Abstract
This chapter opens with an analysis of 1997 film Oscar by Michael Bracewell to focus on pop and rock musicians who in the last sixty years have performed Wilde in fascinating and unpredictable ways. From 1960s bands as The Wilde Flowers; The Beatles; and The Rolling Stones to 1970s icon David Bowie to Morrissey, solo artist and leader of eighties seminal band The Smiths. A meditation on the more decadent sides of Wilde’s oeuvre informs instead the work of Nick Cave and singer Gavin Friday. The chapter then focuses on two fascinating Wilde personalities: Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys) and Libertines founder Pete Doherty. The very last section of the chapter refers to songs featuring Wilde as main protagonist by artists such as Elton John and Company of Thieves.
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Notes
- 1.
Sammells, Wilde Style, 121.
- 2.
Bracewell, England Is Mine, 13.
- 3.
Bracewell, England Is Mine, 13.
- 4.
Michael Bracewell, Oscar, BBC Omnibus Series, 1997.
- 5.
Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, 69.
- 6.
Ironically, Fry himself is part of the docu-film’s cast. Besides giving voice to some of Wilde’s most famous epigrams, he also offers interesting insights into Wilde’s last years as a pariah in Paris.
- 7.
“It’s through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” Wilde, The Soul of Man, 1176.
- 8.
Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy. Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 15–16.
- 9.
Tom Pinnock, “The Wilde Flowers,” Uncut, No. 226, March 2016, 85.
- 10.
On Robert Wyatt and the Wilde Flowers years, see Marcus O’Dair, Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2014).
- 11.
Brian Hopper, “Brian’s Tale,” in The Wilde Flowers (London: Floating World Records, 2015), CD.
- 12.
Pinnock, “The Wilde Flowers,” 86.
- 13.
Nigel Cawthorne, Sixties Sourcebook. A Visual Reference to the Style of a Decade (London: Grange Books, 2005), 164.
- 14.
Silvia Albertazzi, Questo è domani. Gioventù, cultura e rabbia nel Regno Unito 1956–1967 (Lissone: Paginauno, 2020), 37. Here, Albertazzi makes, of course, reference to Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).
- 15.
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head (London: Fourth Estate, 1994).
- 16.
Calcutt, Brit Cult, 50.
- 17.
Significantly, in a 2010 documentary entitled “Love is all you Need,” cultural critic Camille Paglia makes reference to (1960s) John Lennon’s brilliant sense of British humor, to his surrealistic kind of writing […] that, according to Paglia, came out of Lewis Carroll via Oscar Wilde.
- 18.
Another major literary influence on Lennon was James Joyce. In their second more experimental phase, which sees Lennon compose his Joycean track ‘Revolution 9’ included in 1968 The White Album, The Beatles composed a song entitled ‘I Am The Walrus’ released in 1967, a complex intertextual/Psychedelic exercise—which includes oblique quotation from Finnegans Wake. Lennon’s work exhibited a similarly dispirited sense of entanglement to the characters in Finnegans Wake, which likely explains why a copy of the book appears in the ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ video (1980). In these very years, many avant-pop musicians will be fascinated by Joyce’s art, to the extent of writing songs which adapt, or make reference, to works by the Irish writer in complex and unpredictable ways, mixing directness end experimentalism, low and high art. In the late 1960s, Pink Floyd’s founder and solo artist Syd Barrett was inspired by the poem ‘Golden Hair’ included in Chamber Music and decided to put it to music. Main motifs of the thirty-six poems that the collection contains are yearning for love, disappointment, and beauty and universality of music. The poems are also characterized by a complex musicality, for they were written more like lyrics for songs than like poems. Even though it appeared on Barrett’s debut album The Madcap Laughs which is part of his solo work after the Pink Floyd, ‘Golden Hair’ is one of Syd’s first songs, made at the time he experimented with setting poetry to music, during his early psychedelic (cannabis-nourished) idyll at Earlham Street in 1966. In 1967, American psychedelic band Jefferson Airpalne composed a song entitled ‘Rejoyce’ whose lyrics features a more direct reference to Ulysses and Leopold Bloom. Interestingly, the song’s progressive sonic canvas perfectly translates the polyphony and pluridiscursivity of Joyce’s novel; Irish melodies and atmosphere are counterpointed with complex piano figures and a dynamic, inventive approach to bass, whose walking lines seem to sonically stage Bloom’s wanderings in Dublin.
- 19.
Jonathan Cott, “John Lennon. The Last Interview,” Rolling Stone, 1980, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/john-lennon-the-last-interview-179443/.
