Simon Morris has died aged 51. After being reported missing on 7 December, his body was found in the River Wyre on 20 December. Morris was the driving force behind Ceramic Hobs, the Blackpool DIY avant punk band whose ever-changing line-up went through nearly 30 members during their 30 year existence. As their singer and lyricist, he experimented with many vocal styles before developing his “throat nodule-inspiring scream”.

“I have tried falsetto, spoken word, ‘proper singing’ (no fun at all) but keep coming back to that,” he said, “basically screaming my guts out at top volume but trying to keep the notes.”

Morris and Ceramic Hobs championed mental health awareness. In 1998 they released Psychiatric Underground, the title track of which called out the failings in institutional mental health care. “Labelling/diagnosis by the mental health system for three of the 80s band originals” had “drastic real life consequences”, he told Phil England in The Wire 408. Morris was closely associated with Mad Pride, the late 1990s movement that set out to destigmatise mental illness in a time when, in Morris’s words “we all felt like the scum at the bottom of society”. Mad Pride offered Ceramic Hobs “a chance to do gigs in London to crowds of enthusiastic and friendly crazy people”. The shows, he said, “felt genuinely empowering”.

Morris was also a writer whose publications included Creepshots and Consumer Guide, and in 2019 Amphetamine Sulphate Press published Sea Of Love and Watching The Wheels. The year before, Harbinger Sound released Black Pool Legacy, a double album retrospective spanning Ceramic Hobs’s career.

Ceramic Hobs featured in The Wire 408. Read the article in full on exacteditions.com.