('shopped over a Hellfire Club shirt as per original image).
Central fodder.
FWD.
That was a glorious read. Pete sure knows his stuff.Pete Doherty's A Likely Lad features a few Morrissey / The Smiths mentions. He doesn't recount anything about meeting Morrissey etc.
Main one:
"I formed my first band at Nico in my GCSE year, 1995, with Dan De’Ath, my best mate. Dan, a black lad but with an all-white family, had a pretty hard time at school. His dad was from the West Indies, but he’d never met him, and his mum was the daughter of a leading Rotary Club member and left-wing councillor. He had this self-developed refinement – used to say he was Morrissey or that he was Oscar Wilde. He was also really tall, six feet four inches when we were fifteen. He actually left school without any qualifications and ended up working in an all-night garage, but he recently became the mayor of Cardiff for a couple of years.
Dan and I bonded over the Morrissey album Vauxhall and I, released in 1994. I fell for that record, and then we both got really into The Smiths. I’d started to develop this vision of maybe being a writer, and I was lonely and frustrated with the world I saw around me, and The Smiths captured a lot of what I was feeling. There was a Music & Record Exchange in Nuneaton, and I’d buy any Smiths vinyl and obsessively listen to it. I would go down and steal books from the public library and sit in Dan’s room with all my stolen books and listen to The Smiths. Morrissey’s voice and those lyrics were incredible. I saw him on Top of the Pops a few times in that period doing the singles ‘Alma Matters’ and ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’.
Something in Morrissey’s lyrics, his little sketches of characters and narratives, reminded me of the Chas & Dave songs about fat old policemen and two old girls from Camden Town – there was a similar music-hall element. Morrissey was also quite melodic, even though his voice was really strange on those early Smiths albums. His voice is almost pathologically sombre, this groaning Manchester voice: ‘It’s time the tale were told’ … it’s a very literary introduction to a band. I just thought this is a really interesting way to go; it’s poetry but it’s also describing England. Also, there was this Irish connection with Morrissey – it runs through a lot of things I associate with, from Oscar Wilde right through to Beckett."
Regards,
FWD.
although the book was actually written by someone else, based on chats with PDThat was a glorious read. Pete sure knows his stuff.
That’s nothing unusual in the world of music bios. And doesn’t make the reading experience any less great.although the book was actually written by someone else, based on chats with PD
From an anonymous poster with thanks:
FWD.