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.

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.