Someone approached me after a FOUND gig recently and informed me that Morrissey was playing in Hawick town hall. Perfect, I thought. If ever there was a humdrum town that the rain fell hard on it has to be Hawick. I know this because I grew up in a block of flats in the Burnfoot area of Hawick and by the time I had reached my mid-teens the provincial blinkeredness and lack of opportunity there had become painfully apparent. My dad, mum and sister were all working in big, grey textile factories and it looked like I’d probably do the same. At the time I felt like a hopeless underdog caught in the tractor beam of the factories. That’s the same time I discovered Morrissey, the ultimate misfit, with his corpus of songs that seemed to champion my grim backdrop and offer a chorus for all the underdogs to sing along to...
