Autobiography

by Morrissey

  Although The Smiths had done well all around the world, I am stubbornly certain that if not for the unusual artwork and the hint of what could be it would not have dented the public forehead quite so much. I vomit profusely when I discover that the album has been pressed in Japan with Sandie Shaw’s version of Hand in glove included. I am so disgusted by this that I beg people to kill me. Many rush forward. Furthermore, the group’s name is barely readable on the finished artwork, but I am aware of my cranky precision pressing too firmly on the Rough Trade stable-hands.

  I am so troubled by the flatness of the debut that I present to Geoff the idea of Hatful of Hollow as an interim collection that might hopefully detain those scared off by the blunted thud of The Smiths. Geoff fully agrees, and the project works well – charting at number 7, and holding on for forty-six weeks, tipping the platinum sales point that The Smiths had missed.

  Our touring unit is constant and strong, blotted only by clangers from Mike who, in a busy dressing room after a Manchester show blurts out (loudly) how his family do not like me. ‘They think you’re just trying to be Jim Morrison ...’ he rasps, and as everyone in the room turns away in embarrassment I sit in resolute stillness.

  Generally though, the Smiths as a working unit are assured and agreeable, their main misfortune so far being the way in which they had been sold like a cow at a market to Sire Records. Like Allen Ginsberg perched on the top of your mother’s wardrobe, Geoff Travis had looked down smiling his whooping-cough smile as the Smiths lumbered along, hopelessly unaware of their global financial worth. We had made our American debut at the Danceteria in New York, and had planned to continue to Boston and New Jersey. We were booked into New York’s famous Algonquin hotel – so beloved of James Dean in the 1950s and a place of rest for Oscar Wilde many Decembers ago. But there was no glamor to drink in now, and I sat alone in an enormous room lit only by a bedside light. I call downstairs.

  ‘There appears to be no lighting in this room,’ I say.

  ‘Uuh, you’ll find a reading light by the bed,’ I am told.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want to read. I want to unpack, but I can’t see anything.’

  ‘Uuh, that’s the only room available.’

  I open the curtains and cracks of city light throw slits of hope into the room as I hear a loud fritter behind me. I turn to witness a line of hamster-sized cockroaches race across the wonky thrift-store dresser. To my right three more roaches fish about beneath the television stand, and the scurry of horses’ hooves is heard coming from the bathroom. I lean in, click on the light switch, and five large roaches trammel the sharp corners of the washstand. I telephone Geoff, who is staying on the Upper East Side and concluding dinner at a friend’s apartment, having coaxed Morrissey and Marr – with child-like ease – to sign a deal with Sire Records that will land several platinum discs bearing Rough Trade’s otherwise unsellable logo on the Billboard charts.

  ‘Geoff, there are cockroaches ON the bed,’ my voice cracks.

  ‘Well, it’s only for a few nights,’ he says, signing off.

  I attempt to find the other Smiths, but there are no replies at each door. I walk outside, not yet in possession of a credit card, and I have no hard cash, so I walk around darkening Manhattan – delaying a return to the hotel for as long as possible. When I finally return I find that my unpacked suitcase has disappeared. I race down to reception, half-tearful, half-manic.

  ‘Uuh, we moved you to ’nutha room.’

  I sleep fully clothed in the new room – all lights burning. I walk onstage the following night at the Danceteria, and as I do so, my blindness and bewilderment lead me directly off the lip of the stage, and I crash at the feet of the assembled human spillage. Unaided, I scramble back up and onto the stage, and I limp directly off – past three blank musicians who are unable to cope with such embarrassment. My right leg is bruised from top to bottom. I step out of the toilet to a cold-blooded stare from Geoff Travis.

  ‘You know you’re going to have to go back on, don’t you?’ he says, my well-being mattering less and less as the seconds pass. The other three Smiths say nothing, but Andy is laughing. For me, words fitting enough to describe the gloom have yet to be invented. As I walk back out, a shrill female voice from the audience screeches ‘WHAT is WROOOOOOOOONG with yew?’