- 20.
Melly, Revolt into Style, 138.
- 21.
Sammells, Wilde Style, 122.
- 22.
Interestingly, a Chilean band from the 1960s called Los Vidrios Quebrados composed a song (in English) entitled “Oscar Wilde” in which the protagonist is “Wilde” himself narrating the main events of his life in the first person; the song was included in their 1967 album Fictions.
- 23.
Coppa, “Performance Theory and Performativity,” 90.
- 24.
Orwell’s iconic novel holds a very specific space and meaning in Bowie’s work and biography. Deeply impressed by a train journey across the Russian Continent in 1973 in which the dramatic poverty of the fabled Communist paradise generated in the singer a sense of panic and claustrophobia, Bowie chose to design a rock musical around Orwell’s fictional recreation of a Stalinesque society in his novel—Peter Doggett, The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie and the 1970s (London: Vintage, 2012), 196. Orwell’s widow, however, refused to let Bowie have the rights; hence, the artist was left to mould his Orwell-inspired rock-show in a work equally apocalyptic which in the end escaped the conventional physiognomy of the musical to turn into the complex hyper-textual space composed by both the album Diamond Dogs and the show aimed at promoting the album.
- 25.
Published in May 1974 the Diamond Dogs album was Bowie’s attempt to emphasize the literary credentials of his songbook—Christopher Sandford, Bowie. Loving the Alien (London: Time Warner Paperbacks, 1997); indeed, with its echoes of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Burroughs’ The Wild Boys (1971), the album moved beyond the margins of Orwell’s novel. Bowie replaced Oceania with his own future urban environment, Hunger City, a post-nuclear and yet technologically primitive hell. The album’s fragmented lyrics and the portrait of urban America’s meltdown clearly derived from Burroughs, and indeed, much of the album’s literary inventions were the outcome of Bowie’s recourse to Burroughs’s cut-up techniques.
- 26.
The last four tracks of the album, however, directly relate to Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘We are the dead’ is the first of the Orwellian songs included in the album; introduced by a beautiful electric piano figure, the song takes its title directly from the novel, when Winston Smith and Julia repeat “we are the dead” to one another as the Thought Police approach to arrest Winston, Bowie’s vocal performance here perfectly translates the dominant sense of loss. The sound of ‘1984’ projects towards Bowie’s romance with Philly Soul, and indeed, it is characterized by a powerful 4/4 tempo, which seems to convey the idea of a machine-like society characterized by strict and predictable rhythms, in which, however, the social actors are capable of unpredictable intonations and variations. The lyrics seem to refer to Winston’s interrogatory by O’ Brien. ‘Big Brother’ seems to present a more serene and choral tone, almost conveying the idea that after the brainwash Winston has found someone to believe in. In truth, the song’s theme is the dangerous charm of power and the easiness with which succumb to totalitarianism. Here, “the glamour of dictatorship is balanced with the banality,” reminding us that “anyone with a mind to it could be a Hitler;” Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2011), 39–40. ‘Chanting of the EverCircling Skeletal Family’ is truly Big Brother’s outro, closing on the machine repetition of the word “bro.” This repetition represents an interruption in the order of discourse, something which through pure chance turns a machine into a creative force and a space of subversion of an ideology which is based on the ideal of a perfect, controllable machine-like society. On Bowie and Orwell see also Will Brooker, Why Bowie Matters (London: Collins 2019).
- 27.
Raymond Williams, “Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. How Does the Novel Help Our Understanding of the Year,” Marxism Today, January 1984, 12.
- 28.
William Cain, “Orwell’s Essays as a Literary Experience,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, ed. John Rodden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83. Much pop of the 1980s will be characterized by a prevailing sense of conformity, by a desire to turn music into a source of pure entertainment. Of course, there will be exceptions as represented by Bowie’s 1986 masterpiece ‘Absolute Beginners.’
- 29.
Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde,” 219.
- 30.
Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe. Glam Rock and Its Legacy (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), 91.
- 31.
On this aspect see Nick Stevenson, Bowie. Fame, Sound and Vision (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2006).
- 32.
David Bowie, “Interview by Hanif Kureishi,” Interview Magazine, May 1993.
- 33.
Anthony De Curtis, Lou Reed. A Life (New York: Back Bay Books, 2017), 151–153.
- 34.
Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 11.
- 35.
Joshua Clover, “Fables of the Self-Construction. A Users Guide to Velvet Goldmine,” Spin 14, November 1998, 92–99.
