Upon it’s release in 1996, Mark Morrison’s seminal work ‘Return of the Mack’ caused a stir, not just in the nascent world of British R&B, but also through the world of academia at large. To describe this song as pivotal in the genre of ‘borrowing waterproof clothing’ is to grossly underplay its significance. It redefined the genre. It, in a very real way, became the genre.
“The profundity of the song”, said Professor Randulph Quilting the Emeritus Professor of Morrisonology at the University of Ohio in his ground-breaking commentary ‘Mack – but we never realised he’d gone’*1, “is the duality of the word ‘Mack’. On one level it is the very spiritual essence of the man, Mark Morrison, himself, that had in someway been lost and then, like the Prodigal Son, been found again, returning to the very core of who he is. On the more startlingly profound level it’s about the borrowing of a mackintosh.”
So let us explore the beating heart of this colossus of both the art forms of music and poetry, by dissecting the lyrics. And right from the start we get a sledgehammer of a hint about the metaphysical layers contained within the first line:
“Oooooh, come on, ooh yeah”
Many scholars, including the leading Shakespeare academic and oboe-enthusiast, Courtney Pine*2 (Pine 1999), have noted that this initial exclamation “Ooooh” is a direct quote from that of Lady Macbeth in Act 5 Scene 1 of ‘Macbeth’. Lady Macbeth’s is born of the overriding guilt that has done to her sanity want a meat cleaver does to a quail’s egg; whereas for ‘Mack’ he is envisaging the cataclysmic guilt experienced by the – yet to be named – borrower of the mackintosh, and the waterproof garment’s tardy return.
The story behind the “come on”, on the other hand, is rather sweet. Mark Morrison himself recalled the tale in an interview he did with ‘Questing Member Magazine’*3 back in October ’97:
“I was on a train, going cross country, and I was just putting my chains in the overhead storage space, because the vibrations of the carriage when in motion can lead to major nipple chaffage, and once my pendant knocked over a lady’s macchiato, when I heard a voice. A small child was listening on a handheld portable radio thing, to some form of sports match. He was clearly big into sports. And he was like shouting in his tiny tremulous voice, ‘come on you bastards!’ and something about that sweet, naïve innocence really moved me, and I immediately got my PA to write it down. So when I came to write ‘Return of the Mack’, I wanted to imbue the song with a child-like innocence, and knew I just had to have that ‘come on’ right smack bang in the opening line. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to all the adults out there to embrace their childhood, that naivety. I really owe that kid big time. Not financially of course, I want it on record that I don’t owe him a penny.”
The opening line, as everyone knows, ends with “ooh yeah” and here ‘The Mack’ found himself in a legal pickle. It was mooted at the time that the “ooh yeah” is lifted directly from The Beatles track ‘The End’ when McCartney sings “oh yeah, alright, are you going to be in my dreams tonight?” – a claim strongly denied by Mark Morrison himself. Despite his protestations, the surviving Beatles via Apple Corps sued Mark Morrison for the unlicensed use of their “ooh yeah.” The court dismissed the “yeah” but found Morrison guilty on the “ooh” and subsequently every time he has sung it live since, he’s either had to pay The Beatles £4.87, or, during his leaner years, replaced the word with a strange bleating sound to avoid litigation.
The second line presents Morrison in uncharacteristically petulant mood:
“Well I tried to tell you so (yes I did)”
Despite musicologist Leonard Nimoy saying using brackets in song lyrics was “like gluing wings on an egg”*4 (Nimoy 1972), Morrison defiantly utilises parenthesis to sneer at us all as potential reluctant mackintosh-returners. He rebukes us for our lack of listening, and yet there is an underlying fallibility in Morrison here himself – he “tried to tell” us – there is failure woven into the very fabric of the verb phrase. Was it not Yoda who said: “do or do not, there is no try”? Yes. Yes it was. Pay heed Mr Morrison.
