by Morrissey
St Mary’s Secondary Modern School on Renton Road in Stretford may indeed be secondary, but it is not modern. An unattractive slim slab of glass, St Mary’s is life’s second bolt of frightening lightning, and it hits the target with five confined years that will answer no purpose – a school of notoriously mean disciplinarians whom one hopefully survives despite everything. Now comes the hour to choose between being acceptable to others or being acceptable to one’s own self, for we must kill our true selves off in order to survive. I had no idea that life could get worse, or that schoolteachers could be more contemptuous than those of wilting St Wilfrid’s, but the snarling stupidity at St Mary’s is deathless, and its wearisome echo of negativity exhausts me to a permanent state of circumstantial sadness. Vincent Morgan is the Headmaster whose voice is a sigh, whose carriage is militantly empirical, and although a spectacle of suffering, he is mysteriously tuned in to God. Well past middle-age, he is rigorous in grey suit and gleaming black shoes, the sag of cruelty in his face a clue to the torrential capacity for violence. Sealed up like an envelope, he is unable to act with kindness or humanity, for he has neither, and there is evidently nothing to humanize him. For five years I witness the monumental loneliness of Vincent Morgan as he busies himself day after day with the beatings of small boys. And it goes on, and on, and on, and on – leading nowhere, achieving nothing. By 9:40 each morning, we shall all have witnessed several humiliating beatings at St Mary’s, and this is how we begin our day of knowledge. As Vincent Morgan concludes his morning prayer in assembly – in which he gives thanks – he will then point to up to twelve boys seemingly at random, who must step aside and prepare to be lashed, such being the heart of a man of Christian forgiveness. In its motive and conclusion, it is pathetic. Yet it never subsides. Inevitably, I am sooner or later marked out as one of the turkey twelve, drawn to Vincent Morgan’s attention for reasons that he shall never be called upon to explain. Standing in line, my rage is for the smaller boys alongside me who, after one of six swinging whacks with a thick leather strap, have trouble standing, and whose small hands crack under the powerful military might of Morgan’s excited slam. Undersized and freshly plucked from junior school, these boys are still children and are no match for the satanic attack launched by this heaving and burning artilleryman. What could it possibly all be for? Only once do I ever see a boy square up to Vincent Morgan with the measured advice that he should ‘Fuck off’, and it is that moment once again when the gunshot is so unexpected that it baffles the bully. My only possession is a brave front, since I have never known how to fight, and even as Vincent Morgan whacks and whacks and swings that leather belt with the full and mighty force of his entire body, something in his face tells me that he alone pays for all of this misery. Marooned, Vincent Morgan walks to and from school every single day by himself, an umbrella neatly propped on an arm that crosses the front of his body with marksman preparation. He has no friendship with the other teachers, and is only ever visible as the one of perpetual flogging. The fruitlessness of such overactive repulsion, in modern times, would of course suggest the starkest sexual overtures ... for what else? What job did he think he was doing? And ... for whom? And if there is no reason to show interest in these boys for any other cause (as there clearly isn’t), then why be so concerned about administering their punishment? Why isn’t their punishment ignored along with their hopes and dreams?
The tough and tearless boy who had advised Vincent Morgan to ‘fuck off’ was Michael Foley, and as star witness I slung my glass into the sea. At last, an individual! Handsomely G.I.-faced Foley is the only boy of wit and glamor in the entire school, and luckily for me he is in my class and easy to befriend. He cannot, though, turn zest and spark to anything at all other than girls’ knickers, and a friend for life fades in time. He works on the bread vans each Saturday morning, and entices me to give it a go, rising as I must at 6 AM to be poetically active by 6:30 – an experience so frightening as to not be tackled twice. In my short conversations with Vincent Morgan I am struck by his game of persuasion, trying to convince me that whatever I say to him by way of reply has no value. I am dented by his technique of always making the cross-examined feel ‘less’, as I am also pierced by his bullying trick of speaking only in intimidating questions: ‘and what’s all this, then?’, ‘and who told you that you could do that?’, ‘and who do you think you are, exactly?’ – and irrespective of however you explained yourself he would always come back with a question-reply so that he maintains ground as the inquisitor, keeping you answerable, yet failing to account for your actions. The words are a trick to make the victim passive. Without question, the boys lined up before Vincent Morgan, ready to be corrected by his floggings, were England’s dregs, and they could only be taught failure by failures, illumination by violence.
