Autobiography

by Morrissey

  Robinsons Records on Blackfriars Street offers a vast warehouse of extraordinary stock – pristine pressings lovingly racked and dazzlingly stacked, tearfully beyond my budget. I stand for hours flipping each sleeve, examined and memorized, domestic and American, always, always out of reach. On John Dalton Street there is Rare Records, whose records are not rare at all, but whose air is the leathery and old giving way to the young sounds. Rare Records is the last to offer listening booths, yet it is cosmopolitan enough to display the first album by Jobriath – somehow assuming that a pained wretch will part with £2.10 for the pleasure; thus I sense my cue. Although masterfully talented, Jobriath has already been laughed off the face of the planet (this one, and quite possibly other planets, too) as a beautiful blunder whose lyrics read like an exchange of under-the-dryer face-pack gossip. On every level, the press work against him, and his name is generally only heard as a punch line. My duty is to run to his rescue, and thankfully he makes it all worthwhile – some songs commanding, some even imperative – but he is already being snuffed out and no amount of carbon-dioxide foam can extinguish the flames. On Lever Street, the cramped Virgin Records is heavy on prog and student notice boards, and always first with American imports – unaffordable at £5.25 when £2.25 is the general retail ceiling. When HMV appears on Market Street its stock is stylishly shrinkwrapped, and this out-dazzles Virgin’s unvarnished and bending manhandled presentations. Piccadilly Records is awkwardly run-of-the-mill, yet it is here that £2.29 secures the New York Dolls’ first LP as the main window of the shop blazes with thirty Dolls sleeves stapled together in a dramatic traffic-stopping mosaic, 50 million unimpressed shoppers running by with a speed suddenly increased by the sight of Arthur Kane. Like a lost lark I drag all curiosities back to the sanctity of my bedroom where the door closes and James Dead is not Dean art fills wall and headspace as neat boxes of 7-inch discs explain me to any passing psychiatrist. I have no other identity and I wish for none. These were times when all were judged squarely and fairly on their musical tastes, and a personal music collection read as private medical records. You should, after all, judge a book by its cover, and any poor fool anointed by heavy rock or smocky folk begged and pleaded for a public hanging. Music was rarely heard anywhere – never on television apart from Top of the Pops, Disco 2, Lift Off with Ayshea, or the unreliably placed Old Grey Whistle Test. Department stores, television commercials, lifts, escalators, airports, shopping areas had yet to discover the advantages of pop noise. For me, there was no one available with whom to discuss these urgings of the heart, because nobody could understand how the head could ring persistently with song. In 1972 I had played All the young dudes by Mott the Hoople to my father, and as it spun innocently before us on orange CBS, he stands to leave.

  ‘Ooh no, I’m not having that,’ were his words as he vanished in disgust. What exactly he wasn’t having I still do not know. He walks around the house singing Four in the morning by Faron Young, or Scarlet ribbons by somebody else. My sister and my mother never sing, but my sister and I were united in the glorification of the social problem film – a fly-by television treat never to be missed, especially the school-as-cesspit honesty of Spare the Rod (1961), Term of Trial (1962), Up the Down Staircase (1967) or To Sir, With Love (1967), wherein slum kids are shown to endure in sufferance the pointlessness of secondary education (for what use is anything at all that is secondary?). The Blackboard Jungle (1957) had been the first to free teachers – spouting resentment at the no-hope kids who were, by birth, three rungs below scum – and boundaries of frankness snapped. Jackie and I would watch as many films as we could, long before the days when television channels refused to transmit monochrome films for fear that no one would watch.

  Back at St Mary’s, my life harnessed and travestied beyond belief, there is only one teacher whom I physically fear, yet this is not the fear of bulk or brawn because rakish Mr Chew has neither, but he is manically loud and always upset, and it is this offhand agitation as he marches squarely around the classroom that disturbs me to such a degree that I close the book on mathematics and successfully avoid the subject for five years. Instead, I curve left rather than right as everyone swarms to his calling, and I skip every lesson simply by sliding out a side door that leads to the bike sheds. This is the rear of the skanky and stinky canteen – where none dare pass – and where I am never to be detected, or missed as absent. As long as Mr Chew has his trapped audience before him, he is in Measure for Measure delight. Nothing, I have decided, could waste precious life more than trigonometry and logarithms. Meriting equally fully plumbed hatred is Mr Hawthorn, who wastes each woodwork lesson by roasting and scorching every boy before him; no intellectual distinction, yet a fascinating study in volatility, Mr Hawthorn is pitiful to watch – every word uttered without hope, his Eric Morecambe spectacles completing the nightmare unleashed. No one laughs at his jokes, because they are not funny, and they are always hurtful. Mr Chesworth runs the metalwork class, but he does not teach it because his irritability causes the boys to close down and back off. His favorite trick is to creep up behind a boy and then pull the boy’s head back by the hair, to which the rest of the class fall silent at the vocational hatred.

