Morrissey in quotes

March 2015

“The Brit Awards are ghastly. I would never accept a Brit. It would be like Laurence Olivier being happy getting a TV Times award.”

“The Brit Awards are ghastly. I would never accept a Brit. It would be like Laurence Olivier being happy getting a TV Times award.”


“Long hair is an unpardonable offence which should be punishable by death.”


“I wish that Prince Charles had been shot. I think it would have made the world a more interesting place.”


“I’m not very good at being dull.”


“The smell of burning animals is making me sick. I can smell burning flesh …and I hope to God it’s human.” – exiting the stage at Coachella in 2009.


“It’s the refuge for the mentally deficient. It’s made by dull people for dull people” – on dance music and club culture.


“Bring me the head of Elton John… which is one instance in which meat would not be murder, if it were served on a plate.”


“Life would be so colourful if only I had a drink problem.”


“Bob Geldof is a nauseating character. Band Aid was the most self-righteous platform ever in the history of popular music.”


“I would rather eat my own testicles than reform The Smiths, and that’s saying something for a vegetarian.”

“All human activity is fruitless unless pitted against the girls and boys singing on pop television, for they have found the answer as the rest of us search for the question. I will sing too. If not, I will have to die.”


“The Smiths only happened because I had walked home in the rain once too often.”


“The monarchy is foremost a business, and it’s important to them that the British public continue to finance the excessive luxurious lifestyles of the now quite enormous, wasteful and useless ‘royal’ family. I find it very sad.”


“Age shouldn’t affect you. You’re either marvellous or you’re boring, regardless of your age.”


“It is really on the same moral level as child abuse. It’s the same thing. Animals are like children, they look to us for protection.”


“If I met Vic Reeves, I’d have no desire other than to smack him in the face.”


“Just as the Mercury Prize lands like a voodoo doll in the hands of the unlucky recipient (who is usually to be found selling mattresses ten months later), a Brit Award generally goes to a lot of shriveled young souls who have not earned it.”

“(Sigmund Freud) made people feel so neurotic about their lives. I mean, if you dreamt about a lampshade, it meant you wanted to be whipped by the local vicar or something.”


“I am capable of looking on the bright side – I just don’t do it very often.”


“What’s the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning? Wish I hadn’t.”


“I do maintain that if your hair is wrong, your entire life is wrong.”


“(Richard Madeley) referred to me as an ‘insufferable puffed-up prat’. This is a bit rich coming from a man who actually married his own mother.”


“The rhino is now more or less extinct, and it’s not because of global warming or shrinking habitats. It’s because of Beyoncé’s handbags.”


“If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.”


“My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.”


“I don’t iron anything. Never have and never will.”


“The Smiths was an incredibly personal thing to me. It was like launching your own diary to music.”

“It seems unlikely that an end-of-the-world announcement would be believed nationally unless confirmed on BBC1 by Cheryl Cole whilst conditioning her hair.”


“We’re all lonely, but I’d rather be lonely by myself than with a long list of duties and obligations. I think that’s why people kill themselves, really.”


“Lady Gaga said to me, ‘You showed me how it’s done.’ I have no idea what she meant by ‘it.’”


“I have no love for myself as a human being, but I have immense pride in the music I make, and I believe it has an important place. Others do, too, and the thousands of people with Morrissey tattoos certainly proves something.”


“I think I’d be a prime candidate for canonisation.”


“The solo years have been more meaningful to the audiences than the Smiths years, but the press in England only write about me in relation to the Smiths era.”


“I never imagined I’d be a solo artist. And now I couldn’t imagine being part of a group.”

“I think we were all initially swept along with the Obama win, but he’s proven to be simply a set of teeth, and useless in every other regard.”


“Britain has been encouraged to become a nation of idiots (which, of course, is what it is not).”


“The fire in the belly is essential, otherwise you become Michael Buble – famous and meaningless.”


“The Smiths are never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to reunite – ever.”


Morrissey comes to the Capital FM Arena on Friday, March 13. Tickets are priced at £50.40 and £72.80 (includes admin fee), from the box office. Call 0843 373 3000 or visit capitalfmarena.com.

Midge Ure

You’re coming to Nottingham next week to do what?