Whether at St Mary’s or St Wilfrid’s, I am spared the indignity of ever staying for school dinners, although I cannot escape the daily waft of dead pig and foul fish sandblasting both buildings and clinging to the senses for a lifetime. Once the dinner vans arrive, the school corridors are polluted by floating venomous toxins, unbearable to inhale so surely deadly to consume, and by late afternoon the leftovers will splodge and stink and spill and surge from huge bins awaiting collection. We are decades away from food awareness or any consideration of animal compassion, and stories circulate throughout St Mary’s of small stones in mashed potatoes and of mince that moves. Yet it is uncivilized to complain, and a Mr Bumble always hovers somewhere, and although you pay for your dinner you are not invited to shape the menu. The condition of England at the time was such that supported the predicament of taking whatever is dished out, whether this be food or violence. In order for there to be winners there needed to be losers, and the winners were already seated at fully heated Stretford Grammar. Somebody, it had been ordained, must be available to bang nails into wood for a living, and here we were.
By their unlucky presence, the teachers surely felt a similar way about themselves. Not for them some first-class establishment where laughter and success intermingled – they, too, have been thought to be not much cop, their dreams undone by the emphatic grainy-blackness of St Mary’s, unexpurgated and without serenade. Injuries of time marked the school as tired and tatty, yet trying to be technical. Exactly why I am here, and what it is I am meant to do, is beyond me. Each day is an array of invectives, thrown at the boys who are united in their understanding that they have been dumped, and are being dumped upon. Each day is Kafka-esque in its nightmare, and the school offers nothing at all except a lifelong awareness of hate as a general truth. Encouragement is not on any curriculum, its place filled by the shit-without-wit repartee of such as Mr Kijowski, physical education instructor ostensibly, yet whose constant stream of hate suggests that if he is not frightening someone then he is nothing. Young and unmarried, he is obsessed with homosexuality – that it should be traced and uncovered, named and shamed. This tirade goes on and on for more years than could be thought possible, and I am not surprised that I am regularly the butt of his bombast, and yet the most obvious homosexual behavior reveals itself in Mr Kijowski himself, as each PE lesson closes and the obligatory communal showering is enforced. This is always the time when Mr Kijowski will conduct any sub-plot to demand that all showering boys ‘freeze’ and remain still until a fantasized misdemeanor of some kind is admitted to, with the familiar threat that ‘No boy will move until the culprit owns up,’ as Mr Kijowski pushes his way through this cramped room of naked boys. Mr Sweeney is also a physical education teacher, and unmarried, but is less obsessively homosexualist, although it is commonly noted how he stands and stares and stands and stares at showering boys when neither standing nor staring is necessary. One day during five-a-side, I flip forwards and crash down on my right hand. This stirs a blip of compassion from Mr Sweeney, who then takes me into his private office, whereupon he proceeds to massage my wrist with anti-inflammatory cream. At 14, I understand the meaning of the unnecessarily slow and sen
sual strokes, with eyes fixed to mine, and I look away, and the moment passes. Shortly thereafter, drying myself off after a shower, Mr Sweeney leans into my mid-region to ask, ‘What’s that scar down your stomach, Steven?’ – but his eyes are lower, and these are the moments that cause you to check certain words in dictionaries, and for the first time you are forced to consider yourself to be the prize, or the quarry.
Air from 1947 hangs in the school stockrooms where outmoded textbooks stockpile against unwanted plaques anointing proud achievements of boys long-since gone, like a roll-call of the war dead. The slowness of days drills the brain, especially around 2:30 in the afternoon, when time never seems to move, and the 3:40 bell hangs lifelessly until the last drop of nausea has been wrung from the brow. Chalk and stale sweat catch whatever air escapes into these barren vaults, and a yellowing world map is all that the eye can rest upon, with not one continent available to you or meant for you. It is impossible to imagine a time when we shall feel free of all of this dissonance, and it is impossible to meet the situation halfway. Sadly, it is also impossible to simply just get on with it. My eyes lock permanently on the view from the windows, as I long to the point of tears to be released from this prison maze, or this maze prison, where I am ridiculed simply for just turning up. Mr Pink is reading aloud a story entitled Boris the Wig-maker. He stops suddenly and burns in my direction as my eyes watch the black rain banging against feeble windows.
‘Steven, who exactly was Boris?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not interested,’ I quickly reply, but very softly.
‘Right!! Stand up!!’ Warhorse Mr Pink charges to a cupboard to grapple for his treasured leather strap, and I am ordered to stand and take four whacks of the belt across my hands. I am then ordered to sit down, and, his turbulent rush fed, he continues to read to the class. I return my gaze to the rain. It is all so utterly stupid. I am at this point struck by the understanding that this freakish use of the leather strap is the answer for all teachers who find themselves in a situation that they simply cannot deal with, or answer. It is their weakness, not ours. Simply because I quite honestly admitted to having no interest in Boris the Wig-maker, how does a violent charge with a leather strap provide an answer?
