Last week bigmouth struck again, as famed Mancunian singer Morrissey caused an uproar with his interview with German paper Der Spiegel by reportedly making nationalistic “Germany for the Germans, France for the French” statements. In the interview he reportedly also made statements critical of refugees, Angela Merkel, and called Berlin “the rape capital of Europe” all the while defending Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey regarding their sexual abuse allegations by casting some blame on the victims.
We initially did not cover this story, as many major publications had already picked it up due to the controversial nature of the statements made by the former Smiths singer. However, despite “doubling down” in a recent interview on some of his statements regarding Spacey and Weinstein—Morrissey—while performing at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre on Saturday, November 25th, apparently denied that he ever said the comments to our colleague Juliane Liebert.
Morrissey: “I did an interview a couple of weeks ago for a German newspaper and, of course, let me just say this: That was the last print interview I will ever do! Unless you see the words form in my mouth and then you see or hear the words come out of my mouth… please, if you don’t see that, I didn’t say them.”
Since Juliane Liebert has written for post-punk.com and is an active part of the post-punk scene—interviewing luminaries such as Mark E. Smith, and Genesis P-Orridge—we feel it is incumbent that we defend her journalistic integrity, and to point out that a sit down interview of this nature would always have its audio recorded due to stringent German slander and libel laws, which would aid Morrissey if he planned on suing Der Spiegel like he had done to the NME after a 2007 interview allegedly portrayed him as being anti-immigration.
However, it goes both ways, and Morrissey could end up being the one sued this time.
Concerning Morrissey’s latest comments: the interview is a verbatim transcript of what he said. The recording is available to Der Spiegel for comparison, having only some edits to questions due to length. @SPIEGELONLINE #Morrissey pic.twitter.com/FXmUqWuqKj
— Juliane Liebert (@juliapetpetpet) November 28, 2017
Here is a clip of Morrissey making the statement below:
Please support Post-Punk.com! You can do so via:
