Morrissey and Milkshakes: Some Say (I Got Devil)

As I noted in my last post, I can’t ignore Morrissey’s recent displays of support of the relatively new political party For Britain. What follows is my personal approach to the ongoing controversy—mainly looking for clues in Morrissey’s own words via his 2013 memoir, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics). But I begin by listening to his new album.

In this post, for now at least, and for the most part, I am suspending the inclusion of images and streaming music. I realize there’s a lot of uninterrupted text below, but I’m not in the mood at the moment to cause royalties to be sent Morrissey’s way—more than I already have by preparing this.

California Son

Around our house my wife Andrea Carney regularly sings Melanie Safka’s “What Have They Done to My Song Ma.”¹ It’s Andrea’s oblique yet tonic way of responding to the horror of Gaza, Haiti, and elsewhere, which she encounters daily on Facebook.

The song was the B-side to Safka’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” and appeared on her 1970 album Candles in the Rain. As a kid I listened to that album as well as her covers elsewhere of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Judy Collins’s “My Father,” Phil Och’s “Chords of Fame,” and James Taylor’s “Carolina On My Mind.” Like many a fine artist she made those songs her own. Later I became aware of her self-penned “I Really Loved Harold,” from her first LP Born to Be (1968), a pert paean to polyamory. But it wasn’t until a 2006 collaboration between the band Tortoise and Bonnie “Prince” Billie (Will Oldham) that I heard Melanie’s “Some Say (I Got Devil).” She’d included it on her 1971 album, Gather Me, her sixth in three years.

This same song closes California Son, Morrissey’s own just-released album of covers, turning Safka’s understated statement into a defiant reply to those who “have tried to sell me/ All kinds of things to save me.” (It reminds me of a quip my childhood pastor made more than once. “Are you saved?” he was asked. “I didn’t know I was lost,” he replied.) “I know I’m not in danger” is the song’s refrain.

But, as one listener advised Morrissey on the cover song’s (unofficial) YouTube entry, “You are in danger mate, watch out for milkshakes!”

The milkshakes tactic is a latter-day “pieing” of the sort famously lobbed at Anita Bryant in 1977 during her campaign to repeal an anti-discrimination ordinance in Florida. Shakes have been thrown at figures that Morrissey appears to admire, like Tommy Robinson (English Defence League founder) and Nigel Farange (Brexit Party leader). (As I write this, Euroskeptics in Britain and the EU and nationalists in France are making election gains.)

And Moz himself has talked a lot of trash over time, although I see now that I hadn’t been paying attention (nor paying for his solo albums). A brief article a year ago by Chicago’s Consequence of Sound highlights some of his most controversial statements. The icing on the cake—the froth on the milkshake—is the singer’s recent display of the distinctive trident lapel pin of the For Britain party on television and onstage. I won’t get into hair-splitting of whether the aforementioned figures and parties are anti-other, anti-Islam, merely anti-extremist, etc. It’s almost irrelevant: xenophobes will pick up whatever they can get their hands on to bolster their cause just as antifa folk will commit Morrissey to the dustbin despite his explanations—or equivocation, as he posted two weeks ago.

And despite his music. And note that despite its title, California Son doesn’t limit itself geographically to Morrissey’s adopted home, but rather to mostly folk and pop topical tunes and ballads spanning 1964 through 1975, when Morrissey was between five and fifteen years of age. Few of the songs can be seen as having been recorded by Morrissey in a fit of nostalgia.

Search the web on “Morrissey” and “racist” and you’ll get an eyeful. Yet on his new album he includes Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (1964), a tribute to Medgar Evers, the civil rights organizer who was gunned down the year before. This is followed in close succession by Phil Ochs’s “Days of Decision” (1965), which decries warfare in general and, in particular, the Freedom Summer murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in ’64.

And despite their subjects, both these songs contain critiques. Dylan argues that Evers’s killer was a poor white “pawn” used by those in positions of power to maintain the status quo. Carry this notion forward and, well, I think you know the story.

Ochs, via Morrissey, sings:

Now the mobs of anger are roamin’ the street,
From the rooftops they are aimin’ at the police on the beat,
And in city after city you know they will repeat,
For these are the days of decision.
There’s been warnin’s of fire, warnin’s of flood,
Now there’s the warnin’ of the bullet and the blood,
From the three bodies buried in the Mississippi mud,
Sayin’ these are the days of decision.
There’s a change in the wind, and a split in the road,
You can do what’s right or you can do what you are told,
And the prize of the victory will belong to the bold,
Yes, these are the days of decision.

