up to the famous p.120. This is a coincidence. I have already looked at it, in the past.

I don't think Morley's promotion of his own Google search on himself is very realistic. I did one on him and it was quite uninteresting or disappointing.

I have already registered numerous doubts about this book. Yet it has a strange positive power also. Yesterday I discovered that it was John Cage weekend, and made a point of listening to R3 essentially because Morley's uncritical praise of Cage and minimalism had somehow set me up for it. That testifies to some kind of strange power. It is an achievement to get me listening to music on R3.

What I think of the Cage etc is another matter. In dark hours before dawn I dreamed up an article on it but it has faded out in the light of day.

Another poster has mentioned the prevalence of basic mistakes in this book. This is true. Some of them are quite diabolical. Morley should probably soon produce a revised edition with many corrections. It is odd, and debilitating, for a book with such claims to expertise to get so many basics wrong.

Here's a snippet from the BBC Radio 6 thingy:
Paul Morley: Tell me something, do you think Nick is ever jealous or surprised that he isn't a success like the Pet Shop Boys or Divine Comedy?
Eddi Fiegel: Well, I think there's definitely a Pet Shop Boys comparison with that track and I think the Divine Comedy certainly have lifted and borrowed a lot of the literary allusions and style of his performing, so yes, I think he probably is quite...
Paul: Is he seething somewhere in the middle distance?
Eddi: I think he may be seething deeply in Tokyo as we speak, actually. To his credit he's carried on, he hasn't seethed to the extent that he's got himself into an even darker corner than he ever was before and has stopped working. He's still turning out these albums, which is to his credit...
Paul: That's interesting, because one of his heroes, one of his mentors if you like, Howard Devoto, went into a kind of Rimbaud silence faced with the fact that no-one was interested in him showing off his references, but Nick, Momus, does keep going, doesn't he. Is he too clever for his own good, do you think?... You never know, a not-clever, not-ironic Momus may well put him where he wants to.. where he should be, really.

-- Momus (nic...), February 8th, 2004.

I did find the Matthew Herbet interview strangely rewarding, however.

What's wrong with Prog?

I'm surprised that Morley has multiple threads and Penman so few, is all.

Were people aware, I wonder, of the following event?

Thu 4 Mar 2004
7:30 pm Voice Box
Paul Morley and David Peace
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In their broadcasting and fiction respectively, Paul Morley and David Peace are key spokesmen on British cultural life of the 1980s. Paul Morley made his mark on the music scene as the brains behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood and his own band The Art of Noise, also writing for the NME during its punk heyday. Morley published his acclaimed memoir Nothing in 1990 and his new book on pop, Words and Music arrived last year. [Quote]
Through the West Riding quartet of novels, David Peace fictionalised the horror of the Yorkshire Ripper's crimes, and his new novel GB84 is an astonishing depiction of the miner's strike, twenty years on. Structured week-by-week of the dispute, this visceral and dramatic work is the most ambitious yet from one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. [Quote]
Tickets: £6.00
Booking Fee: £1.50 Members: 75p
Concessions: £4

There is a little on pop in 'nineteen seventy fear'; hits of the time provide a naturalistic backdrop and at times an ironic commentary on events. Things like David Essex's "Gonna Make You A Star" [a really good single, IMO] are referenced as being on the radio, or on TOTP in a relative of victim's household, etc...

And did anyone notice how good (!!!) the Newsnight Review panel was the other night?

Late Review is good when Hari Kunzru is on; I feel as though I am rooting for my home team when he makes a good point.

Bull was purty, had a silly gimmicky line on 'Sex and Holby City', but really knew her stuff on ballet and modern dance.

Carey may seem a clown and all, but he came good - when Lawson threw him a question about US drama and Greek Tragedy, he hit it for 6 with the suggestion that the US South and Ancient Greece were quite similar.

Morley highlights:

1. Ben Kingsley acts with his earlobes - from early on it was clear that this was going to be a great earlobe film

2. [On Ballet dancer who used to be in S&tCity and is now dressing as Chaplin etc:] Well, it's clear that he should be the next Dr Who [Good cos a bit baffling?]

