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- Bookish, reclusive-but-pugnacious—avowedly celibate—with an almost Puritan disdain for cheap glamour and armed with a deeply unhealthy interest in language, wit and ideas Morrissey succeeded in perverting pop music for a while and making it that most absurd of things, literary. Some were moved to talk of how much Morrissey owed that blousy Anglo-Irish nineteenth-century torch-singer and stand-up comedian Oscar Wilde, the "first pop star". Arguably, poor Oscar was merely an early failed and somewhat overweight prototype for Morrissey. (en)
- I lost myself in music at a very early age, and I remained there . . . I did fall in love with the voices I heard, whether they were male or female. I loved those people. I really, really did love those people. For what it was worth, I gave them my life . . . my youth. Beyond the perimeter of pop music there was a drop at the end of the world. (en)
- The Smiths brought realism to their romance, and tempered their angst with the lightest of touches. The times were personified in their frontman: rejecting all taints of rock n' roll machismo, he played up the social awkwardness of the misfit and the outsider, his gently haunting vocals whooping suddenly upward into a falsetto, clothed in outsize women's shirts, sporting National Health specs or a huge Johnny Ray-style hearing aid. This charming young man was, in the vernacular of the time, the very antithesis of a "rockist"—always knowingly closer to the gentle ironicist Alan Bennett, or self-lacerating diarist Kenneth Williams, than a licentious Mick Jagger or drugged-out Jim Morrison. (en)
- The England that I have loved, and I have sung about, and whose death I have sung about, I felt had finally slipped away. And so I was no longer saying, "England is dying." I was beginning to say, "Well, yes, it has died and here's the carcass"—so why hang around? (en)
- The ones who listen to the entire song, the way I sing it, and my vocal expression know only too well that I'm no racist and glorifier of xenophobia. The phrase "England for the English" [used in the song] is in quotes, so those who call the song racist are not listening. The song tells of the sadness and regret that I feel for anyone joining such a movement [as the far-right National Front]. (en)
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