Question English accents

Oh my

Enough! or Too much
I am not English and I am not a native English speaker either... and I have a very stupid question.
I can identify the English accent of some zones because of artists or friends.... but I am completely lost with Manchester.

I am mostly asking about the early phase of The Smiths:
Did Morrissey have a "typical manchester accent"? Or was he "faking" his accent? (maybe that's not the right word).

My question is because I see musicians from manchester who are VERY hard to understand when they speak.... Johnny Marr or Mark E. Smith could be good examples.
Whilst others always had a crystal celar English that sounds amazing when they speak (Morrrissey is one example, Genesis P-Orridge is another one).

So why is it that Morrissey and Genesis sound as if they were born in a different place than Mark E. Smith and Johnny Marr??? It's not the same accent at all (at least in my non native ears).
 
Only Joyce had a distinctive accent
You can tell JM and AR are local to Greater Manchester/Cheshire but not overly “Manc”!
 
He wasn't faking - some people just don't 'pick up' a local accent that much. It varies.
Didn't he once say "I thank God for not giving me the Manchester accent"?

Morrissey's voice has always sounded "posh Northern" with a slight Irish undertone.
Johnny has quite a soft Mancunian accent, I'm surprised that he'd be hard to understand.

Apparently, the first words Johnny ever said to Moz were "You talk funny". :LOL:
 
He wasn't faking - some people just don't 'pick up' a local accent that much. It varies.
Didn't he once say "I thank God for not giving me the Manchester accent"?

Morrissey's voice has always sounded "posh Northern" with a slight Irish undertone.
Johnny has quite a soft Mancunian accent, I'm surprised that he'd be hard to understand.

Apparently, the first words Johnny ever said to Moz were "You talk funny". :LOL:
M doesn’t have an Irish undertone imo.
He is probably the only person to be born & raised in that part of Manchester that he grew up in to speak as he does. I’ve never heard another person speak like him.
 
M doesn’t have an Irish undertone imo.
He is probably the only person to be born & raised in that part of Manchester that he grew up in to speak as he does. I’ve never heard another person speak like him.
Still Northern, to my ears though.
And the Irish thing.. it's only on some words. "Annie-way"
 
I was watching The Crown for a while and I want to know how the royal family got those accents. Queen Elizabeth sounds like Carol Burnett imitating Queen Elizabeth. Shouldn't she sound German?
 
I think accents can come from your parents and as well , with his mother being a librarian she would have spoken proper, add in his campness and here we have a posh, camp Manc .
 
I was watching The Crown for a while and I want to know how the royal family got those accents. Queen Elizabeth sounds like Carol Burnett imitating Queen Elizabeth. Shouldn't she sound German?
They all talk German in private.
And they all walk like Basil Fawlty as well.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I am less confused now.

Could it be that in the early phase of the Smiths Morrissey truly wanted to sound very gay purposefully and softened his accent????
(I am not joking, in the early phase interviews he seemed to want to sound very gay and feminine when he talked in interviews... He stopped doing it later). LOL... the comment may sound non politically correct, but I am not trying to sound insulting... I simply mean that in the early years he wanted to sound almost like a glamorous diva, then he began to give a more typical masculine tone to his voice and gave up that way of talking. It's possible to see it in interviews.


(as in the second part of this video... he does no longer speak like that at all).

Marr's accent is very strong, whilst Morrissey is very soft and flows.... kinda hard to explain it.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I am less confused now.

Could it be that in the early phase of the Smiths Morrissey truly wanted to sound very gay purposefully and softened his accent????
(I am not joking, in the early phase interviews he seemed to want to sound very gay and feminine when he talked in interviews... He stopped doing it later). LOL... the comment may sound non politically correct, but I am not trying to sound insulting... I simply mean that in the early years he wanted to sound almost like a glamorous diva, then he began to give a more typical masculine tone to his voice and gave up that way of talking. It's possible to see it in interviews.


(as in the second part of this video... he does no longer speak like that at all).

Marr's accent is very strong, whilst Morrissey is very soft and flows.... kinda hard to explain it.

I think it took a long time for Morrissey’s balls to drop.