Occasionally we suffer the disdainful presence of a local priest, young and patronizing, with a name never to be recalled. Oddly, he seems to fix his curiosity upon me, possibly because I sit aloof, possibly because I do not contribute to polite laughter, possibly because of the newly tended weave in my hair.
‘And what do YOU like in life?’ he asks me, ready to play the patronizing game at my expense in order to raise a giggle from the rest of the class, thus rendering him popular for a few perverse minutes.
‘Mott the Hoople,’ I answer truthfully.
‘Oh, I see,’ he smirks, greater and grander than us all, ‘most boys like girls – he likes Mott the Hoople.’
The Catholic priest looks to the rest of the class having given them their cue for courteous laughter. But no laughter comes, and the priest looks back at me with his face of hate – as if to warn me that there will come another time when he shall score.
The topsy-turvydom of 1972 had brought an explosion of music and art and newness into my life and I was now in full self-development mode and desperate to be free of censure. There was no one with whom to discuss these understandings, and certainly any interest in art and self-expression through music was something to keep hidden throughout the cracked corridors of St Mary’s. I had bought the Starman single by David Bowie, which had climbed to number 42 in the chart, and I catch this epoch of self-realization for the first time on television as the exotic and shapely Ayshea Brough celebrates newly distributed color television with her show Lift Off with Ayshea. As David Bowie appears, the child dies. The vision is profound – a sanity heralding the coming of consciousness from someone who – at last! – transcends our gloomy coal-fire existence. David Bowie is detached from everything, yet open to everything; stripped of the notion that both art and life are impossible. He is quite real, impossibly glamorous, fearless, and quite British. How could this possibly be?
‘STOP biting your finger-nails,’ Mr Pink shouts at Michael Foley.
‘I can’t. It’s a habit,’ explains Michael.
‘RIGHT!!’ shouts Mr Pink, who then grabs his leather belt and the ritualized violent whacks across Michael’s hands ensue. Again, it is pathetic to witness, and pathetic to endure.
An excitingly arch London magazine called Film and Filming has versed me in the Warholian, with all of its guiding principles of self-determination and autonomy. I cried for poetic language and I cried out to find those who were unafraid, those free agents, unbigoted and unshackled. I didn’t want to live unseen, camouflaged within the crowd. I knew then that life could only ever be changed for the better because somebody somewhere had taken a risk – often with their own life. As an educational establishment, St Mary’s contained only the traditional values of negativity, and there would not be a single hour spent within its walls when I could feel either relaxed or untrammeled. It simply wasn’t allowed. In their God-fearing, chanting morality, the teachers of St Mary’s only managed to convey nihilism and limericks. Look for one boy who left the place feeling spiritual and complete. You will never find him. My face had by now taken on the demeanor of continual deep regret, which only music could soothe. The new poets were not by the Lakes, but suspending disbelief in recording studios where words and sound mix the literal with the perceptual and the conceptual. In 1971 I had watched helplessly as Buffy Sainte-Marie made her debut on Top of the Pops singing her own composition Soldier blue; a mannish white working shirt, and what were surely blue jeans, dogged determination in her brownish face, and the truth of it all in her eyes.
Oh soldier blue, soldier blue,
Can’t you see that there’s another way to love her?
The ‘her’ is the land, and ‘the other way’ is minus bombs and military artillery. Or so I assumed. Serious artists rarely make the stages of Top of the Pops because the show is essentially light entertainment, yet this song of great depth has risen to number 7, and, light or not, the BBC are duty-bound as a public service to air any song elected by the public. In the market-driven mush of British pop, there is no continual place for Buffy Sainte-Marie with her carrion calls of loss and injustice. But there she is, and here am I, and the secret of song unravels. I discover Moratorium on the flipside of Soldier blue, and this song has a fighting vocal over a lengthy stream of words that include the line ‘Fuck the war – bring our brothers home’, and I weigh my new love against the Willesden weediness of Greyhound, whose singer’s voice is ready to crack and fold at any second. Trojan Records had also presented the Pioneers with Let your yeah be yeah, attempting to match the impassable scatology of Double barrel by Dave and Ansell Collins, or the freeing stringed swoop of Young, gifted and black by Bob and Marcia. It seemed to me that it was only within British pop music that almost anything could happen. Every other mode of expression seemed fixed and predictable and slow. Sportsmen used the same seven words in every interview, and were largely incapable of surprise (Cassius Clay and George Best the eternal exceptions). The music of 1971 had given the lost strangeness of I will return by Springwater, the eco-protest of Don’t let it die by Hurricane Smith, and the liberating sadness of General Johnson’s voice on a wild roll of Chairmen of the Board singles. From nowhere comes the California cobra chords of Run run run by Jo Jo Gunne and Heaven must have sent you by the Elgins – wide variables on an open pitch, all adapting to different listeners – the well and the ill. All of this starts me, and I cannot stop. If I can barely speak (which is true), then I shall surely sing.
