Yes do As I’d forgotten all about it. Was it good. I need to get on ordering it
It was very well written tbf.
Here are the Moz / Smiths excerpts:
1:
Even when events that now seem seismic happened, I seem to have blithely glossed over them, preferring to enthuse about what we had for dinner or the score of a football game. What a ‘deeply boring young man’ I must have been. Maybe Morrissey was right after all. I suppose I had yet to acquire any sort of emotional depth or any sense of perspective. Subjects like the complex landscape of my parents’ marriage are represented by the odd sentence like Mum and Dad had a row, revealing myself to be an unusually myopic and self-centred child.
2:
I’d fallen in love with the Fall’s wiry surrealism – records like This Nation’s Saving Grace and The Wonderful and Frightening World had become almost sacred to me – and I had worn my stylus down to a nub playing Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Meanwhile, The Smiths’ colossal shadow of influence was ever growing; theirs was such a unique place in the world of pop – cultish and still distinctly marginal but with the reach to make thrilling little forays into the mainstream, so being a fan felt just as transgressive as being into the Pistols years earlier. They had hovered around my consciousness until one solitary evening when I was listening to Peel on late-night Radio 1 and heard Johnny Marr’s gnawing, insistent guitar hook coming through my tiny transistor speaker and Morrissey’s saturnine promise of leaping in front of a flying bullet, and that was it for me. Theirs was a truly special chemistry, at once familiar but unique, a perfectly balanced dance between jangly conceit and pitch-black humour that held me enthralled for years.
3:
I don’t remember there being an especially strong logic about our choice of name beyond the simple fact that it just sounded right. Later journalists would force me to pin some story on to the moniker, and I would try to nicely do as I was asked and blabber on about concepts of ‘beauty through cruelty’ and references to Elvis or Morrissey songs. But the truth is, I liked the way it sounded and I liked the way it looked and sometimes, in music and in life, that’s all that really counts. So we were called Suede and armed with this new impetus and identity we marched gamely on.
4:
Our next show was yet another at the Falcon, but a country mile away from the cruel pantomime we had endured there in December. This time, the palpable frisson and murmur of excitement in the crowd wasn’t just because Morrissey, Suggs and Kirsty MacColl had turned up to see us, it was because at last we had something that people seemed to want.
5:
The first original piece that Bernard played us was something called ‘Miller Man’. I remember it being complex and melodic with an obvious stylistic nod to Johnny Marr and, indeed, The Smiths’ writing dynamic became our model, with me trying to weld lyrics and melody on to Bernard’s crammed, intricate opuses.
6:
Pantomime Horse’ is still one of the greatest ever Suede songs. When Bernard first played me the music it was in a different time signature, and I think my suggestion that we put it in 6/8 waltz time was inspired by The Smiths’ ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’. Anyway, it worked, and I set about writing a slightly self-piteous lyric that built to a wild, passionate denouement. The final scream of ‘Have you ever tried it that way?’ is born from the torment of sexual jealousy but it’s also intended as a probing, haranguing question about class and poverty and privilege.
Regards,
FWD.