As we move into the third line, Morrison starts to make excuses for us:
“But I guess you didn’t know”
There is doubt surrounding the whole Mackintosh-loaning. Perhaps we thought it was a gift? Perhaps there was an unclear time bracket affixed to the loaning period? Why does Morrison feel the need to give us this wriggle-room to escape our obligations when it comes to the guilt we should be feeling for what essentially boils down to mackintosh-theft? Perhaps, like in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ it is love, familial bonds – for “Tybalt, the love that I bear thee does much excuse the appertaining rage I should feel to such a greeting” read “listener, the love that I bear thee does much excuse the appertaining rage I should feel for you still having my mackintosh”. Shakespeare really missed a trick there. And yet, as we read on, we’ll discover that far from giving us an escape route from guilt, Morrison is setting a trap, to bind us in shame.
Morrison dips his foot further into the waters of Literature with the next line:
“As the saddest story goes”
The “saddest story” is of course “Little Women” as was proven by researchers at the University of Stockholm*5. Morrison is saying to the listener, perhaps if Beth had had a decent waterproof jacket she wouldn’t have caught scarlet fever. Although a great lyricist, Morrison has a poor grasp of streptococcal infections. There is an element here of Morrison emotionally blackmailing the loaner. ‘Look what happened to Beth without her waterproof clothing; look what could happen to me,’ he seems to be saying. ‘Your selfish extended borrowing of my mackintosh could potentially be killing me. I don’t want to spend my final days in a small room, sewing, surrounded by bloody kittens.’
“Baby, now I got the flow” is the fifth line and appears on the surface to be a grotesque euphemism. In fact the line comes from the term ‘Orinocho Flow’ which is a form of dysentery gained by standing for too long in Venezuelan rivers. The tedious song by Enya was named about the same illness which Enya had contracted on a kayaking holiday. The incessant moaning caused by the associated stomach cramps Enya simply recorded at the time and it became the lead vocal track. Morrison’s connection to the illness is unclear, but some scholars believe that rather than it being a direct reference to him having it, it is instead a metaphor. As the Morrisonologist, Mandy Ringworm, said “Morrison is metaphorically saying that he ‘may as well be crapping into a South American river for all the good I’m doing in trying to get this mac back.’”*6 (Ringworm 2014)
Morrison was tragically under the impression that he was a crime solving genius because he claimed he knew who had carried out the murder in each episode of Columbo right from the beginning. He would brag as such in many social conversations, and the boast is also to be found in the sixth line: “‘Cause I know it from the start.” Of course, this isn’t really a great feat of deduction as the murderer is shown carrying out the murder at the start of every Columbo episode. Despite friends and family repeatedly telling him this, he still believed it was a great achievement. In her Morrison-focused autobiography, ‘Mack and Me’*7, Mary J. Blige writes: “He just wouldn’t listen, he would say ‘I’m telling you, it was that guy, Mr. Spock, the doctor guy, I’m telling you he’s the one’, and we’d all go, ‘yes, we know Mack, we all just saw him do it, we’re watching it too’, and he’d be like ‘You’re only saying it’s the Spock-guy, cos I did, you’re jumping on my band’s dragon – (that was another thing – he thought the expression was band’s dragon, that’s an entirely different chapter) – and we’d say ‘seriously Mack, we all just saw, that’s the whole point of Columbo, the whole audience gets to see who did it and the programme is about how Columbo slowly traps them’, and he’d get all upset and shout ‘you’re just trying to steal my tundra’ – (see ‘band’s dragon’) and after that we learnt just to keep quiet as there was no getting through to him. I mean, Mack is a genius, there’s no doubting that, ‘Return’ proves it, but the guy’s also an idiot, and everything in between. He’s the full intelligence spectrum.”
“Baby, when you broke my heart.” – Quite famously, this line refers to Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart, and his defeat at Saturday Night’s Main Event XIII to ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage back in 1987. Mack, a lifelong fan of professional wrestling, was distraught at the ‘breaking’ of his idol – Mack wore his replica pink leotard for a solid month after the event in a frankly disturbing act of mourning. Quite why he referred to ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage as ‘baby’ is less clear, though experts have hypothesised it was an attempt to undermine the rampant masculinity of Randy, which was officially rated at 1.5 Fabios. Mack himself briefly toyed with amateur wrestling under the pseudonym ‘Mack Attack’. This career came to an abrupt end when he chafed his right buttock climbing through the ropes into the ring.
