What the pop papers say: Toffs

The New Statesman which, erm, went off the newstands yesterday (No Rock & Roll Fun - last with the news) splashed the Blunt/Bryant 'posh people in the arts' story all over the cover, with contributions from Stuart Maconie and Robert Webb, and - more interestingly - some actual people who make music giving their perspectives.

Johnny Marr actually tried to shift the debate from background to the actual music world; record companies no longer sign up young bands with a view to long-term investment, and:

The worst part of this is the 'pay to play' culture [which] means bands have to hand over cash for 50 or more tickets or pay for whatever tickets they haven't sold, leaving many of them lose heart.
[...]
This is what's happening to young musicians all over the UK, and it doesn't matter what school you went to or what your parent's background is.

Marr is furiously committed to this idea - that background isn't important; it seems partly driven by a desperation to prove that his success wasn't aided by coming from a working-class background when that was supposed to open doors at record company offices.

But it misses the point by a Morrissey and a half - if the only way you can get gigs when you're 18, 19, 20 is by effectively bribing the venue to let you play; if your time 'paying your dues' also involves paying out hard cash, of course the family you come from is significant.

It's not just that coming from a cosier background means a parent might feel willing to dip into the Spanish villa fund to make up shortfalls on ticket sales but also the amount of time families can invest in, say, driving young musicians to rehearsal or a gig. Come to that, if you're growing up in a house which has a large garage to rehearse in, you might have a brick-built advantage over a kid with same amount of raw talent living in a two bed maisonette with neighbours who pound the walls the third time you try to work out a new song.

In sport, there's a suggestion that nurturing the success of a talented youngster can consumer about 12% of family resources; there's no reason why auditions and guitar strings are any less onerous demands than competition and racquet restringing.

Watch with No Rock: Johnny Marr

If you're feeling a bit underwhelmed by the what-is-it-now-sixth-or- seventh coming of Johnny Marr, you can cheer yourself up with him doing There Is A Light The Never Goes Out on Sara Cox's show yesterday morning on Radio 2.

Is there an extra level of enjoyment? Why, yes, because inexplicably, Brian Cox and Genesis are sat in front of the camera while Marr plays, with mixed levels of awkwardness. It's very much how I picture Eurovision voting panels to look like.

Johnny Marr firm on Smiths reunion

Johnny Marr sighs, and stresses again: No Smiths Reunion:

If people get genuinely upset and frustrated that four men that last played together 25 years ago are doing other things, then those people need to go and find a hobby. They really do. If the band only split up two years ago it might be a different matter, but 25 years? Come on. It’s a long time. If you like The Smiths, the records, photographs and memories are all plenty to be getting along with.

And besides, what would be the point of booking Smiths reunions dates? These days, Morrissey only has to spot a gig coming up in his Google Calendar for him to require a lay-down and a course of Lemsip.

Little man, what now? Cameron defies Smiths ban

Johnny Marr has perhaps overworked the 'don't listen to us, David Cameron' schitck now, and it's all to no avail: David Cameron is going to go on listening to The Smiths:

In Delhi for a diplomatic and trade-building mission, he stood defiant, smiling as he told the BBC: "I've now got Johnny Marr and other members of the band saying I'm not able to listen to the The Smiths.

"When I've got the complete and full set, even then, I'm afraid, I will go on and listen to The Smiths."

Of course Cameron's not listening to the pleas of Johnny Marr. He's quite the reputation for not listening to heartfelt pleas.

(Note to the BBC: Are you sure it's a "diplomatic and trade-building mission"? Looks more like a man trying to raise his international fees for when he's out of office from where I'm sitting.)

Gordon in the morning: Tan man

There's a long lens shot of Johnny Marr in Gordon's column today, which claims to be of Marr leaving a tanning salon. Although it's actually of Marr stood outside a tanning salon, which is slightly different.

Not entirely sure why Gordon thinks there's either any defence of the photo, nor any need to run it. He tries what might be the most pathetic attempt I've ever seen to pretend there's a "story" at the heart of it:

He was snapped head-to-toe in the latest Nike gear last year on one of his fitness workouts. He looked like Mr Motivator.

Smiths fans will hope all this clean-living might be geared towards a reunion.

Actually, any Smiths fan has no hope other than there never being a reunion to ruin their memories. But even if they were "hoping" for a reunion, what fan of the band would assume a photo of a man wearing a tracksuit, followed a few months later with that man walking outside a tanning salon, have anything to do with the band at all?

Show us Mike Joyce and Morrissey coming out the same building, you might have a justification. Other than that, this is just a seedy photo of a bloke outside a shop.

