Paul Morley

Rock critics don’t fantasize these days. Period.” So writes John Morthland in his intro to the second posthumous Lester Bangs anthology due out this month, and he has a point, albeit one that is at least partially refuted by Paul Morley’s wonderful new book Words And Music, one of the most audacious and ostentatious examples of music writing-as-artform this side of Tosches, Marcus, Melzer, Murray, Tate and Reynolds.
Morley eschews canonical regurgitations of the same old Beatles/Stones baby food in favour of a remarkable journey through sound using Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ as its starting point, along the way taking in mash-up mixes, Missy Elliot, Eminem, Kraftwerk, Phillip Glass, the Velvets, Erik Satie and Alvin Lucier’s 1969 composition ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’.
It is a sparkling journey through sci-fi sound that makes no differentiation between pop and avant-garde, saving its bile for those crippled with imagination deficiency and false nostalgia: Oasis, The Strokes, the Pop Idol mincing machine. Twenty years after “retiring” from music writing, Morley is still fascinated by notional futures.
Born in 1956 and brought up in Stockport, near Manchester, Morley fell under the spell of pop in the early ’70s, addicted to the usual suspects: Bowie, Bolan and Pop, then punk. He began writing for the NME in the late ’70s, reporting mostly on post-punk and the Joy Division/New Order/Factory record scene, and his cerebral flights of fancy were in marked contrast to the dry analysis of CS Murray, the myth-making of Nick Kent and the spleen of Burchill and Parsons.
Together with Ian Penman, he became renowned as the foremost champion of a New Pop aesthetic that favoured the fizzle of the ever changing now over entrenched posterities, applying modernist ideas to New Romantic futurism and chart acts.
Morley effectively quit professional journalism after a brief stint with The Face and went on to act as A&R man and minister of propaganda for ex- Buggle Trevor Horn’s ZTT label. In that capacity he helped design and hype Frankie Goes To Hollywood, whose debut single ‘Relax’ was the most controversial British hit single since ‘Anarchy In The UK’.
He was also a main player in Art Of Noise, pioneers of the sound collages, sampling and big beats later adapted by acts such as the Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. Since then Morley has published a collection of journalism entitled Ask – The Chatter Of Pop, made various TV documentaries, presented BBC2’s Late Show and is now a regular guest on Newsnight Review and Channel 4’s Top Ten series.
He participated in the resurrection of Art Of Noise with 1999’s sorely neglected The Seduction Of Claude Debussy and the following year published his second book Nothing, a memoir that dealt with his father’s depression and suicide.
Although still respected as one of the most astute critics and chroniclers of popular culture, Morley has never gone back to full-time journalism, discouraged by what he sees as a climate where pop writing has become reduced to the role of consumer guide, crippled with lists, pigeonholes and the just-the-facts-ma’am approach of “the librarians”.
More’s the pity: the monthlies need his keen eye on pop’s biorhythms. Words & Music is playful, self referential, self-deprecating, free-associative and funny (particularly the section where Morley imagines Kylie interviewing him as a prospective ghost writer of her biography).
In the current climate, you’re not supposed to admit that you like a piece of music partially because you quite fancy yourself for liking it. Nor do you admit to Googling yourself on the web. Nor are you supposed to proclaim that you were once the greatest rock writer in the world.

PETER: For a man who claims to have retired from music writing, this book contains some pretty shrewd observations on the state of pop culture.
PAUL: I did stop around 1983 or 1984 really in a way because I thought I was too old, I was about 24, 25. Then, not only did everybody else carry on, they all started inventing magazines and worked for Emap and did Smash Hits and Q and then Mojo and now The Word or whatever. Me and Ian Penman at the NME in the early ’80s used to get up to a few shenanigans and I often wonder whether the revenge on our hubris was the invention of Q and then Mojo and now the Americanisation of Uncut.