3. No Angels is like Grange Hill

4. She's not like a young Elizabeth Taylor so much as a young Stockard Channing, which of course is every bit as good as a young Elizabeth Taylor

5. Dance is the perverted cousin of mime - though it can sometimes seem the cousin of poetry, with its compression of meaning

6. I wondered whether he was going to be the missing link between McCartney and Chaplin, or Lennon and Keaton

7. It's always good to hear Nina Simone sing Jonathan King

What number was he at??

I cannot do those kinds of things as you can well imagine.

as it went through bowie: morley: he did all this great stuff, in the beginning, so we don't mind what he has done, since.

strangely, kylie said almost the opposite about herself.

cook and I convinced ourselves that REM would be in this fifty and, when it got to the last ten, that they would be in this last ten. we were wracking our brains. I remembered cliff richard and forgot him and remembered elton john. there may be a gas leak, in our flat, because we thought, until halfway through the beatles and until ally remembered cliff richard, that REM could be this number one. I'm glad morley was on the TV and not one of our couches.

2. I am amazed by your confession.

Pinefox - can you settle the blue writing debate between JtN and me(I?), over at http://ilx.wh3rd.net/newanswers.php?board=2 ?

Watching Morley as well.

With you.

-- ailsa (ailsa_watson7...), August 24th, 2003.

is this moz cover for real?

Found this on the wuhwuhwuh.

One for The P F not to miss.

That was before I saw the actual posts.

I wonder if Mooro is being ironic, slightly. ?

I like the cryptic.

I have not read PM in a while, save his unpublished press release on Eno.

he's on roundtable on 6music tonight

Paul Morley presents an essay about the influence of art on rock and pop.

Art has always been a consistent thread in music linking emergent '60's art school musicians, such as Lennon, Townsend, Ray Davies and the Velvet Underground, to the '70's wave of David Bowie and Roxy Music, to Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division, from Kraftwerk, Can and Faust to Magazine, Wire and Gang of Four.

Ultimately, Morley argues, the most striking, revolutionary and myth-making music was produced by musicians who were interested in art, who looked to the worlds of surrealism, dada, pop art, expressionism, to the more serious, innovative worlds of jazz, classical and film, as well as the art of literature.

More recently, along with Bjork, the popularisation of avant garde art music, through artists such as Tortoise, To Rococo Rot, Squarepusher, Matmos, Four Tet, and Lali Puna, has proved that it is music driven by artistic impulse that ultimately has the most contemporary resonance.

Oh yeah? Defined by whom? Bjork!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/livemusic/venue.shtml?vid=22665&rid=44

- I think guitar solos are often the most thrilling bits of a track. Wow - let's listen to the last minute or so of 'Like A Daydream' again!

- I think Brian Eno's best thing ever was The Unforgettable Fire

- I think Paul McCartney is a lot more exciting and likeable than that geezer that you wrote about, Paul, in that book, who wrote a piece that went on all night, or for weeks, or something, just repeating -- no, I did not really like the sound of that much.

To some extent it's a circular argument though. Critics tend to be literate and "interested in art" and react positively to artists whose work shows similar preoccupations. Those artists are then (over?)praised by people like Morley, resulting in critical canonisation. Subsequently the same kind of critics point to these artists high critical reputations as "proof" that the most "important" pop music is made by people who share their own interests.

joan- go to ubu web and if you can d/l then you'll be able to hear some of lucier's 'i am sitting in a room'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/

..and now Sylvian with Fennesz

- the use of CV's 'this is entertainment' to open it was wonderful

- some background tracks to illustrate who he was talking about were poorly chosen: quite normal-sounding (even in the late 70's timeframe he was referencing) eg: 'I Zimbra' instead of, say 'Drugs' from FOM (although TH were on the user-friendly outskirts of 'interesting' anyway), or not from the album being mentioned, or not typical of the group (eg while mentioning TG's 2nd annual report the more user-friendly 20JFG was used in the background)

- his style is still deeply annoying
("I'm going to start several sentences in a row with the same phrase"..."I'm going to keep using the same key phrase throughout"..."I'm going to do this BECAUSE I CAN")

- nice to hear Peter Hammill, but some of the Future Now/Black Box era solo work would have provided more relevant material than doomy proggishness (much as i like(d) proggishness)

- Jon Savage should have done this programme. Or Dick Witts.