‘If you MUST sing every night, would you please sing something that we know?’ says elderly Mr Coleman from next door, which was of course a polite way of telling me to shut up, as each night I sang myself to sleep. T. Rex had raged into perfection with their trio
of Jeepster (number 2 for six weeks!), Telegram Sam (number 1) and Metal guru (number 1), an extraordinary rush of success magnifying the importance of Marc Bolan as a rattling sea change. Wearing makeup and an extreme mantle of pride, Bolan didn’t seem to have any life other than song. He is struggling to break in America, but it doesn’t work in a country whose fiercely conservative patterns cannot allow a small and effeminate man to attempt to direct and influence their unknotted Ivy League WASPS. Marc Bolan’s lyrics are steeped in the quietly insane world of the gothic English novel, and are too deeply eccentric to survive any explanation. On earlier records, Bolan sounds as if singing in Olde English – incomprehensible to the modern ear. Yes, but the Bible speaks of ‘a whole earth of one language’, and this is something that only pop singers can manage. Certainly, politicians cannot.
T. Rex are my first concert and my dad and sister drop me off at daunting Belle Vue on June 16th 1972, watching me waddle away alone in my purple satin jacket – a sight ripe for psychiatric scrutiny. I am now determined, and newly emerged from Groovin’ with Mr Bloe by Mr Bloe. England was already set to change trains from Marc Bolan to David Bowie, whose Starman single had shaken everyone with its somewhere-over-the-rainbow chorus and Blue Mink’s Melting pot bridge. Full-page advertising for David Bowie’s new Top Rank tour causes me to laugh excitedly as I see the now famous shot of spike-thin Bowie half-propped on a high stool, wearing tight white satin pants tucked into plastic boxer-boots, one hand on hip, the other hand pointing the way to somewhere, quite fanatically homosexual. The face is damned-soul-as-savior-of-society, preacher and reformer, now free of his own unhappy childhood and willing to help you through yours should Black Sabbath and Deep Purple prove insufficient. I crawl from the cultureless world to Stretford Hardrock in September 1972, where David Bowie is showcasing the venue. At mid-day he emerges from a black Mercedes, every inch the eighth dimension, teetering on high heels, with all the wisdom of our ancestors. Smiling keenly, he accepts the note of a dull schoolboy whose overblown soul is more ablaze than the school blazer he wears, and thus I touch the hand of this inexplicably liberating reformer; he, a Wildean visionary about to re-mold England, and I, a spectacle of suffering in a blue school uniform. Two months later I am at the same venue for Roxy Music, who are still promoting their first LP but who are exhibiting the sleeve of their second LP in the foyer – an advanced flash for those who can’t wait. I creep into the soundcheck (quite easily, since the obscurity of the band does not necessitate any form of security), and I speak to saxophonist Andrew Mackay as he plays a pinball machine in the Hardrock lobby. It is a netherworld encounter for Mackay, but a great joy for the pesky boy. There is new meaning to everything as Roxy Music inexplicably jump to number 4 with their first single, Virginia plain, a pursed-mouth whirl of low noise and words used for sound value only. There is no chorus and nothing is repeated. The song is madcap in construction, and singer Bryan Ferry is an honored northern guest – escapist but shy, a slither of glamor rippling like the sea. Roxy Music are resolutely odd, and Agatha Christie queer; the smile of Ferry is Hiroshima mean, as he shuffles crab-style from stage right to stage left ... like someone who’s had his food dish removed. It’s a voice of cold metal, just barely skin deep. I eagerly catch his first Radio One interview wherein he falls asleep at the drone of his own replies. Eno, on the other hand, uses words that no one else can spell and is wrapped in so much sexual allure that Top of the Pops cameras avoid him for fear of frightening the frighteningly drab majority. The technical detachment of Roxy Music is, briefly and possibly accidentally, a radical experience, one that they swiftly dispense with once they establish a large audience. But before they lose their strangeness they are magnificent, and the drabness of true artifice comes alive. Also billed for this night at the Hardrock are the New York Dolls, who have yet to make a record, but about whom the press had already written so much. Bumped up against the front of the stage, I, and others, sigh heavily as it is announced that the New York Dolls will not appear due to the sudden death of their drummer three days earlier in London. In these limping, impeded days of 1972 there is no way that such news could reach our social quarter, since our houses and our lives are shut down from instant communications.