Thursday, November 29, 2007

Daily Mail misses the crux of the Morrissey interview

Of course, the Daily Mail loves nothing better than something it can call a "race row", so its coverage of the Morrissey NME interview was only to be expected. The paper, however, excels itself by managing to trample over a sensitive area without any care or attention.

You'll recall that Morrissey told the NME his main worry over the possible tone of the piece was

"I just think it could be construed that the reason I wouldn't wish to live in England is the immigration explosion."

Morrissey then went on - quite clearly - to explain there are other reasons, not least the execution of Jean Charles De Menezes, that kept him away from Britain.
So... what headline has the Mail gone with?
Morrissey 'refuses to live in the UK because of immigration explosion'

Something, expressly, that neither the NME nor Morrissey said. Good work, everybody.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

But this is exactly what your piece yesterday inferred. Just because you had the space and anality to dissect the interview line by line, you still came to the same conclusions as the Mail: Morrisey doesn't want to return to the UK because of immigration.

"It's all a bit of a nasty mess - Morrissey revealing more deeply the unpleasant side to his character" --You, yesterday.

BTW< I'm not one of those weird fans, I don't like his music much. My beef is with your narrow point of ......err.....monkeys...something about a smartarse....errr.....etc

Anonymous said...

Read for context. Simon and others, self included, did feel that Morrissey's comments regarding immigration were racist or at least bordering on racism, but I don't believe any of us stated that Morrissey's sole or primary reason for living outside the UK was due to this (for instance, I'm sure tax reasons figure in there as well).

With the NME/Daily Mail kerfuffle, you have a statement made that "a does not equal b", which then got turned into "a equals b". See the difference?

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

Gibbo - what Rachel said, basically. I think Morrissey's fear of the immigrant does betray racism on his part, not the jackboot-and-burning-church variety, but the feeling-uncomfortable-and-not-liking-their-food type. I'm happy to believe him when he says that's not his motivation for living overseas though: after all, if disliking foreign accents was your motivation for deciding where to live, you probably wouldn't relocate to Italy.

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.