12. RamonesRamones
Drawing as much on Morrissey’s beloved early 60s girl groups – The Shangri-Las, The Ronettes – as on the snotty garage bands from later in the decade, the Ramones’ exhilarating debut lit the blue touchpaper for the punk explosion in both the US and the UK. Its sheer brevity- fourteen songs in under twenty-seven minutes- annoyed the prog-loving hipsters of the period just as much as the wilful, slack-jawed stupidity gleefully displayed on songs like ‘Beat on the Brat’ and ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.’ Tales from Topographic Oceans this ain’t. A paid-up fan of glam rock, James Dean and classic, three-minute pop songs however, Morrissey was primed and ready for The Ramones’ brattish brilliance, which anyway was a lot less one-dimensional than it first appeared, incorporating not just the charged, testosterone rush of punk’s first flush, but the persona and lyrics of beanpole misfit Joey, an over-sensitive romantic and charmingly dysfunctional obsessive-compulsive, and the sexually confused confessions of perennial fuck-up and one-time rent boy Dee Dee on ’53rd & 3rd’. Curious, then, that it was right-wing, militaristic guitarist and bandleader Johnny at whose grave Morrissey was pictured paying homage, on the sleeve of 2009’s ‘Something is Squeezing My Skull’ single.
Ben Graham
