I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  While my mates were off dancing with girls or, on occasion, very mature women, I would find the quietest, darkest corner and sulk. I would often have to move quickly when a newly formed couple would hunt out a quiet dark corner to fornicate and would stumble into mine. I wasn’t trying to be cool or ironic or smart, I just hated the places.

  The best of our nights came in October when Blur played at Alexandra Palace, supported by Pulp and Supergrass. The landscape was changing, we were on the journey to watching indie bands in huge arenas but that night felt new, unique, another confirmation that Blur, one of our bands, had really made it. Jacko and I jumped around to our hearts content, safe in the knowledge that this Britpop high would last forever.

  Despite the plethora of wasted Saturday nights, 1994 had been a cracking year, and it ended with the return of The Stone Roses. The five year wait from the Roses universally acclaimed debut album to their second long-player was agonising. Much of the indie world had moved on and got bored waiting for them to return. I, on the other hand, counted down the days on the calendar until “Second Coming” was released on 5th December. I took the day off work and was outside HMV waiting for them to unlock the doors so that I could be the first person in the city to get my hands on the album. I ran into the shop as they pulled the heavy front door open, despite the fact that they hadn’t turned the lights on. I just went running into the darkness to find the album, much to the amusement of the staff.

  “Second Coming” is one of the most underrated albums ever made. It was easy and fashionable to say, upon its release, that it was a pale imitation of their debut but it was a monster. Songs like “Ten Storey Love Song” and” Tightrope” would have been right at home on their debut album. In fact “Ten Storey Love Song” quickly became my favourite Stone Roses tune of them all. Listening to that album on constant repeat was my Christmas holiday period sorted.

  1995

  I Started Something …

  I RARELY made New Year’s resolutions but my resolution for 1995 was quite simple – to grow up.

  I spent the first couple of months diligently playing at being an adult by taking every hour of overtime that was available at work in order to save some money. I would then join up with my mates and go up town on Friday and Saturday nights, get drunk and repeat the dismal nightclub scenario. On weekday evenings I would sit at home listening to “Vauxhall & I” or “Second Coming” and daydream about the adventures that the second half of the year was set to bring, with a sense of anticipation and apprehension.

  On February 9th, I finally got to see Morrissey play live. We were back at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, and I had been excited for weeks waiting for the evening to tick around. I knew that seeing him would be another step on the journey that had started 2 years earlier in House On The Borderland. As he strode onto the stage to the ecstatic roar of the crowd, I think I might have screamed like the girls in the 1960’s film clips swept up in the hysteria of Beatlemania. I had lost control of my bodily functions, becoming a blurred whirl of arms and legs as he thundered into “Billy Budd”. By five songs in and as the intro to “The More You Ignore Me…” rattled the foundations of the venue, the crowd treated the song like a long lost friend and grown men were suddenly throwing themselves over our heads, desperately grasping for the messiah. I spent most of that gig in a giddy haze, dazed and manically giggling at the fact that he was only 50 yards away from where I was stood. Finales to gigs just can’t any better than “Now My Heart is Full”, “Speedway”, and then The Smiths classic “Shoplifters of the World Unite” as the closer. I lost my mates and a trainer in the desperate crush of “Shoplifters…”, hugging complete strangers, feeling the love from the stage and from my fellow addicts. Coming out of the Corn Exchange that night, I was higher than the sun.

  Seeing him live was the final piece of the jigsaw, I now felt part of the Moz gang. I had the tour t-shirt, the cut lip and bruised shin from the crowd frenzy and the ticket-stub that took pride of my place in my gig scrapbook. I had arrived.

  In March, when the spring sun began to shine, I became the ultimate 18 year old cliché by starting a relationship with a 16 year old girl. Jess and I got talking at the bar of the Shamrock Club, while I waited patiently to be served a round of Newcy Brown Ales, (the only drink they couldn’t water down) as she used her impish charm to push to the front of the queue. As we waited, I found myself using quite probably the most pathetic chat-up line ever; ‘Quality (Oasis) shirt, have you seen them play yet? We saw them twice last year, fucking sweet man, really sweet’. Rather than run away from such banal chat, she returned the t-shirt compliment with a knowing nod to my Moz tour shirt and the conversation flowed. It was only at the end of the night, after a sweaty dance to The Lemonheads cover of ‘Mrs Robinson’, and the exchange of phone numbers that she revealed our age differential. By then I was hooked, and drunk, so decided to ignore our birth certificates and the inevitable piss-taking that would come from my mates.

  Jess and I spent the next week talking on the phone in the evenings (local calls were free after 6pm) and then the next weekend sitting in the park, deciding to be boyfriend and girlfriend and kissing. She was a really pretty girl with dark hair and pale blue eyes, a nascent admiration for The Smiths and a shy smile that made my indie-boy heart flutter. Looks-wise she was in the league above me but she loved indie music and I imagine that the fact that I knew a fair bit about that particular subject was what attracted her. I knew that my photographic memory of Glastonbury line-up’s would impress a girl one day and Jess was that girl.

  As Jess was under (and didn’t look) 18, we didn’t go out to pubs or clubs other than the Shamrock who were happy to sell their watered down beer to anyone that simply said that they were old enough. We spent most of March sat in a park just outside the city centre, talking about music. Finally I had found someone who was happy to sit and listen to my ramblings about Morrissey for hours at a time. We never went to her house, due to the fact that her dad wasn’t impressed by the 2 year age gap, but we occasionally went back to mine to listen to music. My dad was concerned about me starting a new relationship so close to going to university. I think he was worried that I would fall madly in love, refuse to go to Cardiff and stay at home. In reality that was never an option but it didn’t stop him being paranoid about it. One afternoon, Jess and I were up in my room listening to The Smiths when Dad came home from work unexpectedly early. He could hear us sniggering so came barging in to find us fully clothed apart from me not having any socks on. Despite my protestations, he was sure that we had been “up to something” but, upon hearing him come in, had managed to both get dressed and appear calm, all apart from my lack of socks which were apparently a “dead giveaway”. I couldn’t wait to get to university, and not have to worry about whether I wanted to invite a different girl every night back to my room. I knew that I wouldn’t be taking a different girl back to my room every night, I might well invite them but I knew they wouldn’t come. It didn’t occur to me that having such a thought probably wasn’t a good omen for my nascent relationship with Jess.

  “Strangeways Here We Come” had become my favourite Smiths album. Of course, “The Queen Is Dead” is 10 tracks of Morrissey/Marr genius, but ‘Strangeways…’ could make me laugh, cry and feel euphoric all in the course of one listen. It’s an album packed with Morrissey’s twisted black humour and some of the very best tunes that Johnny Marr had ever composed. I would play it to Jess constantly and rave about a different track on each listen, from ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ to the delectable tale that is ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’. She would sit quietly in my room listening both to the album and to me, and smile. It is possible that Jess didn’t like “Strangeways…..” at all. I simply didn’t give her enough space in any conversation we had, to talk about anything other than The Smiths.

  I was constantly trying to dig my life deeper into the pit of twisted, unrequited love that Morrissey inhabited. I read Oscar Wilde despite only understanding the meaning o
f one sentence in every three. I would sit for hours watching home recorded VHS copies of films like “Kathy Come Home” because I knew that they had inspired Moz, and wanted them to have the same effect on my teenage bones. I liked the film but it was a bit bleak, which, I just about realised, was exactly the point.

  When Jess wasn’t around, I would stand in front of the stereo in my room and dance through the 1min 54 seconds intro to “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” before throwing myself across the room and singing the lyrics to an imaginary crowd. “Strangeways….” was taking over my life and I bloody loved it.

  In mid April, having answered an advert in the Education section of The Guardian, I was offered a 3 month job at a fee paying school in Hereford teaching 6-12 year olds how to play football and learn to swim in exchange for £55 per week with free board and lodgings thrown in. I accepted the job with the thought that being paid money to teach kids to play football essentially made me a professional coach, and I couldn’t wait to go and live that particular dream.