PETER: These are the guys you believe are responsible for the decline of music journalism.
PAUL: It’s what I’d call the archivists, the librarians, the ones that always were offended that we put “I” in it or that we talked about ourselves or fantasised or changed our minds halfway through a piece. They – whoever they are! – the priestly grey men, seem to want to seal off pop music into a strange vacuum that underestimates its true potential actually. The CD development meant they could comfortably review the past and the present in these awful little shapes, a column the size of a mobile phone, short, stunted, and it just seemed to be against the spirit of the music somehow. It’s like in that awful image at the end of the Indiana Jones film where they pull back off all the strange, mysterious things they’ve found in the world and they’ve all been crated and stuffed into a room.

PETER: So how did Words And Music come about?
PAUL: Somebody asked me to write about ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ and asked me for about 500 words and I ended up giving them 140,000 words! I’d written one or two things for Uncut magazine and they hadn’t gone down very well with the editors, which unfortunately I don’t calm down about. There’s definitely a macho thing going on with some of those people, and some of the slightly feminine or questioning qualities do get them annoyed, the poetic side of it. That’s why the king and the champion for them has become Nick Hornby because he’s got that kind of male, straightforward, no-nonsense kind of thing that talks about emotions or responses but doesn’t seem to actually demonstrate it.

PETER: ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ seems to be able to support any amount of theories; it could’ve been a Weimar cabaret tune or a Moloko-type sci-fi disco track or a mid tempo Stooges thrash. But Words & Music is a fantasia based as much on the images in the video as the music itself.
PAUL: I first saw it on MTV, wasn’t really concentrating, and there was Kylie Minogue, who I kinda liked but never really completely committed to, but suddenly she just seemed so immaculate and it did seem to come out of some oddly female dream that Kraftwerk had. Kraftwerk were obviously very male, sometimes chauvinistically so – so to me it was such an extraordinary thought: “Wow, what if Kraftwerk had been girls, they would’ve been ultimately fantastic.” And then I turned the music up and I thought, “My god, it sounds like New Order, this is even more exciting.”

PETER: You answered your own question in the book – if Kraftwerk had been born female, they would’ve sounded like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s ‘I Feel Love’.
PAUL: Even now if you come up to date there’s The Sugababes and what Richard X gets up to with Liberty X as well. In the early ’80s I always thought electronic music had got rid of guitars, I was quite happy for it to be that way. And the return of the guitars has been the most extraordinary thing, helped and nurtured by these people who panicked when the guitars got removed; it kind of undermined everything they thought the whole thing was about.

PETER: There’s a passage about The Strokes in there that absolutely nails how a good band can end up as a sort of tribute act if they lack the surprise and strangeness of the new.
PAUL: It occurred to me that if you’re 18 and you listen to The Strokes, obviously it’s a different thing than if you’ve been through all the generations of music people our age have been through. And then it occurred to me that a lot of the 40-somethings that were writing about it were lying in a way, a lot of them would have missed some of that more avant-garde stuff coming out of New York. And then it led onto this notion that they were trying to go back in time under the guise of being radical, and it was kind of creepy really if you thought about it too much.

PETER: It was similar to the Oasis mania a few years ago where everyone tried to relive their own version of Beatlemania. It reminded me of Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo trying to dress up his girlfriend as the dead girl he was obsessed with – kind of sad and tragic.
PAUL: I absolutely agree, I mean Oasis I was always completely angry with ’cos of that reason and the whole way it wanted to renew a previous culture of dressing and behaving and seemed so lacking in fantasy, that thing we all got from Bowie and Iggy. It seemed odd that they should be so miserably narrow in their reference points.

PETER: There’s a pretty scalding passage on Simon Fuller where you cast him as Burroughs’ death dwarf, a sort of Bond villain sending pop kids up the chimneys.
PAUL: I find it fascinating that some of the things we’d been told off for by your Cowells and your Fullers over the years, they now seem to be doing. Fuller in particular because when I did Frankie I was told off: “You’re not supposed to do that, it’s all behind the scenes, you’re not supposed to say they don’t play on the records,” and now 25 years later there’s Fuller basically saying: “It’s down to me, I am the man that will do it all.”