  A single minute is not allowed to pass without fiery physical attack from teacher to boy. With no identifiable human being behind the agonized persona, such teachers are restored only by the general truth that the trapped audience before them cannot squeal, for no one would listen. The classroom is their stage, and each day is their theatrical execution – to our joint disadvantage. What gives these teachers the green light for such relentless physical harm? And who, without seeing it, could ever believe it? Warped with trial–sentence–death affixed to their brows, the teachers of St Mary’s block the route to education, because, after all, why bother? The rabble before them are refuse – future postmen at best, largely unemployable, unfit, and ripe for life’s incinerator. Ruggedly rugger-grunting Mr Thomas’s concentrated insults are his only connecting moments with the boys stuck in his company – boys who surely hammer-rammer his nightly dreams.

  ‘Does your mother know you’re truanting?’ Mr Pink leans from his car window as I sidle along the street. I had discovered that if you were to walk out of the school building with concentrated quietism that you would be neither stopped nor thought to be suspicious, and this I did regularly for days of self-exile in Longford Park – awaiting signs of 3:40 movement when it would be safe to be seen on civilian streets. All of the vile merging forces of St Mary’s reduced me to nobody, and it could only be by fleeing the wreckage that I saved myself. To know this was to be guilty – guilty of something. To vary facial expression could lead to a beating, and boys would be forced to hang from the wall-bars in the gym with their bodies facing outwards as Mr Kijowski kicked a football towards them, targeting the stomach whilst demanding that they do not raise their legs in self-protection. It is barbarism. On days of whipping rain we are nonetheless forced outside into a wet yard for what was known as ‘break time’ as – blatantly beyond logic – we are herded out into the rain with all of its obvious detriments. We are then brought back into the school, ravaged and soaked by the bad weather. During several lessons, I stand up and protest against this mayhem, explaining how no one should be forced to go out into a blizzard of rain that will leave them drenched for the rest of the day. But no matter what one thought one knew, if the boys remained inside the building then the teachers must lose their own ‘break’ in order to watch them, and it was for this reason only that dry kids were ordered outside into cloud juice.

  ‘Yes,’ snaps Miss Power, ‘and YOU’RE another one not content with the hair color given to you by Christ.’ Baffled, I immediately imagined Christ setting my hair beneath a blow-dryer, but of course this is in fact Miss Power’s boorish way of drawing attention to my 14th-year adventure of hair of canary-yellow streak. Kath Moores, a close friend who lived in Dukinfield, had whisked the yellow streak through my hair from left corner front
to right corner back. The effect was impressive and suddenly I was famous. No awards for confidence or originality ensued. Previously unknown in the mob-rule dehumanization of St Mary’s history, I stood before their world as a frozen target; a boy with a dyed yellow streak in his hair paying a deathly price for a stab at living artistry. In these days of Arthur Scargill and Brian Clough, somehow a schoolboy with inventively colored hair disgusted art teacher Miss Power. What kind of ‘art’ was she teaching, anyway? The art of non-expression? Swashbuckling Mr Thomas sniffs out burgeoning transsexuality as I sit front row in his history class, and of course he cannot miss the opportunity to sneer, leer and jeer. Under St Mary’s roof, 1974 magically rings with the intolerance of 1850. My hair is, after all, my own, and nobody else’s. Mr Thomas, for example, doesn’t have any – or very little. The abyss in which I live hasn’t the wit to save itself from savage ignorance, and I now feel assured that I am not in the company of my own species (or, at least, I hope I am not, for if I am, then I am they). Dear God, let time pass quickly, and let this end. Let me be older and let this mediocrity pass as a dream – one in which the utmost was done to bury me alive.

