A true twentieth century icon and man of inestimable cultural value, Morrissey’s influence and appeal have long since been the source of ill-conceived cash-ins promising insight and authority but only to offer theory and speculation as to what transpires inside that cynical, celebrated mind. Outside of a self-penned biography, there will be no definitive answer. Until that time (which apparently is steadily approaching) the only thing required is what Simon Goddard has provided.

Having plumbed the depths of Smiths-dom in Songs That Saved Your Life and its later “re-issue, re-package, re-evaluate the songs” (snicker) revised edition comes the final piece in the apparent trilogy, this…. Mozipedia. With over 500 pages and 600 plus entries, Goddard’s dedication to the cause is well without question, rounding up references from the oblique to the obvious, appealing not only to those with a passion for tracing Morrissey’s literary and lyrical borrowings, but also those keen for insider knowledge to a songs origin — The Smith‘s not-so-subtle lifting of T-Rex’s “Metal Guru” rhythm section on “Panic” for instance.

It also lifts the veil on unreleased recordings, information about collaborators, influences, places of importance, his preference for mashed food and his habit of crediting his hairdresser on record sleeves. With the addition of new interviews with Johnny Marr, Chrissie Hynde, Siouxsie Sioux and Nancy Sinatra, and a thorough dissection of all Morrissey recordings post-The Smiths, including Years of Refusal, it’s much more than an updated edition of Songs That Saved Your Life. The in-depth multi-page entries to the crucial poets, artists, actors of cinema and television, and the point in which their trajectory meets with Morrissey’s define its encyclopedia status.

On the bookshelf it’s an intimidating and well designed beast. It goes against the grain of most Morrissey tomes but not using a picture of his lordship in favour of a 60′s style pop-art illustration. Mozipedia – The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and The Smiths (to give its full title) does what the title implies. For the Morrissey apostle its as indispensable as it is engaging, perhaps one of the few encyclopedias that you feel obliged to start at A and go right through to the end. For a man now in his fiftieth year, you can’t but help think Morrissey would find some amusement in being deemed ‘encyclopedia-worthy’. Simon Goddard, for all his efforts, has surprisingly made it so.

Enigmatic and outspoken member of Australian ex-paisley, ex-pop, now quasi-Space rock adventurers The Church, Steve Kilbey has always been a hard man to put down, let alone encounter. Despite his daily blogging on http://stevekilbey.blogspot.com, he’s one of the original churlish and resolute pop stars that myths are made of. Tight-lipped and clipped, Steve Kilbey has been known not to suffer fans, fools or fiends lightly.

This biography is about due. The Church’s star has long since ascended and fallen, Kilbey is more a parent than a musician, and his erstwhile bandmates keep themselves busy. The Church is only an occupation while somebody is there to pay the bills. No disrespect to Robert Lurie’s ability as a writer, but his perspective is from a devote fan, and unfortunately that of an American fan’s who caught the band well into their career. Beggars can’t be choosers but one wonders if there were people who’s contributions don’t rely so heavily on that of the band and their acquaintances.

Too often he falls into the fannish trap of holding Kilbey beyond reprieve. He does undercut the man but too often falls under his spell. Those familiar with the band no doubt have their own stories. This writer recalls sitting in the studio during the making of Hologram of Baal whilst Kilbey made many trips to and from the bathroom to shoot up, each time coming back cracking wise, or sitting backstage in Sydney at the Metro before a show, the main conversation points being who’s got the eyeliner, who’s got the coke? Kilbey’s predilection for drugs is universal with The Church and something he’s made no bones about.

If anything, No Certainty Attached left me wanting more Kilbey. It was neither as insightful in the working mind of the artist nor historically in depth as it could’ve been. Church fans are notoriously eager for the dirt behind the dirt. The stories behind the songs. The Unguarded Moments that become Milky Ways. With Kilbey the ever public diarist, such a biography almost becomes null and void. Too often is Kilbey lured into treading the memory boards and soliciting the meat (poor analogy for a voracious vegetarian) for free and leaving Lurie to strip the bones. Like any good artist, Kilbey leaves you wanting more, and you can’t help but feel that despite all his good intentions, Lurie barely scraped the surface.