- 36.
Interestingly, Auslander establishes a powerful link between glam with its gender bending strategies (that is glamsters’ use of glitter suits, make-up, platform shoes, etc.) and the gothic as a genre; quoting Halberstam, he describes in particular the gothic novel a “cross-dressing performance” whose stylistic excesses are understood as feminine dressing up and whose pages are filled with instances of “grotesque transvestism.” The “transvestism of glam rock is similarly grotesque, and glam rock personae often border on the monstrous,” the excessive (Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 64). Both gothic novel and glam rock music can then be defined as cannibalistic. If gothic as a genre is itself a hybrid form, a stitched body of distorted textuality (think of Dorian Gray too), glam rock songs are often monstrous effigies made up of parts of other textual bodies. In short, gothic and glam partake intriguingly of shared means, including self-conscious stylistic excess and overstatement, the violation of boundaries, transvestism and the assertion of the constructedness of identities and texts, something central in both Wilde and Bowie.
- 37.
Christopher Sandford, Bowie. Loving the Alien (London: Time Warner Paperbacks, 1997), 107. Many of Bowie’s songs are nourished by a space imagery, such as: ‘Space Oddity,’ ‘Life on Mars,’ ‘Starman,’ ‘Moonage Daydream,’ ‘Loving the Alien and ‘Hello Spaceboy.’
- 38.
Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 105. See also Pierpaolo Martino, La filosofia di David Bowie. Wilde, Kemp e la musica come teatro (Milano: Mimesis, 2016).
- 39.
Michael Watts, “1972: Oh You Pretty Thing,” in The Faber Book of Pop, ed. Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), 391–396.
- 40.
Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 111.
- 41.
Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 111.
- 42.
Derek Jarman “Preface,” in Anno Wilms, Lindsay Kemp and Company (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1987), 9.
- 43.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1142.
- 44.
Reynolds, Shock and Awe. Glam Rock and Its Legacy, 91.
- 45.
Bracewell, England Is Mine, 193.
- 46.
Sammells, Wilde Style, 121.
- 47.
Ana Leorne, “Dear Dr Freud-David Bowie Hits the Couch. A Psychoanalytic Approach to Some of His Personae,” in David Bowie. Critical Perspectives, eds Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin Power (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 113.
- 48.
In Ziggy’s narrative, “when the Infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti matter and cannot exist in our world” (Bowie, in Leorne, “Dear Dr Freud-David Bowie Hits the Couch,” 114).
- 49.
Leorne, “Dear Dr Freud-David Bowie Hits the Couch,” 114.
- 50.
Chambers, Urban Rhythms, 132.
- 51.
Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention, 123–124.
- 52.
Interestingly, Brett Morgan’s very recent docufilm or better art-film on Bowie, Moonage Daydream (2022)—entirely constructed on fragments of interviews and performances—features a sequence in which introducing some of the key artistic influences we can see an image of Oscar Wilde himself.
- 53.
According to novelist Jake Arnott: “Bowie was a furious reader,” so much that in 2013 he issued on his official website a (100 titles) reading list. The list is “wonderfully eclectic,” embracing everything from the Beano to Transcendental Magic by Eliphas Lévi. Orwell is of course included, “as is Burgess and Bulwer-Lytton, and others he would have read growing up: John Braine, Keith Waterhouse and Muriel Spark. His own contemporaries are well represented: Ackroyd, Amis, Chatwin, McEwan and, of course, Angela Carter.” Of Arnott’s generation, there are Sarah Waters and Rupert Thompson with Thompson standing as “something of a Thin White Duke of British fiction, sustaining a long career by constantly changing the way he writes.” Many writers including himself, as Arnott observes “owe Bowie for showing us all that work that never made it on the curriculum.” Jake Arnott, “David Bowie. The Man Who Read the World,” The Guardian, 15 June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/15/david-bowie-man-read-world-literary-influences-books-orwell. On Bowie and literature and on the 100 titles reading list, see John O’Connell, Bowie’s Bookshelf. The Hundred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life (New York: Gallery Books, 2019).
- 54.