  ‘Morrissey, you were absent last week – where were you?’ asks Mr Barry.

  ‘I went to Preston to see Roxy Music,’ I explain in perfectly level tone.

  ‘Oooooooooh, no you don’t!’ booms Mr Barry, full of civic bureaucracy and clan-in-the-right. This recalcitrant malaise! Punish the boy! Punish! Punish! Punish! The price you pay for the quest of art. But Roxy Music will drop quickly from the emotional radar soon, as singer Bryan Ferry announces that his favorite food is veal – second only to foie gras in savage cruelty.

  The terrors of releasing the self and enjoying the self swamped the school corridors. With undercurrents of sorrow, teachers are unable to give heart or encouragement, and it must all be beaten back, and the disease spreads into the kids who must bear it for the rest of their lives – as here I am, now, writing this. My mother is asked into the school to explain my fragmentary absences. I see her walk across the yard in a stylishly short black coat, her hair an insignia of pride, her accessories skilfully impressive. But she is nobody’s fool. Exuding feminine goodness, her set expression is determined and fearless. Mr Barry looks up from his desk and bullishly throws in: ‘She’s great looking your mum, isn’t she?’ I can only imagine what will pass between my mother and the war-ruined husk of Vincent Morgan.

  Whilst it is obvious that school teaches me nothing useful, its unsettlement is relieved by sports – all of which I find easy. By accident I am enlisted to represent the school in track events for the 100 meters and the 400 meters for which, unthinkably, I receive schoolboy medals. For this, my Saturdays are marked out by solitary excursions to woe-begone stadiums in child-gorging Gorton or dishearteningly dented Denton. I am obliged to make my own way, and I am obliged to feel honored and to dream of the 14-second dash, or the one-minute 400. I arrive in the always wet and windy north Manchester, where other boys vary in nationality against the virtual whiteness of St Mary’s. Frozen amongst the pugilistic roughnecks whose kits don’t fit, I await the starting pistol, always relieved to let loose on a grey granite track with its wet chalky smells. The school-doom factories of north Manchester are as pitiful as those of St Mary’s south; foul-smelling changing rooms – their tiled floors alive with disease, or awash with disinfectant that is more dangerous to the skin than the athlete’s foot that it sandblasts. How to change into your kit without bare feet touching the floor, lest contamination paralyze you for life or chew your legs off? Bullish and half-grown juvenescents shout under cold showers, and dare you muster the nerve to stand alongside them and show whatever it is you’ve got? The little mannish machine affects indifference to nudity, and personal comments can only be made via gibberished jokes that will allow mutual study. Female nudity is generally easy to find – if not actually unavoidable – but male nudity is still a glimpse of something that one is not meant to see. In mid-70s Manchester there must be obsessive love of vagina, otherwise your life dooms itself forever.

  The star of the fifth year sports is Pete Gregg, who is kitted out in readiness wherever I’m sent, but his is a manly body of muscle against my whipper-snapper, featherlite twister. I am a torrent of nervous dash, whereas he is solid control and hefty granite legs. However, as I struggle down Oldham Road, out of life’s loop, I know that Jason King and Stewart Sullivan and Annabelle Hurst are zig-zagging across Europe solving the unsolvable, and my pain magnifies.

  Of some interest to me are the limericks of Edward Lear and the bordering-on-bathos of Walter de la Mare. There is even more meaning in the scanty lines of Hillaire Belloc:

  Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,

  but Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right

  and in this year of 1974, knowing nothing of Hillaire Belloc (in fact, I walk into a bookshop in St Anne’s Square asking for ‘anything by Hillary Belloc’), I had no idea that a complete poem could be as short as two lines (couplet?):

  I’m tired of love; I’m still more tired of Rhyme.

  But Money gives me pleasure all the time.

  Naturally, Hillaire Belloc’s name is never mentioned in the unhappy classrooms of St Mary’s School for the Daft, and I find it difficult to track down any information on the rhymist who thought it quite enough to say:

  The chief defect of Henry King

  Was chewing little bits of String

  Belloc sets me out on the hunt for humorous verse, a search as yet largely unmapped. Naturally, I find Dorothy Parker loitering, who offers:

  If, with the literate, I am

  Impelled to try an epigram,

  I never seek to take the credit;

  We all assume that Oscar said it.