- I need to listen to it a few more times, and ask other opinions....

anyone?

In a way I liked it, in a way I disliked it. In a way I approved, in a way I disagreed.

I felt it was an apology for my enemies.

Then JtN told me it was old hat and I felt it didn't matter so much what I thought about it all.

yes, when reading the program description last week i felt 'isn't this all so obvious?' - a problem exacerbated i think by the fact i can remember when it felt like an epiphany instead

old stories are new to young ears, but i would expect the catchment for Radio 2 to be generally old enough to know better (or worse)

the degree of knowledge/experience on ILx may have skewed my expectations, however

i listened to a bit of it again today: was reminded of certain other 'oh FFS episodes':
- Pere Ubu (their only ref, i think) get mentioned as 'ambient funk'...wha?
(ok i did stop following Ubu's work after their 4th album, but did they change into Level 42 or something)
- lazy generic statement-slop like: "Throbbing Gristle would end up being influential on chart-pop music from The Human League to Depeche Mode"...really? in what way? because they had one member who used synths? wow, so did several Prog groups...perhaps Morley never saw the 1981 article in which GPO/Oakey were not exactly forming a mutual admiration society - GPO shouts something like 'you represent the shit of the world!' at Oakey - or he means that post-girle HL made +ve efforts to avoid TG's 'influence' as much as possible
(prefer 'influence' possibilities like this to be either a matter of teacher/pupil historical evidence or FROM THE HORSES MOUTH)
- The entire 'Stockhausen: HE'S the Daddy!' theme made it funny to remember just how much disdain the Big Daddy actually held for several of the mid-90's 'electronica' merchants - Dick Witts did a series of R3 programmes (and an associated article in The Wire iirc) where the venerable 'Godfather of Techno' (yes, yet another one, in yet another example of reverse-adoption) was scathing/dismissive of what was presented to him as 'experimental' music...oh how we laughed
- Numan nowhere to be heard...which suits me fine, but if early D.Mode qualify as 'experimental' synthpop, then Numan's relative conventionality shouldn't rule him out either...he was ommitted perhaps because his pop-technodystopian schtick predated the general Rise Of The Synth Gnomes by about 18 months, and Morley knows about him having bumped into his sound, rather than grown into it)
- also VERY little about the awkward-for-his-story but also standard-narrative development of Electro et al in US during early 80's: perhaps Bambataa wasn't that bothered about euro avant-garde art either?
- I must have missed the point in the late 80's at which 808 State were 'experimental'... seemed more like a 'Graham me old mucker..' connection

noticed a good thing more too 2nd time around: the timing/interplay of some of the musical backgrounds with the (mono/dia)-logue is very nicely done

Some very negative ones among them. After a while I had to accept the fact that PM was promoting and celebrating things that I deplore, and denigrating or mocking things that I like when he had anything to say about them. I came to feel that the book was a crime against pop, or beauty, and that Morley should be placed in the stocks and have rotten fruit flung at him.

Yet, in the last 30pp or so, it actually improved. The lists near the end mentioned some nice things as well as the rubbish that he had been going on about for the previous 300pp.

The final chapter was partially convincing - it makes me think: maybe PM is better as an analyst of the internet or of technology than of pop.

But it is odd how his vision is so utopian, not at all dystopian. I fear that this may be foolish, or complacent.

wow! what an amazingly bad piece of writing!

