Words Dept.

Help me. I’m worried I may be one of those “Morrissey apologists” you sometimes hear about. None of my best friends are Morrissey, yet I can’t help empathise with the erstwhile Smiths frontman. To make matters worse, I’ve got form in this area. Three years ago when, in an NME interview, Morrissey expressed some rather [...]

So many press releases are ruined by inane quotes. So here’s Morrissey, talking about his forthcoming gig at this summer’s O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, showing how it should be done. I like to imagine the press officer making up something suitable, sending it off to Moz for approval, and finding out later that [...]

Finally, Morrissey has opened his gob about the NME interview on the Guardian blog (where else?) It’s delightfully long-winded but immensely pleasurable to read. Predictably, he denies wholeheartedly the trumped-up charge of racism and launches into a spectacularly single-minded tirade against the “new NME” and, most mercilessly, its writer, Tim Jonze. I do not mean [...]

Turns out Tim Jonze, the NME journalist who interviewed Morrissey, didn’t ask for his byline to be taken off the piece because it was an anti-Morrissey stitch-up by the NME – but because NME wanted to tone it down! Writing on Comment is Free last night, he says: …it’s been something of a PR coup [...]

There’s an interview with Morrissey in this week’s NME that’s credited in a way I’ve never ever seen before. It says: Interview: Tim Jonze Words: NME How? What? HUH?!!! It turns out that Jonze, the writer of the piece, conducted two interviews with Moz but the NME decided to rewrite his copy. Jonze says “virtually [...]