  The only issue I had to tackle was my fledgling relationship with Jess. The 140 miles between Peterborough and Hereford coupled with a combination of my not having a car and it being a bloody awful train journey meant that I wasn’t going to be coming home very often during my coaching stint. It was however, far too good an opportunity to turn down. So with a quick hug and a promise to write to or call Jess every day, I was off to Hereford.

  I loved Hereford, it was a beautiful, welcoming city with a rich history as well as some cracking pubs. I was on my own with money in my pocket and being paid to coach sport for 4 hours a day. In all honesty I didn’t really think about Jess at all, I didn’t have time. If I wasn’t coaching I was sat on the balcony of my flat, which overlooked the cathedral grounds, listening to music or down the pub with the school’s priest. Father James was in his late 20’s, loved a drink and could talk for Ireland about football and music. We would pop out to the pub at least a couple of times a week and sit in there talking and supping until chucking out time. The next morning I would be stood at the back of the assembly hall trying not to let the Headmaster see how hungover I was. Up at the front, Father James would be singing hymns far too loudly and telling the kids another cleverly disguised tale about morality.

  Hereford was also my first interaction with posh people. I was informed by the Headmaster that the school was well regarded among the upper echelons of British society. At the summer parents evening, the school held a wine and cheese reception “on the lawn”. At such evenings at my old school, parents didn’t get so much as a cup of tea and here I was, sipping vintage wine and eating canapés. I stood on the edge of the assembled group, gulping down the wine like it was squash, trying to hold my nerve, hoping that none of the parents would seek out my opinion on their children’s footballing or swimming ability. Slowly but surely they wandered over for a chat and I was surprised to find that everyone I got introduced to asked me what school I went to. Unsurprisingly, none of the parents at this elite establishment had heard of Stanground College. Many of the parents and teachers were wearing their old school tie, whereas I was wearing the tie that came free with the shirt that I’d bought from Burtons earlier that afternoon.

  Towards the end of my time in Hereford, I took a long weekend off work to join my mates in our now annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury. We knew it was the end of an era in our lives, as Jacko and I would be heading off to university that autumn. The two of us and Doody were therefore even more determined than usual to have a top weekend and with the likes of Oasis, The Charlatans, The Prodigy, Elastica and PJ Harvey in the line-up, the stage was set.

  Aside from our mate Borgs tagging along, it was just the 3 of us at a festival for the first time, no girlfriends, no big group of friends and hangers-on. It was scorching hot and we had the time of our lives, living the weekend without even caring if the world outside those fields of green had ceased to exist. Life consisted of music, laughing, drinking, eating, dancing and occasionally sleeping. A magnificent weekend with my best mates in the world. Borgs was at his first ever festival and, having come to Somerset with £25 in his pocket, proceeded to spend £15 on a commemorative “Oasis – Glastonbury 1995” t-shirt. Faced with only having a tenner left for the weekend, he went into Pilton Village later that day and came back with the essential festival survival kit, namely 8 cans of Fosters, a baguette and a block of cheese.

  Glastonbury 1995 saw Oasis rise from a 2pm slot on the NME Stage the previous year to Friday night Pyramid Stage headliners. It was a meteoric ascent, but one that we all assumed the Gallagher brothers would take in their stride. They strutted onto the stage in the requisite cocksure manner but, as dynamic as they had been the previous year, their set now felt leaden and boring. They played a whole batch of new songs that didn’t sound anywhere near the standard of those on “Definetly Maybe”. It probably didn’t help that we were about a mile from the stage due to the huge crowd, and contributed to us concluding that, aside from a glorious rendition of “Slide Away”, they “were much better last year.”