He’s still camp, that’s his way of speaking.
I know of many a working class kid
From rough stock who are Gay and camp.

The British way of speaking is a very
Confusing issue.
Even if you were born here or not 😉
 
Thanks for all the replies. I am less confused now.

Could it be that in the early phase of the Smiths Morrissey truly wanted to sound very gay purposefully and softened his accent????
(I am not joking, in the early phase interviews he seemed to want to sound very gay and feminine when he talked in interviews... He stopped doing it later). LOL... the comment may sound non politically correct, but I am not trying to sound insulting... I simply mean that in the early years he wanted to sound almost like a glamorous diva, then he began to give a more typical masculine tone to his voice and gave up that way of talking. It's possible to see it in interviews.


(as in the second part of this video... he does no longer speak like that at all).

Marr's accent is very strong, whilst Morrissey is very soft and flows.... kinda hard to explain it.

Yeah, I think that was an affectation (in the early Smiths interviews). Completely different tone to his voice in the 2004 interview with Jonathan Ross, etc. I don't think that 'modern' Moz sounds camp at all.
 
He certainly had a touch of the stereotypical 'gay lisp' -I don't think it was an affectation, but something he worked hard on trying to disguise in later years, and make himself sound more butch and masculine ('The Queen is Dead' seemed to be about that subject just as much as critiquing the Royal Family, IMHO). Plus the male voice tends to naturally deepen as you get older, so that will have helped. The lisp is still there, and creeps out from time to time in later interviews, and even when he sings/speaks on stage, but is nowhere near as noticeable.

This aspect of his voice seems far more distinctive to me than any kind of regional accent - he'll sometimes slip into Irish accent for certain words as an affectation, but otherwise it sounds pretty neutral to my ears.
 
He certainly had a touch of the stereotypical 'gay lisp' -I don't think it was an affectation, but something he worked hard on trying to disguise in later years, and make himself sound more butch and masculine ('The Queen is Dead' seemed to be about that subject just as much as critiquing the Royal Family, IMHO). Plus the male voice tends to naturally deepen as you get older, so that will have helped. The lisp is still there, and creeps out from time to time in later interviews, and even when he sings/speaks on stage, but is nowhere near as noticeable.

This aspect of his voice seems far more distinctive to me than any kind of regional accent - he'll sometimes slip into Irish accent for certain words as an affectation, but otherwise it sounds pretty neutral to my ears.

It's funny.... I understood a lot of things today after talking about a silly subject with a friend: the song "Getting away with it" by Electronic....
And I understood that Morrissey (even with The Smiths) and the Pet Shop Boys somehow had a similar project, which was defining how gay music was going to sound in the 80's and early 90's; but gay music not restricted for a gay audience at all.

Such thing was not a novelty, it had already happened with two genres: Disco and Glam Rock.
Of course the Pet Shop boys picked most of their influences from Disco, which Morrissey was all about quoting Glam bands (The Dolls) and "burn down the disco".

One project involved a celebratory style, danceable, cheerful... whilst the other one involved melancholia and a dramatic tone.
(It is even funny that BOTH bands at some given point got videos made by Derek Jarman, which was almost like a certificate of authenticity in that sense).

But probably BOTH the Pet Shop Boys and Morrissey wanted to deliver the message of "This is gay music not restricted to a gay audience".
So probably Morrissey in his early years was quite interested in delivering the "I am gay" message, specially in the interviews... Or the incredibly weird duet of Morrissey and Pete Burns.



... And, probably, as time passed, Morrissey abandoned that project and mostly gave up playing the game of hide and seek with his sexual orientation and later he simply said "Humasexual" without playing games of hide and seek.
 
Morrissey was raised in an Irish Mancunian family, which means that he would have been surrounded by people who talk in a totally different rhythm to what he would hear outside the house in Manchester. There is a lyrical quality that comes with many Irish speech patterns, and as a child I could tell by listening to other school kids talking whether they came from an Irish family or not. Strong Manchester accents, but delivered in a familiar rhythmic way.

I hear that same sound when Morrissey speaks, with a soft Northern accent, as many here have.
 
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