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The pensioner breathing new life into Glasgow’s underground electronic music scene
MEET TONY MORRIS, 72, WHO HAS ACHIEVED CULT STATUS WITHIN GLASGOW’S MUSIC SCENE AND VIRAL FAME ONLINE
AS someone who defies simple description, Glasgow one-man electronic band Tony Morris has been given a multitude of labels: ‘Chick Murray meets Dieter Meier’; ‘a Minimal wave Ivor Cutler’’; ‘King of the Avant Garde’; ‘a mix of Leonard Cohen, David Lynch and Xiu Xiu’.
Or, as the audience of ‘kids young enough to be his grandweans’ screamed while gathered within the intimate surroundings of The Berkeley Suite - a stylish Glasgow nightspot hidden behind an unassuming pawn shop in the city’s Charing Cross area to see him perform a few Saturdays ago at eclectic dancefloor duo Optimo’s bi-monthly residency, he is simply ‘“Tony f ****** Morris!”
Thanks to a mixture of intermittent performances in the flesh and unremitting activity on social media, Tony Morris has, at 72 years young, achieved both cult status within Glasgow’s underground electronic music scene and viral fame online.
Influenced by the likes of The Fall, The
Second Viennese School, Captain
Beefheart, The Beatles and Béla Bartók, Morris describes the music he produces as “kind of” songs with “a distinctive vibe but no meaning”, made using his own voice alongside “simple electronic backings” of his own devising.
And yet, despite confessing to spending a lot of time trying to situate himself within the world of art, his experimental music and sensual-religious outpourings on everything from his recent experiences of ‘Glasgow coffee howffs’ to Don Quixote and fabricated memories of Scarborough, combined with his flair for visual production, are inspiring others to chase their own sonic, and artistic, dreams.
“I can honestly state that I feel impelled to do what I am now doing. For the first time in my life, I feel I have found my niche. I think about what I’m doing every waking hour and since I incorporate my dreams into my work you might say that the involvement is 24/7”, Morris told The Herald.
“I’m not a musician in any shape or form. My discovery of the music software Ableton instantly allowed me to make simple
percussive backing tracks over the top of which I could vocalise in anyway the fancy took me. So, it turned out that there was no need for me to be a musician.
“Erroneously, I thought initially that I would have to learn some kind of musical instrument and since I thought equally erroneously that even a twerp like me would be able to learn the bongos, I put an advert in the window of Oxfam in Byres Road for a Bongos tutor. Laurie Pitt, a very well-known percussionist on the Glasgow music scene answered it.
“After a few lessons around at Laurie’s flat I asked him what musical pursuits he had. He told me he was a member of the Glasgow electronic music group Golden Teacher. I listened to some of their music and was instantly smitten with the digital rhythms. I abandoned the bongos and Laurie taught me how to use Ableton. After that there was no stopping me.”
After graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1976, Morris, whose biography on social media reads simply, “denizen of Broomhill”, worked in a variety of roles: lecturer; academic; accountant and taxi driver.
He said: “I graduated with the only First in Psychology and supposedly a glittering academic career ahead of me. After lecturing part-time for 10 years at the university in the Psychology of Personality I realised that I wasn’t cut out to be an academic or a therapist and spent the next 30 years paying off the mortgage by
teaching, driving a black cab around the night-time streets of Glasgow and finally retraining as a bookkeeper until I retired. That whole era can be summed up as Waiting for Godot.
“Finally, when I was 65, Godot turned up in the form of the Glasgow underground electronic music scene.”
Morris’s viral success - and appeal online, it seems, is the fruit of his penchant for “micro-songs”, the likes of which can be found on his most recent release, ‘An Exemplary Earthling’. And while he describes the collection of 17 one-minute tracks - released on online platform Bandcamp - as “suitable for playing on niche internet radio stations”, these “kind-of songs”, and accompanying videos performing the songs posted on TikTok and Instagram, have seamlessly tapped into the cultural zeitgeist in a social media landscape where short-form video is king.
In Morris’s case, necessity has been the mother of invention, as issues with his health prevented him making or performing songs of a standard three to four-minute length. Instead, it led him to “make material that is ideal for clubs that play electronic dance music”.
He said: “Pop music has always played a big part in my life. I like music that I can listen to again and again and again. I like the unpretentiousness of the lyrics and the fact that they deal with the concerns and delights of everyday life.
“But once I got into electronic music, I wanted to ditch the conventional format of the pop song - verse chorus verse etc - but keep the unpretentiousness of the lyrics.
“Then a health issue intervened which greatly shaped what I now do. During 2022 I was extremely ill and was hospitalised with multiple and varied afflictions including a bout of sepsis which almost killed me.
“As a result of this my various internal organs have been damaged, and I get exhausted very easily. Even now, two years later, I have great difficulty climbing a short flight of stairs.
“So, performing live was out of the question and lockdown had closed a lot of other avenues as well. So, I had the brainwave of making one-minute videos of myself performing micro songs, as it were, which I then posted to Instagram. One minute’s action was all I was fit for.”
HE continued: “Going on Instagram was the best decision I ever made. One particular video has now been viewed by more than half a million people and that has led to my other videos being watched as well. I now have almost 14,000 followers and that has undoubtedly led to people in Scotland wanting to see me play live. And some ridiculously high-profile people from the world of the arts have made contact with me and offered me encouragement, all as a result of Instagram.
“That health constraint has also led me into making short snappy pieces which, ironically, can be stretched infinitely, as it were, into loops of 5, 10, 15 minutes. The lack of conventional song structure has allowed for that looping. And, I love listening to rhythmic loops, I can listen to the same 10 second loop for ages - 10 minutes, 20 minutes.”
While he accepts being likened to a ‘72-year-old Minimal wave Ivor Cutler’ “Well, I am 72”- he prefers comparisons to other artists such as pioneering New York synthpunk duo Suicide, whose signature sound was based around a beat-up Farfisa organ and drum machine set-up.
“The lyrical content comes mainly from dream material or, and I know that this is an increasingly unfashionable thing to say, from being in a state of slight alcoholic inebriation,” he admitted.
“Words and phrases come to me from these two sources, and they usually have an irrationality which I think has led to the Ivor Cutler comparison.
“I saw Ivor play live in Glasgow at the Third Eye Centre so I have always been a fan. Certainly, my song, ‘When I grow up I want to be a great big German’ has an Ivor Cutler feel to it.
“But I actually prefer another comparison that followers of my Instagram account often make and that is with Suicide, Scott Walker and the films of David Lynch. I’m more comfortable with that, I think.
“I’m really a petit bourgeois version of Suicide. Whereas they sing of life on the streets of downtown New York, people struggling with various addictions and petty crime. My lyrics feature privet
Pop music has always played a big part in my life. I like music that I can listen to again and again and again ...