Kill Uncle

Kill Uncle
"... both very good and like nothing else in pop"
"Tunes a loving mother would have trouble humming"

Our Frank
Asian Rut
Sing Your Life
Mute Witness
King Leer
Found Found Found
Driving Your Girlfriend Home
The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye
(I'm) The End Of The Family Line
There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends
Tony The Pony

Released In March 1991

"Langer and Winstanley produced Kill Uncle and it's the most commercial sounding recording Morrissey has ever made, though it contains some of his finest, most intimate songs ("There's A Place In Hell For Me and My Friends")."
- Dan O'Kane, CD Review, April 1994

BETTER RELATE THAN NEVER
"Welcome back, Mozzer. Three years in an absurd wilderness of his own making have done sod all for Morrissey's reputation as someone to be taken seriously and a lot for his image as Mr. Flaming Pillock.
On the few occasions he gave interviews, Morrissey chose to present himself as arrogant, self-obsessed and depressed. Not much new there, except he wasn't funny anymore. In the meantime, he released singles from which invention, melody and the old Moz trick of having something interesting to say had nipped out to the corner shop with no intention of returning. 'November Spawned A Monster', 'Interesting Drug', 'Ouija Board, Ouija Board', 'Picadilly Palare' - a quartet of duller records has not been released in such numbing succession since the last days of Johnny Hates Jazz.
"If ever there was a man who had lost his way, his interest in making music, or possibly his will to live, it was Morrissey. But by immense good fortune for the known universe, Moz suddenly decided to write with Mark Nevin, the one with the hat in Fairground Attraction. This meant that there was a chance that Morrissey might actually make a good record; and if he didn't, it would effectively be goodbye to old grumbleguts forever.
"So Moz and Nevin went off and worked together. And the result of their unlikely labour is 'Kill Uncle', the first longish new Morrissey product since 1987. Produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley and played on by Nevin, Andrew Paresi and ex-Madness man Bedders, 'Kill Uncle' is a somewhat underweight 33 minutes of music. It's got one rather long song and a couple of very short ones. And it's pretty good. Nevin and occasional writer Langer have cured us of Morrissey/Rourke Disease and written flaming melodies for Mr. Music.
"They have put nagging hooks and memorable arrangements in places where once the band merely plodded on to the next verse. And in this context Morrissey does what we expect of him, some things we don't expect of him and pop music raises its standard triumphantly over the corpse of 'Ouija Board, Ouija Board'.
"The predictable stuff is the least good. There's '(I'm) The Last Of The Family Line' [sic] - once you've heard the title, you've heard the song - with irritating Moz lines like "I arrive/With incredible style" which wouldn't be funny even if you were drunk. There's a self-pitying song about being fancied by someone who isn't a schemer ('Found Found Found') but it stomps like the very devil and it has bass guitar the size of Scotland on it. And we have the rather splendidly final (in both senses of the word) track 'There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends' with its sarcasm and anger-dripping lyric ("All that we hope is that when we go" croons Morrissey, "Our skin and our blood and our bones don't get in your way/Making you ill the way they did when we lived") and churchy piano.
"Everything else leaves the production line with a bang. 'Our Frank' you may well have heard, with its mess of riffing guitars like a sudden shower of spears and incredibly unpleasant lyric about vomiting on pullovers. It is a cousin of thunder and a sister to the remarkable 'Mute Witness', wherein the guitars wail and crash like the Pixies on amyl nitrate, the piano clatters like some old Sparks tracks, a keyboard goes "oh ah oh ah" and Morrissey sings a Twin Peaks-like vignette of a woman standing on a table and pointing to a frisbee.
"With the possible exception of the five minute chord-grinding and fairly self-explanatory 'The Harsh Truth Of The Camer Eye', Morrissey allows compassion to rear its be-quiffed head too. 'Driving Your Girlfriend Home' is a short story of pain and 'Asian Rut' is classically bonkers. Only Morrissey could have decided to answer critics by writing a song where an Asian teenager attempts to revenge his best friend's death and is murdered by English boys, the whole shebang set to a funeral march with grim violin stylings top it. The pudding is nearly over-egged, but not quite.
"So 'Kill Uncle' is a collection of songs that are both very good and like nothing much else in pop. They range every which way across styles and themes and still they sound like only Morrissey could have sung them. 'Kill Uncle' bodes immensely well for the future, not least because this is the first Moz album where half the songs are about someone other than himself. It also indicates to all but the dimmest that a Smiths reunion is about as useful and relevant to anyone's life as a Yell! reunion.
"For now, things are great Moz-wise and all we need is a world tour, a few happy smiles and another top album which has actually got 45 minutes of music on it and we will all be in paradise together."
- David Quantick, New Musical Express, 1991

