Morrissey recently shared a carousel of old photos on his Instagram. Most of the photos are from the '90s, and they capture Moz with people like the punk singer-songwriter Phranc, his guitarist Gary Day, and the feminist artist Linder Sterling. The final photo in the carousel is not of Morrissey, but of a letter he apparently received from Ron and Russell Mael, his old buddies in Sparks. Moz's caption says the duo wrote the letter to him "before they turned into headless Palisades savages who threw their old friends into hot molten lava for sexy kicks."
Morrissey was an early Sparks adopter, telling NME in 1974 that their LP Kimono My House was "the album of the year." Many albums later in 2008, Sparks released "Lighten Up, Morrissey," a tongue-in-cheek song about a guy whose crush is too obsessed with Morrissey to go out with an average Joe.
By 2017, Sparks had claimed that Morrissey was flattered by "Lighten Up, Morrissey." That same year, however, jihadist terrorists staged a suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena after an Ariana Grande concert, and Morrissey gave a pretty misguided critique of the government's response to the tragedy. The next year, Russell Mael described being "disillusioned" by Moz following those remarks: "[His stance] seemed so inconsistent, all these perspectives that he has on those various issues, just stupid, dumb kind of things. I obviously don’t agree with any of these things. They’re just so ill-conceived and wrong.”
In 2021, Morrissey's nephew interviewed him, and asked about his apparent fallout with Sparks. "I’m quite used to it," Moz said when asked if he was upset by what Sparks had said about him. "I stood by Sparks for many years and I promoted them in my own humble way whenever I could, and they were famously people without opinions so I was surprised that they kicked me in the teeth. It came across as an almost fiendish ingratitude. Oh, the pain of parting! [Laughs.] They will always be important to me as a memory."
So all of this, I suppose, amounts to what Morrissey has now called getting thrown into "hot molten lava for sexy kicks." Here's what Sparks' letter to him said:
Morrissey —
Here's the cassette of demos that we worked up in some very rough form. Hope that you enjoy them.
Have been trying to phone you for about a week to let you know they were on their way, but without any luck. So, hope the tape reaches you somewhere. Give a call when you do receive it.
Talk to you soon.
I wonder what was on that demo cassette. See Morrissey's post below.
