Morrissey is a racist

would love to pivot to the racist/right-wing underpinnings of Joy Division/New Order...

Have they done anything beyond being REALLY REALLY REALLY TERRIBLE at naming their band? I actually don't know.

No.

The Nazi in the band killed himself.

The band’s demo EP An Ideal for Living featured a cover with a Hitler Youth member pounding on a drum. The inside artwork is the infamous picture of Jews with their hands up in surrender during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Curtis described the choice of artwork as “thought-provoking.” Kevin Martinez of the Socialist Equality Party penned an article in 2008, explaining the band’s relationship with Nazism: “While Curtis was not flirting with neo-Nazism, some of his bandmates indicate that they had a fascination with fascism at the time, and the whole thing suggests unseriousness and irresponsibility, as well as a growing social nihilism.”[7] Unfortunately, this did little to stop Nazi skinheads from attending Joy Division’s shows in droves or to deter regular accusations that its members were Nazis and/or supported fascism.

heh

I was kind of joking (Marr's attempt at misdirection is ironic) but fwiw there's some lengthy back and forth here: The Ian Curtis memorial thread

xpost - I'm not aware of anything specific beyond the terrible names and the artwork for that EP though.

yeah, the ideal for living cover artwork, bernard going by bernard albrecht, the song warsaw being about rudolph hess and bernard shouting "You all forgot Rudolph Hess!" before playing some song at an early manchester show. oh and curtis being a tory

i'm half right dan, admittedly i can't count lol (i forgot which year panic came out bcz i am old) but the actual line as cited (="reggae is vile") was not the one mentioned in wikipedia, and is (acc.billy smart ) from the regular nme mini-feature a "portrait of the artist as a consumer" panel of feb 1985 (not strictly speaking an interview tho the info was often gathered by phone iirc). in frank owen's 1986 melody maker piece he makes a differently worded charge against reggae

lol i might as well (re)link the entire piece as it tells the story reasonably clearly i think: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/05/other-jacksons-in-your-house/

bernard shouting "You all forgot Rudolph Hess!" before playing some song at an early manchester show.

Curtis surely?

Morrissey is a racist imo

xp it's clearly Bernard's voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceHzceD8QpQ

What makes you so sure that's Barney though?

the context of mid 80s britain discotheques (in carlisle, dundee, humberside) is not one that would have been had much to do with black people or black music

within spitting distance of where morrissey grew up there were clubs with lots of british caribbean ppl that played soul, funk, reggae etc. as well as local sound systems. tony wilson and the factory records ppl were hanging out in these places. the likes of greg wilson were playing disco & electro in legends in the city centre to a mixed audience from the early 80s, plus, yknow, northern soul and all that. I don't think disco wld code as white to anyone in manchester back then

i guess you did have the bee gees

hanging a DJ for playing the bee gees seems wrong also

definitely fighting words in my house

(after his insane peace mission) Meanwhile, Hitler initiated Aktion Hess, a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists that took place around 9 June. The campaign was part of a propaganda effort by Goebbels and others to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners

I would have thought that the average late 70's punk/fascist edgelord might have gone for some other nazi than that cabbage tbh!

sorry slightly offtopic and very otm post by ogmor up there

i guess you did have the bee gees

... from Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

x-post Sounds like Barney to me. Flirting with Nazi imagery was very much in the air in late 70s Britain and Joy Division was definitely part of that. It's hardly a good look, but there's still quite a chasm between that and the overt racism of Morrissey.

I'd say there's a pretty direct line, actually

resentful white working class with a chip on its shoulder/eager to provoke ---> racism

and even the most resolutely anti-Nazi Mancunian had it in him to write "The Classical"

(full disclosure: out of the canonical Manchester bands under discussion - Smiths/Morrissey, JD/New Order, the Fall - I'll take the Fall, warts and all, in a heartbeat)

The resentful white working class were not generally the ones flirting with Nazi imagery fwiw.