  Hello, America.

  The following day we are set to move on to New Jersey (although, offhand, I have no idea why). Geoff tells me that he will not be coming the rest of the way with us – as if this might make any difference. His investment secured by the signatures on the contract, Geoff is not quite interested enough to endure a second American gig. I am then led across the hallway to where Mike has his room, and there he sits upright in bed – a mass of large red sores covering his face and upper body. It is explained to me that Mike had shared his bed last night and that the unlucky dalliance left him with an outbreak of Lebanese warts. This now means that our trips to New Jersey and Boston must be scrapped, yet we cannot leave the country until the infected body is able to travel. I pass several more days in New York by myself. Johnny is nowhere to be seen, and I do not lay eyes on him once during my entire stay at the Algonquin. I am baffled, or mentally deficient, or both, but certainly I am deliberately cut off from everyone, as a prearranged plot kicks into full gear. I am being frozen out. It is a difficult week of rigid iceberg weather, as I dig despairingly at the Strand Bookshop and cough my way through the cheap eateries of Times Square slime, and I now fully realize that the other three Smiths are taking great steps to oust me. Why, I do not know. New York has not yet been daubed with New World flash and brightness – no sign, as yet, of the computer age, and here in the wrong section of Fifth Avenue it is still a quagmire of midnight cowboys and sterile cuckoos. Perhaps it is the best of times for New York City. I am never troubled or approached as I sit alone in Washington Square. Smells abound unique to this city, and a warring settlement moves too fast, and the lonely traveler is engulfed. When we all finally meet at the airport there is enough silence to indicate the end. As we separate in Manchester, fatality shrieks. Behind my back, Joe Moss has coerced Johnny, Andy and Mike into axing the singer, and Joe carts all three buffos off to a legal firm in order to sharpen the blade against the Morrissey monolith. Since Joe himself has written himself out of the picture, he has no wish to see the little tugboat sail on, and the Morrissey monsoon must go. For a while, the other three agree with him.

  It takes Johnny a few weeks to lance the views of others out of his system, and he then calls me. Hanging by a thread, we resume – deloused of Joe Moss. May 5th 1984 is departure date for a European tour, and at the airport in Manchester I see diana dors dead shrieking from the front page of the Sun newspaper. oh my diana headlines the Daily Star, and the Daily Mirror keeps alliteration alive with diana dors dies. Although the press had always raced to name Diana Dors as a nationally corrupting influence (because she was happy and a free spirit), by her death she has won them over. Death evidently has its uses.

  The European tour is a success, although there are no band wages to be had at its close. We are ‘we’ again. Evidently Joe Moss as lead singer wasn’t something that Johnny, Andy or Mike thought helpful. On a flight to Finland I plonk a headset onto Martha DeFoe’s ears so that she will hear Death by Klaus Nomi, and whilst listening intently she bursts into tears. As Martha sobs, I do too, and I run into the toilet to avoid the embarrassment of appearing too human.

  Engineer Stephen Street had worked on the unkillable Heaven knows I’m miserable now, and admirably so. He was shy and receptive and three thoughts ahead of every situation – technically masterful and very patient. I suggest that we make the second album not with John Porter but with Stephen alone, and that we fill in all the artistic bits ourselves. At once, all band members disagreed, and only I give the Stephen Street vote.

  Johnny’s affectionate closeness to John Porter had finally clicked beyond price with How soon is now?, and so daze
d had I been that I ran from the studio with a final mix and jumped into a black cab, piling out at Collier Street, where I took the stairs five at a time and powered into Geoff’s office. Geoff swivels in a large chair and I balance on a footstool as the song plays. How soon is now? struck me as a new landmark, but once the track had ended, Geoff broke the silence:

  ‘WHAT is Johnny doing?’ he said, ‘THAT is just NOISE.’

