Johnny Marr uses Twitter to express his distaste at Gordon Brown's name-dropping, adding definitively: 'I forbid you to like it'
Johnny Marr uses Twitter to express his distaste at Gordon Brown's name-dropping, adding definitively: 'I forbid you to like it'
It has become something of a tradition for British prime ministers to name-drop a rock star or two in the hope that a bit of cool will rub off by association, only to be publicly and embarrassingly rebuffed.
Who can forget Gordon Brown's Arctic Monkeys debacle in a men's magazine, when he was unable to name a single track?
Or Tony Blair's admission that he was a fan of Oasis only for lead singer Noel Gallagher to announce that he was fed up with taking "flak" for it?
Now David Cameron has become the latest to run the gauntlet of the uneasy and usually unrequited relationship between politician and musical muse.
'Stop it'
Johnny Marr, a founding member and the lead guitarist of The Smiths, yesterday called on the Prime Minister to stop saying that he liked the band.
"Stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don't," he wrote on Twitter, adding: "I forbid you to like it."
Cameron has made no secret of his love of the Mancunian group, who since the 1980s have been acclaimed as one of the best British bands.
He picked This Charming Man a track composed by Marr with the group's lead singer, Morrissey when he was a castaway on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs four years ago.
Marr hasn't explained why he was so incensed at being Cameron's taste.
Not the exception
Marr is not the first musician to take exception to Cameron.
Radiohead's frontman, Thom Yorke, came forward to dispute a claim made by Cameron during his appearance on Desert Island Discs that Yorke had performed the song Fake Plastic Trees, his favourite, at a show following a request by the prime minister.
Although Fake Plastic Trees may have been the favoured soundtrack at Notting Hill dinner parties in 2006, its inclusion in the band's set had nothing to do with any special guests," Yorke said in a statement.
The Killers, Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan, Cameron's other musicians of choice, have yet to air their views.
He's no JFK
Oasis's Noel Gallagher, who famously chatted with Tony Blair in Downing Street in 1997 had launched a scathing attack on the prime minister.
He said people had thought Blair "was going to be John F Kennedy", but he was now "saddled" with the Iraq
war.
He told BBC that he did not think there was "anything left to vote for".
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