PETER: What’s your reaction to that conceit?
PAUL: It is a most remarkable thing that with all the sophistication of the 21st century they’ve in fact really taken us right back to the ’50s, exploiting these kids just because they’re pretty and in the right shape and have a voice that’s moderately in tune – even though they’re still gonna boost it up 95% in the studio. And the kid has no real legal representation, doesn’t really know what they’re getting themselves into, is spat out as soon as they’re got a wrinkle or they’ve exhausted, and it’s happening right in front of us, and there’s a weird fascination with that in the gladiatorial sense. I kinda like it as a soap but I think it has absolutely nothing to do with pop music as such. They invent a celebrity and what they need also is a soundtrack and the most appropriate one is a pop soundtrack.
What exactly was your role in Frankie Goes To Hollywood?
Well in hindsight I was probably doing seven or eight jobs, but because I’d never been in the business before I didn’t know that seven or eight people did it. So I kind of art directed the sleeves, I A&R’d with Trevor, chose what songs to cover, said yea or nay to a track if I thought it wasn’t living up to some bizarre rock critic’s dream of what would’ve been a great pop track.

PETER: Do you get a laugh when you see Frankie t-shirts on TV shows like Friends signifying everything people would like to forget about the ’80s?
PAUL: Yeah, I did when it appeared in The Simpsons as well. Somebody said that of all the millions of words I’ve ever written I’ll be remembered possibly for three: Frankie Say Relax! Which got me slightly alarmed.
On the royalty statements there was suddenly a lot of mentions of Zoolander and I couldn’t quite work out why. So I went to see the film and of course the whole point of Zoolander is it’s based around ‘Relax’ being used as some secret code. That was quite amusing.

PETER: A lot of people would know you as a regular contributor to BBC2’s Newsnight Review, sharing a table with people like Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin. Is Tom really as mad as he seems?
PAUL: (Laughs) Tom is very clever actually – the great competitiveness of doing a Newsnight Review is everybody knows they’ve only got so much time, and you wanna do something incredibly powerful and Oscar Wildean, and Tom has a great way of slightly undermining you. It’s a live show, and just before you go on he’ll pretend he’s really, really tired and start yawning and curl up in his seat, which is disconcerting ’cos he kind of drags your energy level down with him. And then of course when he’s on, he’s on. And appearing on live TV with Tom Paulin when he’s halfway through a sentence and then the sentence just takes a complete right angle turn and goes somewhere you weren’t expecting, it’s very exhilarating.

PETER: Have you ever been accosted by someone you’ve slagged off in print or on television?
PAUL: Yeah, over the years. I remember Youth out of Killing Joke trying to hit me. Luckily he was so drunk that he slipped on some beer and fell to the floor. Lou Reed actually tried to have a go at me once, and he also was incredibly medicated, it was in a coach driving away from some gig in Berlin and he was coming up the aisle towards me screaming at the horror of journalists in general. And, of course, I was the only journalist there at the time and I thought, “He’s coming for me, he’s coming for me,” and just as he got to me he slumped to the floor, and his manager dragged him off by the legs saying, “He’s a bit overtired, it’s been a bit of a heavy schedule,” which I’ve always thought was a great line.

PETER: You were one of the earliest champions of U2, but unlike many you didn’t make a career out of it.
PAUL: The first time I saw them was supporting a band called The Soul Boys in front of six people in West Hampstead. A little like when I first saw Joy Division, your instinct, your absolute gut reaction which you couldn’t even articulate at the time, was that it was too big a thing, too big a thought to be playing a stupid little club in front of six people. They definitely seemed to have it, the awful thing they all talk about these days, the X factor, y’know, I felt they had pretty much all the alphabet.

PETER: What have you made of their evolution over the years?
PAUL: It’s been funny seeing it, ’cos I lost complete heart when they decided they wanted to be black and they went a bit down the highways and byways of the blues forest, they got stuck in that wood, truly a wood, and they wanted to be wooden and threw away anything that was modern and got a bit fundamentalist on us I think.
I thought it was fabulous when one of me heroes Eno came along, it seemed to be a fantasy come true. And I enjoyed it loads from then on, even when it went silly with the big lemons and the whole post-modern stadium tour, there were many, many elements of that I actually adored, because it seems far more preferable to try things and go crazy than to be safe and end up with Ryan Adams and George Michael.

