The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
Martin Freeman’s new series ‘Breeders’ tells a tale of family life, but is it a sitcom… or a horror story?
ragings with those pains. ___
ANSWERS
The Plague, Albert Camus
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe
Blindness, José Saramago The Decameron,
Giovanni Boccaccio
Sweeney Todd: The String of Pearls, James Malcolm Rymer Titus Andronicus,
William Shakespeare
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter
* Pi Day should not be confused with Pi Approximation Day, of course, which takes place on July 22, because the fraction 22/7 is a close approximation of pi…
Of course, some people have always preferred to self-isolate. Can you identify these famously reclusive authors?
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C E E
ANSWERS
J D Salinger Samuel Beckett William Faulkner
‘Ido not read newspapers/ They are troublemakers,” Morrissey croons on the title track of his 13th solo album, I Am Not a Dog on a Chain. I guess he won’t be perusing the pages of The Telegraph to see how many stars have been awarded to his latest offering. Yet you don’t have to agree with his views on the media to applaud the passion with which he expresses them. What starts out like a sweet nursery-rhyme ditty builds to a spluttering explosion of righteous rage: “I raise my voice/ I have no choice/ I raise my hand, I hammer twice/ I see no point in being nice.” It is bracing stuff, beautifully delivered. At the age of 60, he is still making music as if his life depended upon it.
The underlying assertion of the album title, of course, is Morrissey’s right to express himself as he sees fit, and damn the begrudgers. His support for Right-wing political causes has created tension with fans who idealised his Eighties indie band the Smiths as liberal champions of the oppressed. Yet a streak of politically incorrect provocation has existed in Morrissey’s work since his earliest days and there is a suspicion that what might have seemed iconoclastic in a young man has come to be viewed as misanthropic for a mature artist.
Perhaps one of the reasons Morrissey gets into trouble is that he dares to embrace subjects rarely tackled in pop music. There are songs here that touch on: suicide (Jim Jim Falls); transsexualism (The Truth About Ruth); chastity (Darling, I Hug a Pillow); political despair (Love Is on Its Way Out); repressed homosexuality (Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know?); deeply personal family memories (I Saw the River Clean); and music as an antidote to depression (The Secret of Music). It is an album bursting with epigrammatic phrases, ridiculous rhymes, huge melodies and provocative opinions. The sound is brash and arresting. American producer Joe Chiccarelli (with whom Morrissey has worked since 2015) dials up the electronica, fusing synths with more familiar gothic rock and baroque elements, while Morrissey’s assured, inimitable voice glides airily above the mayhem.
Knockabout World is an anthem for the bullied that ends with a cheerful singalong of “You’re OK by me!” Yet he can switch from empathetic humanity to the mean-spirited trolling of What Kind of People Live in These Houses?,a jangling guitar romp delivered with the sneery judgmentalism of an angry prig (“What carpet chewer lights up this sewer?/ What dented gent bends over in this tent?”). Morrissey remains a deeply complicated character, parading his brittle psychology in song; you don’t have to like everything he creates to respect such absolute commitment to his art.
The album ends beautifully with My Hurling Days Are Done, a song as great as any he has ever written. “Time is no friend of mine,” he sings, sadly. Erstwhile fans who might prefer Morrissey to shut up and go away should be careful what they wish for.
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