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CMU Beef Of The Week #275: Morrissey v the UK, David Cameron, and erotic fiction

By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 25 September 2015

Well, it’s been quite a week in the world of Morrissey, hasn’t it? It’s hard to know where to begin. How about we start with the news that straddles last week as well as this week – the former Smiths frontman’s last ever show in the UK ever ever ever. That’s right, people. Morrissey will never play in the UK again. If you’ve never been to one of his shows and you have no passport, you have zero chance of ever seeing him play. It’s no use crying about it, he’s gone, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now.

Well, I suppose there is one group of people who could do something about it, but they all seem pretty reluctant. Who are those people? Anyone with the power to give Morrissey a new record contract, that’s who.

Tooting on his internet trumpet, the True To You website, ahead of his two very recent London gigs, the singer explained: “There is absolutely no way that we can generate any interest from record labels in the United Kingdom, therefore the imminent two nights at Hammersmith are likely to be our final ever UK shows. We are obsessively grateful for all interest and loyalty from our audience – throughout 28 years – but without new releases, there is no point in any additional touring”.

No point at all. Imagine playing live in a place where you only had a back catalogue of 38 band and solo studio, live and compilation albums to sell. Everyone’s already got them. Every single one. Even that last one that was withdrawn from sale because he fell out so badly with his then label, resulting in him being unable to convince any others to work with him.

So, it’s bye bye Morrissey. But just because he won’t come and play his songs for us, that doesn’t mean we’ll never hear from him again. He will remain, I’m sure, a man always quick with a statement for any given situation. And therefore a Beef Of The Week regular.

This week, he was right there when news broke that Prime Minister David Cameron had allegedly once put his penis in the mouth of the severed head of a pig. I think we’re all smart enough to see that this particular allegation is a power play, exploiting the knowledge that the furthest anyone is likely to go in defence of the PM is to say that he “probably” didn’t do it. That seed of doubt’s always going to be there though, isn’t it?

And so, on the off-chance that a) he did it and b) he ever admits it, animal rights group PETA and Morrissey published a statement telling Cameron that if he had “performed a sexual act on a dead pig while at Oxford University, then it shows a callousness and complete lack of empathy entirely unbefitting a man in his position, and he should resign”.

I don’t know, he’s shown callousness and a lack of empathy plenty of times before and he just got re-elected. Who knows, maybe in 2020 he’ll decide he would actually like a third term in office and win a landslide victory based on a one policy campaign of dead pig fucking. Stranger things may or may not have happened.

Sorry, we’ve strayed off the point here a bit. We were talking about Morrissey. Morrissey as a mouthpiece, I believe. Now, as I alluded to above, that statement on David Cameron was really penned by PETA, he just posted it online. What we really need is Morrissey in his own words.

We’ve already had that, of course, with last year’s autobiography, ‘Autobiography’. So now we have to settle for the next best thing, demon-possessed sports relay teams in Morrissey’s own words. That’s right, Moz has written a novel. And that is genuinely what the novel is about.

Look, here’s Morrissey’s first novel in Morrissey’s own words: “The theme is demonology, the left-handed path of black magic. It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who accidentally kill a wretch who, in esoteric language, might be known as a Fetch, a discarnate entity in physical form. He appears, though, as an omen of the immediate deaths of each member of the relay team. He is a life force of a devil incarnate, yet in his astral shell he is one phase removed from life. The wretch begins a banishing ritual of the four main characters, and therefore his own death at the beginning of the book is illusory”.

Amazingly, the subject matter is not the main thing that has caught people’s attention about this book project. More, they have been discussing the affront to erotic fiction that appears within its pages.

Here are actual words that a man wrote down and then had published in an actual book, via The Guardian: “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”.

Bulbous salutations, one and all.