Popularly known as Van Nielsen’s Conundrum (Van Nielsen ‘98*8), the next line of the song, “That I had to come again.”, has puzzled Morrison scholars because of its seeming banality. Morrison was famed for putting layer upon layer of subtext into his lyrics, and so the apparent vacuous nature of this line has vexed Morrisonologists, including Van Nielsen herself who marvelling at it’s apparent emptiness stating: “it’s like staring into Ronald Reagan’s soul”. In the later tome, by Josiah Chinstrap ‘Not Just Ike – Christ Proclaimers of the late 20th century’*9, the writer claims that far from being vacuous tosh, this line was Mack declaring himself to be Christ and therefore how he was obliged to return. Chinstrap, cited a line from the Apocrypha, from the Book of Baruch, that said “And so as the song of the engorged cockerel doth signal the raising of the Sun and the coming of a new day, so there will be seven sacred songs that wilt crow the coming of the Saviour once again to God’s people on Earth.” Those who have followed the work of Chinstrap have mainly been bickering about what those ‘seven sacred songs’ are, but they are all agreed that ‘Return of the Mack’ is one, ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ another, and that Morrison, or indeed Lally Stott, is therefore potentially the Christ.
“And show you that I’m with” – grammatically this line is all over the place, yet Morrison, like ee cummings before him, was never one for prescriptivism. Morrison is happy to leave the preposition dangling unfulfilled at the end of the line there, and we are thrilled for him. Symbolically, Morrison is saying that he stands alone, isolated by the agony of waiting for his mackintosh’s return.
“You lied to me.” The bluntness is shocking; the honesty even more so. Morrison has been betrayed. This line is emotionally raw – on a par with Jackson’s ‘ah-ah-ah-ah-ah’ in his ‘Earth Song’, Dolly Parton’s ‘I’m begging with you please don’t take my man’ in her ‘Jolene’, or the “Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh” in Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’. The fact that this line is repeated three further times before we reach the chorus is Sophoclean in the sheer scale of the tragic rhetoric. Morrison here is Oedipus learning the truth of his parentage; he is Clytemnestra seeking to slay her husband Agamemnon for his sacrificing of their daughter; he is Cat Slater screaming “I am your mother!”. The listener is exposed, emotionally vulnerable, and as such is then peppered with instance upon instance of brutal truths.
Firstly, “All those times that I said that I loved you.” According to star of ‘Are You Being Served?’ and amateur Morrisonologist, Wendy Richards, ‘408’ is the number of times that Morrison said he loved you. Wendy Richards was of course also a famed numerologist, citing Pietro Bongo’s ‘Numerorum Mysteria’ as her book for ‘Desert Island Discs’, though she did explain to Sue Lawley at the time that it was a close toss-up between that and Jilly Cooper’s ‘Riders’. The significance of the number ‘408’ as Richards explained in an interview with TV Quick magazine (Nov’ 4th ’98)*10 was “the true number of Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, and therefore, in many real ways, Morrison is the true heir of Leonidas.” Richards’ assertions have since been discredited and put down to stress due to over-exposure to Adam Woodyatt.
Secondly, “Yes, I tried, yes, I tried.” There is an air of petulance about this line. He is exasperated by our inability to listen to reason on the appropriate time period for borrowing a mackintosh. By extension, aren’t we all, as a species collectively putting our fingers in our ears and singing ‘la la la la la’ loudly, just because we don’t want to hear the truth? Pre-dating Al Gore’s campaign and film by some ten years, surely Morrison has truly hit the nail upon the head about what is actually ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.