Morrissey, apparently, has heeded Ochs’s “bold” call to “do what’s right” (as he sees it) rather than “what you are told” through his embrace of For Britain. Because “these are the days of decision.”

Between these two tracks is Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Suffer the Little Children” (1969), which shares its title (of scriptural origin) with a Morrissey/Smiths number from 1983. This is an indictment of indoctrination, and thus a prelude to Ochs’s “do what you are told.” But it’s also a critique of capitalism, with the song’s “Mama” doing what she’s been told.

Just get them through the factories
Into production
Ah, get them into line

In scrolling and scrolling down today for Morrissey’s discography thru his Wikipedia entry I ran across a quote by Andrew Warnes, professor of American Studies at the University of Leeds, who characterized Morrissey’s band The Smiths as “this most anti-capitalist of bands.”² I immediately recall lyrics from that same band’s first album (1984), the song “You’ve Got Everything Now”:

No, I’ve never had a job
Because I’ve never wanted one
I’ve seen you smile
But I’ve never really heard you laugh
So who is rich and who is poor?
I cannot say

Because I never wanted to work for a wage, these words, of all that Morrissey penned, were my inspiration to keep my eye on the prize: early retirement.³

The Last of England

The educated are bound to their country by quite other ties than the illiterate man, whose chief consideration is food and physical comfort.

This citation is from an exhibition catalog description written by Ford Madox Brown regarding his painting The Last of England (1852–1855), which portrays a writer (not a laborer) and his wife on their departure for Australia during a great emigration in the 1850s.⁴ Derek Jarman adopted that same title for the sixth of his eleven feature films after actor Tilda Swinton complained about the original working title The Dead Sea, taken from a Thatcherism.⁵ Regardless of whether Jarman was employing a double entendre in his appropriation of Brown’s title, it’s worth consideration in the context of our present conundrum that these emigrants presumably had no desire whatsoever to integrate themselves into what has been described as “the oldest continual culture on the planet.”⁶

Both Morrissey and Jarman were appalled by Margaret Thatcher’s cruel aspirations for Britain. The two collaborated by way of Jarman setting Smiths songs to film in 1986. Jarman portrayed a Britain in decline and disarray first in Jubilee (1977, pre-Thatcher) and then in The Last of England (1987, after eight years of her PMship). Steven Dillon⁷ cites Michael O’Pray’s contrast of the two films:

The carnivalesque air of Jubilee, with its black humor and theatrical excess, is replaced [in The Last of England] by the unrelieved anger of a poetic documentarist who uses the wasteland of London’s docklands to create an atmosphere of hysteria, paranoia, and pessimism.⁸

It’s the “documentarist” aspect—Jarman’s use of Super 8 footage but also frame-skipping video and paparazzi shots—that allows the latter film to be rooted in the real world rather than fantasy.⁹ Both films are poetic enough that the uninformed viewer might not see them as critiques (prophetic and present-day) of Thatcher’s social darwinism. But one cannot mistake a scene described by Jarman himself, after re-viewing a reprint test at BFI in 1989.

The film’s a mess! And very rude. Hectoring annoying dialogue, or should I say monologue? The graffiti, though, are great. You could never see them on the TV, but on the big screen they shout out: Is this sex or isn’t it? over a stark naked Jenny Runacre wearing the state crown […].¹⁰

And yes, she had murdered Elizabeth II.

Morrissey, I suppose, also can be seen as a poetic documentarian. The aforementioned “Suffer Little Children”—his title (correctly) omits Sainte-Marie’s definite article—from the first Smiths LP (1984) is a lament about the Moors murders of the mid 1960s near his home town of Manchester. The second LP’s “Barbarism Begins at Home,” “Headmaster Ritual,” and title song “Meat Is Murder” (1985) are portraits of reigned-in curiosity and dissent, corporal punishment, regimentation, and cruelty to sentient innocents. These are not love ballads. And there’s “The Queen Is Dead,” title song of the third LP (1986), in which he sings about the decline of Dear Old Blighty, its “cheerless marshes,” and the monarchy’s relevance. After all, as Morrissey alludes in the song, in 1982 one Michael Fagan, after having been dumped by his wife, creepy-crawled into Regina’s boudoir as she slept.¹¹