A totally acoustic set. It’s me and a guitar just singing a bunch of songs that are hopefully worth singing - and hopefully I’ll be able to sing them (laughs).

Where is the OBE you were awarded and what do you do with it?

I’ve got no idea where it is. Like most of the things you get over the years it ends up in the loft. I couldn’t put my hands on it right now if someone put a gun to my head. I don’t know what to do with it. Maybe if you’re writing letters to the school you might put OBE at the end of your name so it makes you sound officious. You know, if you’re trying to get the kids out of trouble.

You took the name Midge as an inversion of your real name Jim?

That’s right. It was the band I joined in 1972, called Salvation, they already had a Jim and he was one of the leaders of the band. He said ‘we can’t have two Jims so you’re now Midge’. When you’re a spotty long-haired youth you don’t really argue.

 I read you were a member of Thin Lizzy?

I never joined them but I did work for Thin Lizzy. I was in the studio putting the finishing touches to the first Visage album and I’d just joined Ultravox when Philip (Lynott), who I’d known for a long time, called to say Gary Moore had left the band. Can I jump on a plane tomorrow and finish the American tour? They sent me out on Concorde, which was ridiculous. Within 24 hours I was on stage with them playing The Boys Are Back In Town and having a ball. Then we did a Japanese tour and an Irish tour. So I was a token member of Thin Lizzy.

Is it true you co-wrote Yellow Pearl with Phil Lynott, which of course became the Top of the Pops theme for many years?

I did. It was something we used to jam with Thin Lizzy during sound checks. I’d just start playing this little riff and Phil said ‘great, I’ll put that on my solo album’. The remixed version is the one that ended up as the Top of the Pops theme. Money for old rope really. Every time it was played on the television you could hear the cash registers ringing.

Is it true that in 1975 you turned down an offer to be the singer with the Sex Pistols?

I don’t know. I turned down being in the Sex Pistols but I don’t know if it was to be the singer or the guitarist because Malcolm McLaren never got round to asking if I was a singer or a musician. I was stopped in the street of Glasgow by Bernie Rhodes, who went on to manage The Clash. McLaren was sitting in a car in a mohair jumper and a dog collar, which was quite an odd sight at the time. He told me all about his plans for this band he was putting together. But he didn’t even ask if I played anything. I looked a bit like James Dean so he was more interested in style than content, which I didn’t think was right, so I said no.

Don’t you find it bizarre that despite being one of the top five biggest selling singles of 1980, Vienna didn’t actually reached No. 1?

Yeah, it outsold all the others that kept us off the No. 1 spot: Joe Dolce (Shaddap You Face) and John Lennon (Woman). It’s just the way it works. It wouldn’t happen today because neither John Lennon, Joe Dolce or Ultravox would get played on the radio today. It’s so formulaic now that oddities, as Vienna was, wouldn’t get through. Even though it only got to number two it changed our lives forever.

You have four honorary degrees from Scottish universities. What do they mean to you?

And I’m about to get another one later this month from Bath University, as I live down here now. I’m not a vindictive person but the old, battleaxe, vindictive teachers I used to have at school, who used to tell me ‘boy, you will amount to nothing’... in a way I wish they were there to see me getting these things.

Is it right that the first time you spoke to Bob Geldof about the famine in Ethiopia, which would lead on to Band Aid and Live Aid, was when you were rehearsing with Ultravox for The Tube and Paula Yates handed you the phone?

That’s right. Bob and Paula and I had been friends a long time. We were just chatting when the phone went and it was Bob at home asking her about keys or something. She said ‘he wants to talk at you’ and handed the phone to me. He had just seen the Michael Buerk footage that night and said ‘I want to do something, will you help?’ And that was it.

Gig

Who: Midge Ure

Where: Rescue Rooms

When: Thursday November 11, 7.30pm

Tickets: £13, 0845 413 4444

Web: www.gigantic.com

Bob Geldof

November 2001

“Contentment is just not part of the human plot. The religious seek contentment, work f***ing hard at it, but never achieve it.”