Thirdly, “Even though you know I’d die for you.” Here Morrison is taking us on the ultimate guilt trip. We are on a road to nowhere and he is our driver, fellow passenger, and errant hitchhiker. Quite what the circumstances under which he’d die for us are unclear within the song itself but were clarified by Morrison much later in a candid interview he gave for Countryfile with John Craven:
“What I was saying, John, was that I’d metaphorically die for you, for anybody. I’m not going to literally take a bullet. I mean, it could bounce off some of my bling, but without that guarantee, I’m not going to put myself into a situation where I could potentially be obligated to get between yourself and a crazed gunman. But I would in a very real metaphorical sense do that thing. And at the end of the day, for most people that is a far more important commitment as you’re far more likely to metaphorically get shot than actually get shot, John.”
The response had confused Craven as he’d asked Morrison about his smallholding in the Cotswolds. Ever the consummate professional, Craven neatly segued into a comment about milk yield in Frisians. Footage of the incident isn’t available on iPlayer but can be found easily on YouTube.
Finally, “Yes, I cried, yes, I cried.” When this line first dropped, it revolutionised the world of ‘rhyming’. The skill that Morrison showed in rhyming “Yes, I cried” with “Yes, I tried.” blew the minds of Morrison’s contemporary lyricists and poets alike. “What’s the fucking point,” declared then Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, in an interview with Alan Yentob for the Observer*11 “of me picking up my pen again? Morrison’s done it. It’s the fucking unified theory of poetry, that’s what it fucking is. Bastard.” It took Seamus Heaney five days to persuade his friend to come down from the attic, but he was never the same again and died a mere two years later.
As we arrive at the chorus, it should be highlighted at this stage the details of the mac borrowing that lies at the heart of the song. Famously, Mark Morrison has always remained deliberately vague and non-committal about the specifics, not wanting to, in his words, “colour people’s perceptions”, but instead allow them to “come to the song with their own garment-borrowing experiences”*12.
There are, of course, two major schools of thought about the true origin of the song. Firstly, there is the Mildred Gupta Theory. It is well-documented that Morrison lent a beige mackintosh to Miss Gupta, a woman he’d met at a loft insulation convention, for a jaunt she was going on in the Pennines back in the Spring of ’93. Dr. Evadne Cheesebotherer, who lectures in Morrisonology at Oxford, falls very much into this camp, and in her article for ‘The Church Times’ entitled ‘Neither a Borrower nor a Lender be – a Biblical Interpretation of Return of the Mack’*13 she wrote: “The Gupta Theory holds the most weight because of Morrison’s famous, nay infamous habit of falling in love at the drop of a hat – quite literally in this case – their eyes met when she stooped to pick up a trilby. It stands to reason that a song so imbued with emotional resonance must have its genesis in a failed romance.”
The second incident, and that favoured by the more militant wing of Morrisonology, is that known as the ‘Lemony Tardigrade Event’. The Reverend Lemony Tardigrade was the parish priest of St Mandy’s Church, Leicester, back in ’94, when a 22-year old Morrison attended a ‘bring and buy’ sale there, which was raising money to fund a neon Herod. Confusion arose when, seeing a rain-sodden cleric, a dozen years of Sunday School training kicked in, and Morrison offered the Reverend Tardigrade his mackintosh. Lemony, only the 3rd woman to be ordained into the Church of England, thinking that Morrison was donating it to the stall, immediately priced it up at £5.50, and a mere thirty minutes later had sold it to the local chiropodist, Barry Creamhorn. Post-rainfall, when Morrison returned to the ‘bring and buy’ stall, he was distraught to find his mackintosh had been sold and vowed to hunt down the mac-purchasing foot doctor.
There followed an epic saga of Mark Morrison’s attempts to reclaim his garment and being thwarted at every stage as it was passed from owner to owner like a hot potato or a venereal disease at a Levellers gig. The escapades that ensued are famously documented in Lucretia Plinth’s ’98 book “Don’t Go Chasing Waterproofs – An Amateur’s Account of the Lemony Tardigrade Event”*14. It was, of course, subsequently turned into an ITV drama staring Lennie Henry as Mark Morrison and Patsy Kensit as the Reverend Lemony Tardigrade. In a touching gesture, Mark Morrison lent the original mackintosh (which he eventually got back from a wolverine) to the production company to perform as itself. Not an entirely altruistic act as in order to make it filmable the production company had to get the stains out. As many of us can testify, things always come back soiled from a wolverine.