  The Collier Street clouds lowered, and How soon is now? resigned itself to B-side status. With further return, Geoff removes his glasses. This means he is about to tell me something unpalatable and he’d rather do it in darkness.

  ‘Now, you realize that everyone is saying that every Smiths song sounds the same?’ Geoff had an impressive knack of implying in his question the answer that he’d prefer. But the curtain fell with a clank. I am a puzzled child on the St Anne’s sands, shouting to sea-sounds of wave and gull. I am that stretch of sand that the sea never reaches. Like dumpy relatives, the Smiths were stuck with Geoff, and he with us, until term’s end (a term which he – not we – would take steps to extend).

  Undernourished and growing out of the wrong soil, I knew at this time that a lot of people found me hard to take, and for the most part I understood why. Although a passably human creature on the outside, the swirling soul within seemed to speak up for the most awkward people on the planet. Somewhere deep within, my only pleasure was to out-endure people’s patience. Against sane judgment, I risked unpopularity with my adrift physicality; but there it was, and how could the world possibly be in need of yet another Phil Collins? The subject of sex remained theoretical, and no one expressed any interest in me, which I didn’t mind as long as I could create.

  Gill Smith suddenly wound her way in as a hottie of blouse-ripping biological urge, but I take too long as I measure chemistry against meaning and she moves on like a hot-blooded goat in search of a rutting ram. Shakespeare’s sister bursts out one night in a snowbound studio in Surrey. I felt that we had outstripped ourselves once again, and I loved Andy’s cello denouement. To his credit, Geoff jumped into his battered Astra and chugged his way through a blizzard to hear the song at the studio, but he is not impressed with it. He lays out his compromise: ‘I’ll release this as a single if you give your approval for How soon is now? to come out first – as an A-side.’

  This was quite rich considering how Geoff had dismissed How soon is now? as ‘just noise’ a few months previously. The gabbing tongue gabs, and having gabbed, gabs on.

  In the event, neither Shakespeare’s sister nor How soon is now? troubles the Top 20, and even worse is the fate of That joke isn’t funny anymore – dead in the water at number 46. The Smiths are repeatedly pointed to as the hottest band in the country, yet we cannot respond with a visible hit single.

  Recording what would become the Meat is Murder album in a predictably cheap studio in Liverpool, I saw relief in everyone to be away from John Porter. Mike, at last, was free to play his drums his own way – rock-steady, yet with horse-race pace. Andy’s brilliance flourished without the schoolmasterly ear of John Porter. The key to everything, Johnny finally made his first album. I could see John’s worth on How soon is now?, but Johnny, Andy or Mike were not musicians who needed to be told what to play. When they allowed this to happen – with The Smiths – the results were flat. I share the shame of being led. John had asked me to record Reel around the fountain line by line – that is, singing one line and then stopping the tape, singing the second line and then stopping the tape. I found this to be a horrific idea, but I bowed to someone who I assumed had something pictorial up his sleeve. He didn’t.

