Paul Morley - Great Writer Or A Twat?

I've mostly enjoyed his musings over the years.Read a couple of his books -'Nothing' and 'Words And Music'.He's usually the only one with something interesting and/or funny to say on those top 100 of the 80s or 90s type programmes.

Killing Joke hate Paul Morley

He's both, depends on how big a pretentious prick he's being in any given article. I used to be really into all the ZTT bands. Morley wrote all FGTH's sleeve notes, was a founding member of Art of Noise (albeit the counted a journo as a bandmember) and married my fave female singer, Claudia Brucken.

more recently he did a few gigs with a half assed reformed Art of noise (the new music is amazing, but I miss JJ and his performing fairlights), where he's actually been errrr "rapping" would you believe?

I still haven't understood some of the things he wrote in Ideal For Living. I've had that book for almost 20 years, and consider myself well educated and widely read.

He was witty in articles he wrote for Esquire. It was fun to read them.

I also like a lot of his writing, some of it, though, doesn't strike a chord with me. Really dig his sleeve notes for that Magazine compilation album After The Fact.

Terrwat

As Rob Gretton said, he is full of shit.

I read about 80ish pages of "nothing" before I stopped fooling myself into thinking he is anything but a shit writer.

T.W.A.T.

Steve Campbell wrote: He's both, depends on how big a pretentious prick he's being in any given article. I used to be really into all the ZTT bands. Morley wrote all FGTH's sleeve notes, was a founding member of Art of Noise (albeit the counted a journo as a bandmember) and married my fave female singer, Claudia Brucken.

more recently he did a few gigs with a half assed reformed Art of noise (the new music is amazing, but I miss JJ and his performing fairlights), where he's actually been errrr "rapping" would you believe?

Good point you bring up about JJ. I once read, with a great deal of amusement I might add, the production credits on the Animotion 12" Obsession that it took 5 people to program the Fairlight on that song

LOL, yet that mad bastard could run two of them, LIVE, one of which was played by Anne Dudley 30 feet away. AND he could solo them :) :) :) My fave fairlight story has to be the one about the guy sitting programming away, and the engineer says "man your fairlight's on fire", and the musogeek ups it a notch and starts pumping more fairlighty goodness into the track, and the engineer says "no, your fucking fairlight's on FIRE" and sure snough the man computer case is sitting there belching black smoke, with flames licking out of it, and the bugger was still playing.

i actually had an extract from the manual ( let's be honest, it's 1984 I'm 13 and the fairlight costs £60,000, it's all I was ever gonna have), apart from being longwinded and insane, actually sequencing on it didn't seem hard as such (other than it having to be done in the drum machine page).

the DVD without JJ, features a playin of beatbox with one of trevor horn's sarmwest interns doing a cut and filter job on it.....fuck me it falls FLAT on it's arese. All I could think was, "wow, how much must they all hate each other than to put up with that shite rather than get JJ back", I know trevor can program a bit, but he doesn't have that man/machine interface that jeczalik posesses.

Bit disgusting that the name Paul Morely appears as an equal credit with his on a many a release.

EDIT: actually the only other fairlightist in JJ's vein (if not league) I can think of is nick Rhodes, and not only did he go for tripple reduncancy and a tape fallback, but that ashen complexion and nervous look developed about the time he started touring fairlights :)