Even when Morrissey is giving praise these days, he seems to find a way to trample over someone else. Or in today’s installment of Days Of Our Moz (or was it As The Moz Turns?), the former Smiths singer penned a tribute to the late Richard Attenborough for sorta-official fan site True To You, and in it, he managed to bring up the deaths of Lauren Bacall and Robin Williams, expressing displeasure that Williams’ death took some of the spotlight away from Bacall’s.
Moz wrote that it was “so sad that her death was overshadowed by that of Robin Williams. It was Lauren, not Robin, who changed motion picture history. Yet modern media has an odd way of forgetting the more senior servers of the arts.”
Attenborough, as Stereogum points out, starred in the 1947 film Brighton Rock that inspired Morrissey’s Now My Heart Is Full, off 1994’s Vauxhall and I song “Now My Heart Is Full.”
Here’s Morrissey’s full statement on Attenborough; meanwhile, he’s currently looking for a label after recently parting ways with Harvest Records, which issued this summer’s World Peace Is None Of Your Business…
Richard Attenborough dies
26 August 2014
“I was thrilled beyond words to have met Richard Attenborough, who, of course, played Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1947), a central theme of my song Now my heart is full. When I met Sir Richard he was delightful, and I asked him if Brighton Rock seemed like a hundred years ago. He replied ’Oh, much more than that…’.
I also had the extraordinary pleasure of meeting the recently deceased Lauren Bacall … so beautiful, so cautious … and so sad that her death was overshadowed by that of Robin Williams. It was Lauren, not Robin, who changed motion picture history. Yet modern media has an odd way of forgetting the more senior servers of the arts. Dora Bryan, whom I knew personally in the late 80s, and who also died in recent weeks, had pitifully slim attention from the British news media, yet her talents were a treasured staple of British life throughout the 1950s, 1960s and beyond. Dora had agreed to introduce the Smiths onstage at the London Palladium in 1986, but at the last minute her agent asked for a fee which we, the Smiths, just couldn’t afford.
However, in our X-factory society, it seems that anyone who has NOT appeared on Big Brother just isn’t worth remembering by the British media … alas.”