  With Meat is Murder we thrashed through all of the new songs back-to-back in order to see – just for the hell of it – where everything would land. Out poured the signature Smiths’ powerhouse full-tilt that had been lost on the debut. Straight away the hard Ardwick aria spits out as The headmaster ritual; a live-wire spitfire guitar sound that takes on all-comers; bass domination instant on Rusholme ruffians; weighty and bruiser drums on I want the one I can’t have. The Smiths began to stand upright. The aspirant moment is the title track, each musical notation an image, the subject dropped into the pop arena for the first time, and I relish to the point of tears this chance to give voice to the millions of beings that are butchered every single day in order to provide money for agriculturalist butchers. Meat is Murder enters the UK album chart at number 1, kicking Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA off the top spot. Although the title track of Springsteen’s album continues to blast from radio stations on constant rotation, no radio station ever plays Meat is Murder. In the year of 1985, abuse and torture of animals is protected under various British laws, and if you therefore want to act in defense of animals then you are forced to break the law. To publicly make the observation that meat is murder is, in fact, to claim that the law is wrong. It is also to suggest that all British judges who enjoy hunting and shooting and fishing, and who have personal investments in animal industries, are themselves terrorists, which, when viewed from any perspective, is undeniable. The horror of animal abuse is now common knowledge due to such famous cases as Huntington Life Sciences, and the global conspiracy of animal abuse is so financially profitable to the highborn and the upscale that the judiciary reserve their most aggressive and severely exaggerated prison sentences for anyone who selflessly attempts to rescue animals from unimaginable conditions of torture. The debate has opened up considerably in recent years, and it is no longer denied by anyone that eating animals and fish are cruel things to do. You either approve of violence or you don’t, and nothing on earth is more violent or extreme than the meat industry. Generally, the media still believe that animals deserve all that they get – after all, they are not human, so how could their feelings matter? In return, the meat industry offers the human race a menu of colon cancer, heart disease, swine flu, E. coli, salmonella, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, mad cow disease, listeriosis, shellfish poisoning, bird flu, tongue cancer, and so on. Either slowly or quickly, all of the above kill carnivores, none of which matters much as long as money rolls in for the farming fatcats. Mad cow disease is, of course, mad farmer’s disease – since it is the madness of the farmer that destroys the cow. The cow itself does nothing to make itself mad. In the US, the homeland meat industry causes more deaths to Americans than any other known entity, and its array of contaminations place the heaviest burden on medical care. In the UK, the NHS has expressed anger towards people who smoke because such an avoidable habit ultimately saps NHS resources. Yet the same can be said of people who eat pigs and sheep. Environmentally, the meat industry damages the earth’s resources more than any other known threat, and 80 per cent of global warming has been attributed to meat production. Yet people are still encouraged to eat death, and to have death inside their bodies – long after tobacco warnings have cautioned people into fits of fear. Although many people are certain that the planet is for human use only, and that sea life should be called seafood, the British judiciary continues to label animal protectionists as ‘extremists’, whilst being unable to consider the Holocaust carnage inside every abattoir to be extreme. If the RSPCA were a credible organization they would not allow abattoirs to exist.

  ‘Ohhh ... I absolutely HATE the Smiths!’ I hear Slade singer Noddy Holder say in a daytime radio interview, as in the same week Cockney Rebel singer Steve Harley tells the Daily Mail, ‘I cannot STAND the Smiths.’ In Manchester, the famous Manchester Evening News desperately attempts to portray the Smiths as ‘fans’ of Hindley and Brady, and finally relent with the almost-invisible BAD BOYS ARE TOPS when Meat is Murder hits number 1. How delightful to be thought ‘bad’, I muse, as I sit by a reading-light, pawing George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Life is clearly so much better when you can get straight to the point.

  Discounting The Hollies Greatest Hits (1968), Meat is Murder is the first studio album from a Manchester band ever to reach number 1 in England, and although
rife with singles-to-be, we are already further at odds with Gentleman Geoff, who is insisting that Hatful of Hollow (Rough Trade’s biggest ever earner) does not count as a contractual album (being what, then? A bountiful gift from the land of the fairies? Random sweepings from the flagged floor of the Rough Trade workshop?), and an unfriendly deadlock digs in. In the US, Sire release How soon is now? as a single, but they cannot get it onto the Billboard 100 even though the song is receiving national airplay and garnishing fantastic attention from coast to coast. Sire then paste together a predictably vomit-inducing promotional video to accompany the single, and my heavy heart sinks further as I witness the cold-blooded mess on VHS. The Smiths will encircle the US twice – to quite outstanding success in large arenas – yet Sire cannot get a television spot for the band. We have no publicist, and we have no support from the label. At a chaotically sold-out Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles I announce:

  ‘I would like to thank those who made all of this possible ... the Smiths’ – it is petulant, of course, but it’s the only way to get the point across.