by Morrissey
Seymour Stein smiles: ‘We have no idea how you’re selling so many tickets!’ to which smiles and shrugs are meant to follow.
What he is really saying is that Sire have done nothing at all to pitch the Smiths in the US. In Los Angeles, our first visit to the city comprises two sold-out shows at the Palladium, and business elsewhere is even stronger – from Boston Great Woods to 12,000 tickets sold in Toronto. There is no media or press interest. It is unfortunate, and sad. I point Seymour Stein towards our support band James, whom he then signs, and who manage a hit single on the Billboard 100. Even our support band in the UK (Easterhouse) edge onto the Billboard 100, yet Sire cannot manage a hit single for the Smiths themselves – not even after two voluminous tours of screaming hysteria and stage invasions. There is no one in the wings to document or organize, and not even an American photo-session is suggested. Still travelling economy, the Smiths conclude each tour penniless – the funny and the lonely side of it all. Our mouths taped shut, we had no idea that the young audiences of America and Canada would be so feverish. Rolling Stone magazine repeatedly said ‘No, thanks,’ and have kept their word for thirty years, yet they will applaud any sub-Smiths progeny who taps on their bunker. But that’s life. Go first and be sure of a hard time.
Pain continues as a source of inspiration. Back in darkness, we begin recording The Queen is Dead. Geoff had interestingly suggested George Martin as a producer – which is one of Geoff’s very rare magnanimous proposals. George Martin declines, saying that he only wants to be known for his work with the Beatles. Johnny and I then have tea with Tony Visconti, most famously associated with the supremely noble works of T. Rex and David Bowie, but after our meeting Tony also declines. Free to howl again, I do so, and we record The Queen is Dead as we had recorded Meat is Murder – with Stephen Street making sense of it all. Johnny is in the full vigor of his greatness. He is a deluge of ideas and motion, and it streams from his every touch on The Queen is Dead. The chords are biteable and studlike, and it is Johnny’s soaring attitude that leads Andy and Mike. Although I am now outstripped by the Smiths success (I had no idea that it would jump to such proportions), the lesson deep in my soul remains the same: the music always comes first – before lawyers and accountants – and I am suddenly bolder in demeanor. I am now living at 66 Cadogan Square in Chelsea, as the Smiths zoom empirically, with the press always within earshot, complicating every question and inventing meddlesome Morrissey quotes. It is mostly amusing, and often deadly.
Once The Queen is Dead has been recorded, Geoff serves a writ upon me at Cadogan Square which states that the album will not be released until a court hearing decides whether or not Hatful of Hollow counts as a contractual album. There would of course be no need for a court hearing if contractually there were no grey areas on the matter. But there were, and so it was now merely a question of bully-tactics in a public courtroom ... see the luck I’ve had ... The writ is served upon me, but not on Johnny, Andy or Mike. However, Johnny very bravely attends the court hearing by himself – so certain that the law can’t fault the truth. He is, of course, butchered and ridiculed by Geoff’s uncivil barristers, and the common ownership kibbutz of Rough Trade kicks the shit out of the Smiths. The artist is the enemy.
Geoff had approached me after Meat is Murder had entered at number 1, and he leaked a little touch of sentiment that almost verged on the human as he said, ‘I’ve dreamt of this happening all of my life,’ which seemed to me to be unlikely, since Rough Trade had never even remotely been in the running for a number 1 album, and with this gush of acknowledgement Geoff handed me a bag of biscuits bearing a 2 pounds and 75 pence sticker still affixed. I gave no answer. How could there be one? I assumed and hoped I was mid-dream.
Such sentiment had long since died away as I stood in the telephone box across from Peter Jones department store on the Kings Road at 9:15 one Tuesday morning, calling Rough Trade to find out whether or not The Queen is Dead had made its projected number 1 chart position. Although sales and press fervor are strong enough to ensure a number 1 position, my body sinks to hear Geoff briskly say, ‘It’s number 2. Phil Collins kept us off,’ and feet of clay carry me back to 66 Cadogan Square – somehow certain that the album had been disallowed number 1 status because of its title. I lit the fire and sat hunched and contorted for the rest of the day. The Queen is Dead is the album of the moment in England, but there remains zero airplay and it seems impossible to get all cylinders working at the same time. Radio One continues to ignore the Smiths, as does Capital Radio, and there appears to be nothing at all that anyone can do about it.