If Morrissey might have pissed off some people via his provocation, Jarman did the same. Punk stylist Vivienne Westwood issued an “Open T shirt” diatribe condemning Jubilee. Yet she obtained an OBE from Elizabeth II in 1992, despite having sported another T shirt just fifteen years earlier depicting the Queen with a safety pin in her lips, tag line courtesy the Sex Pistols: “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN/ SHE AIN’T NO HUMAN BEING.” Through an open letter in 1991, Jarman received pushback when he criticized openly gay actor Ian McKellen for accepting a knighthood at the same time as James Anderton, Manchester’s anti-gay police chief.¹² McKellen held his tongue, and while some people supported Jarman, more did not, including the “McKellen 18”—prominent actors et al. claiming that the knighthood was a milestone as well as a nail in the coffin of the excuse that coming out would kill your career.¹³

Unlike Morrissey Jarman never emigrated beyond the white cliffs of Dover, seen in the background of Brown’s painting. He was diagnosed with AIDS in late 1986, dying a little more than seven years later, twenty-five years ago. Were he alive today, would he be siding with Morrissey or denouncing him?

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

The mouth speaks first, and then thirty seconds later the brain catches up with whatever it is I’ve just said.¹⁴

In his autobiography Morrissey recounts some of what he’s withstood. For instance, an undated British clipping announcing that The Smiths would cancel a tour of Italy:

Morrissey’s enemies may well be Italian right-wingers. As well as holding strong views on animal rights, he has also attacked the Royal Family and has often expressed his detestation of Mrs Thatcher.¹⁵

Later he lists ludicrous tabloid headlines like “Morrissey Says Sorry to the Queen.” A Melody Maker interview invented “as fact the idea that I had spent my youth hanging around public toilets in Manchester.”¹⁶ After the release of his first solo album, Viva Hate, he was questioned by the Special Branch Task Force about the album’s “Margaret On the Guillotine” (not having been so interrogated after earlier announcing the monarch’s demise). An excerpt of his several lines of assessment: “I was cross-examined [sic] for allegedly welcoming the assassination of Thatcher, but when her own cabinet effectively assassinated her they were not subjected to a Special Branch investigation, or even arrested for a hate crime. Of course, politicians have their own laws for themselves (none, specifically) […].”¹⁷

Later in his memoir Morrissey is equivocal and even evasive about those actions and assertions that have brought him notoriety. After a riotously enthusiastic 1991 U.S. tour was truncated due to, well, riot, Morrissey and band were booked for a recording session with the late Allen Toussaint in New Orleans. The song: “The Thoughts of Jack the Ripper.” The band was exhausted, Morrissey embarrassed, Toussaint’s reservations expressed, and “El-vest has left the building,” as the singer told his guitarist Boz Boorer at the time. Upon the return to England Morrissey was informed that an antagonistic writer for New Musical Express was now its editor. At an outdoor concert Morrissey was pelted by sharpened £1 coins, causing him to leave the stage. The next NME cover asks, “Is Morrissey flirting with fascism?” To which I ask, Is Morrissey making a connection between his desertion of bad studio chemistry and an opportunistic journalist? (There’s much fodder for fact-checking in this memoir.) Morrissey counters the accusations cleverly: “Surely if any pop artist were, in fact, racist, it would be wrong of the NME to grant them so much suffocating curiosity?” (Of course, Morrissey asks this question about five years too early were we to swap “pop artist” for “con artist.” Just like the lamestream media with Trump in 2016, today NME and other outlets are getting a lot of mileage from Morrissey’s mouth.)

Morrissey followed all this (at least according in his memoir) with a ditty called “The National Front Disco”!¹⁸ In the song, Morrissey laments how “we’ve lost our boy” David, but he teases us with hints like “England for the English” before the punch line (if we’d forgotten the song’s title): David’s “gone to the/ National Front Disco.” Which is an interesting way of describing a solitary soul seeking fraternity. (I discuss this in the Disco Dialectic section of my recent look at Gang of Four.)