SAINT Bob Geldof swears now and again — it is the eff word he favours.
“Of course, you know, we’re speaking on the telephone right now, and I’m sitting outside a cafe and yeah, things are fine.
“Do I feel like bursting into song and running down the street? No.”
He almost laughs.
Laughter is probably something Bob Geldof doesn’t do too often.
Of course, for that you can’t really blame him.
Six years ago his incredible life took a downturn when he split from wife of nine years Paula Yates.
“Plenty of guys get divorced but not at some Shakespearean level of tragedy,” he reflects.
Since then, despite being in the public eye more than ever, Geldof has kept a low profile.
Until now that is.
After years of silence Bob Geldof has come blinking into the spotlight again.
He has a new album to promote called Sex, Age and Drugs. It is his first for five years.
And with it he is raking up the whole episode.
On the album’s opening track called One For Me he sings:
“And the teenage clothes and see-through sizes, the mutton dished up on the Sunday plate, is now the lamb in ghostly guises, you should have known better.”
On My Birthday Suit he sings
“I always prayed for me and you but never mind, it doesn’t matter now.”
Inside the CD booklet is a photo of a woman with blonde hair lying on a bed, a crucifix on the bedside table.
“What do you think it’s meant to be?” he asks.
Last year, Paula Yates was found dead at her London home lying on a bed. It followed the suicide of lover Michael Hutchence in November 1997. Despite three years passing, Paula was still overcome with grief, and took an overdose in September last year.
So, it’s Paula, right?
“Well it’s not,” he says, so matter-of-factly he has obviously missed the possible connection.
Less subtle is the track Inside Your Head:
“You got the gold, I got the lead, You got the juice, you left me the dregs, You got the view, I got the ledge, You got the palace, you left me the shed. So why not put a noose around your neck. What the f***’s going on inside your head?”
Considering INXS singer Hutchence was found hanged in a Sydney hotel room four years ago, the similarity is, to say the least, tantalisingly close.
Perhaps what is most startling is the way the song is delivered. It begins with a lot of background chatter, almost like a party song.
Bit sick, isn’t it?
“It’s not a party, it sounds like a cafe or something. Why I did that was because this whole thing was going on between me and the other people involved [he rarely mentions Paula’s name, and never Michael Hutchence’s] was like a public spectator sport. That’s what it was like. Like you were in some sort of f***ing Roman arena where people were just tormenting you. There was enough torment going on anyway.”
Then he adds: “I think that’s what it is. I think that’s why I did that.”
The reason he sounds so vague is that the album, like a diary of his darkest years, was finished over a year ago.
And the songs were written before Paula Yates’ drug overdose.
“I waited until I felt right to put out the record, to be honest with you.
“Why? I don’t know?
“The songs were all written before Paula died but they still work.
“You think you know what they are about and I think I know what they are about and for other people they might mean something completely different. They probably mean something completely different to me than they do to you.
“You are trying to interpret it through what you know about me, and you are probably wrong, which is not your fault.
“It is people interpreting what they know about someone that they know through a distorted filter, like the papers, or whatever.”
Despite that, he admits the album is a reflection of how he felt during the period in question.
“It was not a cathartic exercise but an attempt to give shape to an experience that was wholly incomprehensible and largely still is. I don’t feel a sense of release or relief. It hasn’t got the demons out of the system. In fact, I can’t listen to the album because I find it too troubling.”
“It is unsettling and you don’t want to be reminded of those things.”
Odd that he can’t listen to the album but can sing the songs off it on his short UK tour, which lands at Newark Palace Theatre tomorrow.
Bob Geldof tends not to tour the UK too often, rather favouring the Continent where he is still just Bob Geldof — musician.
“For 25 years I’ve been in people’s faces and so they know all these different types of Bob. Probably the last thing they think about me is music. That isn’t true on the Continent where that’s all they know me for.
“But music is what I do. I do business stuff and other stuff — but it doesn’t occupy any of my brain space.
“Music is completely fulfilling. It’s a crap word and not adequate, but it is. Especially playing live.
“It’s emotionally cathartic, it’s physically exhausting, it’s financially rewarding and psychologically complete.
“When you leave stage after a good gig you sleep — and I don’t sleep very well generally so that’s a novel experience — but you also disappear. You leave yourself and other concerns behind and you are off in the music.”