  And, of course, in the world of words, there is only one Oscar. Now begins a whirligig of dramatic shock as I am awed beyond reason by the poet who gives the whole person, and jabs sharply. They can tell you everything you need to know about your own sorrow, and about the joy and sadness that is usually found side by side. My senses sharpen at the words of Stevie Smith:

  Some are born to peace and joy

  And some are born to sorrow

  But only for a day as we

  Shall not be here tomorrow.

  Smith had recently passed away after a lifetime of bleeding to death. She appeared to live like a never-opened window, with hardly any right to be, except to pass on a shivery touch of flu. She lived with her aunt in a Victorian pile in Palmers Green, all so painful yet full of life; absent from life – yet all of it right on top of her; fencing adversity with spilled ink; 50 per cent blotting-paper and 50 per cent loose tea.

  With a face of distressed concrete, W. H. Auden drops into view:

  Give me a doctor, partridge plump,

  Short in the leg and broad in the rump,

  An endomorph with gentle hands

  Who’ll never make absurd demands

  That I abandon all my vices

  Nor pull a long face in a crisis,

  But with a twinkle in his eye

  Will tell me that I have to die

  In 1973 W. H. Auden dies, the words silenced, the heart finally given a rest, all in life’s shocking order. I do not know much about him, but there is so much wisdom in the unfolding words; flinching at the narrow-minded and sighing at the petty irritants. He had been interviewed on television, and I could sense the air of genius even before he spoke – as if a person’s greatness need never be pointed out, for it is there, anyway, in the silent being. Invisible behind a fog of cigarette smoke, W. H. Auden has a face of concentrated power, a voice that comes from somewhere deeper than the body, and a life too full and intense. W. H. Auden has lived through the lifetime that it takes in order to find all the right words. There is a stroking sensuality to the voice, and the richness of tone wards off t
he listless Yorkshire giggle of interviewer Michael Parkinson. Here, for me alone, is a glimpse of genius of the highest intellectual distinction which nobody could possibly be qualified to question. I am gradually beginning to grasp the meaning of W. H. Auden – with his eyes too large for their sockets, and his mouth stuck in the wrong part of his body. A half-asleep voice of broadcasting tones is carefully warning you that the only way to deal with him is to back down. More affable and screen-friendly is poet laureate John Betjeman (1906–1984), who is a monument to the sadness of human virtue:

  I made hay while the sun shone.

  My work sold.

  Now if the harvest is over

  And the world cold

  Give me the bonus of laughter

  As I lose hold.

  Betjeman puts it all as well as it can be put, in language of simple rhythm, fastidiously straightforward. There is no egocentricity with Betjeman, who is always helpful and at ease, and who is hopeful and is happy with his gift. But, clutching his teddy bear, Betjeman evidently frustrates the will of prickly poets who look on his celebrity as a dry well of formulated thoughts. Even with the misfortune of always knowing what is coming next, Betjeman is without agitation or propaganda. His only connection with fleshy life is through a small door kept locked, and therefore his view of England’s condition is often sugary. Yes, well, I see it now. The crate in the basement contains a living poet who is burdened by an increasing sense of their own idiocy, with pride and self-pity securely as one. The will surrenders to the resolve and dignity of the written word, and I, the gentle self, step forward, pattering up the ramp, one half of an incomplete person, knowing with certainty that I cannot live – yet wondering if I could possibly write? Slight and weary and full of angularity, my heart is never unbroken, but I am unable to call out. I have a sudden urge to write something down, but this time they are words that must take a lead. Unless I can combine poetry with recorded noise, have I any right to be? Yet, let it begin, for who is to say what you should or shouldn’t do? In fact, everyone tries to knot your desires lest your success highlight their own failure. Better, it is thought, that we all swill in the same bucket, just making do. But I have no intention of living backwards, and I have no intention of surviving for eighteen years in order that I might be strangled to death in my nineteenth. I will never be lacking if the clash of sounds collide, with refinement and logic bursting from a cone of manful blast. Here, from the weeds, the situation worsens since each abiding art-form lacks one essential ingredient – and that ingredient is the small and bowed passionate I. Since there is no living being as recipient of my whispers, and since there are no certainties that one shall ever appear, then the off-balance distortion of my everyday feelings must edge into the un-cooperative world somehow.