‘The success of the Smiths is down to however many magazines you can get your face on,’ says Geoff, wrongly. I push for Johnny to take on half of the press requests, but Pat Bellis says that magazine covers are only on offer if the interviewee is me. Uh. The creak of Morrissey attacking Thatcher is what the press would prefer, even though her name is annoyingly printed as ‘Maggie’ whenever I refer to her as ‘Thatcher’.
I ask Pat Bellis, ‘If I repeatedly say Thatcher, why do they print Maggie?’
‘We-ee-ll,’ says Pat, ‘people are getting a bit fed up with your list of complaints.’
‘And who do I complain to about THAT?’ I ask.
In Scott Piering’s office I ask the same question. ‘I’d never call her Maggie, so why do they print what I didn’t say? Thatcher is her name. I didn’t invent that.’ But the press is in a world of its own, and you might add to it but you can’t disturb it.
The daily tabloids fabricate bare-teeth stories with utterly stupid headlines – MORRISSEY: ROYAL ROW, MORRISSEY SAYS SORRY TO THE QUEEN, MORRISSEY APOLOGIZES ... as my spirit is stoked and tended like a downstairs furnace. I smash into Pat Bellis’s office: ‘Morrissey says sorry to the Queen? When? For what? Who has the right to print such lies??!’
‘We-ee-ll,’ says Pat, her lipstick stuck to her teeth, as Scott Piering juts in with the untrue ‘all publicity is good publicity’.
‘Me apologizing to the Queen isn’t good publicity!!!!’ I explode. A great wash of humiliating and penalizing editorials flutter through the daily newspapers, all superficial, and all stupid. SICK MORRISSEY alerts the Daily Mail, who write how the sick Morrissey has claimed that it’s OK for boys to like boys as well as girls. With the tabloid press, nothing appears to work, and I examine what appears to be an increasing sense of my own lunacy – as if I should only be dealt with through a small door kept locked. Chewing my way out of the psychiatric wing, I evidently sputter out apologies to the Queen’s horses, and it all overflows beyond ridiculousness. In the NME, a writer opens a major piece by claiming that he rang my doorbell and I appeared at the door wearing a tutu, and no effort is made to assure readers that the writer is jesting, and I am shocked to discover that people assumed it to be true. Morrissey quotes shoot out from the press like darts, distorted and exaggerated, and something sniggers to me that my life is no longer my own. What registers is that I appear to be playing the naughtiness game, when, really, I am consumed with a question that is more difficult than it seems: what can I salvage from all of this? A Melody Maker interview is written by a failed Manchester musician under an assumed name, and becomes one of the first major hatchet jobs, wherein the writer’s own questions are impressively printed as loquacious eloquence, and my own replies are printed as stunted fumblings. In truth, the writer’s questions bore none of the intellectual swoop that his own typewriter later bestowed, and my real-time replies contained none of the stumble and fidget squirminess that journalistic license later decided they should have. Added to this the writer invents as fact the idea that I had spent my youth hanging around public toilets in Manchester. I protest about all of this to Rough Trade, and Pat once again rounds her shoulders with,‘We-ee-ll, it’s a front cover ...’ and the new face of the Independents is interchangeable with that of the old Majors. ‘But this is slander, or libel, whichever way you look at it ... and ...’
‘Defama
tion,’ whispers one of the many now gathered.
‘Yes, defamation, and I don’t consider a Melody Maker cover a good enough treat for the reputation of hanging around public toilets ...’ I am now hysterical.
‘We-ee-ll,’ says Pat, saying nothing.
But Johnny finds the right words: ‘We’re gonna get him,’ and he bangs a fist into an open palm, like Burt Ward as Robin the Boy Wonder. Because of the public-toilet disparagement, there are of course legal grounds to take action against Melody Maker, but Rough Trade are now making useful inroads with the press because of the Smiths, and they don’t want to cause a fuss, and I am still too green around the gills to ignore their reluctance. I could attempt to tackle Melody Maker myself, but without the label behind me, I am at sea.
The meeting for the Melody Maker piece had taken place in Cleveland, Ohio, and after the face-to-face interview had concluded I had retired to the joy of pure cotton sheets. In the middle of the night the telephone rings and it is the journalist. I say nothing, confused, and I put the phone down and return to sleep. Whatever was it that the writer thought he might learn or access by dialing my number? Didn’t the peevish printed article boom of enraged loss? Isn’t it the case that wildly vitriolic reviews of hate usually have their waterlogged roots in personal rebuff – now and forever, Amen.