“The Forgotten Man of Britpop”.

As ludicrous a tag to hang on anyone, Luke Haines must be shaking in embarrassment for even allowing the suggestion to be made. One would think the Forgotten Man of Britpop would prefer to remain un-named and un-shamed, seeing that it’s a period in English music history that was akin to a gold rush minus the gold, guitars swung like pickaxes, searching for the elusive vein. What Haines has to do with any of this is beyond me. His Britpop era act The Auteurs being as likely to embrace a ticking bomb than willingly be associated with Blur or Oasis.

Bad Vibes, Haines memoir to those heady days is not only a polemic on Britpop, but the music industry and musicians in general. His own hate-filled debt-collecting masterpiece if you will. His pedigree in this was never in question, starting all the way back from his first band The Servants, right through to present day. If you ever did Haines wrong, he’d never let it go, even when you’ve long since been given your P45 and shoved out the back of  the rental van. Woe behold the one only referred to in the book, not by name, but as “The Cellist”.

His recollections do reek of well-thumbed copies of the NME and Melody Maker, but his insight and retelling are as good as any you’d overhear at the Groucho in its heyday. His candour and behaviour adds only to the legend – the bad loser in the Mercury Awards, the tormented artist who hated touring so much that he broke both legs throwing himself off a ledge. Opting for career suicide by driving The Auteurs into a brick wall and seeing how they survived by enlisting the help of Steve Albini with After Murder Park and so on.

Despite having the ability to craft great albums, The Auteurs were not a favoured band and their “Wonderwall” moment never came.  Haines mistily recalls the disappointment of expectation after a rash of ‘new band hype’ didn’t translate into sales. Chart placings are generally irrelevant and are no arbiters of taste, but for The Auteurs, even when you thought they were a band in ascendancy, they never really took off (except in Paris – give your band a French name and align into the art scene and they’ll adopt you as their own). After the faded Hollywood glamour of their debut New Wave, and the ill-judged follow-up Now I’m A Cowboy, The Auteurs were relegated to rocks back pages and Haines became better known for his vitriolic lashings of his peers than his music. A harnesser of choice quotes rather than a writer of great songs.

Bitter and scathing as he might seem, Haines would agree that many great minds were never appreciated in their own time, but few went as far as creating a terrorist themed band/album combo and having the old nudge-nudge wink-wink moment that comes with a Top 40 single entitled “Unsolved Child Murder”. If Haines was tempted to go down the less safer route, painting himself into a tight corner and espousing against all, I’m sure he’d have a hard time finding a publisher, but placing himself within the Britpop Generation at least gives the curious a place to start, and is a far more entertaining and worthy read than Alex James’ own sketchy recollections of that time.

For a career that existed before the birth of Britpop and still continues to this day, it seems a wasted opportunity to end Bad Vibes in career midstream. Haines’ sense of humour and his contempt for the music industry never lost its bite, and for the man who once called for a moratorium on pop music for one week, his ideas would occasionally exceed his ability to deliver, but his conviction was never doubted.

It begins at the end, or the supposed end, where having retired the old guard for a succession of young guns, Mark E. Smith faces up to a musician mutiny on The Fall’s 2006 tour of America, where the disgruntled boys quit en masse four dates in. Were it for the peculiar placing as the opening chapter, you’d think Renegade was solely an excuse to settle old scores and while the transgressors get their due, this opens up to a unique insight into the wonderful and frightening world of Mark E. Smith.

“I hope this book turns out to be Mein Kampf for the Hollyoaks generation.”

Were such a thing possible, Smith might’ve been a dangerous man, though its unlikely the “Hollyoaks generation” are going to find favour with the reflective ramblings of a fifty-odd year old man, who might recognise The Fall’s “Touch Sensitive” as being used in the Vauxhall car advert. Renegade reads as little more than hours of recorded interviews taken down the pub, Smith having one eye on a match on Sky tv and the other on the jukebox, of which co-author Austin Collins should be applauded for the onerous task of transcribing and trying to put Smith’s tangential musings in some kind of logical order.