According to Morrissey, his next album, Vauxhall and I (1994), was greeted by NME’s “Morrissey-is-racist pantomime” yet it “swooped in at number 1.”¹⁹ The magazine then rated the album 8/10, and twelve years later included it in its list of 100 greatest British albums of all time.²⁰ While working on his next album, Southpaw Grammar (1995), Morrissey heard about the death of the first of the Kray twins. When his producer Steve Lillywhite expressed pleasure at the news, the singer became reflective, expressing in his memoir the moral equivalency between murderous gangsters who “thrive unappointed outside the law” and the system that reigned them in. “The history of the judicial system is the history of torture, from the ducking stool to hanging, to the death of Bobby Sands. Brute force and cruelty are the point of the halls of justice, and fear is forever the key.”²¹ Just before this, the deejay John Peel was asked to provide a voiceover for a Smiths compilation, Singles (1995), but he “refused due to what he termed ‘the Morrissey racism question’.”²² Three years later Peel would receive his own appointment to the Order of the British Empire.

California Sun

Morrissey moved to West Hollywood in 1997—a years-long sabbatical, if not exile—and so he was there on 9/11, writing that “with no understanding of why people of foreign lands might dislike American policies, Bush does the manly thing by ordering more death and destruction, with American error being forever unthinkable.” And

the resulting bombings in London that claimed more innocent lives were the answer to the ever-grinning Tony Blair’s meddling in Iraq, thus rendering him guilty of war crimes that his honorable judicial friends would make sure would never land him in the cooler.

If not for Tony Blair’s self-interests, the people who were blown to pieces on London’s transport system that July morning would more than likely still be amongst the living.²³

Amongst the opposition, this critique is mainstream. Less mainstream, evidently, was Morrissey’s onstage remark five years later in Blackburn, Lancashire (cf. The Beatles’ “A Day In the Life”) for which he’d been heckled. “I had just announced how prison sentences of twelve years had been bestowed on animal protectionists relating to the famous Huntington Farm case, and I spluttered out how the murder of a child would only land you with six years in prison. Just ice.”²⁴ By this time he had two post-sabbatical albums under his belt. The first, You Are the Quarry (2004), contains a song that would mirror, somewhat mutedly, some of Morrissey’s interviewed remarks that alarmed his fans. In “Irish Blood, English Heart,” as suggested by the title, he acknowledges both his parents’ heritage and their adopted home. And then:

I’ve been dreaming of a time when
To be English is not to be baneful
To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful
Racist or partial

And finally:

I’ve been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories

Fourteen years later he told an interviewer:

I have been following a new party called For Britain which is led by Anne Marie Waters. It is the first time in my life that I will vote for a political party. Finally I have hope. I find the Tory-Labour-Tory-Labour constant switching to be pointless. For Britain has received no media support and have even been dismissed with the usual childish “racist” accusation. I don’t think the word “racist” has any meaning any more, other than to say “you don’t agree with me, so you’re a racist.” People can be utterly, utterly stupid.

Anne Marie Waters seeks open discussion about all aspects of modern Britain, whereas other parties will not allow diverse opinion. She is like a humane version of Thatcher … if such a concept could be. She is absolute leadership, she doesn’t read from a script, she believes in British heritage, freedom of speech, and she wants everyone in the UK to live under the same law. I find this compelling, now, because it’s very obvious that Labour or the Tories do not believe in free speech… I mean, look at the shocking treatment of Tommy Robinson…²⁵

I know the media don’t want Anne Marie Waters and they try to smear her, but they are wrong and they should give her a chance, and they should stop accusing people who want open debate as being “racist.” As I said previously, the left has become right-wing and the right-wing has become left—a complete switch, and this is a very unhappy modern Britain.

With this Morrissey enumerates three out of For Britain’s eight campaign priorities: protect British culture, freedom of speech, and restoration of the rule of law. The others are: exit from the EU, end of political indoctrination, reduce immigration, bring stability to the public sector (“For Britain believes in our Armed Forces and will restore them to greatness”), and end the Islamization of the UK. Dig a bit deeper into the position statements on these priorities and you’re in for something unsettling. For instance the statement on Islam. I won’t bother with a commentary because, on Monday, For Britain posted the following:

For Britain Press Release

Title: For Britain welcomes the visit of President Donald Trump to the UK
From: The For Britain Movement, Press Office
Date: Monday 3rd June 2019, 1 a.m.
Notes: For immediate release.

British political party For Britain wholeheartedly welcomes the State Visit of Donald Trump and his family to Great Britain.

