Autobiography

by Morrissey

  One day a large wooden gate falls open into a walled yard somewhere amongst unmarked backstreets behind Deansgate, and there before us stood what was the original outdoor set for television’s Coronation Street. It is a grubby façade of pretend houses and a shabbily stark corner shop – carelessly stacked with yellowing cornflakes boxes with their brand names sloppily hidden behind hastily applied gaffer-tape. Misdirected, we walk in, squinting at the magical properties of television. The eye is detained by the smallness of the set and the surprising lack of realism. Behind us, the Coronation Street cast suddenly arrives in readiness for exterior shots, on a street where cobbles face the wrong direction, and where each house has identical off-white net curtains.

  ‘Have you noticed how the post-box is facing a different direction in each episode?’ smiles Julie Goodyear (who plays Bet Lynch).

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  Julie Goodyear is dressed in her faux-leopard brassiness, and is linking Peter Adamson (who plays Len Fairclough). I am suddenly faced with Bernard Youens (who plays Stan Ogden), who looks at me oddly.

  ‘Oh, you are a nuisance, aren’t you,’ he comments, which confuses me since I hadn’t actually said anything apart from one simple-soul ‘yes’. Jon and I realize that we are assumed to be extras for the afternoon shoot, which centers on Margot Bryant (Minnie Caldwell) struggling around on feeble feet. Hours pass, and nothing seems to happen, so we advance to leave, but I am stopped by a woman tumbling with a bundle of scripts.

  ‘Can you handle a bicycle well?’ she asks.

  ‘Very,’ I say.

  ‘We need a boy for Saturday. It’s a 7 am start, no dialogue.’

  On Saturday I am prompt for my first television appearance: an Edwardian drama of a brooding England rife with tuberculosis and fraught romances against the typical northern landscape of tug-of-war family ties and money worries. Ushered into the Granada TV makeup room I am forced into a chair where my shagpile moptop is shorn to the bone without my consultation. I am horrified, and then, thirty seconds later, I am thrilled. Habitual-criminal mismatched tweeds, a worn and torn debtors’ prison vest, the obligatory pit-boots and pickpocket’s waistcoat ... and the screen is mine. I am ordered to cycle through a conventional industrial scene of the frozen north of 1913 whilst in the foreground lovers tiff about whatever it is lovers tiff about. The day is naturally overlong, the weather naturally arctic, but the cycling chimney-sweep pulls it off. Avril Elgar is the main star of this production of The Stars Look Down, and I, a spot on the horizon, cycling in search of the Hollywood Bowl – a punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate. Even if you don’t blink at all you will miss me.

  When Lou Reed played the Palace Theater in 1973 I had befriended Hazel Bowden and Kath Moores, who are part of an east Manchester sect steeped in all the right noises. They all bound off to Leeds to see the New York Dolls, and they spend the night with the Dolls at the Dragonara Hotel – not as sleeping partners, but just sitting around saying not very much, as David Johansen throws Arthur Kane’s famous above-knee-length boots out of the hotel window and on to the street below – just for a hoot. Hazel wears a beret, is 1940s skinny, speaks in a full whisper, drinks whiskey, smokes impressively, and holds the eye. Hazel appears not to care about anything at all – which is a relief, of sorts. Michael Foley is impressed with this new glamorous syndicate and wants to get closer to the pizzazz of Elnette and Russian cigarettes. As we follow Roxy Music into the Midland Hotel in 1973 (where we are most certainly not wanted), Hazel returns insults to a passing roughneck who bats back the compliment with a bone-crunching whack to Michael’s face. It is an unfortunate but recurring Manchester wrangle wherein the female starts the trouble but is then protected by her femininity when combat kicks off, and the innocent boy-stander (Michael) gets the one–two punch to the blindside. I watch all a-wobble as Michael’s face expands.

  Hazel was careless but greatly likeable. She was scatter-shot but loyal. She was tough but funny, and anything is forgiven of anyone who makes us laugh. Kath Moores and her Dukinfield friends were all lascivious young women, and they liked their men to look like the Dolls or Bowie. They despised the macho Boddington’s-eloquent chat-up drunks of which Manchester produced nothing but. Male beauty was Mick Ronson or Jerry Nolan, and any man wearing makeup rang all the right bells. For me, it is a relief to be with people who are not shockable, although my own style is Antique Market baggy trousers and cord jackets of men long dead. I know only lodging-house thrift, and I do not ever attempt glamor in this city of gangs. From this time, it is Hazel Bowden who attempts to prolong our friendship, baffled as I am, since her life in Romiley is nothing like mine – with all of its redundantly difficult circumstances. I like Hazel whilst understanding nothing about her.