The Fall were one of the first uncompromising bands to come out of the Manchester punk scene in 1978. Personally, they were also one of the first bands I ever saw — Smith and The Fall in Sydney in 1991 touring on the back of Extricate. It was one of those life-changing moments. Smith was on form and The Fall were the greatest. I’d grown up reading his interviews in the NME. I recall the one where he was sat with Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan in a pub and the journalist only had to get the rounds in and hit record. It was all there — his biting wit, his?Northern working class attitude and his indifference to his peers and the music industry as a whole. The Fall were a band unique to themselves, and so was Mark E. Smith.

The years and the bottle haven’t weakened him. Throughout Renegade Smith is often garrulous and cruelly dismissive. Having to consider the amount of musicians that have passed through the ranks of the Fall, he finds himself barely holding back contempt: “I find it hard to talk about enthusiastically about the ex-band members thing… They came, they saw, they fucked off and now I no longer see them.”, then later comparing himself to the manager of Manchester United, “I’m a bit like Alex Ferguson of the music game… He knows when to fuck players off… It’s his club. His ideas. His final word.”. A hard taskmaster, you begin understand just why the wheels so regularly began to fall off.

The Brix years are given a chapter entitled “The Wife”, where she too is relegated a minor role and her contributions diminished “It’s incorrect to say that Brix smoothed out the rough edges of the band. People only said that because of the way she looked”, and also his humorous experiences with women, “My sex life actually went down when I formed The Fall. It wasn’t the reason why I did it, of course”, and relationships, “Every woman I’ve been out with has been different. But when we’ve broken up it’s always been for the best. More often than not, they’ve left me.”. As uncompromising as he sounds, Smith is largely aware of his destructive nature and that he is at times his own worst enemy.

The 90s find Smith and The Fall at their nadir. Smith, now divorced, was then sued by a manager and filed for bankruptcy, while the Fall continued on making largely unimpressive albums throughout the decade. The lowest point being the one that brought The Fall back into focus again, with the much publicised incident in 1998 while the band was on tour New York. After scuffling with the band onstage and taking it back to the hotel, Smith is later arrested and charged with third-degree assault, spending two nights in the cells. Fortunately for him he wasn’t alone, “The best thing about it was that I got arrested the same day as George Michael. Because on MTV at 6am, the headlines are ‘British indie-rock guy goes ape-shit in New York hotel’. But two hours later George Michael was arrested. So that was the main news.”

For people who like the sound of the curmudgeonly music legend giving you his lager-ed wisdom (“Women who are into red wine are manic-depressives” and “99.9 per cent of people on a healthy diet eventually die”), this would’ve made a stupendous audio book. For fans of the Fall who’ve either intently or casually followed the band over the years, you’re given a swift run-through the recordings of key works with Smith more or less keen on focussing on the ineptitudes of record companies and their staff. Despite the “I don’t wilt like other people. If I wasn’t who I am I wouldn’t stand a chance nowadays” chest-beating there will only ever be one Mark E. Smith, and while a better story has yet to be written Renegade is likely the best we’re going to get.

“I don’t wanna stay at your party/I don’t want talk to your friends/I don’t wanna vote for your president/I just wanna be your tugboat captain.” Over simple chords, and a shaky voice listing in an ocean of reverb, it was with those words that first signalled the arrival of a little known Boston, Massachusetts band called Galaxie 500.

Dean Wareham wrote the words, played the guitar and sang the songs, along with fellow Harvard University friend Damon Krukowski on drums and his girlfriend Naomi Yang on bass. Both of whom were of equal importance and input, but Wareham was most assuredly its tugboat captain. When he suddenly decided to jump ship, it was not only as much of a shock to their fans as it was to the rest of the band, who were left rudderless without their meal ticket. Black Postcards opens with a disparaging quote from Krukowski discussing Wareham’s behaviour toward the end of Galaxie 500′s tenure where under a supposed prearranged spotlight, Wareham walks to the front of stage to engage in a little rock posturing. An event that flew so far against the grain of the un-rock Galaxie 500 that left Krukowski disgusted. To begin an autobiography with such an unflattering endorsement sets the scene for an honest and candid appraisal of one’s musical career.