Classic, though, for the clownpunching incident.

paul morley on the 1995 tv program: he had enough time and space to really spread his wings (often a given reason why his 'genius' doesn't shine through on the i love... and 200 best.. shows) - the famous 1995 lido documentary was dismissed ny him as 'wet'. ok, paul.

i'm being silly because the book isn't meant as a text-book. but it occurs to me that non-text-books can serve some text-book functions (obvious case in point: dt's biographical dictionary, which is actually pretty useful), and morley's fails a little here. and the mistakes, typographic and factual, are annoying.

i) self-conscious 'writer' type (not about music) playing richard x while passing time on the net/bus/tube, savouring the ironing but also enjoying it
ii) famous journalist commissioned to write book about modern pop, listening to richard x in order to write book, savouring ironing, but more or less doing it as a duty

i mean YES everything is 'theory', but -- well, i'm not convinced that morley has heard more than a couple richard x/neptunes/kylie tracks and seized on a few elements that fit the book he wanted to write. if the neptunes *are* minimal, mightn't it be useful to ask them how far 'in c' was the real inspiration behind 'hella good'? or whatever.

abebooks.co.uk has matched the following wants:

Want Criteria:
--------------
Title: ask; Author: paul morley;

Your Want has been matched with the following book(s):

Book Id: 205400444
Author: Morley, Paul, Corbijn, Anton (illustrator)
Title: Ask : The Chatter of Pop
Publisher: London, United Kingdom: Faber & Faber Limited, 1986
Description: First edition. Large quarto. A near fine quarto paperback with
small coffee stain. A scarce book filled with rock artist interviews by Paul
Morley . Included are Quentin Crisp, Boy George, Killing Joke, Ted Nugent, Jerry
Garcia, Marilyn, Depeche Mode, Gary Glitter, GAry Numan, Mick Jagger, The Clash,
Iron Maiden, Iggy Pop, Fire Englnes, Alice Cooper, Steve Harley, Bauhaus, Adam
Ant, Sting, Wham, Marillion, David Sylvian, Meatloaf, Paul Weller, Martin Fry,
Chrissie Hynde, Jim Kerr, Phil Collins, Grace Jones, Midge Ure, Duran Duran,
David Bowie and Peter Gabriel.
Price: £ 70.18

Did Paul Morley's sister do the documentary about fucking many many men? What was it called? I'd like to see it again. I remember some creepy old fat Manc talking about her, saying "..like a small schoolgirl. With enormous breasts."

There's so many people that could be: Shaun Ryder; Barney Sumner; Johnny Marr...

C'mon BBC, give Morley his own show!

I do enjoy his writing - at his best he's truly inspirational, firing the intellect and your more fundamental instincts - but sometimes it can seem a bit too clever for his own good. On TV or the radio, he has to be more concise and it suits him well. He's erudite yet inclusive, witty and engaging.

I saw the London production at the Old Vic in 1993.

But because we formed in the punk Seventies, the smithy of our soul, to quote Joyce, was the British music press, and the intellectual ideas of the time, some of which were preposterous, and people grew out of them, but they were great thoughts, and the memory of not wanting to be in a crap band, not wanting to turn into the pointless two-headed Seventies rock monster, to not become a roaring cliche, that's what makes us resist the temptation to grow fat

Bono sure knows how to play his audience though, I'll give him that. even a veteran cynic like Morley must've been flattered by that...

Oh, he was.

http://www.snappishproductions.com/blog/morley.jpg

Edna?

--

What I really really want

Paul Morley
Sunday February 19, 2006

According to my notes, my favourite albums for 1996 were by Sleater-Kinney, Cat Power, Patti Smith, Tori Amos, John Cale, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, 808 State, Placebo, La Bradford, Underworld, Aphex Twin, Me'shell Ndegeocello, DJ Shadow, Beck and Tortoise. (I misread the OMM editor's memo suggesting special memories of 1976, but let's just say that somehow I began the year with long hair wearing a 'Nils is God' scoop-necked T-shirt and ended it like a Stockport Richard Hell in a torn T-shirt that announced: 'Poet at Work'.)

My favourite singles from 1996 included 'Firestarter', 'Stupid Girl' and 'Born Slippy'. I was not taken with the artificial wonderworld of Britpop, although there's an affectionate mention in my notes of Suede's 'Beautiful Ones'. My notes also make passing reference to the lack of groups prepared to put a 'The' in front of their name unless they were still, perhaps, responding faintly to the way The Smiths used their 'The'.

The biggest 'The' group of the year was actually that year's Arctic Monkeys, The Spice Girls. 'Wannabe' was really the single of the year. It had taken about 20 years for something resembling the stunning female energy of The Slits to slip into the mainstream. When it finally did, mundanely, as a straightforward marketing response to Take That, the idea of a girl having any kind of power in pop was so novel and original that it became a phenomenon.

