Autobiography

by Morrissey

  The frayed threads of Iggy and the Stooges on 1973’s Raw Power were, as with the Dolls’ debut, a disconcerting reply to the macho men of rock. Lipsticked Iggy was tougher than them all, and each night on stage he sang and he moved as if he might possibly die at any moment, whilst also diving offstage like a wild schoolboy who can do nothing in secret. Iggy does not so much sing as relieve himself. Your pretty face is going to Hell has a quality of emotion in line with Paul Robeson, and this is why I am still writing about it forty years on. I am not writing about Goats Head Soup. All of the body is thrown into the vocal delivery; bare-chested in tight silver pants, Iggy defined the new manhood that the world so badly needed, lest we die beneath the wheels of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. No one represents Iggy other than Iggy, and commercial success is not necessary to Iggy’s own success. He heads the secret stream of inspiration granted to the active few. Mainstream success can often be the worst thing that can befall a true artist. Imagine David Bowie without his EMI America years – better to be absent and inactive in Hannover, or better my lover dead. Iggy was a face and a voice that had not been stated before his time. He recorded Raw Power as a moment of life that could never again be lived. It spat at you. Ask a boy from Michigan to be Elgar; he can’t. Ask a boy from Michigan to be Iggy; he can’t.

  Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Patti Smith have secrets that have never been lost because the inquisitive mind can’t get in. This trinity is decorative art with an incredible understanding of effect. Their contribution to thought marks them out as our very own Goethe, Gide and Gertrude Stein, and it tells us that we all might come to whatever it is we seek – with flickering irony. They pawn everything of themselves into the current moment. The daring brilliance of early Lou Reed takes its place with the literary greats partly because he denied all tradition in his writing and physical presentation. With his Velvet Underground, life itself was the movable stage; lowbrow, imaginer, maker, self-regarding, susceptible to the will to corrupt. It is a proud sign of bad breeding, and of carrying within us everything we seek outside of us. You have their insolence at hand still, and now, but when the morgue yawns for them, their harsh expressionism will clank its way into hagiography as the new saints, and you will understand their meaning to be far greater than whatever seems logical during their lifetime.

  At last I am face to face with Marc Bolan – as his flutterers flutter about him in the lobby of the Midland Hotel in Manchester. I am nothing and look nothing.

  ‘Could I have your autograph?’, I ask softly.

  ‘Oooh, no,’ he says, and slowly walks away to nowhere – unavailable to the outside world. I nod with all the shyness of adolescent modesty, as if understanding the catastrophic trouble I had brought upon him by asking. His new album will enter the chart at number 50, and mental illness is artistic activity is mental illness is artistic activity. On this day of buried disappointments, the showbiz version of Marc Bolan probably relishes the socially trapped condition, yet there is no one here but I – a member of his audience to whom he once turned for confirmation of what he was, and I gave to him as he gave to me. Ah, but not today – shadow close, swift as a swallow ...

  Back on Manchester’s inscrutable streets I find a tatty leaflet stuck on a Peter Street lamppost telling me that the Sex Pistols will play that very night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. They are not the saviors of culture, but the destruction of it – which suits me quite perfectly, and I manage to see them two more times that year. By their third Manchester visit they have released a single, Anarchy in the UK, and everything has tensed up. The music papers are at their peak, and it’s almost as if this idea of music has only just started. Their riches are overwhelming, and they seem to be helping everyone to come up with something new. The Sex Pistols are the first British band whose social importance appears to be instantly recognized, and their immediate success is an exhilarating danger to behold. Their singer is a striking Dickensian original; a pop-eyed Wilfred Bramble, but aged 19, and I am fascinated to discover that the Sex Pistols loathe and despise everyone on earth except the New York Dolls. I see! Something must’ve happened over Manhattan. Solitary, I slope from gig to gig, and I find my freedom only in the liberating shouts of others as they sing themselves into view. Nothing is ever enough, and I want my turn. Manchester gigs throw up the same dramatis personae; Paul Morley and Ian Curtis are always in line, both ready to be Elvis, both ready to chronicle the age. Ian stays with his grandmother on Milner Street, which leads off Kings Road, and he telephones me a few times to test my palette of words. He is genuine and is attempting first poems. I continue to live with my mother and sister at 384 Kings Road, with its landing haunted by the previous occupant – an elderly woman who lived and died within these walls. Of course, elderly people were not always elderly, and are often new to such a surprising fate. I am suddenly full of sweeping ideas that even I can barely grasp, and, although penniless, I am choked by the belief that something must happen. It is not enough just to ‘be’. I am reliant upon the postage stamp, and tactlessly revealing letters are catapulted north and south – anywhere where a considerate soul might lurk. There is such a godsend as ‘penpals’ – friends known only via letters, and these are easier to construct than any living embodiment. The lineage from Dolls to Ramones seemed like a Himalayan missionary’s trek from which a thousand lessons could be applied. But I want no more. I want it to stop now. I cannot continue as a member of the audience. If only I could forget myself I might achieve. I am crumbling from the top downwards – in mad-eyed mode, finding daylight difficult. Unemployable, my life draws in tightly. At 17 I am worn out by my own emotions, and Manchester is a barbaric place where only headless savages can survive. There is no one to take me on, and no one to bother about me. Months go on for years. I explode from intensity. I cannot cope with anything other than my inability to cope. I want to sing. I am difficult and withdrawn – a head, really, but not a body – full of passion within, but none outwardly. There are no sexual guidelines and I see myself naked only by appointment. It is simply a funnel, and there is no one around who suggests otherwise, and my mental horizons are so narrow and no soul is interested in the me that is beneath the chastity belt.

