First, we have those who seek to infer that they have read the book and are unimpressed by it. There is something rather less than convincing about such inferences, however. When the first, ever so thoughtful, reviews appeared on Morrissey Solo, the book had barely been published and, in fact, none of the contributors had even seen a copy. So what we are expected to believe is that our critics are so avid in their quest for knowledge that they snapped up the first copies of the book to hit the shelves, scuttled home, devoured all one hundred thousand plus words and paused for due reflection only to be left unconvinced by the quality of our scholarship. Sorry, but nobody is going to fall for that one. The individuals who have spent the last week sniping on this website are, doubtless, possessed of singular intellectual gifts. But the reality remains that there is simply no way that they would have had enough time to have read the book, digested its arguments and arrived at an informed judgment of it. The opinions excreted onto the pages of Morrissey Solo should, therefore, be seen as nothing more than expressions of the impotent and barely literate rage of their authors.

The people who fall into the second category have little more to recommend them than the lost souls who occupy the first. But they are at least completely honest about their own ignorance. These individuals are only too keen to declare that this is a book they have not read and have no intention of doing so in the future. They no nothing of the book’s contents but they have searched deep within their souls and can only reasonably conclude that it is a very bad book indeed. This celebration of ignorance has many echoes and brings to mind the prejudices of those Catholic bishops who sought to resist the rising popularity in 1930’s Ireland of African American music. These clerics were only too happy to admit that they had never heard a single note of jazz but nonetheless felt entirely entitled to denounce it as the work of the Devil himself. The same smug ignorance was, alas, only too apparent in the postings on this website in the last few days. Congratulations, lads, on keeping the flame of indolence and idiocy alive.

Those who chose over the last week or so to share with the rest of us the sound of fresh air whistling between their ears differ in terms of their candour. What conjoins these evil twins though is an utter moral and intellectual cowardice. While those who posted could have disclosed their identities and entered a genuine debate, they chose instead to skulk behind the skirts of their own anonymity. This choice is both spineless and depressingly predictable. It is hard not to be struck by the difference between the experience of meeting Smiths and Morrissey fans in the real world and the virtual one respectively. In the flesh, people who genuinely know and love the band and the man are invariably intelligent, funny and decent. If only this law held true when you go online. It is genuinely shocking for many people to discover that a vocal minority of those who inhabit Morrissey Solo consists of complete idiots. What is it about the Smiths and Himself that these vacants simply do not understand? Here is a band and a singer that, more than any other, instructed people in the virtues of intelligence, wit and sensitivity. Why then do so many who post on the site seem to bear no trace of these qualities at all? Do you care or even know anything about this great band or this great artist? Your postings suggest that you cannot possibly. So why don’t you take your cemented minds and stunted vocabularies and go and obsess about something more appropriate? Like Snow Patrol. Or Blink 182. Or maybe even Busted.

So where does all this leave us? All I would ask of people is to give the book a decent chance. Some people will inevitably read the book and find that it is not their cup of tea and that, of course, is fair enough. We can simply agree to differ. Other people will, hopefully, read the book and find that the essays tell them things they never knew, remind them of things they had long since forgotten, rekindle a sense of what made them fall in love with the band in the first place. That would make all the work that went into the collection even more worthwhile. If people are willing to give the book a fair hearing they might just get to like it. There are some really good pieces in there. If there is better essay on the Smiths than the one by Nabeel Zuberi, for instance, that closes the collection then I certainly haven’t encountered it. So, hopefully people will give the book a chance. There will inevitably be some who will have neither the spine nor the spirit to do so. Those who have spent the last week carping will doubtless prefer to retreat to the swaddle of their own spiteful onanism instead. And that is their entitlement. But we should never again allow these crashing bores to use the designation of ‘Smiths fan’ to describe themselves within our earshot.

We should perhaps leave the last word on this sorry and ultimately futile saga to one of the true intellectual greats of the last century. I hope that those who mither from the shadows of Morrissey Solo will find a reference to Theodor Adorno sufficiently high brow. I realise that these are people with an acutely developed sense of academic and aesthetic hierarchy. They are only wiling, it would appear, to listen to the views of people who reside in real universities of international repute. Doubtless they are themselves alumni of these esteemed seats of learning. Why, judging from the grace of their prose, I would not be surprised to learn that they hold positions of seniority in various of the great world universities. How these people manage to hold down professorships in Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge and still spend so much time online simply beggars belief. But, no matter. Back to Teddy Adorno. In this short quotation he is saying something characteristically withering about modern listening habits. But if you replace listening/listeners with reading/readers, the text works rather well for our purposes. It offers a sense of the kinds of people who, unable to control their own passages, choose to smear their waste over this otherwise brilliant website in the insistence that there can be only ever be one book on a certain matter. Enjoy.

‘…There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.’
(Theodor Adorno, 'On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening', 1938