We've had this conversation before though.

the national front v active in manchester round that time too of course. there has been a big irish/anglo-irish community in manchester since it industrialised and anti-irish racism was equally well-established (for the condition of the working class engels focused on the 'little ireland' area round oxford road which while poor and prone to cholera outbreaks was small & more limited in its squalor and criminality than angel meadows, the o.g. manchester no-go zone, but 'little ireland' had already been the subject of moral panic journalism with strong anti-irish flavour) and was still v much around in the 70s and 80s, and morrissey's ideas abt englishness seem like the same sort of relayed racism/traumatised overcompensating/punching down you see w/ loudly patriotic minorities desperate to be accepted by racist tories today

what's a better classifier/description?

xps

Of what?

Not in any way supporting punks flirting with nazi imagery, but there was really a lot of it going around, and they all seem to have been mortified by it within a few years.

Morrissey, however, cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, as there is absolutely no doubt.

of who was flirting with nazi imagery

xps

Bowie fans!

Resentful that they couldn't get their hair to stand up like Bowie's on the cover of "Aladdin Sane".

wait are you saying chorlton isn't in manchester or what

I'm saying it is!

ah ok! this classic photo from hulme in 85 seems just about relevant enough to justify posting

https://i2.wp.com/britishculturearchive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/img_7506.jpg

Marr is such a fan of Chic that he named his son Nile. I wonder what Mozz thought of that, or what Marr thought of the "burn down the disco" bullshit.

and what made him a marvelous guitarist was the degree to which he eschewed lead guitar cliches and played rhythm, i.e. like a guy who spend his formative years playing Motown 45s.

Marr's guitar parts are really bizarre, I wish there was a muso breakdown book of them with tunings, tabs, etc. A lot of the chord structures in the songs are quite simple, but the multi-layered guitar parts are a maze.

I imagine he never told Mozza that "How Soon Is Now" was inspired by Hamilton Bohannon's "Disco Stomp" either.

I used to often walk through Hulme towards Deansgate when i lived in Whalley Range for a bit in the late 90's. I can't even imagine how much affordable housing is there these days!

xps about nazi imagery

the Bromley Contingent? lots of middle class London suburban art school dropouts (or would have been if they were a bit older) with swastikas and stuff is it? I'm more of a keen listener than scholar of music social history, but that is a thing that is in my head for some reason.

I have this bit in one of my Smiths books at home (surely not The Severed Alliance?!) with more detail:

Tell us a secret
The Smiths were planning a disco album.

I went through a lot of Marr stuff with my teacher once, and while there aren't many weird tunings iirc (aside from "How Soon is Now?"), there is a lot of capo use and some super-cool chords and patterns (and of course layers). And you can definitely catch the Nile Rodgers influence when you learn what Marr is up to.

besides the universities slowly sprawling out into it hulme hasn't seen too much development since the 90s tbh, more towards castlefield and the city centre. contra owen hatherley who sez its all gone downhill since they demolished the crescent and nothing good has come from manchester since a guy called gerald blah blah I think somehow despite being bulldozed and rebuilt twice since the war hulme has more of a legit proper community feel with co-ops and not totally horrible social housing and so on than most of south manchester. altho having said that a guy I went to school with got funding to build a music studio in the arts centre there and the only ppl he can ever get to come and use it are indie bands from chorlton

Morrissey never recovered from being seated between a DJ and George Michael, while being assigned to watch a hiphop movie

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5x78ql

It’s really fun to play smiths stuff on guitar ime

Flirting with Nazi imagery was very much in the air in late 70s Britain

and in the US in the NY and LA punk scenes

And, from the same 1986 Melody Maker interview with Frank Owen as the Diana Ross comments above:

Morrissey: "I don't think there's any time anymore to be subtle about anything, you have to get straight to the point. Obviously to get on Top Of The Pops these days, one has to be, by law, black. I think something political has occurred among Michael Hurll and his friends and there has been a hefty pushing of all these black artists and all this discofied nonsense into the Top 40. I think, as a result, that very aware younger groups that speak for now are being gagged."

Interviewer: You seem to be saying that you believe that there is some sort of black pop conspiracy being organised to keep white indie groups down.

Morrissey: "Yes, I really do."