Johnny Marr defends flogging song to shop

A lot of huff has been expended on the decision by Morrissey and Marr to let John Lewis write them large cheques this Christmas. Now Johnny Marr is fighting back. Speaking from, probably, a Jacuzzi of cash, Marr explained that letting the song advertise geegaws and whatnots wasn't a bad thing at all:

Writing 'Please Please...' one Friday in '84 is one of the best memories of my life. This ad has not sullied that memory one bit."

"And you know what", he continued. "If my memory had been sullied, I could have just popped it into a John Lewis JLBIWM1402 Integrated Washing Machine. That baby has an A+ energy rating, and can make light work of a six kilo load. That would unsully anything."

He then went on to criticise the fans who had been "bitching and moaning whilst, wait for it, watching X Factor."

"... almost certainly, though, not on a screen that could hold a candle to the John Lewis JL19 LED TV, which has pinsharp clarity on the picture but is small enough to make a handy second TV. Maybe for kid's room or the caravan?"

... before linking to a YouTube video of former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins, in which the punk singer dismisses the notion of using songs in advertisements as "selling out".

"After all" he concluded "if you really want to see selling out, get yourself down to John Lewis and watch the way the twig Christmas tableware is flying off the shelves. That playful but practical cutlery is going to be a talking point in smart households up and down the nation."

I think the taking the cash is alright, but the whiny self-justification for it is a bit much to take. You wonder who Marr is trying to convince; and to just dismiss the fans who made The Smiths concerns about something very important to them being used in an ad is ungrateful, to say the least.

But it's not like the travesty that Littlewoods have made of Terry Scott's My Brother, is it?

Gordon in the morning: Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want

Joey Barton is trying to reunite The Smiths. He's a big Smiths fan.

Obviously, both those sentences can't be true.

Gordon reckons Barton is working on an attempt to piss on yet another memory:

[T]he QPR skipper has been working on the musical equivalent of the Middle East peace plan.

Now The Stone Roses have patched up their differences, Joey has taken it upon himself to reunite one of Manchester's other legendary bands, The Smiths.

This is akin to the drummer from Cud popping up trying to insist that Jimmy Case is added back into the Liverpool team for this Saturday.

"If I could get The Smiths back together that would top anything I could achieve on the football pitch."

It turns out that he's not actually "working" on it, just has met Morrissey and Marr. Separately.

They haven't played together for nearly 25 years but Barton thinks the ice is thawing. He added: "They told me they had turned down £40million for a reunion — but I reckon Marr is up for it."

That's not actually thawing, is it? That's just suggesting that Marr might bite if the money was good enough. Nor is it "bringing them together", it's just asking if they have.

It's unclear if Barton or Smart are even aware that the Smiths weren't a duo, and that two very vital parts of an actual reunion took Morrissey to court after he claimed they weren't actually vital parts of The Smiths. And their names might be harder to get on any reunion document. To be fair to Barton, though, he seems merely to be saying "it'd be nice if they got back together" rather than having a flipchart with a plan on it.

Twittergem: Johnny Marr

Or possibly "johnny marr":

David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don't. I forbid you to like it.

Ivor winners in full

The curious Ivor awards - for songwriters and, this year, for Noel Gallagher's heores - have been dolled out, and here's who took them home:

BEST CONTEMPORARY SONG
Song: Daniel
Writer/s: Natasha Khan
Performed By: Bat for Lashes
UK Publisher/s: Chrysalis Music

BEST SONG MUSICALLY AND LYRICALLY
Song: The Fear
Writer/s: Lily Allen / Greg Kurstin
Performed By: Lily Allen
UK Publisher/s: Universal Music Publishing / EMI Music Publishing

BEST TELEVISION SOUNDTRACK
Broadcast: Desperate Romantics
Composer: Daniel Pemberton
UK Publisher/s: Moncur Street Music

ALBUM AWARD
Album: Sunny Side Up
Writer/s: Paolo Nutini
Performed By: Paolo Nutini
UK Publisher/s: Warner/Chappell Music

PRS FOR MUSIC MOST PERFORMED WORK
Song: The Fear
Writer/s: Lily Allen / Greg Kurstin
Performed By: Lily Allen
UK Publisher/s: Universal Music Publishing / EMI Music Publishing

BEST ORIGINAL FILM SCORE
Film: Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Composer: John Powell
UK Publisher/s: EMI Music Publishing

BEST ORIGINAL VIDEO GAME SCORE
Game: Killzone 2
Composer/s: Joris de Man
Developer: Guerrilla Games
UK Publisher/s: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

INTERNATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT
Imogen Heap

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Paul Weller

PRS FOR MUSIC OUTSTANDING
CONTRIBUTION TO BRITISH MUSIC
Trevor Horn

SONGWRITERS OF THE YEAR
Lily Allen and Greg Kurstin

SPECIAL INTERNATIONAL AWARD
Neil Sedaka

THE ACADEMY FELLOWSHIP
Sir Tim Rice

THE IVORS CLASSICAL MUSIC AWARD
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

THE IVORS INSPIRATION AWARD
Johnny Marr

It's still never convincingly been explained to me why the song that is best musically and lyrically isn't the best song. Obviously, Daniel is a better song than The Fear, but I'm not clear what criteria the Ivors have used to decide this. "The Fear has the best music, and the best lyrics, but it's totally the wrong length and has a terrible title"?