The Bard seems particularly relevant in order to investigate Bowie’s many complexities of a man who thought himself as theatre; it is possible to establish a link between Bowie’s mid 1970s-mask, namely The Thin White Duke and Shakespeare’ s Prospero, the Duke of Milan in The Tempest. Lombardo focuses on Prospero’s multiplicity: Prospero is at once a man (who must choose between life and death), the father of Miranda, the Duke of Milan, a coloniser but also a scientist and magician. If on the one hand we must acknowledge that Prospero is the product of peculiar historical circumstances and specific conventions, four centuries distant from our own, on the other hand this very idea of plurality perfectly captures Bowie’s deeper essence and his extraordinary capacity for self-fashioning. At a different level Bowie’s role in his album Station to Station (1975)—a work powerfully nourished by Bowie’s interest in occultism—seems to be that of a magician, who is able to conduct a fascinating sonic theatre, in which he creates a synthesis of all his musical influences, indirectly composing, in this way, a tribute to the most musical of Shakespeare’s plays. Besides as Greenblatt affirms “Shakespeare the working dramatist did not typically lay claim to the transcendent, visionary truths attributed to him by his most fervent admirers; his characters more modestly say, again in the words of Prospero, that their project was ‘to please’ (The Tempest, Epilogue, line 13). The starting point, and perhaps the ending point as well, in any encounter with Shakespeare is simply to enjoy him, to savour his imaginative richness, to take pleasure in his infinite delight in language;” this kind of stance should also inform our approach to Bowie, who like Shakespeare was a man of theatre, so we must take delight and pleasure in his theatrical approach to pop itself. See Agostino Lombardo, “Prefazione,” in William Shakespeare, La Tempesta, (Milano: Garzanti, 1984), xxxvii–L and Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction,” in The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2000), 1–71.
- 55.
In 1986, Bowie contributed to the soundtrack for Julian Temple’s filmic adaptation of MacInnes’ 1959 Absolute Beginners, composing two original tracks, “That’s Motivation” and a song named after the novel, which stands as a tribute to the teenage years spent with his half-brother Terry in Soho. Interestingly, the unnamed protagonist of this novel is like Bowie himself an inside-outsider; in the very first pages of the novel, he reveals his craft of photographer and indeed what we have here is a series of moving pictures of a scene, that of 1950s London, inhabited by beautiful girls, musicians, gays, black immigrants, prostitutes and corrupted producers who literally construct and sell the latest musical talent available on the market; this was basically the London Bowie grew in. The protagonist is at once inside and outside that scene: he moves within that culture and yet he is able to capture its images and details, through very careful and almost documentary descriptions. The novel investigates the revolution generated by the rise of the world of teenagers which was strictly connected with the post-war economic boom. There was indeed, in the Fifties, an increase in the general welfare and consequently of the amount of money boys and girls could have access to which they could earn through their jobs or get through their parents. The absolute beginners of a scene emerging first in America and then in the UK were indeed teenagers who used music, fashion and the last trends in matter of catering and motorcycles to write their own identity and signal their affiliation to a specific subculture.
- 56.
In 1992, Bowie composed the soundtrack for Roger Michell’s BBC version of Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). The novel tells the story of a mixed heritage young Londoner, Karim Amir, who finds in pop a precious resource to cross all barriers (sexual, racial, social) and to give sense and vitality to his life. The novel features two main sections entitled “In the Suburbs” and “In the City” and it documents the passage of the protagonist from one to the other in a way which somehow recalls Bowie’s own translation from Brixton to Soho in the early Sixties. The novel is rich in references to popular music which document the evolution of rock and pop music from the early Seventies to the very dawn of the Thatcher’s era. In this sense, the novel signals the passage from glam rock and other parallel phenomenons like prog to punk. Charlie Hero, Karim’s best friend and lover, seems to be modelled after Bowie who among other things had attended ten years before the same Bromley School as Kureishi himself. In a recent article, Kureishi himself has focused on Bowie’s relevance in contemporary popular culture, stressing again how "he constructed himself and his many aliases from a wide range of sources" and refers to his obvious precursor, Wilde, who, as we have seen, wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray “Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature”—Hanif Kureishi, “Starman Jones,” in Id. What Happened? (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), 97–105. Bowie indeed is best described by ideas such as multiplicity and plurality; his was a philosophy based on the vital coexistence and simultaneity of opposite, irreconcilables stances. In this sense as Kureishi observes, his finest work was that incredibly difficult thing—both experimental and popular. Bowie, like Wilde, was as Critchley puts it, a ventriloquist, a man of many voices and languages. Simon Critchley, On Bowie (London: Serpents Tail, 2016), 45.
- 57.
Oscar Wilde, “The Doer of Good,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 901.
- 58.
Critchley, On Bowie.
- 59.