"An under-nourished 33 minutes 5 seconds of lyrically potent (possibly for the first time in pop music history the words 'Chihuahua' and 'Tizer' are used and successfully rhymed) but musically drab doodlings. Pop meisters Langer and Winstanley produced but Our Frank and Mute Witness aside, these are tunes a loving mother would have trouble humming." (**)
- Q, September 1992

"After falling out with Stephen Street, Morrissey enlisted Fairground Attraction guitarist Mark Nevin plus celebrated Madness producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley for his second official album. It's a slender volume at just 33 minutes, featuring lovely featherlight ballads ("Driving Your Girlfriend Home", "I'm The End Of The Family Line") but also flashes of the worryingly lazy self-parody which would dog future releases." (***)
- Stephen Dalton, Uncut, 1998

TIMID
Struggling for compassion and inspiration, Morrissey's creative rafters may be riddled with woodworm.
"No stranger to the extravagant gesture, on the sleeve of his first all-new long-player since 1988's Viva Hate, Morrissey is pictured from below as if he were a soapbox orator belabouring a gathering of the curious under a clouded English sky. Which, perhaps, he is. Less exquisitely titled than its predecessor, Kill Uncle still offers no balm to that dwindling band who hold that singers by their mere popularity should be obliged to serve the young an example of moral rectitude and good table manners. Sadly, it also offers Morrissey's worried fans further evidence of woodworm in the creative rafters, a state of affairs one could have predicted by noting that this much agonised-over follow-up to Viva Hate totals just 33 minutes and five seconds of playing time - less, once suspects, a return to LPs like they used to make 'em (and a snook cocked at value-for-money CD owners), than an admission that the muse has been visiting fitfully of late.
"So much for the width; the quality of a Morrissey record usually takes patience to perceive in all its greyish glory, but 15 plays yield exactly one classic song, a slice of potted "controversy", a few mildly good jokes, some meticulous invisible mending by the musical boys (including producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, drummer Andrew Paresi, ex-Fairground Attraction songwriter/guitarist Mark E. Nevin and ex-Madness keyboardist Mark "Bedders" Bedford) - and no fewer than two fond farewells, to be found of course, at the end of the album.
"From the top, Our Frank pictures Morrissey in un-Morrissey mood, bored rigid by a friend's "open, deep conversation", dying for a drink and a ciggie and contemplating secretly throwing up all over his tedious friend's jumper which has, in its "vulgarity", hijacked his interest. Morrissey's detractors will be amused. Asian Rut reprises 1988's Bengali In Platforms and, to a marching beat spiced with the sort of music often associated with flock wallpaper, it pictures a "tooled-up Asian boy" in a light both sympathetic and alarmed, as if Morrissey would like to be able to identify more closely with the mild-mannered victim-turned-avenger but can't close the cultural gap.
"This air of being an observer not participant extends to Driving Your Girlfriend Home, where he finds mixed feelings as a reluctant confidant; King Leer, a Woody Allen-esque vignette of unrequited attaction enlivened by the appearance of a "homeless chihuahua" for which Morrissey must find not only a home but a rhyme. It is immediately followed by an almost identical tune with a different set of lyrics, The Harsh Truth Of The Camera Eye, where the opening couplet of "Churchilian legs, hair barely there" is as good as it gets.
"Mute Witness is the best song by a long way, an observation - again from a timid distance - of a traumatised, perhaps raped woman trying to "describe the fright of last night/4am Northside, Clapham Common" (The Smiths' Suffer Little Children seven years ago likewise explored English kitchen-sink crime). In the tension between the cold, clever craft of his telling (the music is almost Sparks-like cerebral rock), and the compassion he is struggling to feel, Mute Witness gets under the skin and stays there. Found Found Found and Sing Your Life are recycled Morrissey-by-the-yard, while (I'm) The End Of The Family Line should have been the tongue-in-cheek valediction, but he follows it with a bare piano carrying the even barer bones of what could almost be a Broadway show tune, There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends, wherein our hero revisits the well-trodden turf of his own image as perennial outsider making jest of his tragic existence.
"Like much here, it's a thin song but an excellent title. When all else fails, Morrissey still gives good headline."
- Mat Snow, Q

"I do openly admit that some of the songs, some of the solo songs have been substandard. And when it occurred to me, around the period of the Kill Uncle album, it was a great shock to me to actually make a few records which I didn't really think were exceptional for me. But I think I'm through that time now. It was actually a very bad time for me privately, also."
- Morrissey, Raygun, March 1994

"It's not necessarily sexual. I don't think I mention sexuality in the song at all. But even in the limited capacity of finding a real friend and realising that it actually does take a lifetime to find one, I'm always slightly exalted by coming across someone with whom one has an instant rapport, an instant harmony..."
- Morrissey on "Found Found Found", Select, July 1991