I'm also wondering if the organisation needs to rethink the 'most played' prize - I'm sure The Fear did get played more than anything else last year, but only because it was used as a bed by everyone editing together a package for any purpose at all. Maybe the prize should only go to the 'most played in full' song?

Marr and Morrissey: Is it Christmas cards, then?

Johnny Marr does talk to Morrissey. Just not very often:

“I wake up in the morning with about 200 e-mails from a lot of people I don’t know, so I’m assuming it’s going to be the same with Morrissey, that’s the way the modern world is,” he said.

“So by the time I’ve got through the e-mails I’ve got to do, I’m not going to go oh “Dear Mozzer, Having a cup of tea, blah blah, blah.”

If I'm understanding this correctly, Marr seems to be suggesting that by the time he's dealt with offers of penis-enlarging pills and sent off his money to get his European Lottery Winnings passed to his account, there just isn't time to keep up to date with Morrissey.

NME are still doing their cool list

For reasons that can only be self-destructive, the NME is pushing ahead with its Cool List. Seven years they've been doing this now, and still not learning from their mistakes - which Stereogum helpfully point out: the NME is useless as separating 'cool' from 'notorious':

Before talking about NME's seventh annual cool list, it's kind of cool to look quickly at the 2007 Top 10 to see who's still ... cool. Lethal Bizzle? Barely. Amy Winehouse? Lucky to be alive. Ditto Keith Richards. Beth Ditto? No. Last year one, two, and three went, respectively, to Gallows' Frank Carter, Klaxons' Jamie Reynolds and CSS's Lovefoxx. This year they're all far from the top 10 and the coolest three folks didn't make the list at all 12 months ago.

Apparently, Liam Gallagher is cool again - number nine - while Noel isn't. Has nobody at the NME seen Liam's promo pictures, with his hair and attempts at soulful eyes making him look like Playmobil have licensed Snoopy? Alice Glass from Crystal Castles is at number one - because this is the one time a year when NME pretends it likes Gurls - and Jay-Z is at number two. He wasn't in the list last year; we're awaiting delivery of a full explanation as to why Jay-Z in the last twelve months was cool whereas Jay-Z between October 2006 and October 2007 wasn't even fiftieth coolest.

The only thing the cool list proves, year-in, year-out, is that the NME approaches music like a confused thirty-nine year old, trying to draw up some sort of list that will try and give it some sort of purchase on making sense of it all. Johnny Marr is slightly less cool than Dave from TV On The Radio, who in turn is slightly less cool than Lil Wayne. At least the Sunday Times Rich List shows the made-up numbers it uses in drawing up its equally pointless annual chart.

Professor Marr

There's a lovely piece in today's education Guardian marking the start of Johnny Marr's role as visiting professor in music and recording at Salford University:

Marr hopes to be involved on all levels - from working with university bands, helping them to analyse and deconstruct their own songs, to giving talks on the processes of forming a band and making records, debunking some of rock's enduring myths. Such as? "The idea that producers are dweebs with no legs who sit and twiddle knobs," he says. "I can show bands how to produce themselves. In the same way, many bands think you can't make it without some fat cat in London or New York to manage you. That's just crap. All you need is someone a bit older than you with a bit of business nous whom you trust. The Beatles and U2 did it that way and so did The Smiths. I got to know this bloke [Joe Moss] who ran the clothes shop next door to the one I was working in and I'm proud to say we've been together ever since."

Perhaps of more interest to the Smithsheads is his reaction on returning to the site of that record sleeve shoot:

"I'd never given it a moment's thought," Marr says, "until they started taking pictures at my university inauguration last year. I looked around, saw the red brick walls and thought, 'this is familiar'."

Marr laughs it off, suggesting the brainfreeze was merely the product of a lifelong desire to forget that photo.

"I just hate it."

Because it's become so iconic and stylised?

"Nah. Because I look so crap in it. It's the one frame I'd put an X against to show that I didn't like it and then someone - who looked exactly the same in every single picture - decided to use it just to piss me off."

"Someone", eh? Wonder who that could possibly be?

