Tag Archives: Mancunian

Mavericks in a Metropolis of Millions…

by in 2SLGBTQ+ Community Issues, Aesthetics, Art, Über-Transgression..., Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community, Literature, Politics, Post-Transgressive Fiction and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump has won again.

I can’t believe I’ve just written those words.

I don’t wanna believe I’ve just written those words.

But I hafta.

’Coz they’re true.

Toxically, traumatizingly, tear-tappingly true.

So how’m I gonna respond to the toxic truth of tyrannical Trump’s triumph?

Welp… how better than by publishing some fiercely unbowed words of anti-fascist resistance from one of the core counter-cultural components at one of the world’s leading anti-racist publishing houses?

Yes indeedy, this Papyrocentric Performativizer is positively pulsating with pride and passion to present an exclusive antifa extract from arguably the best interview in Titans of Transgression: Incendiary Interviews with Eleven Ultra-Icons of Über-Extremity (TransVisceral Books 2024), which has just seen its third edition.

Please raise your revolutionary fists for Jay Guinness, Artistic Director and Ipsissimic Aesthetician at Manchester-locused Savoy Books, long hailed as England’s most transgressive publishing company…

Readers’ Advisory: Interview extract contains strong language and uncompromising counter-cultural contrarianism. Proceed at your own risk.

[…]

Miriam Stimbers: Manchester was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2017 [editor’s note: Miriam is referring to the murder of twenty-two people by the homophobic and misogynist Islamist suicide-bomber Salman Abedi at the Manchester Arena].

Jay Guinness: It was, yes. Sadly it was.

Miriam Stimbers: How did you react at Savoy?

Jay Guinness: We in the Savoy community were badly affected. Clearly, we’ve engaged fictionally, artistically, aesthetically with issues around fascism, hatred, intolerance throughout our professional lives, but to have those issues strike on your own doorstep, as it were, strike for real, well, it’s something you could never be prepared for.

Miriam Stimbers: So you think what he did was fascism?

Jay Guinness: I think it was echt fascism, fascism pur sang. Pun not intended. Let’s not beat about the bush. It was fascism.

Miriam Stimbers: Much has been made of the fact that the terrorist––

Jay Guinness: I don’t think “terrorist” is the mot juste. Not at all. For me, he’s just a criminal with a diseased mind. And I don’t mean that as a compliment!

Steve Bell of The Guardian excoriates the Manchester Arena Bomber

Miriam Stimbers: Okay. Much has been made of the fact that the criminal was born and brought up in Manchester. Have you any thoughts on that?

Jay Guinness: You’re right, much has been made of it. But for me and my colleagues at Savoy what he did merely underlined the fact that Manchester is a state of mind far more than it is a physical and temporal Sitz im Leben. It’s about a locus of values, not about geography. I mean, I was born in Huddersfield myself, but I felt that I was Mancunian from the moment I first hung my hat here, because I subscribe to Mancunian values. People who were born here but don’t subscribe to those values aren’t part of the city. Not for me, not for the Savoy community, not ever. I think Dave [Britton] put it best when we were processing the news of what he’d done. Dave’s words have stayed with me: “He’s not a fucking Manc, he’s a fucking cunt. The fucker should be fucking strung up.”

Miriam Stimbers: Metaphorically speaking?

Jay Guinness: No, not metaphorically. Literally. We in the Savoy community are a pretty progressive bunch. We’re not instinctive supporters of the death penalty, to put it mildly. But if you took a vote at Savoy in terms of whether people who do things like that should be hanged, it would be a unanimous yes. No dissenters.

Miriam Stimbers: I’m taken aback. It seems a little extreme. A lot extreme, to be honest.

Jay Guinness: The Savoy community might be progressive, but we’re not bleeding-heart liberals. As Dave said, the fucker should be fucking strung up.

Miriam Stimbers: But what could you hope to achieve by it?

Jay Guinness: Well, for one thing it would be a deterrent to others. Just as importantly, it would ensure he doesn’t do it again.

Miriam Stimbers: But he won’t be doing it again. How could he?

Jay Guinness: Very easily. And he will do it again. We in the Savoy community are confident of that. Leopards don’t change their spots.

Miriam Stimbers: But how could he do it again? He’s dead.

Jay Guinness: I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. Who’s dead?

Miriam Stimbers: Salman Abedi, of course. The suicide-bomber at the Manchester Arena. Who else?

Much More Mucking Maverick Than You, Monkeyfunker!

Jay Guinness: Oh no, no, no, you’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t talking about that poor British-Muslim boy. He was quite possibly the biggest victim in that unfortunate business at the Arena.

Miriam Stimbers: Then who were you talking about?

Jay Guinness: That despicable creature Morrissey, of course. Those comments of his about immigration and Salman’s background were utterly unforgivable. Utterly. But no more than one would expect. As Dave went on to say: “That fucking crypto-fascist cunt’s just a fucking attention-seeker, always fucking has been, always fucking will be. String the fucker up!”

Miriam Stimbers: And you really think there’d be a majority at Savoy in favour of executing Morrissey?

Jay Guinness: I don’t think it, I know it. But it wouldn’t just be a majority, it would a unanimous vote, nem. con. What has Morrissey ever done but bring Manchester into disrepute with his dire music, his shitty fashion sense and his toxic racist agenda? As Michael Moorcock once said: “Fascism never sleeps and nor must the anti-fascist community.” In terms of saying it all, it does. Definitively.

[…]

Interview extract © Jay Guinness, Dr Miriam Stimbers, TransVisceral Books 2024

• Jay Guinness is a Huddersfield-born artist and aesthetician, and the subject of Dr Joan Jay Jefferson’s incisive and exhaustive biography Art-Bandit: Interrogating the Outlaw Aesthetics of Über-Maverick Gay Atelierista Jay Guinness (University of Salford Press 2012). See reviews of Art-Bandit at: Pink News, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Quietus, and Huffington Post. Visit Jay’s website for news of his latest projects.