  My mother had given me the money to travel to New York in 1976, where I stayed on Staten Island with Mary, who had left Manchester in 1969. Mary was now married with two children (Matthew and Erin), and is welcoming as seven sun-blasted weeks pass. But I cannot muster any lift in spirits, and I spend every day apologizing or saying the wrong thing, and I am born sorry. Mary’s large wooden house is dramatically positioned in the midst of a tricky swampland area, where grasping reeds of great height line the sides of each narrow dirt road. The final stretch of hidden laneway leading to the tall and shaky house is permanently covered by large, busy toads, and there is no way to reach the house without leaving a tire-trail of squashed slime as the toads gather in their thousands. ‘Look, there’s nothing we can do,’ says Mary, as my head drops into my hand. Each journey to and from the house is heartbreaking, and the toads multiply daily in their hundreds and are fixed to the road. This is the only road available, and each night beclouds with sound of toad and cricket. When Mary had first bought the house she had found three pythons living in the basement. Possums lumbered through the trees like fat cats.

  ‘So, what kind of girls do you like?’ probes Mary, but too much rattles about my head. Thankfully Hurricane Belle distracts Mary, who is warned by local authorities (authorities in what, I have no idea) to leave the island or face the wrath of any approaching whirlwind. In the event, we remain behind, boarding up the house and boxing ourselves in, peering out at the lashing reeds as the eye of the storm circles above. The next day there are apparently dead bodies across the island, but the toads remain.

  I wander into CBGBs, where I find Russell Mael, and I blush my way through a request for a photograph, and there I stand – 17, clumsy and shy, with Russell, smiling beneath the CBGBs canopy. The first five Sparks albums ha
d been constant companions. I had first heard This town ain’t big enough for both of us as Radio One’s Record of the Week, which they played daily at around 5:15. I had no idea who Sparks were, but I thought the singer – whoever she was – had the most arresting voice I’d ever heard. In time, of course, Sparks exploded, the color of madness. Ron Mael sat at the keyboard like an abandoned ventriloquist’s doll, and brother Russell sang in French italics with the mad urgency of someone tied to a tree. It was magnificent, and the ferocious body of sound was a speedboat in overdrive. The life and death question was: what is it? As children the Mael Brothers probably slept in bunk-coffins in an unused wing of the house, playing with surgical instruments whilst other kids of Los Angeles addressed the surf. The straitjacket sound of Sparks could never be fully explained, and even now their historic place is confusing since they belong apart. Lyrically, Ron Mael is as close to Chaucer as the pop world will ever get – elevated and poetic, nine parts demon, and I am very thankful:

  You mentioned Kant and I was shocked ... so shocked;

  You know, where I come from, none of the girls have

  such foul tongues.

  The lyrics of Ron Mael and the vocal sound of Russell Mael are solid and original factors, so unique that by the very laws of existence I can hardly believe they exist. The sound registered is very tough, although the faces are fixed in imperishable marble. What are Sparks? A miracle, of sorts, and the dead child is momentarily revived.

  You’ve been waiting for your first encounter – what a let-down.

