The Word Smith and Me - Guest Post by Louise Hart
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If my life were a song, Morrissey would sing it. When I sat before my chunky television set on Friday 4th November 1983, my life changed forever. For framed within a seemingly impenetrable screen, was a figure who reached into my narrow existential realm and told me that I was okay. When you are fifteen and believe yourself a freak, you long for affirmation. Morrissey arrived just in time to save me from isolation and reassure me of my uniqueness. Like many lost souls of the Thatcher generation, I clung to the poet of pop, believing that his voice mirrored my own. When Morrissey sang I heard, not violins, but my own concerns and preoccupations reflected back to me, in the form of his song lyrics. I had fallen in love with words and I was never to recover. Morrissey’s lyrics struck my ears like a synthesis of aural honey and acid; he spat out words with proletarian divinity and relieved himself, like a backstreet urchin, on the non-believers