Dotted throughout the chorus, after each bold declaration of “Return of the Mack” comes a series of interjections by Morrison: “It is”, “come on”, “oh my God”, “Here I am”, “Once again”, “Top of the World”, “Watch my flow”, and “Here I go”. For Terpsichore Merridew, founder of the Church of Morrisonologist – a fringe group for lunatics, the “It is” is clearly a nod, once again, to the deific nature of Mark Morrison. “As Yahweh is ‘I Am’, so Mack becomes ‘It Is’. He is God, but in the 3rd person.”*15 The “oh my God” is similarly ascribed by Merridew as a third person declaration of Godhead.
“Come on” avoided litigation from Kevin Rowland, when Morrison was able to prove that far from being a nod to Eileen, it was actually an abbreviation of Vladimir’s line in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?” Morrison is metaphorically calling upon us to return the Mack. ‘Gogo’ is all of us and none of us at the same time in Morrison’s eyes.
Whereas most of Morrison’s lyrics are agonised about over months, if not years before they find themselves part of a song, the “Here I am” and “once again” were improvised in the studio. Bored during a recording session, Morrison embarked on one of his legendary epic hide and seek games, eventually being found by producer Mich Hedin Hansen hiding inside a water tank in the studio’s loft, where, so enthused by the success of his 23 hours of successful hiding, he leapt up and declared “Here I am!” and immediately insisted on another round “Once again!” Hansen declared that the lines should be immediately recorded and be part of the track, before Morrison managed a slightly less successful three and a half hours hidden in a double bass case.
“Top of the World” is Morrison’s nod to ‘The Carpenters’. Morrison is obsessed with Richard Carpenter and has a tattoo of him on his right buttock playing the piccolo, which is curious, as there is no verified footage of Richard Carpenter ever having played the piccolo. “Watch my flow” is a nod to another of Morrison’s idols, former children’s presenter, actress and life peer, Baroness Floella Benjamin. Morrison is exhorting his listeners to go out and experience as much of Benjamin’s work as they possibly can – especially her work on ‘Playschool’ and her pivotal role in the first ever episode of ‘Bergerac’.
Morrison, as I shall demonstrate later in the treatise, had a particular affinity with playgrounds. The “Here I go!” is what, in Morrison’s world, counts as a catchphrase, shouted out by himself and his entourage every time he was at the top of a slide. By extension, the lending of a mackintosh is for Morrison a ‘slide of faith’, a perilous moment where he loses control and becomes at the mercy of forces greater than himself.
The final line of the chorus “You know that I’ll be back” is repeated throughout the song, and can be interpreted as either, according to the Mildred Gupta Theory, his assertion to Mildred that he’d be returning to the convention the following year and if she hadn’t returned the mac already, then that would be a suitable occasion to do so. Or, if we follow the ‘Lemony Tardigrade Event’ his words to Lemony that he’d return to the stall later on to collect his mackintosh, a line that must have been lost in the drizzle and general hubbub of a fete, for the vicar to have sold the mackintosh on. The “(don’t you know)” affixed to the end of one of the later repetitions seems to fit better with the Tardigrade Event, and the uncertainty surrounding the vicar’s hearing of his original statement. The line’s appearance in the song, from either perspective, is a rallying cry to those who’ve loaned waterproof items of clothing to be resilient and determined. Despite James Cameron’s words in the Director’s commentary for the 25th anniversary of ‘Terminator’ in 2009, Morrison is not referencing Schwarzenegger in this line, having never been allowed to watch the film by his mother, whose strict faith forbade her to acknowledge cyborgs in any form.
The more smutty-minded amongst Morrison-scholars have assumed that “So, I’m back up in the game” is Mack coming clean about his rumoured months of working as a gigolo. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that truth lies in the choice of preposition “in” rather than “on”. The ‘game’ referred to in the lyrics is Subbuteo. Morrison spent a good deal of his youth playing the game in the Subbuteo leagues of Leicester, becoming Under-14 champion before giving up the sport due to repetitive strain injury in his flicking finger. Briefly in ’96 he came out of retirement, hence this line of the song, before once again packing away his Plymouth Argyle team once and for all when he was knocked out in the last-16 by a much younger man.
