Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pounds

[Young Flesh]

... and it just looks like a load of cobbled together press-clippings with no revelations whatsoever.

 

[Punchdrunk]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

Its SHIT!!

> ... and it just looks like a load of cobbled together press-clippings with
> no revelations whatsoever.

 

[Young Flesh]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

I suppose it's okay for the new fans who just want a basic biography and don't have all the magazine features and interviews it seems to get almost all its information from, but the way it was trailed as something controversial and revelatory is somewhat questionable.

 

[Danny]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

Probably better off reading the interviews over the years. There are loads on the web. Much more informative than any of the biographies including Severed Alliance which is wildly overrated.

 

[Young Flesh]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

Well, the Severed Alliance was a genuine work of exhaustive research and did present a heck of a lot of new and exclusive material at the time. If Rogan did his promised solo Moz one, you could bet it'd be closer to the real thing. Severed Alliance was a journalistic quantum leap away from a mere rummage through the press cuttings file.

 

[Danny]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

I found it very sketchy myself. He didn't seem to have talked to anyone important and we just got loads of pointless information from people that sort of remembered Morrissey from school and arguments between sound engineers and tour managers. Found out virtually nothing about the Morrissey/Marr relationship.

 

[Young Flesh]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

> I found it very sketchy myself. He didn't seem to have talked to anyone
> important and we just got loads of pointless information from people that
> sort of remembered Morrissey from school and arguments between sound
> engineers and tour managers. Found out virtually nothing about the
> Morrissey/Marr relationship.

Weeeeell ... you say he didn't speak to anyone important, but he spoke to Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Mike Joyce, Geoff Travis, John Porter, etc. and a wide range of people who worked for and with them.

 

[Danny]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

He didn't speak to Morrissey. The couple of quotes from Moz in the book are just him basically explaining why he didn't want to be written about.

If he spoke to Marr for any length of time he didn't get much out of him did he? There almost nothing from Marr about Morrissey or the Smiths.

I think he pretended he had more access than he actually did. I think a lot of the so-called interviews were casual conversations. Either that or he forgot to take his tape recorder along.

 

[Young Flesh]

Re: Well, the 'Scandal and Passion' biog is out in UK HMV shops for a mere £4.99 of your earth pound

> He didn't speak to Morrissey. The couple of quotes from Moz in the book
> are just him basically explaining why he didn't want to be written about.

> If he spoke to Marr for any length of time he didn't get much out of him
> did he? There almost nothing from Marr about Morrissey or the Smiths.

> I think he pretended he had more access than he actually did. I think a
> lot of the so-called interviews were casual conversations. Either that or
> he forgot to take his tape recorder along.

He did speak to Morrissey - he had at least one long phone call with him as I recall. Marr and Joyce he says he spoke to exhaustively - in fact, I seem to recall most of his long interview with Marr later being published In Record Collector in either one or two parts. He is known to be a quite in-depth bloke once he gets a commission - sleeping on people's floors, not eating for a year etc. till he gets it done rather than just staying in a warm living room with a box of cuttings; his book on record managers was quite exhaustive, too, so I think he does do the job. (He even tracked down and interviewed Morrissey's dad.)

The school stuff - certainly that was all for Moz anoraks, but I did find all that quite interesting and somewhat relevant.