The last time he was in the county was 1985 with the Boomtown Rats at the Royal Concert Hall.
Back then, he ended the show with Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? which became the biggest-selling single in UK history until Elton John’s Candle In The Wind tribute to Diana.
“That was the only tour we ever played it. I never played it again after that.
“It’s not sort of my song anyway, really. At least I don’t feel it is.”
It was with the new wave group Boomtown Rats that Geldof first tasted celebrity.
The group formed during the punk movement of the late seventies as the Nitelife Thugs.
Geldof, or rather Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof as he was born in 1951, had recently returned from London where he had worked as a music journalist for the NME.
The group were one of the key bands of the era with a dozen hits including Rat Trap and I Don’t Like Mondays, both of which reached number one in the charts.
The same year the band split was the year of Band Aid, which launched Bob Geldof — celebrity.
He wrote Do They Know It’s Christmas? with Midge Ure and assembled the nation’s biggest stars for the record, after seeing news reports of famine in Ethiopia.
It raised £6m and another £50m followed with the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia.
“The point about Live Aid was that it was an issue no one was discussing and there were potentially 30 million people dying.
“So you had to bring that to general awareness.”
Seeing Geldof with Charles and Di, Mother Theresa and an array of uncomfortable world leaders was not an unusual sight then.
In 1986, he married Paula Yates, the same year he received an honorary Knighthood (honorary because of his Irish birth).
In 1992, after trying a spot of TV and film acting, including Pink Floyd’s The Wall, his TV company Planet 24 launched The Big Breakfast on Channel 4.
Ironic that it was on the show that presenter Yates would first meet Hutchence, whom she would leave Geldof for in 1994.
Initially many saw Geldof as the wounded animal, the victim, separated from his home and his children.
The divorce case, however, revealed the split was a direct result of Geldof’s infidelities throughout his marriage.
Yates fell pregnant with Tiger Lilly during her custody battle with Geldof, which he won.
It is alleged that the day before Hutchence hanged himself in his Sydney hotel room, he had a heated argument with Geldof about the custody of his children.
The Shakespearean tragedy climaxed last year when Yates died of a heroin overdose.
“I don’t discuss these things because I literally can’t,” says Geldof.
“I can’t show you my soul. Some things are unsayable. But maybe you try to articulate the unspeakable in music.
“Musically the album couldn’t have sounded anything but exhausted and weary because that’s the place I was in.”
Sex, Age & Death is his fourth solo album and echoes the introspective work of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
Although quite a bleak album, lyrically, it ends on a high with a thank you to his partner of four years, French actress Jeanne Morine.
The track 10:15 begins: “Jeanne saved my soul.”
Says Geldof: “I was very raw during all of this. You’re like a sort of livid mess and if anyone touches you with the tiniest amount of kindness or tenderness you recoil — like you’ve been touched in a very wounded spot.
“But nonetheless, it begins to make you whole again. It fits in well as being the last song as the last word on the album is smiling.”
They share a home in Faversham, Kent, with his three children with Yates — Fifi Trixibelle, 18; Peaches Honeyblossom, 11; and Pixie, 11, — and her child by Hutchence, five-year-old Tiger Lilly, of whom Geldof was, perhaps oddly, awarded temporary custody.
One wonders how the girlfriend feels about Geldof’s album raking over a past relationship.
“I think she understands that it’s necessary. If you are a songwriter, it’s what you do and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“I can’t go away and write, ‘Oh yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy’.
“She does listen to it and she thinks it’s great which gives you quite a lot of confidence.”
There was no financial need for Geldof to make the album or do the tour (or get out of bed), having sold Planet 24 for £7m.
“Things are good at the moment but, you know, four kids, all that stuff...
“Also I’d go out of my head if I didn’t do stuff. I like ideas. That’s the thing that excites me.”
He likes to drink wine, has dieted and will always be scruffy Bob, he just doesn’t look right in a suit, he says.
He has never been comfortable with his celebrity and he makes his feelings known if bothered in the street.
“They think they know lots about me.
“Bobbyyyyyy... that’s one thing they shout and it drives the kids mad.
“If it gets to be a pain in the arse, I just think f*** off — the problem is, they like that more.
“If I’m in a really grumpy mood and someone keeps asking me for an autograph I’ll turn round and say, ‘Look will you ever f*** off?’
“And they are like, ‘Wow, Bob Geldof told me to f*** off’.”