Seventy five million times 'No': Moz won't reunite Smiths

Whoever thought of offering Morrissey $75million for fifty Smiths dates misjudged what Morrissey would really want.

Now, if they offered to take out Johnny Rogan, they might have been in business.

We know about the offer - alleged offer - because Morrissey issued a press release:

"In an effort to stop the speculation and kill off the rumor mongers who seem to use these things to take advantage of committed fans, we can tell you that one thing the future will not bring is a Smiths' reunion tour."

The motivation might have been less to quell the rumours and more to just show off the size of the offer, we suspect.

Marr's been hired more times than a 1950s cab

A decade or so back, Select magazine ran a graphic attempting to prove that without Johnny Marr and his connection to so many projects, music would implode or something. Since then, it seems, Marr has been attempting to correct the image that he's six degrees from every band by working directly with everyone.

He's just hooked up with Crowded House.

Paint a Vulgar Picture

According to the Manchester Evening News, The Smiths are going to be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame next year. This could mean a reunion - or at least the load of them stood together on the same stage.

We're not so sure we're as confident in the tale as the MEN's Adam Moss is.

Admittedly, it's the first year that the Smiths have passed the eligibility criterion of having formed 25 years ago, so they could be up for it this year. However, since you not only have to be nominated, but also pass the voting stage (around 600 industry experts get to weigh the nominees), it's possibly a little bit early to be suggesting the Smiths will definitely be inducted. As this year there was some suggestion that the voting was rigged, with some votes being ruled ineligible to shut out the Dave Clark Five and finally allow a rap act into the Hall (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, if you're curious), it's probable that even if the figures are going to be manipulated to shoo-in Morrissey and the boys, it's unlikely they'd be drawing attention to the fix by telling people "they're in" before nominations have even closed.

And would the band really come together again? Sharing a stage after Morrissey described Rourke and Joyce as "session musicians who could be replaced like parts of a lawnmower"?

Even assuming the bitterness could set aside, how crushing would it be to the legions of fans who've kept a special place for the Smiths in their hearts all these years to see the band come together for a reunion at one of the most self-congratulatory insider events of the year?

Mouse takes Marr to Manchester

It's going to be a misty-eyed homecoming for Johnny Marr as he turns up with his new American friends at the last night of their UK tour next month:

ATP Vs The Fans - May 20th
London Royal Albert Hall - 23th
Glasgow ABC - 26th
Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall - 27th
Nottingham Rock City - 28th
Manchester Ritz Ballroom - 29th

Ronson: "it's so easy to hate; it takes guts to be gentle and kind'

Mark Ronson's pointless cover of The Smiths' Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before is still enraging both indie purists and music lovers up and down the country. Despite having taken a reading of a song that so lacks any passion or understanding of the words it makes that rave version of Smells Like Teen Spirit sound like Olivier doing the Agincourt speech, and then dumped the dull, shapeless vocal on top of a flaccid backing track which seems to have escaped from an elevator in an especially cruel bank building, Mark Ronson hasn't gone to ground, requesting a change of name and planning face-altering surgery that would not only save him from being pointed at in the street by angry children, but also spare him from having to look in the mirror and see the gormless, gawking visage which had been on the front of the head that allowed the idea of this beast to fester within its depths.

Oh no, he's defending it.

Good lord, Ronson, there came a point when even Dr Frankenstein had to admit he'd made a bit of a blunder and the world would have been better off if the discarded corpse parts had been left alone.

Ronson's defence is that Morrissey and Marr like it:

"When I recorded the original demo of 'Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before' ...the first thing I did was send it to Morrissey and Marr immediately," he wrote on his MySpace. "I needed to know if they would be alright with it, basically like a kid showing his parents his finger painting for their approval!"

"It took a long time to hear back from them, but when I found out that Morrissey liked it, and especially liked Daniel's (Merriweather) vocal, you can imagine how I felt when (Johnny) Marr approved it as well - but I don't know his exact thoughts. The man who co-wrote my favourite song of all time gave (his) blessing to this new interpretation."

We wonder what Marr's exact thoughts were - probably something along the lines of "Dorothy, could you have a quick look and see how much the Tears For Fears boys made from that Gary Jules cover version?"

And getting Morrissey's blessing might be nice, but having heard the mid-career solo stuff, we wouldn't have him pegged as the world's greatest critic when it comes to the stuff he wrote.

How soon is forever?

In an upcoming interview, Johnny Marr has described How Soon Is Now as The Smith's "most enduring song":

"When we'd done 'How Soon Is Now?', we knew it was something else."

The new Healers (Marr's sometime band) do a really good job of it. I know Morrissey still does it live, too. But Tatu's version was just silly. Plastic music."

Still, it wasn't so bad you didn't cash the royalty cheques, we bet.