Now we come to the playground motif that is echoed throughout the rest of the song. In ’95 Morrison became part owner of a playground in his home of Highfields, Leicester. “(Running things like my swing)” At first Morrison is coy about his foray into playground management, choosing to mention it as an aside in brackets, but later in the song he is more open about his passion with the line “up and down” referring to the playground’s trampoline, before seemingly regretting this openness and instead referencing the roundabout in parenthesis: “You’ll know that I’ll be back (round and round).
The missing ‘g’ in “Lettin’ all the people know” was symptomatic of Morrison’s one man campaign to address the imbalance caused in English spelling by silent letters. He claimed in an article in ‘Loose-lips and Lexicographers’ magazine*16 back in ’99 that:
“such consonant gluttony is going to lead to some pretty devastating shortages in the future if we don’t compensate for them right now. I’m thinking of the children, the next generation who are going to have some serious pronunciation problems if we’re throwing round silent letters like they’re going out of fashion. It makes me sick.”
As such, Morrison frequently drops the ‘g’ in gerunds, and due to pterodactyl spells ‘pig’ as ‘ig’.
“That I’m back to run the show” – Morrison hosted a dozen episodes of Countdown, whilst Richard Whiteley was on sabbatical because of his legs in December of ’95. Morrison was under the impression that the producers wanted him back in ’96 as part of Channel 4s attempts to refresh its appeal to younger viewers. His name was also bandied about too in ’98 for the launch of T4, and Morrison was said to have been ‘as sick as John Parrott’ when Dermot O’Leary got that gig ahead of him. In the end, Whiteley didn’t leave Countdown in ’96, and none of Morrison’s dozen episodes in ’95 were aired due to the ructions caused by him refusing to accept any words from a contestant that ended with a ‘g’. When a Timothy from Weston-Super-Mare proposed ‘gagging’ for seven, Morrison had to be physically restrained by Gyles Brandreth.
Many a Philosophy undergraduate has been given the next line as a conundrum in semantics and logic. “Cause what they didn’t know was wrong.” By extension, what they did know was right. Though this falls down as Morrison himself didn’t know about rainbows. Morrison, by background, was a Stoic, though differed in standpoint to Zeno’s belief that virtue is the only good, considering cake rather pleasant too.
The next line, “And all the nasty things you’ve done”, is an oblique reference to his own mother’s cooking. Morrison’s mother, ‘Honeydew Morrison’ – named after the Muppets’ scientist, was a notoriously bad cook, having once been charged by police for aggravated assault for a lasagne she made for a church fete. Morrison learnt to hide his mother’s food about his person during mealtimes to subtly dispose of later, in a fashion very similar to ‘The Great Escape’. He survived by foraging in the local park once his mother was asleep each night.
“So, baby, listen carefully” – Morrison briefly dabbled in the world of inventions and entrepreneurial adventures. His foray into this world began and ended with his first concept, that of ‘baby answering machines’. In ’88 at the age of 16, whilst babysitting his nephew ‘Lofthouse’, Mack realised that a fortune could be made if babies could be trained to listen to phone messages and then recite them back. He reasoned that babies were essentially home all day and so they might be put to some form of use. He realised the flaw in his scheme when, despite repeating his mantra ‘so, baby, listen carefully,’ a message left by Halfords about picking up the inner tubes he’d ordered for his BMX, got garbled into some nonsense about teddy.
Morrison goes all ‘meta’ in the line “While I sing my comeback song.” There is an air of triumph. The mac was returned, the Mack has returned. This was Caesar’s Gallic Triumph for Generation X.