  I’m just finishing my first encounter – what a let-down.

  By the continued grace of my mother, I manage three more trips to America before 1980 enters us all, but by now Mary has moved to the less-interesting Denver, and although my life remains all wrong, I continually dump myself on Mary for seven-week stretches where I am unable to do anything but just get by. The knee-high Arvada snow makes everything look bright and clean, and I rashly place a fruitless ad in the Rocky Mountain News in search of musicians as despair mounts upon despair. I apply for a job at the ghastly Pathmark, only to be turned down whilst headless mutants are taken on. I attend an interview at Target but once again I am unconvincing to the mom-and-pop co-op who will employ almost anyone as long as they have at least one fully working eye. It is all too much. ‘You have a better chance of being hit by lightning,’ laughs Mary. I cannot burden Mary any longer with my heavy granite shoulders, and I cry myself back to intolerant Manchester. Yanks is a messy record shop somewhere behind the old Gaumont Cinema on Oxford Road. It is a large, damp cellar stacked with cut-price US deletions, and it is here that I ring the till for a few months – wrapped in a heavy overcoat, as the cellar quite naturally has no heat. A customer hands me a credit card and I have no idea what it is – having never actually seen one. Another hands me a cheque and I drop it into the bin below. My heart and mind are elsewhere – or rather, nowhere. One November night, as work concludes, I climb the cellar steps only to be met by a gang of immovable bulk who punch me to the ground and kick me senseless, hurling me from full Nelson to scissor-hold. I see blackness, and I hope it is death. A ludicrous concept, I struggle towards Piccadilly Bus Station with a twisted mouth. Walking through busy 6:30 traffic – with blood on my face, and with no intervention from passers-by – my life in Manchester is defined. I then serve time in another basement as a filing clerk for whom, upstairs, is the Inland Revenue. It is the only way, I am sure, to get the money to return to America because sooner or later something must work in my favor.

  Several war-torn months are spent kowtowing to the rigors of gabbling clerical ciphers in a fate worse than life. As I understand it, there is nothing else I can do. This is one small rung below prostitution and is fully against sane judgment (because I would actually prefer prostitution), but my zest for life is fifty fathoms below sea level and it’s all I can do to add this day to yesterday. Let it all seep as one. Each day I enter the building prepared for execution.

  ‘WHAT is that?’ shouts the senior clerk pointing to my Gabba Gabba Hey t-shirt, and I am thus summoned to the all-powerful 4th Floor Inspector, and I wonder what world I am in as he sits before me – bald and paunched, an off-white shirt of sweat-encrusted armpits.

  Sadness can often ... just be ... fatigue.

  At Stretford Jobcenter a fat-assed woman sits before me demanding to know why I left my golden position in the underground warrens of the Inland Revenue. She is a Dunlop bloater of such walrus proportions that I find it difficult to answer her.

  ‘Look at you,’ she says, ‘can’t you tidy yourself up?’ and she shifts her full-figured pigginess, with lard-arms waving and jelly-legs struggling ... and I to the appointed place.

  ‘Because you left a perfectly good job we cannot allow you any unemployment benefit. Here is a job I want you to take.’ The hippo hands me a card with job details, and I read with disbelief.

  ‘You are asking me to clean canal banks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Clean canal banks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As an occupation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I breathe one final prayer of mercy, and I recall Nancy’s words in Oliver Twist: I shall put the mark on some of you that will bring me to the gallows before me time ... and the morgue yawns my name. I am cross-examined at Stretford Sorting Office as there are postman vacancies, and this is the most I consider possible. Yet it isn’t, because I am turned down – deemed physically and psychologically incapable of delivering letters. There is now no escape but death.

  I take the train to London to attend an interview with Sounds magazine, who are looking for a new writer. Editor Alan Lewis gives me hope, but the inevitable refusal arrives by post nine days later, and my head once again drops permanently to the side.

  Starting a few weeks’ employment at the Bupa hospital in Whalley Range I begin my first day’s walk to work in heavy snowfall. It takes me an hour to reach the hospital by foot, and I fall flat on my face four times, clinging hopelessly to hedges as I slap to the ground. God is sending me a special message. My work in the sluice room requires me to shake bits of human innards out of post-op doctors’ uniforms in readiness for laundry. I will only be here for a few weeks, but I am holding on, poorly adapting yet not quite numb to shame. I am surely a secretive part of some scientific experiment of endurance, or a prank played by God. I represent filth. I am forbidden to live – by religion.

