• Derry (Rialto) - Nov. 24 and Belfast (Ulster Hall) - Nov. 25, not the other way around as previously listed.
• New date: Galway - Nov. 27
• Cork - Nov. 30 - not Nov. 27 as previously listed.

Sorry about the mixup - it's probably a good idea to confirm any of these dates before making travel plans. At least now we can tell  who's been copying from the site without giving credit... here's a link (from Gert) to an article that just appeared at NME.com about the tour dates (they have the old uncorrected Irish dates), "November Spawned A Mozza" (Sep. 9).

Some info on other gigs-

From Travesti:

We've talked to La Iguana, the promoters in Spain, and YES, Morrissey will be playing in Barcelona (Zeleste) and Madrid (LaRiviera). Tickets on sale next week.

I spoke to the manager of Sex-Beat Records in Copenhagen, and he confirmed the Moz show in the Grey Hall on the 24th - tickets will be on sale Monday the 14th September at 10 o'clock through BilletNet. The tickets are exorbitantly expensive IMO, 315 Dkr which is roughly equal to 50 USD.

The Grey Hall can hold about 1600 people.

Hope to see a lot of people there anyway.

The Oct. 22 show in Tilburg, Netherlands is confirmed. Tickets will go on sale on Sat. Sept. 11. You shall be able to order tickets via this link.

I spoke to the Barrowlands in Glasgow, Scotland, and they said Morrissey WOULD be appearing there "round about" December 5. They said the date would be confirmed over the next two days.

I was just visiting a site about the Byrds called ByrdWatcher. It has a long interview with David Crosby. In the interview, he talks about Johnny Rogan in terms that are very... familiar. Seems like Morrissey isn't the only one to question the man's veracity.

Excerpt:

---

I Have Seen That Movie, And It Wasn't Like That

BW: There is a lot of detail about Michael's last days that I hadn't ever heard before in the new version of Johnny Rogan's book...

DC: Rogan is not actually a very good source. Johnny Rogan thinks he knows everything, and he speaks with great authority, but he is repeatedly wrong. If you sit down with that book, I can show you 24 mistakes in the first 7 pages. He comes off as if he really knows everything, and he is an opinionated little son of a bitch, but he is continually misinformed. And I would like to go on record as saying "Do not take Johnny Rogan as an accurate source, because he damn well isn't." He can't even spell names, let alone get facts right.

BW: There's a funny interview where Chris Hillman runs into him sometime after that book comes out and just gives him the dickens. And Rogan recounts it, pretty much at his own expense, somewhere. He basically got the bum's rush from Hillman, and it's like a three paragraph interview.

DC: I'm not surprised. You know, Chris feels, I'm sure, very much the same way I do. The guy is... you know, he comes off opinionated as hell and acts like he really knows what the hell he is talking about and he really damn well doesn't. If he had expressed all of his misinformation as opinion, I would have said, fine, he has a right to all the opinions he wants. But he purports it to be the facts, and he is sadly mistaken.

First Radiohead and now Blur - in a UK teletext interview to promote their singles box set, Alex James from Blur said that their singer/songwriter Damon Albarn was inspired to form a band after watching the South Bank Show on The Smiths. Blur will have a South Bank Show dedicated to themselves soon.

A South Bank Show special on Blur will be screened at the end of October. The documentary will follow them on tour, in the studio and back to their home town of Colchester. Each band member tells his own story, with Alex providing a tour of his favourite pubs and clubs around London. Damon, meanwhile, reveals he started Blur, originally called Seymour, after watching a South Bank Show on The Smiths.

Our old friend Billy Bragg is talking about the Smiths again on the Music365 website.

An excerpt:

---

Did you really look at their material that closely?
"Very closely. Frankly, I wouldn't be covering their songs if I wasn't that into it. I opened for them on their first American tour and I was playing 'Jeane' in my set because they weren't. At the end of the tour Morrissey came up to me and said, 'You've reminded me of how great a song it is'. I was listening to a compilation their stuff in the car the other day, and it got me thinking about how without The Smiths they'd be no Suede, no Pulp, so many bands just wouldn't exist, and I don't think they're always given the credit they deserve."