President Trump is here to commemorate the D-day landings of 75 years ago; to remember the dedication, sacrifice and bravery of those who liberated Europe from a totalitarian aggressor. This event also reminds us of the important bond between the United States and the UK.

We believe that Donald Trump is already one of the great American Presidents, and we strongly admire his ‘America First’ vision and philosophy.

We note the economic success and growth that the President has brought to America; creating jobs for all communities and a US financial market that is reaching ever new highs.

Furthermore, we respect the fact that President Trump ‘says it as he sees it’. He is authentic, and does not filter his words through a government spin machine.

No matter what President Trump has achieved, we know that the biased UK mainstream media will cause mischief with the usual smears and denouncements during his visit, as will many of our politicians.

Smears and denouncements aside, Mr Trump has enormous support in the UK for his straightforward and common sense approach. It is the same approach we believe in at For Britain, and when this message is heard, it will bring us similar levels of support.

(I happen to agree that Trump’s straight-talking style is a welcome change, but, I’ll wager, for reasons other than Anne Marie Waters’s.) By calling Waters a humane version of Thatcher, would Morrissey characterize Trump as a humane version of George W. Bush?

As I mention above, the tabloids fabricated Morrissey’s having apologized to QEII; I think this was after the 1986 release of The Smiths’ album The Queen is Dead. What I don’t mention is how one of the band’s record label support staff, Scott Piering, quipped that “all publicity is good publicity,” to which the singer exploded.²⁶ Given the barrage of publicity this spring one wonders whether Morrissey finally has come to agree with Piering, now deceased.

¡Oye Esteban!

Late in his memoir Morrissey writes about his connection with Latinx fans in Fresno, California.²⁷ It’s September 10, 2002. Outside the concert venue, “Fresno is Hollywood and Vine condensed into a single image of gangs, gangs, gangs everywhere.” “The streets flood with Morrissey.” “Peeping from the side streets, the police hide—watching this crowd to see if they can possibly make any money from it by way of tickets and taggings—every arrest a potential notch and a sexual thrill for the cop crotch.” Morrissey muses: “Could I disembark at Fresno and join the good-looking stud-muffins? No, I am as cut off from the crowd as I was in 1973, stressed in Stretford [Manchester].” Again, the dialectic of the disco.

Inside, the Rainbow Ballroom “walls drip with sweat” and “Fresno is Morrissey Central.”

Why do you come to me? I face my race. I wonder how they found me. All Mexican mellow, yet ready to put the chill on. Here in Fresno I find it—with wall-to-wall Chicanos and Chicanas as my syndicate. I walk onstage and the roar that greets me nearly kills me—would Italian godfathers find better respect? For once I have my family.

The dearth of white faces “is a remarkable answer to those dap snappy London music editors, each boxed up in Bow [East London], who would have me hanged as racist for daring to sing about racism.”

Morrissey follows this up by comparing la polizia of Rome, where he eventually moved, with the Los Angeles Police Department.

It is the only city I have ever traveled to where the police appear to want to help, and where they have a certain confidence in their public charges […] whereas in Los Angeles you must prepare yourself for trouble from any emerging police car. In Rome, people will even smile at police officers as they walk past, whereas attempt to smile at an LAPD officer and you would be pinned to the ground in the city where everyone is guilty until proven guilty.²⁸

Imagine

I’m grateful to this exercise in mining Morrissey’s memoir for evidence of contradiction to, and substantiation of, his stance since the time of the book’s publication. Correct me if I’m wrong: In sum, he reviles the racist label but his concern for England’s identity and culture allows him to be lumped in with unsavory nationalists.

And yet there’s so much more that leads up to this stance, as I’ve noted. I’ll close with three citations from the last few pages of Morrissey’s autobiography. On page 333 he writes:

Bahrain has been rebuilt in the center of Brussels, by people who moved in but didn’t care too much for what they saw. The change from my first trip to Brussels some twenty-eight years ago is ungraspable.

Fifteen pages later:

There are more stolen goods in either Buckingham Palace or the British Museum than the Mexican poor could ever get their hands on. Yet, the people of Mexico are largely unable to move or to progress, and although their toil and labor has built most of America, modern America does its utmost to keep them from joining in.

And on page 326:

Buying a Morrissey disc remains a political gesture […].

Regarding Morrissey’s legacy, I’m old enough to have read John Lennon’s December 8, 1970 interview in Rolling Stone when it was issued in two editions over the following two months (I still have them).