Black Postcards charts Wareham’s early beginnings in New Zealand and Australia, before settling down in Manhattan in 1977, finding the teenage, music-curious Wareham in the midst of a musical explosion. From his attendance at CBGBs watching bands like Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Pere Ubu, to the Paisley scene that would give rise to the Dream Syndicate and Opal, bands that would influence the sound of the nascent Galaxie 500. From their first single, the aforementioned “Tugboat” released in 1988 to their third and final album This Is Our Music released in 1990, Galaxie 500 grew from being a disregarded act in their own hometown to playing festivals across Europe and sold-out shows in London and New York. From scribbled diary entries, Wareham charts the success of the band growing in inverse proportion to his own happiness, wholly aware that as the band became a business, any democratic decision-making became impossible when two-thirds of your band are in a relationship.

In the wake of Galaxie 500, Wareham formed Luna, a more livelier, psychedelic extension of the Galaxie 500 sound, this time comprised of four males and not a couple among them. Arriving during the grunge explosion of the early 90′s, Luna found themselves, like Australia’s The Go-Betweens, being one of the quintessential great rock bands you’ve never heard before. In an era when Pearl Jam and Nirvana were ushering in a new era, disenfranchised youth may have understood the meaning behind “In my dreams I slash your tires,” but were lost in stoned confusion at “Are you a fox or a hedgehog?” Despite all attempts to the contrary, the acclaim Wareham encountered on a small label with Galaxie 500 would never transfer to that of a major label. They managed to survive throughout that decade within their niche of hardcore fans, but that didn’t quite equate to the amount of sales required to keep a big label from dictating decisions for you.

There are elements of schadenfreude and soul-searching throughout Black Postcards, from returning to hotels you swore you’d never spend another night in, to grown men trading infantile jabs in a packed econoline van to alleviate boredom. Wareham frequently relates to rock bible film This Is Spinal Tap but to me his adventures are more akin to National Lampoon’s European Vacation with Wareham playing the role of Chevy Chase, as the uncertainness of touring in foreign countries mounts up with the long drives, cheap hotels, bad food, petty arguments, and the knowledge that a year from now you’ll be playing to the same place playing to the same people, while your records sell in ever dwindling amounts. From massaging the ego of a guitarist who needs to be constantly placated to dealing with his own post-groupie guilt, Wareham had to master the role of democratic band leader and also be accountable for his own imperfections.

An awkward and unexpected turning point in both the band and Wareham’s personal life occurs when original bassist Justin Harwood quietly quits the band returning to New Zealand. After a few auditions, the settle on the dazzling and demure Britta Phillips to fill the bass shoes — a no-brainer decision if there ever was one. Wareham instructs the rest of the band: “No hanky panky. If anyone gets involved with her they’re out,” before going on to guiltily devour his own words, breaking the cardinal rock ‘n’ rule of “don’t fuck the bass player,” knowing that such an action would not only change and inform the dynamic of the band (as it did with Galaxie 500) but also bring forth a disintegration of his marriage.

Black Postcards is as much a personal memoir as it a diary of a rock and roll band. At times a truly depressing read, and a more than valid shattering of the myth that ‘living the dream’ does not automatically make for an easy bed, especially when those moments of being onstage for 90 minutes barely add up to the days and weeks in limbo where you try to exist as best you know how. Much will be said about Wareham’s lonely encounter with an Amsterdam prostitute, though while this would barely raise an eyebrow with your hard partying rock and roller, it’s an unexpected and awkward admission, but what Wareham highlights with this is that there are no hard and fast rules to life on the road. You are tested, physically and emotionally, and in cases presented in these pages, you often find yourself wanting.

With the wealth of music autobiographies appearing written by contemporary musicians, Black Postcards finds its own niche amongst the excess and success, highlighting the plight of the mid-level band, where youthful exuberance belongs in a different decade and paying the bills becomes the prime motivation in hitting the road. The highs never seem quite high enough and the lows become your own personal demons, saved for your therapist, or in this case, your publisher. One can only hope that the subtitle of this biography, “A rock and roll romance” stays true. Wareham is too good to let it go to waste.