See Pierpaolo Martino, “‘Vicar in a Tutu’: Dialogism, Iconicity and the Carnivalesque in Morrissey,” in Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities, eds E. Devereux and A. Dillane, M. Power (Bristol, Chicago: Intellect, 2011), 225–240. This section of the present chapter draws on that contribution, rewriting and expanding it in terms of Morrissey’s (and The Smiths’) relationship with Wilde.
- 60.
See Paul A. Woods, ed., Morrissey in Conversation: The Essential Interviews (London: Plexus, 2007).
- 61.
Wilde’s epigrams can, in a sense, also be considered, as we have seen, the equivalents of Sixties pop’s 45 rpms; they are easily accessible and, in a way, ubiquitous.
- 62.
Morrissey, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics, 2013).
- 63.
See C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. We introduced Peirce’s semiotic theory in chapter 2 of the present study.
- 64.
Johnny Rogan, Morrissey and Marr. The Severed Alliance (London, New York and Sidney: Omnibus Press, 1993), 158.
- 65.
Rogan, Morrissey and Marr, 158.
- 66.
Rogan, Morrissey and Marr. The Severed Alliance, 185–186.
- 67.
Zoe Williams, “The Light That Never Goes Out,” The Guardian, 23 February 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/feb/23/shopping.smiths.
- 68.
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 179–189.
- 69.
Mark Simpson, Saint Morrissey (London: SAF, 2004), 49.
- 70.
Gavin Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), 24.
- 71.
Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, 26.
- 72.
Speaking about these films during a 1985 interview on Australian Radio, Morrissey confessed: “I’m afraid that they probably remind me of my childhood because I lived in lots of those circumstances and I also think that […] I gaze upon them fondly because it was the first time in the entire history of film where regional dialects were allowed to come to the fore and people were allowed to talk about squalor and general depression and it wasn’t necessarily a shameful thing. It was quite positive […] people were allowed to be real instead of being glamorous and Hollywoodian, if that is a word, and I sincerely hope it isn’t” Simpson, Saint Morrissey, 58.
- 73.
According to Simpson, A Taste of Honey represents: “The landscape, the mother country, the heart of Morrissey’s work […] it is a lyrical play whose affecting but plain-speaking poetry proceeds from ordinary people showing their extraordinary side […] Likewise, it exists narcissistically in a word of its own, where it is everything to itself: the drama and all the characters seem to proceed from Jo’s adolescent imagination; they are merely aspects of her own predicament, conversations between her emotions.” Simpson, Saint Morrissey, 60.
- 74.
In a 1987 Sanremo Festival interview asked about his favourite book Morrissey answered: “Oscar Wilde: Complete Works.”
- 75.
Rogan, Morrissey and Marr. The Severed Alliance, 247–248.
- 76.
See Malcolm Hicks,“Introduction,” in Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems, ed. Malcolm Hicks (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), 7–15.
- 77.
Simon Goddard, The Smiths. Songs That Saved Your Life (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002), 201.
- 78.
We have already focused in chapter 3 on Wilde’s interest and fasciation for Keats. In a recent and extremely rich study—significantly subtitled “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music”—Maureen Doody focuses instead on the relationship between Wilde and Yeats and affirms how “From their first meeting in London in 1888, Oscar Wilde’s personal image fascinated W. B. Yeats, and was catalytic in setting the workings of influence in motion. As a young man, Yeats was timid and introverted but he had aspirations to rise beyond what he saw as his limitations and develop a public persona that was more outgoing and self-assured. He saw Oscar Wilde as the embodiment of social ease, and admired his flair, fluency and style, perceiving him to be an apposite image for emulation. Both writers shared much in common: both were Dublin men from Ireland and, besides their mutual engagement with literature, politics and philosophy, they were very much interested in Irish politics and cultural concerns. Many of their friends and acquaintances were familiar to both writers. At the time of their first meeting, Wilde was a more established man of letters than his countryman who was in the early stages of his literary career, and Yeats recalls in Autobiographies the powerful impact made on him by the brilliance of Wilde’s intellect and the persuasive charm of his personality. Wilde became a constant presence in Yeats’s imagination throughout his creative life.” Noreen Doody, The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats. “An Echo of Someone Else’s Music” (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3.
- 79.
Sean Campbell, “‘Irish Blood, English Heart’: Ambivalence, Unease and The Smiths,” in Why Pamper Life’s Complexities? Essays on The Smiths, eds Sean Campbell and Colin Coulter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 51.
- 80.
Goddard, The Smiths. Songs That Saved Your Life, 277.
- 81.