  When we’d booked our Glasto tickets back in March, The Stone Roses were billed to be the Saturday evening headliners but, thanks to John Squires cracked collarbone, they were unable to play. The music press had been buzzing with speculation as to who would replace the Roses. Rod Stewart, Madonna and Blur were all being mentioned. But, again showing that they were a family with the ability to turn festival water into wine, the Eavis’s opted to give the coveted headline slot to Pulp, who had just had a huge hit with “Common People”.

  Everything about that warm June Saturday night was spot on. I was stood in this magical field with my two best mates, passing round a bottle of Southern Comfort, watching Jarvis stride onto the Pyramid Stage and rule Glastonbury. From old favourites in “Babies” to new songs such as “Sorted for E’s and Wizz”, (it was the supreme setting to debut that song) the ginormous crowd lapped them all up.

  I loved The Stone Roses dearly and was gutted that they had pulled out, but they simply couldn’t have put on as good a show as PULP did that night. After little over an hour of their sparkling performance, with band and crowd alike hot, sweaty and beaming huge smiles, Jarvis announced that the next song was to be the last.

  Some songs are much better live than they are in their recorded format, they appear to get a new lease of life and this was particularly true for the epic final tune that night. As Jarvis announced; “This is the last one, we can’t do anymore. This is “….C….O….M….M….O….N….P….E….O….P….L….E”, a lusty roar of joy went up from the crowd and we joined in with the other 60,000 folks pogoing, singing and hugging each other. It was an extra special moment, one of those that instantly seared itself into the area of my brain marked ‘Recall if you need to cheer yourself up’. A memory that would still be in glorious technicolor and crystal clear 20 years hence when you are starting to struggle to remember simple life facts such as the names of your primary school teachers.

  We spent the rest of the night buzzing our bits off wandering the site, laughing, drinking, taking legal highs that didn’t alter your mood one bit, and then raving outside Joe Bananas Blanket Stall until 5am. As dawn broke over our campsite, with Jacko and Doody passed out in the entrance to our tent, I nicked Borg’s last can of Fosters and took the long and winding walk down the hill to my spot at the front of the deserted Pyramid Stage.

  I sat there and watched acid casualties stumble and fall to the ground, sleeping where they lay whilst late night courting couples ran back to their tents to get some fumbling in before the morning broke the spell that the night had cast over them. I pondered on the fact that my life was about to change. I was off to university in the autumn and sat there daydreaming about all the gigs I was going to attend, and all the books I was going to read. Coupled with the memory of the previous night’s revelry I felt as contented and relaxed as I usually only did after eating a 12 inch cheese feast deep pan pizza. I began to let sleep envelop me
as the sun was beginning to rise, safe in the knowledge that I was in my favourite place in the world. I was woken an hour or two later by a kindly litter picker who nudged me and said:

  “C’mon mate, time to wake up. You must have been steaming when you fell asleep here, you’ve been laid in someone’s Tofu stir-fry.”

  I thanked him and made my way back up the hill covered in the flavourless but pungent vegetarian meal. After a quick kip, we staggered out of our tents and, in traditional Sunday morning Glasto style, searched our rucksacks to see what provisions we had left. Our pool amounted to: A multipack of Mini-Cheddars, a Tracker bar and a bottle of Southern Comfort. That was breakfast sorted.

  Unsurprisingly, I can’t recall too much about that particular Glastonbury Sunday.

  I went back to Hereford and, when not swimming or playing football, I would listen to ‘Vauxhall & I’ and ponder further on the changes that were about to crash into my life. Through the spring months I had kept in touch with Jess mainly by letter. She would send me long, floral outpourings detailing how much she missed me, I would reply with a single sheet explaining that I was very busy and quoting random Morrissey lyrics. Occasionally she would raise the romance killing spectre of me going to university in her letters but I just flatly ignored such talk. I still felt that I was committed to our relationship.

  When my time at the school was over, I went home and spent any time we had together trying to fill her head with Morrisseyesque tales of difficult long distance romance being the best romance possible. I believed it all as well as I was totally swept up in Morrissey’s love of unconventional relationships.