  Suddenly and without necessity, Jon Daley takes up the sport of shoplifting. He favors the larger stores such as Lewis’s, Kendals and Debenhams, but for one so eloquent he cannot explain why he does what he does. Often he would throw the stolen items away, and would always be in possession of enough money to cover the cost of whatever he had just lifted. I do not ever accompany Jon on his excursions, but the impressive spoils were often laid out before me with poacher’s pride. Oasis on Market Street is regularly marked out by Jon, where Stolen From Ivor offers a cubicle curtain so large that Jon can make anything disappear. These are not yet the years of imposing security guards or intrusive CCTV cameras. Behind Lewis’s stands a fancy art-supplies shop called Megsons, where the materials are unaffordably dazzling and priced out of my range (for, as ever, I have no range). Jon manages to haul in a host of notebooks, heavy paper, fancy pens, wax pastels, and water-soluble Caran d’Ache – all free of charge to those who have no intentions of paying in the first place. It is funny, but probably wrong. At some faraway track at Wellacre School, Jon arrived one day to watch me run for St Mary’s (although I was actually running from St Mary’s). He is a standout oddity in an exhaustingly straitlaced crowd (for what else in Sale in 1974?), and I begin to understand how things must seem. Wellacre are roughish posh boys with Garden of Eden facilities, and none of the put-up-and-shut-up regimented mildew and mold of St Mary’s. I am jealous and I stay jealous.

  It is Hazel Bowden who stays close to Jon in the fading days of friendship, long after Jon and I find we have less to say to each other. There is a natural phasing out without a falling out, and it is Hazel who tells me that Jon has been killed in a horrific motorway crash. Driving alone to Birmingham, Jon is crushed by a tailing juggernaut that fails to brake. The story makes the national television news, and, as it does, this period of my life loses itself to the lap of memory. I stand at Jon’s grave at Moston cemetery and I see that his name is spelled with an ‘h’, and that both of his parents are encased on top or beneath him. It is too much to bear, and in this dank November air I hear voices of people who are not there.

  From St Stephenson Square I take a beetroot Ribble bus north to Accrington, near where Anji Hardy lives, in Haslingden. It’s always a slow and laborious journey, and a chill drizzle never fails on arrival. The short and cold streets of Haslingden are full of cramped clumsiness and the slate-landscape of out-of-time Lancashire. An eternity of repetitive streets of Victorian terraced houses rest on one another for fear of being wiped out, their windows like empty eye-sockets hiding secrets in back bedrooms and dingy parlors. How, I wonder, would Lou Reed cope with this? In its midst, Anji Hardy uses her madcap humor as an excuse for everything, and every single day is an orgy of hysterical sensation. Inertia was unwelcome in the house that Anji shared with her Scottish mother; a house oddly laid out with large, bare bedrooms over-run with mice. (I never see one myself, but Anji assures me.) I climb into the single bed in the dreary back room and my feet slip into a mass of knitting needles; Anji’s humor is there to be relished. She rarely leaves the house, but when she does we allow ourselves to be thrown about by Haslingden’s unfailing winds. This is a forgotten and daft-as-a-brush town where locals might say ‘I were
agate’ to emphasize surprise. It is true that nothing happens in Haslingden, and only fantasies sap Anji’s strength, although there is occasionally a strong and unsmiling teenager who often appears in the house, and I assume that his trousers are apt to come undone, for why else is he there? He works for Holland’s Pies, and will tell no more than that. I don’t ask, anyway. In the town center everything looks awful; pigs’ feet are displayed in shop windows, and tripe is listed proudly on café menus. One day we bump into four of Anji’s girlfriends, and they are pleasant and tough and unvarnished. They are mad about boys and are typical girls of their day, of intense expression and Boots makeup.

  My repartee goes no further than music, and I ask them who they listen to. All four reply at once:

  ‘Glitter Band and t’New York Dolls.’

  ‘What?’ I say, falling backwards gently.

  ‘Glitter Band and t’New York Dolls. We’ve seen t’Glitter Band four times.’

  I push a little, and the fresh young life of Haslingden tell me that they have pictures of the Dolls on their bedroom walls – amongst the usual run of unnameable others. They tell me that they had all bought the Dolls album in Accrington. This outer reality hits me like a discovery of tombs in Luxor, for I had no idea that truly ordinary Lancashire girls might take on the New York Dolls when press reports make it clear that the Dolls are out of bounds to anyone other than the sexual outcast. In fact, David Johansen himself had said, ‘We have come to redeem the social outcast.’

  Attempting to expand my horizons further, Anji’s mother asks me to meet her one day in central Manchester. I do so, and she leads me to a doorway by the Britons Protection pub just below St Peter’s Square. As she hands me a lit cigarette, we are ushered into a private club. I am 15 years old, a pale mask of clumsiness, holding a cigarette that I cannot smoke, and here is something interesting. We are the only two white faces in a darkened cellar where we are encircled by up to thirty black men, none young, all locked in 1960s speakeasy tight pants and tight shirts, like immigrants of 1955 looking for digs and a job on the docks. The music is soft Blue Note jazz, and the air is south of the midriff, and everyone is relaxed behind bolted doors. Anji’s mother is a familiar face here. She is life-loving and ready to laugh, and it is time to wonder what and who one really is.