• Miriam Stimbers is a Glasgow-born psychoanalyst, literary scholar and cultural commentatrix whose most recent book is the updated edition of Morbidly Miriam: The Mephitic Memoirs of Miriam B. Stimbers (TransVisceral Books 2023). See a review of Morbidly Miriam at Papyrocentric Performativity. Visit Miriam’s website for news of her latest projects.

Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Il Nano e il Necrofilo… – an earlier exclusive extract from Titans of Transgression…

• The Hurt Shocker – an even earlier exclusive extract from Titans of Transgression…

Guns’n’Gladioli

by in Book Reviews, HBD, Music, Politics and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Front cover of A Light That Never Goes Out by Tony FletcherA Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths, Tony Fletcher (Windmill Books 2013)

Coke, booze, earsplitting volume. Not a combination you associate with the Smiths. But it was there, as you’ll learn from this book. Towards the end, they were almost turning into Guns’n’Gladioli. Morrissey, of course, was the odd one out: he wasn’t battering his brain-cells with drink and drugs on their final American tour. But back home his Lichtmusik was also lout-music: the Smiths didn’t just appeal to bedsit miserabilists in rain-hammered humdrum towns. No, they appealed to some football hooligans too, including a Chelsea fan who didn’t mind being asked, “You still wanking off over that miserable northern poof?” as he travelled north by train to do battle with Manchester United and Manchester City, who also supplied hoolifans to the Smiths (pp. 509-10). So did football clubs in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Smiths are easy to caricature, but the caricatures don’t capture their complexity.

Tony Fletcher does capture it: the band, their music, their fans, friends, producers, studio-engineers and record-labels. He’s definitely a Guardianista, but his prose is plodding rather than painful and he does a good job of putting the poof and his partners into context. The 1980s is one important part of that context. So are Irish Catholicism and Manchester. When you look at pictures of the Smiths, you can see two clear divisions. One of them separates the singer, guitarist and drummer from the bassist: the dark-haired, bushy-browed, strong-faced Morrissey, Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke clearly belong to one race and the light-haired, lesser-browed, milder-faced Mike Joyce to another. They’re Irish and he’s English: the British Isles are rich in language and rich in biology too. But Morrissey’s height and handsomeness also separate him from Marr, Rourke and Joyce, like his polysyllabic name. Both must be related to his intelligence, his creativity and his ability to turn himself into the Pope of Mope and become much more famous than any of the other three. Fletcher doesn’t talk about this biology – as I said, he’s a Guardianista – but it’s implicit in his descriptions of Irish settlement in Manchester and of Morrissey’s genius.

Is that too strong a word? Maybe. Morrissey is certainly the interesting and original one in this book and it ends with his story only just beginning. You can feel the tug of his later career throughout the book: it’s not discussed, but you know it’s there. But Fletcher isn’t concentrating on Morrissey and doesn’t seem very interested in Carry On and Brit-film in the 1960s, so he’s less good on what might be called the Smythos: the world created by Morrissey in his lyrics and interviews. Morrissey’s influences are better explained in Simon Goddard’s Mozipedia (2009), which isn’t just about the New York Dolls, the Cockney Rejects and vegetarianism. It has also entries for everyone from Hawtrey and Housman to Williams and Wilde by way of Sandy Shaw, Shelagh Delaney and Jobriath. No-one will ever devote an encyclopaedia to Marr like that: music doesn’t have as much meaning and metaphor in it. It has emotion and beauty instead and Fletcher is good at describing how Marr created a lot of both on albums like Meat Is Murder and Strangeways Here We Come.

Front cover of Mozipedia by Simon Goddard

Front cover of Mozipedia by Simon Goddard

I’ve never liked him much, though. I like what he did with the guitar and in the studio, but I don’t like what he did to his body and mind. Or what he put on his body: he didn’t have Mozza’s way with weeds either. In the photos, you can clearly see Morrissey’s narcissism and Marr’s weediness. It’s no surprise that Marr smoked a lot of marijuana, preferred working at night and didn’t eat properly. But he’s weedy in more ways than the physical: there’s also a photo of him with Billy Bragg, the committed socialist behind Red Wedge. This was a collective of musicians and bands who wanted to make the world a better place by fighting Fatcher, fascism and free speech with their fantastic music. Morrissey had his lefty opinions too, but he didn’t like collectives and he didn’t scorn just Margaret Thatcher and the Queen: Bob Geldof and Live Aid got the sharp side of his tongue too. Which is good. Mozza is worshipped by Guardianistas, but he’s not a Guardianista himself.

Or not wholly. The hive-mind hasn’t been able to hum him fully into line, unlike Marr and Bragg. As for Rourke and Joyce: their politics don’t matter and the most interesting thing one of them does in this book is get stung by a sting-ray (pp. 539-40). They were competent musicians, but they weren’t essential to the Smiths. Joyce is most important for causing trouble, not for strumming his bass: first there was the heroin addiction, then the 21st-century court-case in which he sued for more money and earnt Morrissey’s undying enmity. Fletcher barely mentions the court-case and ends the book in the 1980s, with the Smiths exhausted, antagonistic and unfulfilled. They never achieved their full potential and though few bands do, few bands have had more to offer than the Smiths. The Beatles were one and managed to offer it from the nearby northern city of Liverpool. They were Irish Catholic too. But, like the Smiths, they achieved success in England, not Ireland. That’s important and the younger band captured it in their name. “Smiths” is an Anglo-Saxon word with ancient roots and difficult phonetics. It seems simple, but it isn’t. Rather like light.