Read Disgusting Bliss for Free Online

would be painful,’ says Simon, ‘but the constant playing gave us a better idea of rhythm and harmony – and how to keep playing your guitar when someone pours a pint over it.’ Twice a year the Jesuits shipped in a busload of girls from a Preston school for a disco. ‘I can imagine they went back to their rooms and prayed nothing serious happened. Of course, for us this was like heaven, with unlimited booze and girls everywhere.’
    Chris also played bass in the school’s official sixth-form dance band, Upper Syntax and Poetry. Head of history Tom Muir used to train and organize the front line, comprising trumpets, clarinets and trombones, including Tom Morris, while teacher and school archivist David Knight organized the rhythm section of guitar, bass and drums. Both Morrises were, recalls Knight, ‘wayward’: ‘Chris neither sought nor, indeed, needed any advice. He was less malleable to my own suggestions than was usually the case with boy musicians. But then he was more competent than most, so I would like to think of this as merely a comment rather than a criticism. I believe that Tom Muir had a similar experience with Chris’s brother Tom.’
    Chris read sciences at A-level, and David Knight says Stonyhurst teachers remembered ‘a bright boy from the top class who did well but less than spectacularly academically’, though this was in the context of a school where most of the pupils were, on average, pretty good. Yet Morris didn’t seem to be set on a particular direction in life at that point. Tom would win an exhibition for Pembroke College, Cambridge, but Chris took up zoology at Bristol University in 1980. Having been a fan of children’s TV staple Johnny Morris and his Animal Magic anthropomorphism, it was amusing and a bit of a thrill to be going to study in the town from which his namesake had broadcast his most famous programme.
    Among his fellow Bristol zoology students was Mark Pilcher: ‘Chris had long bushy hair – almost touching his shoulders at one stage, I think. I have a photograph of all the students in 1980 and, now I look at it, Chris has one of, if not the biggest, most stripy tie of all the undergraduates.’
    Morris shared a house in the Clifton area of Bristol with legal student Caroline Leddy, who would be a long-time friend and much later work on producing Brass Eye . A cousin of Morris from America also lived there. She was training to be a medic and went out with a music student named Jonathan Whitehead. Though he and Morris didn’t get to know one another at that time, Whitehead was later to become a friend and key musical collaborator. Both were bassists in bands, Morris playing in Expresso Bongo, a rhythm and blues outfit in the mode of the Stones.
    Morris was still into the Bonzo Dog Band and began using one of their techniques for fun. The Bonzos had once gone out near their studio to record vox pop interviews on such nonsense notions as the importance of the ‘shirt’. The resulting confused responses from the public were used to lead into an album track of the same name. Morris took a big reel-to-reel tape recorder to the streets of Bristol for his own interviews on similar subjects which he played back to friends in his room. ‘He asked daft questions and was surprised that he got all these really serious answers,’ says Phil Godfrey.
    A student revue put on by Morris’s department targeted the staff in one of the items. ‘There was a tall, thin lecturer in botany who had a funny haircut and an odd way of pronouncing certain words,’ says Mark Pilcher. ‘Great ammunition for Chris.’
    In the summer of his third year Morris produced a project on lizards under the general supervision of tutor Roger Avery, who can now recall little detail of either the work or the student who produced it. As at Stonyhurst, Morris hadn’t particularly stood out in his year for good or bad. He graduated with a 2:1 in 1983 and headed back Cambridge way to home in Buckden.
    The