Morrissey: Bad Sex

Morrissey has won the 23rd annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award for List of the Lost (Penguin). The prize was presented by the lawyer, columnist and performer Nancy Dell’Olio.

The award was announced at a lavish ceremony on Tuesday 1 December 2015 at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square, London, where the 400 guests raised a toast to the winner. List of the Lost is Morrissey’s debut novel. His memoir, Autobiography, was released by Penguin Classics in 2013. List of the Lost follows four Boston relay runners who are cursed by an old man in the woods. The judges were swayed by an ecstatic scene involving Ezra, one of the athletes, and his plucky girlfriend, Eliza: ‘At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

Morrissey rose to fame in the 1980s as the lyricist and frontman of The Smiths, before launching a lauded solo career spanning ten studio albums to date.

Morrissey was unable to attend due to touring commitments and was unavailable for comment. As he explains in List of the Lost: ‘Sex was always there – everywhere photographically, in print, in film, so expansively thought about that almost nothing more could need to be said about it…’

Literary Review. 

Rumour has it Miss Morrissey could win a few awards for 'crap sex', too...

PS '[Transportation Security Administration] have ignored my official and legal and constitutional complaint. From this we gather that TSA stands for Thorough Sexual Assault. If you are traveling through San Francisco International Airport you must be ready for a full sexual attack by people who claim to have your interests at heart. It is unlikely that ISIS would stoop so low.'

La Mozza keeping things in perspective as usual via a new missive on True To You.

Morrissey: Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

I think the sex scene in Morrissey’s much-mocked first novel, List of the Lost, sounds quite fun: “A rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation.” I mean, that sounds better than the rollercoasters I’ve tried at EuroDisney. But the moral of Morrissey’s otherwise terrible foray into literature is: repression can be a wonderful thing.

I don’t mean repression for everyone. For humans, it’s not good, as a rule. But for artists, yes. As a teenager, like so many of my generation, I yearned with Morrissey, not for him. It was only in adulthood that I realised why: he was a gay man born in 1959, facing a triple whammy of Irish, Catholic, and Northern repression. No wonder he hated the gay scene, himself and everyone else, with a twisting, superior self-loathing that royally screwed him up for evermore.

But for everyone else, it was great. In the closet he became a songwriter of genius. Now, I look back and see he was hiding in plain sight — his best songs hissing with anger at forcing his self away. Yet it was coded enough that I never noticed at the time; I didn’t need to. Putting on record after record in my bedroom, his peculiar, dated, suffering became universal. It was a longing made sarcastic.

Repression, paradoxically, restricted Morrissey enough to be creative. Now he has the licence of his latter years to write this novel, he just isn’t editing himself enough. What if Morrissey had been born in Brighton today and found contentment and a lovely boyfriend aged 17? All of his best stuff would never have been written.
Helen Rumbelow, The Times.

Well yes, of course.

Though this point has been made before and - dare I say - far more eloquently in the essays, Ambisexality and Morrissey: The God That Failed in Richard Smith's quite brilliant Seduced And Abandoned: Gay Men And Popular Music.

PS As with the stinking reviews of the Stonewall movie, I can't be arsed compiling all the bad reviews of List Of The Lost.

Morrissey: There Is Only One Thing Worse Than Being Talked About...

It’s commonplace in this kind of article to tell you we’re reading the book so you don’t have to. It’s a tease, usually. In the case of List of the Lost, however, it’s absolutely true. Do not read this book; do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems. All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame, for it’s hard to imagine anything this bad has been put between covers by anyone other than a vanity publisher. It is an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination. 

Michael Hann, The Guardian.

The digested read: Morrissey is still obsessed with death and young men's athletics.

"Hello? Morrissey? Right, well... I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that EVERYONE’S talking about your book…"

— Pete Paphides (@petepaphides) September 24, 2015

Morrissey: Song Of The Loon

True To You.

Alternative cover...