We return to the seismic emotional shock of the phrase “You lied to me” again, as it is repeated on the build up to the chorus. This time, the phrase is punctuated by four different phrases: “Cause she said she’d never turn on me”, “but you did, but you did”, “All this pain you said I’d never feel”, “But I do, but I do do do”. The first one is started by the abbreviation “cause” which can be quite startling for an infant or just someone outside of mainstream R&B or pop to witness, yet it has its origins in an equally startling moment from Morrison’s own youth. When he was six, Morrison suffered an anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, and ever since has been paranoid about bees, even going so far as removing the syllable ‘be’ from any lyric and most aspects of his everyday life.
The “But you did, but you did” was later sampled by Peter Buttigieg for his 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries, for it’s phonological similarities to his surname. Erroneously, he claimed that the line had been written in honour of his late father, Professor Joseph Buttigieg, who Morrison had met at a charity auction for donkeys being hosted by Leonard Cohen. When carrying out his research for his book ‘The Magic and Myths of the Mack – The Legends of Mark Morrison’ (2021)*17, the magician Dynamo discovered that not a word of the previous sentence was true.
“All this pain you said I’d never feel” is Morrison on one level rebuking his dentist, Dr Stig Bosenquet, whose bridge work upon Morrison’s mouth caused the artist to only eat chicken soup for a fortnight, but also he’s rebuking us. Morrison is angry. He is angry that we mocked him for becoming distressed at his mackintosh not being returned. He is angry that we belittled his anguish and that our supposedly soothing words of ‘it’s alright mate, you can just get another one’, were woefully inadequate and lacked any form of empathy, or indeed humanity. For what is it to be human, if not to share the experience with other humans, and in mocking the Mack’s mac, we spurned not only him, but our own core nature.
“But I do, I do do do” is Morrison taking pity on us and decrying his own humanity through the medium of toilet humour. And yet he is also reinforcing his mortal nature. He is telling us that he does do do-do. This is Morrison’s Shylock moment. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”, “If I am fed, do I not defecate”, he is saying to us. Morrison is trying to break down the air of mystique that surrounds the pop artist, the R&B legend. He is tearing down the barriers between the stars and the public, saying to us all, ‘we all go toilet’.
As we return to the chorus for one last extended time, Morrison repeats the joyous news of his waterproof’s return, and alongside the original responses, blesses us, his listeners, with a plethora of other declarations. “Hold on” is lifted directly from “Living on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi, who had in turn lifted it from “Hold on, I’m comin’’ by Sam and Dave (whose dropped ‘g’ Morrison greatly approved of), who in turn had lifted it , with minor adjustments, from “I Hold that On the Seas” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘HMS Pinafore’, and so on back to Beowulf and “þu anhielst”. Bon Jovi’s lawyers are currently working on a time machine to see if they can retrospectively sue God.
The imperative “Be strong” is Morrison admonishing himself and giving himself a rallying cry. He is saying to himself that he recognises the despair caused by the mac being borrowed for rather longer than he expected, but that he can’t give up hope now. “Here I come” has its origins in the same epic game of hide seek that was mentioned earlier. The phrase itself was than kindly donated to ‘The Fugees’ by Morrison for their hit single later that year of “Ready of Not”. In fact, ‘The Fugees’ song in itself was inspired by one of Morrison’s Herculean hide and seek games.
“My little girl” is a worrying element in the lyrics, as Morrison seemed to have developed a parent-child relationship with his own mackintosh. Although distinctly odd, it does explain why Mack was so keen to get the mackintosh back. Perhaps, like Linus van Pelt in ‘Peanuts’, this mackintosh is a security blanket, required to maintain Morrison’s mental safety. The fact that he wrote a song about its return would seem to suggest that this is the case. No such passionately moving song had been written about missing clothing since Andy Stewart’s 1960s tear-jerking lament about sartorial deficiency “Donald, where’s your troosers?”.
As we journey towards the end of the extended chorus, we enter a pantomimic episode of “Yes it is”. Morrison, heavily influenced by the work of Christopher Biggins and Lionel Blair, adored pantomime, and here it is implied that at home as we listen to the track on the wireless, record player or audio cassette player, that between his repetition of “Yes it is”, we, his listeners are calling out “Oh no it isn’t!” He is daring us to doubt the return of his beloved mackintosh, raising the sense of disbelief and consequently the dramatic amazement and significance of its reappearance.