Girl Power was where you obsessed about clothes and make-up but wanted to be taken seriously. It was described by the group as responding to a wolf whistle by shouting 'get your arse out.' The Spice form of Girl Power, of being on top, redirected by a prurient male media skilled at exploiting a nation of men committed to masturbation, has led directly to Abi, Jordan and Jodie.

Nothing about the group was especially original - except the whole idea of these pushy, gobby girls as a pop group. The first thing I would think of if asked to remember 1996 would be The Spice Girls telling us what they really, really wanted, and then running off with it when we gave it them.

I miss them, though, and look forward to their return, not least because they will seem quite exotic in the slightly dour world of boy 'The' bands who have grabbed back the idea that a pop group is a male thing based around male lust for action, whether cerebral, stupid or sexual. When wondering what Kandy Floss would sound like - the imaginary group of Celebrity Big Brother winner Chantelle - I was hoping they might be more Bikini Kill grrrlie than Spice Girls girly. But failing that, I would prefer them to be more Spice Girls than Girls Aloud. By the time we reached Girls Aloud, the hardcore femaleness of The Slits as tabloided by The Spice Girls had been completely gutted by what can only be described as men behind the scenes who like their women to be painted, obedient and vacant. And not likely to bleed.

There's barely a sign of a British girl group arriving to continue the pioneering work of Slit (as wild radicals) and Spice (as abrasive glam hostesses) in the post-Strokes context of Franz and Editors. Apart from Leeds' The Ivories, perhaps, who know their Bush Tetras as much as their PJ Harvey, their Wire as much as their Huggy Bear. To give them Spice-type names in a way that's appropriate to how they represent their uncompromising thinking through music - Emma the guitarist is Stein, Cathy the bassist is Plath, Anna the drummer is Woolf and Helena the singer is O'Brien. They might be a little too Rough Trade 1981 to commercially make it in the world of Domino 2006, but they confirm how sensationally unsettling and abstractly sensual punk music can be when combined with unfettered feminine intensity. Thirty years after The Slits - and in a way 10 years after The Spice Girls -we should be able to take it.

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), August 25th, 2003.

What absurd aggression!

But some of Mark S's responses now look very fine to me.

I was thinking that 'The Beautiful Ones' was really good only last night/this morning too.

His Spice Slits vision is potent and appealing.

Maybe he meant Flann O'Brien, as the wolf in the fold.

Re the absence of 'The' bands ten years ago, there really weren't any were there? They seemed to die with the 80s.

the prodigy
the spice girls
the chemical brothers
the bluetones
the manic street preachers
the wu tang clan
ver verve

non-the bands in 2006:

clap your hands say yeah
go team
freeform five
son of dork
franz ferdinand
gils aloud
westlife
pussycat dolls
black-eyed peas
lcd soundsystem
arctic monkeys

Who the fuck is Paul Morley?

and there should be a The in front of Go Team, Freeform Five, Pussycat Dolls, Black-Eyed Peas and Arctic Monkeys...or is this a joke?

The BAND?

the posters in the tube don't have it.

Tonight on Radio 2, 11:30:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/musicclub/doc_musicalgenres.shtml

Paul Morley is both fascinated and confused by the number of different musical genres that exist today.

In this four-part series, he sets off to find out where all of these new genres have come from and what, if anything, do they mean to music fans today.

Each programme finds Paul talking to current champions of a new music style and the artists that have influenced them.

Tune in to find out everything you ever wanted to know about psych-folk, glitch, twee, post-rock, emo and perfect pop in the company of Lou Reed, Billy Bragg and Bernard Butler amongst others.

Tonight!

11.00pm Newsnight Review

Kirsty Wark hosts a special extended programme looking back at the cultural highlights of 2008, with guests Michael Gove, Paul Morley, Julie Myerson and Ekow Eshun.

