BOOK REVIEW: Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance

Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition
by Johnny Rogan
Paperback: 624 pages
Publisher: Omnibus Press; Upd Rev An edition (13 Jun 2012)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1780383045
ISBN-13: 978-1780383040

Once again I would like to thank those jolly nice people at Omnibus Press for having kept my leisure hours amused for the past week or so with this massive re-issue of a classic tome by Johnny Rogan. Bizarrely, in some ways at least, I should have read this book many years ago. Although I never particularly liked The Smiths, this is one of the classic rock music biographies and I am an avid reader of such things.

The really peculiar thing is that although, as I have said I never particularly liked The Smiths, this book enthused me enough to re-examine their music. And I now know where I was going wrong. Being an anally compulsive sort of cove, I have always approached listening to any band in the same way. I start at the debut album and continue through in chronological order. This has served me well on a number of occasions, but when I read that even the band themselves weren’t particularly enamoured with the mix on their eponymous debut album, this time around I started my investigations with their second (I refuse to call it their sophomore) album, and – much to my surprise – after two and a half decades of missing the point, I finally get The Smiths.

I had always quite liked Morrissey’s solo albums and in particular the 2006 offering Ringleader of the Tormentors, and had always annoyed purists by saying that his solo stuff was considerably better than The Smiths had been. Now, at least as far as the second and third albums; Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead, I lay my shoulders down in shame. They are magnificent.

However, this is where the really bizarre thing comes into play. Although Rogan’s incisive prose finally turned me on to a whole slew of music that I had missed back in the day, there is nothing he said about any of the people concerned, especially Morrissey and Marr, that made me like them even a little bit. They both come over as cold, calculating and selfish, and one ends up feeling more than a little bit sorry for the lesser members of the band, and for the long line of people who did their best to manage them. I’ll re-phrase that; you feel a little bit sorry, but not very much, because most of them don’t come over as particularly likeable. But boy, Johnny M could play a mean guitar (and Johnny R can't half write).

Well done Mr Rogan.