Finally we get the issue of the “oh oh oh oh” in the last chorus, and the climatic “(aaauw)”. It is not a coincidence that Beyoncé used the “Oh oh oh oh” in her track, ‘Crazy in Love’. She was a massive Mack fan and was happy to give him work grouting when his career went a bit quiet. Morrison himself had included the “Oh oh oh oh” in homage to King Louis in the Jungle Book who he felt was unfairly treated. He briefly set up an institute to teach orang-utans to walk and talk. The institute folded quickly as it was pointed out to Morrison that they could kind of already to the first thing, and weren’t biological set up correctly to do the second thing. The “(aaauw)” has become the stuff of legend and a million old wives’ tales. The most prominent of these as listed in ‘Moist Marmot Magazine’*18 (Sept ’05) is that it is simply Morrison doing an impression of a crow. Former Liverpool and Norway full-back, Stig Inge Bjørnebye, suggested that it is the noise made when offered a chocolate only to realise that there are only coconut ones left. It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry has a theory about the “(aaauw)” and Morrison has always remained silent on the subject, seemingly enjoying the myriad of hypotheses spawned to explain the noise’s origins.
Probably the most satisfying explanation from a narrative perspective is that it was simply the noise that emerged from Morrison’s throat when he was finally reunited with his beloved mackintosh – instinctive and spontaneous and representing the sound of unfettered joy and relief, the emotional core of the Mack. It’s a fitting end to the traumatic story; a fitting end to this treatise.
Sources:
*1 Quilting, Prof. R. (2002) ‘Mack – but we never realised he’d gone’. New York. Hodder and Staughton
*2 Pine, C. (1999) ‘The Bards: William and Mark”. London. Penguin
*3 DeVil, C (1997) ‘Big Mack and Fries’. ‘Questing Member Magazine’. Vol. 12 (Oct’ 97)
*4 Nimoy, L (1972) ‘Spock Pop – Defining the Illogical’. New York. Faber & Faber.
*5 Svenson, T. et al. (1987) ‘Misery in Literature – A Quantitive Assessment’ Books Journal Vol. 83 (7) pg. 102-127
*6 Ringworm, M (2014) ‘The Importance of Water-based Infections in the Works of Mark Morrison’. Oxford. Oxpress.
*7 Blige, M. J. (2017) ‘Mack and Me’. Los Angeles. Puffin.
*8 Van Nielsen, T. (1998) ‘Van Nielsen’s Conundrum – The Apparent Banality of Morrison’. Morrisonology Journal. Vol. 3 (8) pg. 7-8
*9 Chinstrap, J. (2007) ‘Not Just Ike – Christ Proclaimers of the Late 20th Century’. London. Puffin.
*10 Robbins, T. (1998) ‘Wendy Richards – My Morrison Theory’. TV Quick Vol. 7 (Nov’ 4th)
*11 Yentob, A. (1996) ‘Poetry’s Response to The Mack’ The Observer. (10th January ’96)
*12 Micklethwaite, J. (1998) ‘A Natter with the Mack’ Yorkshire Evening Post (7th October ’98)
*13 Cheesebotherer, Dr. E. (2008) ‘Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be – A Biblical Interpretation of ‘Return of the Mack’’ Church Times Vol. 107 (3)
*14 Plinth, L. (1998) ‘Don’t Go Chasing Waterproofs – An Amateur’s Account of the Lemony Tardigrade Event’. London. Penguin.
*15 Merridew, T. (2015) ‘Mack the Redeemer’ Ipswich. CM Publishing.
*16 Fran, I. (1999) ‘The Silent Plague’ Loose-Lips and Lexicographers. Vol. 11 (12) pgs. 100-107
*17 Dynamo, M (2021) ‘The Magic and Myths of the Mack – The Legends of Mark Morrison’. London. Disney.
*18 Kristoff, K. (2005) ‘What’s in an (aaauw)?!’ Moist Marmot Magazine. Vol. 10 (September 2005)
Treatises of Gloria 