You know, I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge.
I’m just beginning to think he’s doing a good job. I would never know until I went to China. I’m not going to be like that, I was just always interested enough to sing about him. I just wondered what the kids who were actually Maoists were doing. I wondered what their motive was and what was really going on.²⁹

This was at the mid-point of the Cultural Revolution. It didn’t end well. Imagine (“if you can”) a British cultural revolution led by For Britain.

Who remembers Lennon’s flirtation with Maoism? I do, of course, but I don’t know that I can envision a future in which Morrissey’s alliance with this new party will be ignored. But we’ll see what happens (to quote “one of the great American Presidents”).

Notes

1. I’m obligated to note that, despite its lyrics, the song’s title is not “Look What They’ve Done to My Song Ma.”
2. Andrew Warnes. Black, White, and Blue: The Racial Antagonism of The Smiths’ Record Sleeves, Pop Music, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan 2008), pp. 135–149.
3. I discuss a society with an aversion to work in The (In)Dignity of Labour from my recent look at Gang of Four.
4. As cited in Ford M. Hueffer. 1896. Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work, London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 100, archived here.
5. “The title most commonly attached to the evolving film was The Dead Sea—the Dead Sea of Victorian values (a particularly loaded phrase taken from one of Thatcher’s many hectoring speeches to the nation), and of ‘post industrial decline, whose stagnant waters erode the crumbling cities’.” From Tony Peake. 2000 (1999). Derek Jarman: A Biography, Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 368, 367.
6. “DNA Confirms Aboriginal Culture One of Earth’s Oldest,” Australian Geographic, 23 Sep 2011. Consider the article’s comments; as with all science it is raw material for revision.
7. Steven Dillon. 2004. Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea, Austin: University of Texas, 166.
8. Michael O’Pray. 1996. Derek Jarman: Dreams of England, London: British Film Institute, 159.
9. Dillon, 165, citing Justin Wyatt, Autobiography, Home Movies, and Derek Jarman’s History Lesson, from Chris Homlund and Cynthia Fuchs. 1997. Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 161.
10. Derek Jarman. 1994 [1991]. Modern Nature, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 82.
11. The most disturbingly amusing retelling of the incident is by Fagan himself: “Michael Fagan: ‘Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints, down to her knees’,” Independent, 19 Feb 2012, posted here. The incident prompted a male sex worker, “hoping to capitalize on the publicity,” to reveal he’d had a years-long affair with the head of royal security (“Police Lapses Cited in Palace Intrusion,” New York Times, 22 Jul 1982, A10). I discuss this in my next post.
12. Peake, 464. Jarman also objected to the knighthood in light of the recriminalization of homosexuality—post Thatcher. For details, see An Investigation into the Relationship Between Gay Activism and the Establishment of a Gay Community in Birmingham, 1967–97, a thesis by Jeremy Joseph Knowles, M.Phil. Twentieth Century British History, University of Birmingham, Sep 2009, archived here.
13. Peake, 465, 562n32. The letter was published in the Guardian, 09 Jan 1991.
14. Morrissey, 325.
15. Morrissey, 139.
16. Morrissey, 142, 143.
17. Morrissey, 170. Throughout his memoir he employs the term cross-examination incorrectly in legal contexts. It is not a first round of questioning, but a second, after a witness has undergone a direct examination, and it only is practiced in a court of law, rather than as an initial interrogation.
18. Morrissey, 196–198. The song is included on the third solo album, Your Arsenal (1992). Producer Mick Ronson would die nearly nine months to the day after its release.
19. Morrissey, 215. See also Morrissey discography Wikipedia entry.
20. “His Astra’s Voice,” NME, 12 Mar 1994. “100 Greatest British Albums Ever,” NME, 28 Jan 2006.
21. Morrissey, 219–220.
22. Morrissey, 223.
23. Morrissey, 272. Bombings of London subways, successful and attempted, took place 07 and 21 Jul 2005.
24. Morrissey, 300–301.
25. If you feel like taking a roller coaster ride of nationalist-but-not-racist/fascist nuance, search on Tommy Robinson né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
26. Morrissey, 142.
27. Morrissey, 314–316.
28. Morrissey, 317–318.
29. “The Rolling Stone Interview: John Lennon, Part Two, Life With The Lions,” Rolling Stone No. 75, 04 Feb 1971, 39.