John Mullen, “Detest and Survive,” MOJO Morrissey & The Smiths Special Edition, 2004, 87.
- 82.
Johnny Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums (London: Calidore, 2006), 128.
- 83.
Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 128–129.
- 84.
Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 148.
- 85.
Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 151.
- 86.
Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 152.
- 87.
John Dee, “I’m Not Sorry,” Mojo. Morrissey & the Smiths Special Edition, 2004, 112.
- 88.
Simpson, Saint Morrissey, 51.
- 89.
It is interesting to note that the publication of the single—two weeks before the album—was accompanied by the release of a video-clip consistently played at MTV, which in this way “promoted”—in visual terms—Morrissey’s counter-discourse on the establishment’s favourite discursive channel (television), something which again connects to Wilde at different levels that is to his problematic relationship with journalism and to his use of London as stage. The video features Morrissey singing the song with his musicians and a few people as audience in a relatively small (underground) marginal space. The focus of the video’s director is on Morrissey’s voice, on his words and hence on the importance of “listening” to those words. Morrissey is portrayed as a middle-aged singer who asserts his otherness in relation to the “young and beautiful” prototype often reproduced in music television, which makes us think of Wilde’s own transformation from his 1880s dandified to the more mature, decadent Nero look of the 1890s. Dressed in a white jacket—which besides being a pacifist symbol is perfectly in tune with the singer’s choice of wearing extra-elegant (Rat Pack-like) suits during concerts and public appearances from 2002 onwards—Morrissey accompanies his words with a mime which amplifies the verbal contents in particular on words such as spit, denounce and salute, that is, the expressions more directly related to the ideology of resistance.
- 90.
Cited in David Bret, Morrissey. Scandal and Passion (London: Robson Books 2004), 257.
- 91.
Hopps, Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, 59.
- 92.
Hopps, Morrissey, 6.
- 93.
Salman. Rushdie “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), 9–21.
- 94.
On the figure of Christ in Pasolini and Wilde, see Aldo Onorati, Il Cristo di Wilde e Pasolini (Napoli: Paolo Loffredo 2020).
- 95.
Speaking about the Italian director and poet during an interview, Morrissey confessed: “I’ve seen all the films […] There’s nothing flash about them. You’re seeing real people without any distractions, just the naked person, with everything taking place on the streets […] He didn’t have to be anybody else, he was being himself in his own world and even though he was obsessed with the low-life that was all he wanted.” Rogan, Morrissey. The Albums, 298.
- 96.
See Pier Poalo Pasolini Lettere Luterane (Torino: Milano, 1976).
- 97.
Mark Beaumont, “The New Roman Emperor,” New Musical Express (25 February 2006), 23.
- 98.
Peirce, Collected Papers.
- 99.
Oxford English Dictionary (Concise), ed. by Judy Pearsall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 704.
- 100.
Augusto Ponzio, “Lo Stesso Altro: il Testo e la sua Traduzione,” in Lo Stesso Altro, Athanor, n. 4, ed S. Petrilli, 2001.
- 101.
Brummett, The Rhetoric of Popular Culture.
- 102.
Kress, van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse. See also Mapping Multimodal Performance Studies, eds Maria Grazia, Sindoni, Janina Wildfeurer and Kay O’ Halloran (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
- 103.
Amy Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks. An Armchair Guide to Nick Cave (London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 2005), 10.
- 104.
Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks, 8.
- 105.
Hanson, Kicking Against the Pricks, 9.
- 106.
Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 429.
- 107.
See Will Self, “Foreward,” in The Complete Lyrics 1978–2007, ed. Nick Cave (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
- 108.
Reynolds, Rip It Up, 430.
- 109.
Reynolds, Rip It Up, 431.
- 110.
Rushdie,, “Imaginary Homelands.”
- 111.
Self “Foreward,” xi.
- 112.
Self, “Foreward,” xi–xii.
- 113.
On this aspect, see Simon Frith, “Why Do Songs Have Words,” in Id (ed) Music for Pleasure; Essays in the Sociology of Pop (London and New York: Routledge 1988) and Alan Moore, Song Means. Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).
- 114.
Cave’s second novel The Death of Bunny Munro was published in 2009.
- 115.
Nick Cave, King Ink (London: Black Spring Press, 1988), 68–75.
- 116.
Wilde, De Profundis, 48. Cave’s reply to his fan’s question can be read on Cave’s official site: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/what-is-mercy-for-you/ (The Red Hand Files, Issue 119, August 2020).
- 117.
Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again (London: Faber & Faber 2004), 431.
- 118.
On Bowie’s influence on Friday, see Friday, Gavin Friday, “Foreword,” in David Bowie. Critical Perspectives, eds Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin Power (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), xi–xii.
- 119.
Gavin Friday, “It Was Oscar Drove Me Wilde,” Independent, November 22, 2000. The Sunday Independent, https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/it-was-oscar-drove-me-wilde-26257419.html.
- 120.
Gavin Friday, “It Was Oscar Drove Me Wilde.”
- 121.
Caroline van Oosten de Boer, Gavin Friday. The Light and The Dark (Amsterdam: Von B Press, 2003), 16.
- 122.
Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 884.
- 123.
Frankel, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.) The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, 24.
- 124.
In Frankel, “Introduction,” 24.
- 125.
Frisell has very often worked in literature-related and quite sophisticated musical productions as in the case of Hal Winner’s work on (and with) Alen Ginsberg entitled The Lion for Real (Antilles, 1989). In a way, Frisell’s ironic and carnivalesque approach to music and in particular to jazz—that is, his thinking sound as theatre—connects with Wilde. Jazz music is mostly about improvisation, interplay and interaction; in this sense, it is mainly, even though unintentionally, concerned with the redefinition of the self in dialogical terms through its multiple masks; it is an art-form which being strongly rooted in concepts such as enunciation and performance confers centrality to listening. In jazz, very often there is no score to read or respond to, what the musician is asked is to listen to her body and to the body of others in order to read and translate sounds in other sounds, in a horizontal, democratic dimension, which conceives no verticality, no authority. Jazz becomes in this sense a model for a free and freed social interaction, and for the construction of a polyphonic self within this very social dialogue; jazz is a language capable of speaking across cultures, it is about stepping across lines and borders, and it is a language which refuses to rest in a single place and which very often coincides with the idea of migration itself. As Watson observes in his recent study on Bill Frisell, “jazz has always been a generous and a malleable music […] it has always reached out beyond race, culture and nation, and beyond doctrine and dogma. Jazz has always been a hybrid music as complex as its history.” Philip Watson, Bill Frisell. Beautiful Dreamer (London: Faber & Faber, 2022), 290. On jazz, migration and dialogism, see also Andy Shipton, A New History of Jazz (London: Continuum, 2008) and Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 126.
Gavin Friday, “It was Oscar Drove me Wilde.” In September 2003, Friday performed for the ESB Dublin Fringe festival, a monologue that revisited his childhood, his teenage heroes and anti-heroes, and his life’s experiences of Dublin. In the monologue entitled I Didn’t Come Up the Liffey in a Bubble, Friday confessed: “I lost my virginity to Oscar Wilde and was f***ed by Bowie, here was something that was new, it was anti-hippy, it was outrageous, it was anger. You could go to Mars with David Bowie or the bank. I knew where I was going.”
- 127.
Oscar Wilde, Claudio Marconi, and Matteo Pennese, De Profundis (Milano: Auditorium, 2012).
- 128.
Bracewell, Oscar.
- 129.
Calcutt, Brit Cult, 328.
- 130.
FV.
Fred Everett Maus, “Glamour and Evasion: The Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys” Popular Music, Vol. 20, No. 3, October 2001, 381.
- 131.
Bracewell, England Is Mine, 43.
- 132.
Bracewell, England Is Mine, 44.
- 133.
In a Diary feature written in 2009 for The Spectator, Tennant has again focused on Wilde: recalling a strange experience he had when he was 16 and he had a séance with some friends, and at some point, Oscar Wilde’s voice was heard invoking the children not to make his mistakes. Tennant has always felt a connection to Wilde since then, as though he was someone he met once for a brief moment. In the diary, Tennant also reveals how he has come across a book called Oscar Wilde in Purgatory, published in the 1920s, which consists of transcriptions of conversations a man called Hester Travers Smith claims to have had with Wilde via a ouija board. To put it with Tennant, in death, as in life, it seems Oscar is a great talker. Neil Tennant, “Diary” The Spectator, 23 May 2009.
- 134.
Neil Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), x.
- 135.
Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xxi–xxii.
- 136.
Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xv.
- 137.
Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xxii.
- 138.
Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xvi.
- 139.
Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, xxii.
- 140.
On the concept of critical interruption, see Iain Chambers, Postcolonial Interruptions. Unauthorised Modernities (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
- 141.
Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics, 89.
- 142.
Douglas Wolk, “A Full Time Punk,” The New York Times, 12 March 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/arts/music/a-fulltime-punk-again.html.
