From the "Uncut" newsletter 15/12/08...
I managed, though, to sneak away from the office for a couple of hours last week when the savage glare of our fearsome Production Editor, to whose schedules we all must dutifully adhere, was directed elsewhere, a momentary distraction I was able to take full advantage of.
Anyway, when he wasn't looking, I made a surreptitious exit and headed into the West End and the Pigalle Club in Piccadilly, for a playback of the new Morrissey album, Years Of Refusal, which is coming out next February.
The Pigalle turns out to be a pretty swanky nightclub, like something you might see in archive footage of the 50s or 60s, when it might have been full of Brylcreemed gangsters, villains from Whitechapel and Bow and similar 'manors', up West for the night, accompanied by buxom starlets with platinum beehives, the place otherwise full of raffish movie stars, familiar faces from awful British films of the time, and football managers, the shadier kind, wreathed in cigar smoke, dolly birds in tow, ordering champagne by the bucket-load.
It's full of music hacks this afternoon, some of them from far afield, all present to lend an ear to Morrissey's latest opus. Morrissey is even here himself, to introduce the album.
He gets up from the table where he's been sitting, and with a little cough leaps on the small stage, where an easel has been set up with a large mock-up of the new record's sleeve resting on it, Morrissey in the picture that adorns said sleeve holding a baby.
"It's not photo-shopped," he now tells us, and he sounds like he's got a cold. "That's my son," he playfully quips, as eyebrows go up across the room.
He goes on to make a short speech, but watching him, wondering why he appears to be wearing clothes that look at least a size too small from him, I am thinking of the description of the great man in poet Simon Armitage's wonderful memoir Gig: The Life And Times Of A Rock Star Fantasist, in which he recalls seeing Morrissey - "with his waiter's hips and builder's shoulders" - at King George's Hall, Blackburn, I can't remember when.
"Back in the Eighties," Armitage writes, "there was barely enough of Morrissey to stop his paisley shirts and floral blouses from completely imploding. Now he looks like a retired shire horse standing on its back legs, or something from mythology, as if those tailored Italian trousers might be hiding a pair of goat's legs."
I snap out of this brief reverie as Morrissey winds up his introduction.
"This is my new album, please God you like it," he says, with a little bow of his head. He exits the stage as the first rumblings from the album, something with the cheery title of "Something Is Squeezing My Skull", flood through the speakers that are everywhere around the room.
That's as much, I think, as I might be allowed to say for the moment about Years Of Refusal without risking a good hiding from someone. I'm sure, though, we'll have a lot more to say about it at the appropriate time.
Until then, all the best.
Allan
How fascinating!