Is there a Smiths' song you wish you'd written yourself?
"That would be 'Back To The Old House'. I remember when I first heard about The Smiths back in 1983. A lot of people who were writing to me were also going to see them and then the first time I actually saw them I wasn't that overwhelmed. It was at the Electric Ballroom in Camden and the guy next to me shouted, 'They're the new Beatles!', and I said 'Yeah, and I'm the new Bob Dylan'. I didn't really get them until I was doing a soundcheck for a gig in Sheffield and someone played 'Back To The Old House' through the speakers, and then it really got me.

"When I say I was in competition with them, I don't mean I was trying to better them, but they were certainly moving in a way and cutting a swathe which was complementary to what I was doing. I always felt we both represented something really positive in British songwriting, our attitudes and our points of reference were similar. Me and Johnny hooked up because we didn't really know any big rock stars or anything, so when we came to make our respective albums, mine and The Smiths, the only people we knew were the guys who'd produced Peel sessions, particularly John Porter, who kinda put us together. There's a lot of common musical ground between us, Johnny once told me that most of his guitar riffs were just Martin Carthy folk tunes speeded up."

I know he's popping up a lot lately, but that may be in proportion to the amount he opens his mouth:

>From a concert review in The Oregonian, Portland, OR Saturday 9/4/99

"Bragg lost no chance to tell people his beliefs, but he was never strident. An honest workingman, in other words, and one of the lads. He laughed at a music paper's one-line description of him as 'the poor man's Morrissey--and that's no slight.' 'No,' he told the crowd of 2,500, 'but it is wrong--I'm the workingman's Morrissey."

I recently saw Billy Bragg in concert here at the Fillmore in San Francisco. It was a good show that had some funny Morrissey moments.

First, Billy mentioned that someone wrote in a magazine (I didn't catch the name) that Billy is "the poor man's Morrissey." He said "this is not a slag; but if that's true...I 'd like to be more along the lines of the ' working man's Morrissey!'" Then he did his song "A New England" and improvised a Smiths' ending to the song singing: "I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I'm UNDERPAID now." It was neat to hear this little tribute. Later on he covered "Jeane" as he seems to be doing on this tour. After the show I went up to get my CD signed and he saw that I had my "Sheila Take a Bow" T shirt on. He laughed and said "Aha! I see what you're wearing there! More Morrissey!"

I said it was nice to hear him do "Jeane" and that I really like the stuff he and Johnny did together, but that was the extent of our conversation. He was a very nice guy and I just thought this story might be of interest to others...

This was taken from an interview with Ronnie Martin of the synth band Joy Electric...

Talking a bit about what you do lyrically, there almost seems to be a bit of irony in the new band being called Joy Electric, because coming with the new band name was a darker turn in the lyric writing.

The name Joy Electric, unfortunately, it's not meant to evoke happiness and joy and this kind of stuff. The songs just come out the way they do. Sometimes I'll have an idea of, "I want this song to be about this," or whatever, and a lot of it's just trying to make a personal experience sound like its not a typical personal experience, you know, try to make it sound a little different or neat-o or something. Some of the songs are written, I guess, because I get really depressed sometimes, and it comes out of that kind of state. But it balances the music. To me the best music was music that almost sounds happy, but at the same time it's got all that melancholy going through it. To me that's how The Smiths were. If you listen to a Smiths instrumental track you've got all this guitar chirping away and it's all major chords and it all sounds kind of happy until Morrisey gets on top of it and he does his melodies and it turns it all through. So you can say the music sounds all upbeat and happy, but Morrisey's melodies are so beautifully sad and that's all I've ever really wanted to do with it. And it's hard to do, I've had a hard time doing it. Some songs click and other ones just don't.

I just went to the R.E.M. show on Jones Beach, Long island. Right before the concert started in the pre-set music "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" came on. I was shocked, and as the song ended the show started. It made the R.E.M. show that much better for me.

KROQ's list of 500 songs of the 90's included two Morrissey songs. "Sing Your Life" came in at #453 and "Tomorrow" at #145. That kind of sucked but I was glad to see them in the countdown anyways.