Morrissey to NME: I'm not racist!

It is on the backs of writers such as Morley, Burchill, Kent and
Shaar Murray that the 'new' NME hitches its mule-cart. But the stalled
views of the 'new' NME sag, and readers have been driven away by a
magazine with no insides. The narrow cast of repeated subjects sets off
the agony, a mesmerizing mess of very brief and dispassionate articles
unable to make thought evolve; a marooned editor who holds the divine
right to censor any views that clash with his own.

The editorial treatment given to my present interview with the 'new'
NME is the latest variation on an old theme, but like a pre-dawn
rampage, the effects of the interview have been meticulously considered
with obvious intentions. It is true that the magazine is ailing badly
in the marketplace, but Conor doesn't understand how the relentless
stream of "cheers mate, got pissed last night, ha ha" interviews that
clutter every single issue of the 'new' NME are simply not interesting
to those of us who have no trouble standing upright. Strangely enough,
my own name is the only one featured in the 'new' NME that links their
present with the NME's distant past, therefore a Morrissey interview is
an ideal opportunity with which to play the editorial naughtiness game.

This, regrettably, is what has taken place with this most recent
interview, which, it need hardly be said, bears no relation in print to
the fleshly conversation that took place.

So before I continue, there's something that needs to be pointed out.
Every single quote attributed to Morrissey is 100% correct, there was
no provocation at all, and Morrissey was given a chance to apologise or
clarify his views with a second telephone interview. At no point did he
back down. Although Morrissey as a person was charming, courteous and
(until this point) a joy to interview, I found comments such as
"England's been thrown away" and "These days you won't hear a British
accent in Knightsbridge" woefully ignorant. I wrote a piece saying that
Morrissey - although liberal in many of his views - was using the
language of the BNP and Enoch Powell when it came to immigration. In
the piece I mentioned that his comments likening the UK to that of
"going to Zagreb and hearing nothing but Irish accents" were offensive
as they compared British ethnic minorities to tourists. I also said he
was being overly nostalgic for a Britain built partly on empire and
imperialism and that someone as well travelled as Morrissey had no
excuses for such comments.

The magazine quoted Morrissey allegedly saying: "Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous.

"If you travel to Germany, it's still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity.

"But travel to England and you have no idea where you are," the singer is reported to have said.

The 48-year-old, who has spent the last decade in Rome and Los Angeles, was apparently responding to a question about whether he would return to live in the UK.

A trigger for much of the criticism was Morrissey's performance at the first Madness Madstock! reunion concert at Finsbury Park, London, in 1992, in which he appeared on stage draped in the Union Flag, a symbol often associated with nationalism and hence with far right groups in Britain. As a backdrop for this performance, he chose a photograph of two female skinheads. The NME responded to this performance with a lengthy examination of Morrissey's attitudes to race, claiming that the singer had "left himself in a position where accusations that he's toying with far-right/fascist imagery, and even of racism itself, can no longer just be laughed off with a knowing quip".