- 143.
Bauhaus, ‘Dark Entries,’ In the Flat Field, 4AD, 1980.
- 144.
As Lynskey observes “Like the Smiths […] the Libertines come armed with several bedroom-walls’ worth of heroes and icons, a cultural collage that reaffirms the idea that sometimes in rock there is nothing sexier than a voracious intelligence. They enthuse about a mythic Englishness they refer to as Albion […] and Arcadia. […] They have expressed affection for Oscar Wilde, Disraeli, and Galton and Simpson. You might also add Joe Orton, Lindsay Anderson’s film If… and Pinkie from Brighton Rock.” Dorian Lynskey, “We Believe in Melody, Hearts and Minds,” The Guardian, 10 January 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/jan/10/artsfeatures.libertines
- 145.
Lynskey, “We Believe in Melody.”
- 146.
Simon Hattenstone, “Down and Dirty,” The Guardian, 22 April 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/apr/22/popandrock.libertines
- 147.
See John Shepherd, Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
- 148.
Laura Barton, Alex Petridis, “Emily Dickinson? She’s Hardcore,” The Guardian, 3 October 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/oct/03/poetry.popandrock. In this perspective, in his 2007 monograph on Doherty, Hannaford focuses on The Libertines and on their capacity of creating with their admirers a community through a shared interest in literature: “Rock’n’roll hadn’t seen anything like The Libertines for too long. Pete knew his poetry and his literature, but he gave it an edge – he made it cool. And the truth was, thousands of kids were getting inspired. Pete’s love of language; his passion for England and Englishness; his quest for Arcadia; his love of literature, all rubbed off on his audience. Rock’n’roll had been injected with intelligence. Suddenly Internet message boards – thought of as time-wasting and even dangerous by parents – were alive with chatter, but fans were discussing where the terms ‘Albion’ and ‘Arcadia’ had cropped up in British literature. They were talking about Oscar Wilde, quoting Blake, Yeats, Coleridge and Byron.” Alex Hannaford, Pete Doherty. Last of the Rock Romantics (Reading: Ebury Press, 2007), 263.
- 149.
Other songs based on Wilde’s play include Kim Wilde’s ‘House of Salome’ (1981, in which the singer mixes 1980s synth-pop and Arabian melodies), ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ by John Cale (1991, featuring dark, hypnotic piano figures and spoken word by Judy Nylon) and ‘Stand Inside your Love’ by The Smashing Pumpkins (2000, whose video stands as a fascinating black and white filmic adaptation of the play and a tribute to Aubrey Beardsley).
- 150.
Wilde, “The Ballad” 883.
- 151.
The Australian band The Cat Empire also published a song entitled ‘Oscar Wilde’ in 2019; the song characterized by a world music upbeat sound heavily indebted to Paul Simon most definitely seems not to reflect the melancholy and complexity of the playwright’s character.
- 152.
Commenting on the promo of ‘Oscar Wilde,’ Wilde scholar S. I. Salamensky observes how: “dressed, in a video of the song in a schoolboy uniform, and humorously depicted as ‘French Club President,’ ‘Debate Team Captain,’ ‘Choirmaster,’ ‘Kung Fu Club Yellow Belt,’ and in other ways Most Likely to Succeed, Schatz, like her bandmates, is spirited and bright – undoubtedly someone whom Wilde, were he alive today, would like far more than the dim, dull scholars who read and study his work.” Salamensky, The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde, 155.
- 153.
Tom Doyle, “Fantastic Voyage,” Mojo, Vol. 155, October 2006, 90.
- 154.
Elton John, ‘Oscar Wilde Gets Out’ in The Diving Board (Capitol, 2013).
- 155.
Marlene Kuntz, ‘Il genio (L’importanza di essere Oscar Wilde),’ Nella tua luce (Sony, 2013):
- 156.
Vinicio Capossela, ‘La ballata del carcere di Reading,’ in Ballate per uomini e bestie (Warner, 2019).
- 157.
Mahones, ‘Stars,’ in The Hunger and the Fight (True North, 2017).
- 158.
Marchelle Bradanini ‘Oscar Wilde’ in Only a Woman (Bandcamp, 2020).
- 159.
Benjamin Clementine, ‘Eternity,’ (Behind, 2018).
- 160.
Sammells, Wilde Style, 127.
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Martino, P. (2023). On the Wilde Side: Oscar Wilde in Contemporary Pop Culture. In: WILDE NOW. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_5
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