It is, in fact, blatantly obvious that Morley should have had money thrown at him until he agreed to curate and present a major arts television skein. He has become - or, perhaps, has remained - one of the few real, aggressive neophiles in British cultural life. Hell, in a perfect world he'd be director general of the BBC. I could, if I felt so inclined, make a case for Morley as the last guardian of Reithian intent. His book Words and Music is the monolithic equivalent of the great rhetorical television series of the past, the likes of Civilisation, The Ascent of Man and Connections. It's very nearly a conflation of all three, with a bit of Carl Sagan's Cosmos thrown in and left to ferment in a crashed car in JG Ballard's garden for a thousand years. Sometimes I think Morley wrote it because he knew he'd never get to do it as a TV show.

When I read Words and Music (great book, btw) I was so bothered by all the typos and mistakes that I started making a list of them (ironic, huh?). At the end I had a five-page list which I sent to the publishers with a copy to Morley. I never heard back from either of them. A year or so later I saw him at a Peter Hammill gig, went up to him and asked him if he'd ever received the letter. He said he had and told me to look in the second edition (which I didn't even know had come out). When I looked the errors had all been corrected and there was a "thank you" to me in the acknowledgements.

That is imprwessive.

EDINBURGH NIGHTS

it goes back in a way to the SOURCE of popular music and brings it forward to Kylie Minogue's 'can't get you out of my head’
I’ve written a book about that, I felt like I could write another book

at the bottom of a well, how I've felt sometimes this week at the festival, like I was at the bottom of a well

best use of puppets at the Edinburgh festival, put THAT on a poster

with all this clowning and miming
and finding the inner idiot
I have been hoping that somebody
would find their inner genius

that's a good piece of rwriting
and you're wreading it quite well
but in the end it's just not GOOD enough!

a lot of Rik Mayall going around

the star system was introduced in 1993 by Q magazine
and that was the end of everything.

Terry Eagleton sticks the boot in:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/13/north-almost-everything-morley-review

Reticence is not this author's strong point. There is a compulsive use of the couplet: "brilliance and persistence, acceptance and slyness, dirt and glamour". There is also a reference to northerners who speak "with a certain sort of tough, scuffed and striven fluency", preferring the "slap, twist and thud" of their own speech to "the slur, sting and snap of near neighbours". There is certainly a glut of scuffing, slapping and thudding in these extravagantly overwritten pages, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley become "charred, trapped scraps of frustrated northern will". It makes them sound even worse than serial killers. Liverpool, predictably, provokes Morley to a bout of severe verbal flatulence: "Liverpool, passion. Liverpool, moving, Liverpool, moving cotton, sugar, slaves, invoices, music, ideas here, there and everywhere …"

Writers who wish to avoid hoots of southern derision would do well to avoid sentences like: "There was only one tree in our garden, which never produced any leaves." One can almost hear the cries of "Luxury!" from satirists of the prolier-than-thou syndrome. If you begin a paragraph: "I don't remember my dad making anything other than a pot of tea, eccentrically spreading marge on his Weetabix and dousing his Kellogg's Cornflakes in milk and sugar", you have only yourself to blame if a reader scrawls "before feeding the lot to his whippet" in the margin.

Ian Brady was from Glasgow, of course, which is north but not North

I'll be buying this, because I buy all Morley's books. But if I wasn't already going to, that review would make me more, not less, likely to buy it. I think Morley is one of the great living stylists of English prose; his writing has an appeal that is as much emotional and musical as it is intellectual.

Plus, anyone (but anyone) who still refers to that monty python "hard life" sketch, needs, um....

were any of the 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch writers (Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman) from the north? serious question.

Buxton, Weston-super-Mare, Leicester and London (only had to look one of those up! O-level Drama project still filed away up there...)

new interview:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/15/paul-morley-why-did-dad-kill-himself

Terry Eagleton is the worst.

Someone pretty please with sugar on top compile every Morley TV appearance onto VHS or whatever works best for you and ship it off to me. Thanks.

― Andy K (Andy K), Tuesday, January 14, 2003 11:29 AM (fifteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INdtNsOBfm0

n/m

tyvm

He has a new book about David Bowie coming out next month. I love Morley's writing but I'm agnostic on Bowie, so I'll probably give this a miss.