  Since Coronation Street is our only link to Bel Air, I write to Leslie Duxbury at Granada TV, helpfully explaining how the twice-weekly crawl through northern morals needed a new knight of the pen. I am invited to submit a script, and I whip off a word-slinger’s delight wherein young take on old as a jukebox is tested in the Rovers Return. Swords cross, heads bump and horns lock, and the episode fades with Violet Carson addressing the camera, one eyebrow arched, with ‘Do I really look like a fan of X-Ray Spex?’ – cue Thanks-for-the-memory-style theme tune. It’s silly – but, really, what isn’t ? Leslie Duxbury assures me that my talents lie elsewhere and, self-unmade, I turn once again and I look at myself, my entire body ready to be put on ice. On Cross Street, Damien and Jason are looking for a stylist. I am not one, but I apply and I am given a trial run until I fail to differentiate between oily hair and an actual wig. There are rumors of tunnels beneath Cross Street and I start to look for them. I am beginning to give insanity a bad name.

  The bus rattled down the Old Kent Road – away from the overdeveloped pink blob of the Elephant & Castle’s shopping center. Each inch of the road has spent itself in other eras, everyone once working but now lying in bed, returning to nothingness on ice-cold afternoons in 1977. The famous Thomas a Becket pub completes the cynical view of an area that can no longer look after itself; many doctors, many waiting rooms, and the new life hammers the old life. I make this journey many times throughout the late 70s to visit James Maker, who lives with his parents in
a maisonette of ramps and grey slabs on the corner of St James’s Road and Catlin Street. I jump off the bus at the Civic Centre, where Tommy Trinder fell from the rafters every Friday night and told it his own way to those unlucky people. James is cluttered in a row of 1950s formulations that have bright living rooms and downstairs bedrooms, walled in by Rotherhithe Road and Raymouth Road. It is the safest side of the tracks that are unsafe on both sides; a mishmash area that wisely manages to keep Peckham at bay, with its distinctly enormous schoolgirls with fat-tire legs. James is a year my junior and digs down deep – Louis XIV wit gallops ahead without a word or gesture lost. Dunhill cigarette smoke blasts the atmosphere, and James lives a life of impotent rage. He is certain that words can be found to describe the entire mess, yet he is also convinced that life has been made difficult on purpose in order to squeeze out the greatness in those of us who flutter wildly at the bars. His look is James Dean mid-blizzard, with a tongue more free than welcome.

  He will utilize anything at all that might serve the purposeful quest for recognition. We are united. James will tell you that his life had been nothing until the New York Dolls, and he is enslaved to the song Frankenstein – the Dolls’ slumland melodrama wherein the deeper associations of evangelical pop have a roughhouse scruff-up with the musical dreams of Mahler’s 7th Symphony: ‘When those plans they don’t fit your style, you get a feeling of your own, or two,’ is David Johansen’s phonetic poetry – words as collage, using shape as well as sense to convey ... um ... what? ‘Well, I’m asking you as a person ...’ Verbal, verbal, verbal, the song is 5:58 of holler-holler, minus chorus, minus repetition. Frankenstein has all the magical properties of sheer nerve, ready to blow up any minute. Screw loose and fully-to-the-skull, the guitars of Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain wrap around spiffy-tuff drums of Tony Lo Bianco’s ducking and diving French Connection New York City. Steam rises from the streets to meet David Johansen’s tourette’s, which complements his teenage dementia. The musical seizure of Frankenstein is an everlasting hallucination for James Maker, from which there is no joy like hearing loss; mechanical noise, tinnitus, joy. The neutral basis equals medication, and the New York Dolls become the amphetamine that they themselves are always in search of. The Dolls have a ‘when readers write’ aura; no one is more like you than we are. It is everlastingly lamented by James and I that Frankenstein had not been the opening track on the most important album ever made, instead of the Dolls’ foolishly impaired Personality crisis, and oh, the moldering debate goes on in a cramped back bedroom at 91 Redlaw Way in 1977, as intuition races ahead of understanding. Our walks through fog-bound south London were always funny and full of the child-rhymer, but we also knew it was the dark turn of righteous oblivion, full of willing stubbornness, feeling short-changed should a day be dull – as if it all, somehow, should be peak after peak.