  Anji’s nightly telephone calls to Kings Road are marathon, and even the most vague generalities of her day are spiced with such absurd account that the two hours kneeling in an unheated hall, ears numb and jaw aching, are always worth the labor.

  ‘Oh, I went to the doctor today,’ begins Anji.

  ‘Y-e-e-s?’ I say, impatient for Part Two.

  ‘He said I’ve got six weeks to live,’ she breezes, almost throwaway. I laugh because everything in Anji’s delivery is funny – and she knows it.

  ‘Yeah – leukemia ... hang on, there’s someone at the door ...’

  Some weeks later Anji’s life has met its deadline, liberating laughter leading her every step to the grave, never losing her edge for an instant, bearing sadness with dignity, and always explaining herself so well, at peace with death as she was with life, the black earth of Haslingden entombing seventeen years of best endeavor and generosity. I see her now – peeling potatoes in the sun and laughing her head off.

  For reasons too terrifying to analyze I had found myself walking around Macclesfield town center one sorry-assed Saturday in 1975. Such jaunts are typical of those scattered days when you aren’t quite sure what to do with yourself and you appear to be the bounty that nobody especially wants. These are Saturdays when the content is always the same, and the search for a listener is fruitless. Lured into Boots the Chemist I pass ten minutes flicking through their routine selection of best-selling long-players only to inexplicably find Horses by Patti Smith, unfathomably racked as an import at five pounds. Precisely why such a record was for sale (on import!) in such a frowsy frumps’ paradise as Boots the Chemist is something that foxes me to this day. The distinction of this LP was that it had recently been reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray for the New Musical Express, and then a week later it had been re-reviewed with equal exhilarating commotion. It was, in fact, the only album I had ever known to be re-reviewed. The galloping joy of Charles Shaar Murray urged me to take the risk. Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed Horses to enter my body like a spear, and as I listened to the bare lyrics of public lecture, I examined the genderless singer on the heavyweight album sleeve. So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love; pain sourced as inspiration, an individual mission drunk on words – and my heart leapt hurdles, scaling and vaulting; something won and overcome. Unfulfilled as a woman, impotent as a man, Patti Smith cut right through – singing and looking and saying absolutely everything that would be thought to go against the listener’s sympathy. But the reverse happened, and the wisdom of centuries shook me and told me that, however heavy-hearted and impossible you might feel about yourself, you can still bestow love through recorded song – which just might even be the only place where you have the chance to show yourself as you really are since nothing in your disposed life gives you encouragement. The fact that you do not look like a pop-star-in-waiting should not dishearten you because your oddness could become the deciding wind of change for others. There is nothing obvious about Patti Smith, least of all any obvious biological conclusions, and this gives its own erotic reality in a shyness of arrogant pride. The past snaps. I have never heard or seen anything like Patti Smith previously, and I have never heard truth established so sincerely. The female voice in rock music had rattled with fathomless depths of insincerity, whereas Patti Smith spoke with a boy’s bluntness, and she looked for squabbles wherever she went. Horses pinned all opponents to the ground. It shook the very laws of existence, and was part musical recording and part throwing up. Its discovery was the reason why we could never give up on music, and its effects were huge. 1976 slapped the face of the world with the first album by the Ramones, who were so negatively disposed that it seemed difficult to imagine them attracting anyone at all. At first I felt galled by Ramones because I had so earnestly wanted the Dolls to be the ones to reshape the planet, and here were the Ramones moving in with their own style and with songs that sweat blood – all trashcan-in-the-sun New York. The Ramones told me there was nothing I could do to prevent the Dolls from becoming fagged-out back-numbers, and as I catch the Ramones’ first Manchester gig (at the Electric Circus in Collyhurst) my mouth is a big round O. It is mesmeric. The Ramones are models of ill-health, playing backwards, human remains washed ashore, so much condensed into a single presentation, and it is outstanding. Change! Change! Change! It doesn’t happen by being the same as everybody else. Now I could accept all the suffering that came my way as long as the Ramones were in the world. Singer Joey looked as if he had been murdered in a hospital bed. I’ve found my twin. The following year Jackie and I would see them at the Lyceum in London, and I would spend the night on Birmingham’s New Street Station in order to witness Patti Smith at the Birmingham Odeon. In a dream state I watch her explode as she takes on the lesbian contingent at the front who are calling to Patti to ‘come out’ (where to? from what?), and they heckle her in almost every song. By extreme contrast I see David Bowie in 1976 at Wembley. He is already cold in form and ungiving, and as I spend the night hanging around Euston Station awaiting the first train back to Manchester, I am lost in Bowie’s loss. It is Patti Smith, though, who rings as the first musical artist who promises nothing, and who gives nothing other than the sordid actuality of fact.