Sean O'Hagan on The Smiths. Twenty-five years ago this month, a bequiffed 18-year-old called Johnny Maher turned up unannounced at the door of 384 King's Road, a nondescript terraced house in Stretford, Manchester. 'It was a sunny day, about one o'clock,' he recalled years later. 'There was no advance phone call or anything.
I just knocked and he opened the door.' 'He' was Steven Patrick Morrissey, then a 23-year-old misfit who inhabited the fringes of Manchester's fragmentary postpunk music scene. Morrissey had already tried his hand at being a writer, sending live rock reviews to Record Mirror, penning non-fiction books for a small publisher, Babylon Books, (a homage to James Dean, a tract on his favourite group, the New York Dolls) and even sending unsolicited scripts for episodes of Coronation Street to Granada Television. _1653451_map300. Moors murders timeline. Moors murders: Prelude to the crimes that shocked a nation. Winnie Johnson was being laid to rest today, the body of her beloved son Keith Bennett still not found, 48 years after being taken to his death on Saddleworth Moor.
Paul Taylor look back to the very first inkling of what would come to be known as the Moors Murders. ‘Do you remember these missing people?” Pleaded the headline in the Manchester Evening News on February 19, 1965. The article was a call for action to set up a central missing persons bureau. Domesday Reloaded: THE MOORS MURDERS. Timetable of Moors murders case. 1938: Ian Brady born out of wedlock in Glasgow. 1942: Myra Hindley born in Crumpsall, a north Manchester suburb.
The Smiths - Suffer Little Children. Les Moors Murderers et les Smiths. S'il ne devait y avoir qu'un seul article sur les rapports entre pop et faits divers, ce serait celui-ci, tant il constitue à lui seul la matrice de tous les autres, le point nodal de toutes les interactions que peut entretenir la pop avec le territoire accidenté et événementiel dans lequel elle évolue.
Il n'est pas innocent du reste que la chanson "Suffer Litthle Children", lancée par The Smiths sur leur premier album éponyme en 1984, soit née à Manchester, cité rock par excellence, au coeur du territoire noir où le sang, la rouille et la musique ont toujours marché main dans la main. L'histoire de "Suffer Little Children" est, par delà la stricte beauté poétique de l'ensemble, moins connue que le faits divers dont elle s'inspire. Parmi les premiers titres composés par le duo Morrissey-Johnny Marr, la chanson, là encore pas innocemment, aura eu un rôle décisif dans la consolidation du duo : le choc des mots et de la plainte, contre le poids (plume) des accords de guitare.
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN LYRICS - THE SMITHS. "Suffer Little Children," Morrissey Explores The Moors Murders. When you are young, sometimes tragedies strike you in a deeper place than when you are an adult.
However, the impact can stick with you well into your adulthood. Whether or not the tragedy happens to you or is a news story, it can place itself deep in your psyche. If you are a creative person, they might manifest themselves into your work at some point. Such was the case with Morrissey when he wrote “Suffer Little Children” for The Smiths 1984 self-titled debut. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and the Moors Murders in pictures. The face of human evil. When Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were found guilty at Chester Assizes - she of two murders, he of three - capital punishment had recently been abolished.
Only months earlier and they would have been put to death, and our image of Hindley would have been fixed into myth: the dyed blonde hair and staring eyes, implacable, unnatural, monstrous, with a name like something out of a blood-chilling playground chant. Instead, she remained behind bars for 36 years. Alive, she has haunted us.
Hatred for her, kept alive by her repeated applications for parole, never faded. Her bleached-out photograph became like a nightmarish inversion of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and one of the icons of the last century. From the Guardian. The Moors murderers are back in the headlines - one wants to die; the other continues to fight for her freedom.
Ian Brady made his first court appearance for 30 years yesterday for the right to starve himself to death. The hearing is expected to last for four days but the main arguments are already clear. Myra Hindley has written over 150 letters about her life, which form the basis of a BBC documentary tomorrow evening about the Moors murderers that explores whether a life sentence should mean life. The truth about Myra. What Myra Hindley hoped to achieve by her collaboration with Duncan Staff for Modern Times (BBC2) is a mystery.
Greater public sympathy for her appeal against continued imprisonment? A fuller understanding of what could drive a young woman to what she did? Whatever the intentions, the results could only serve to remind all and sundry of the overwhelming horror of the moors murders. The careful planning and execution of each crime was described alongside extracts from the 150 pages of Hindley's letters to Staff - and the yawning discrepancy between the cold facts, and Hindley's recollection of them, was there for all to see. Staff's film was impressive in its objectivity. Hindley had no control over the editorial content of Modern Times, as was clear from the fact that, after this bout of special pleading, Staff's film shifted focus to the murders.
Profile: Myra Hindley. Myra Hindley's part in the Moors murders gave her an infamy which remained undiminished even after her 36 years in jail, fuelled partly by the disbelief that a woman could have carried out such horrific crimes against children.
Every bid to win her freedom attracted hostility from the public, and even the sight of her portrait hanging in a London gallery triggered violent protests. Hindley, 60, always claimed that her role in the murders was to abduct the children, and that she did not take part in the killings or sex attacks. She increasingly heaped the blame for the crimes on Ian Brady, claiming she was infatuated with her lover who beat and blackmailed her into going along with his plans.
But attempts by campaigners - led by the Labour peer and champion of social and penal reform, Lord Longford - to challenge the "evil Myra mythology" made little headway. "I hope Brady will not be released in any foreseeable future and that Hindley will be kept in prison for a very long time. " Letters: Thatcher, Ian Brady and the media. Ian Brady is 'chronically psychotic' and should stay in hospital, says doctor. Moors murderer Ian Brady remains "chronically psychotic" and should remain in a hospital setting for treatment, his mental health tribunal heard on Wednesday .
The child killer suffers from long-term paranoid schizophrenia which does not "just fade away and die", according to the clinician in charge of his care at high security Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside. Brady, 75, was constantly paranoid about the Home Office and the Prison Officers Association, and believed hospital staff were acting as their agents. His wish that he could "send cancer in an envelope" to one doctor was one example of anger which was the driving force for his paranoia, a panel sitting at the hospital was told. Giving evidence, Dr James Collins said Brady also had paranoid beliefs about fellow patients who he thought were spying on him. He wrongly believed that others were out "to get at him" and he responded by spilling shredded oats cereal outside one man's door and smearing the chair of another with jam and honey. Murder on the Moors: The Ian Brady and Myra Hindley Story — Witness To Murder.
Superintendent Talbot was to be leaving on a much-needed vacation on the morning that he received an unexpected call from Detective Inspector Wills.
Wills had been reluctant to make the call, but this was important. Sitting in the Inquiry room at Hyde Police Station, were 17-year-old David Smith, and his young wife. They had called the police early that morning with an incredible story. 1966: Moors murderers jailed for life. 1966: Moors murderers jailed for life Ian Brady and his lover Myra Hindley have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the so-called Moors murders at Chester Assizes. Judge Fenton Atkinson imposed three concurrent life sentences on Ian Brady, aged 28, for what he called "three calculated, cruel, cold-blooded murders".