PETER: What about their most recent work?
PAUL: I’ve always liked the part of U2 that went bonkers. I thought the last album went a bit Christian on us, but that’s entirely a personal thought, and Eno told me that I was wrong and that it would be remembered and be cherished and be great and sell millions, and he was absolutely right as always. So I didn’t put that one down in black and white ’cos I don’t like to be wrong!

PETER: The Frames regarded you as one of the few people in the ZTT camp who actually understood where they were coming from, particularly with respect to how they should be recorded. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but they’re one of the biggest domestic acts in Ireland right now.
PAUL: I remember I was very, very insistent within that strange maelstrom of ZTT that it would alter the entire DNA of existence if Trevor Horn produced The Frames. Because Trevor and his people don’t understand that, and in a way from their point of view they’re absolutely right, y’know: Trevor Horn, one of the biggest producers of all time, just produces things and whoever he produces should thank god that he is – forgetting slightly that there’s another world where people don’t necessarily need to be produced. And I do remember a very sort of strange discussion when I said it will rupture the universe if Trevor Horne produces The Frames. And in a way it stopped them actually growing. They might have been as big in other parts of the world as they are in Ireland. But the funny thing about the Trevor world is it’s like Being John Malkovich, if you go into Trevorworld you go into his head, whether you’re The Frames or Seal or Grace Jones, they all go into Trevor’s head and they have to live inside it, and that’s the point really. And a lot of acts and artists don’t like to do that and can’t do that.

PETER: I suppose the point is that Trevor Horn specialises in huge hits but short term careers, whereas The Frames are more like moss or something.
PAUL: And they’re creepy as well. Y’know, Trevor doesn’t really make dark records, unusual records. I remember when we made ‘Doctor Mabuse’ by Propaganda, Trevor was actually a little bit alarmed, he said, “God, I’ve never really made a dark record before, it’s a little bit like making a horror movie, isn’t it?” To him he was genuinely uncomfortable in a sort of moral way. I remember one of the great incandescent rages I’ve ever heard Trevor get into was when he first heard NWA; because of the language, he just went apoplectic. He was trying to call Chris Blackwell on the phone to tell him off.

PETER: That Yes album he appeared on was a kind of horror movie in its own right.
PAUL: Absolutely!

PETER: ZTT can seem like a black hole where Irish acts go to die: The Marbles, Shane MacGowan, even a sure-fire pop act like Dove, who seemed guaranteed a hit with ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’.
PAUL: You do go into an alternative universe and it’s a tricky one to negotiate. It’s like an equivalent to Factory Records but whereas Factory’s spirit was ultimately artistic and liberal and generous, the Trevor spirit if you like is – kinda oddly considering it would panic him to think it – slightly more sinister in a way. It’s anti-art, yet there is art to it, it’s a really odd hotch-potch of things.

PETER: At the same time a song like ‘All The Things She Said’ by TATU is pretty hard to argue with. His work on that was Phil Spector territory.
PAUL: Well I think in a way it settles down to what he does best: it’s almost like the act itself is of no interest to him whatsoever and he probably has no idea what they’re about, but he just had a chance to construct something because the people behind TATU needed a huge construction to make any sense of what they were really, which was pretty nothing.

PETER: Speaking of Nothing… you recently appeared as a commentator in the Adam Ant documentary The Madness Of Prince Charming. Last week Ian MacDonald, one of your peers at the NME, took his own life after years of battling depression. Did writing about your father’s suicide in Nothing make any sense of what had happened?
PAUL: I guess from letters it’s certainly helped people to know at least there are some other people out there that have these dark secrets that we all have in our families. It’s certainly been part of the help that I’ve needed, (just) to know when I’m approaching that mood that I must be careful. I don’t think my father really had the knowledge to know that when you get near to that stage you have to be very careful. I often listen to music or just go to sleep or just be very calm, whereas he didn’t really get much chance, and you can feel how it could build up and build up in that cancerous sense. Whether I’ve got even five per cent of what he had I don’t know, but I do know that I can sense the cloud approaching and do something to deal with it, and writing the book was part of the recovery in that sense.