The summer of 1986 brought Anthony Wilson’s Festival of the Tenth Summer, which took place at Manchester’s G-Mex with a roundabout intent to salute Anthony Wilson as Manchester’s occupying power. At first I said no to the event, because I thought the ticket prices were too high, when in shuffles a typed letter from Anthony H. Wilson:
This isn’t about Factory, this isn’t about Tony Wilson or Steven Patrick Morrissey; it’s about Manchester, and Manchester only. I know you’re worried about a Smiths fan having to pay thirteen pounds to see the Smiths. But this isn’t a Smiths concert. It is designed as an event which reflects the achievement of the youth of this city, and the ticket price merely reflects our achievements. Our only reference in pricing was to go as we all do in our concerts for the lower end of the norm, but with regard to that norm.
It would have needed a fifteen pound ticket to have financed properly but we felt that thirteen pounds ... was as far as we could go. I felt rather in the mood to call the whole thing off. I have summoned up my energies one more time because I think the young people of this area deserve to know themselves, to understand how important they are. I think City Fun’s greatest hits and Shy Talk and Out There should be reprinted, and have Cummins pic of the Electric Circus hanging on the wall; I think the works of Garrett and Saville and Mulvey and Boone should be displayed and ...
Yakkety-yak, thud.
In fact, the G-Mex event is a great day, and theatrician Wilson is at his best master of ceremonies scarf-flowing staginess. He calls everyone ‘darling’, but it’s all a part of the public relations aspect of his showboat routine and not at all disingenuous. Before the Smiths go onstage, film-maker Derek Jarman is brought into the dressing room and is introduced. Johnny says ‘Hello,’ and then turns sideways to vomit. It is certainly a moment, but unfortunately it wasn’t caught on film.
Onstage, the Smiths are received as a life-giving source, and this begins to enrage Wilson so much that he flutters and fumes backstage, demanding to technicians that the Smiths’ power be cut off. No backline crew will comply with Wilson, who is effectively gagged at his own festival. At the base of it all, general opinion assessed Wilson’s rage to be the blustering fury in realizing that the Smiths had meant more to the crowd than his nurtured protégés New Order. Suddenly Wilson’s divine right to be Mr Manchester is scuppered, and he spends the remainder of his life with a Morrissey-Smiths wasting disease of the lower limbs, whilst oddly admitting that his big mistake in life was that he didn’t sign the Smiths to Factory.
Yes, well, there we go.
Departing for a tour of Ireland, Johnny turns up at my mother’s house, wobbles, and collapses. Everyone waits outside in the tour bus. It is perhaps 11 AM. There is much fussing, and I retreat. Johnny is carried upstairs and placed on a bed. Half an hour later my mother comes downstairs and walks over to where I am standing by the window.
‘Well, he’s OK,’ she says, ‘but he owes me an eiderdown.’
On arriving in Dublin, Johnny is whisked away by ambulance. I am concerned, but I have no idea what is happening, and I am told nothing. Bossy nurses take over and shove everyone else out of earshot, as if none of us count. The shows take place, and wherever we play in Ireland – Waterford, Dundalk, Letterkenny, Cork, Limerick – crowds scream and rush the stage with fantastically warped mania. Second by second it is thrilling. At Waterford, the audience hangs from any particle of stage-surround that they can grasp, and the operatic framework of this hoary old theater is ripped apart as – suddenly, the stage itself wobbles, having stood untroubled for more than one hundred years. In Letterkenny, the screams and squeals are of Bay City Rollers damp-knickered shrieks, and the Smiths are bundled in and out in a screwball frenzy. Geoff Travis had delayed the release of The Queen is Dead by nine months because of his court action against Morrissey and Marr (but not, let someone note, against Rourke and Joyce), and the bewildering excitement of touring ran alongside the legal demands of our lives being sealed up as the usual heel-dragging, fleshed-out, money-making and deliberately distracting court action takes place, and Johnny and I are fleeced from all directions. The Smiths may have saved Rough Trade from extinction, and may have allowed Geoff to lumber up to the spotlight, but all is fair in love and war as his legal eagles shatter the Morrissey–Marr defense. Johnny Marr, having never once deprived Rough Trade of a second of his outstanding and liberating talent, had been turned into a woeful joke by Geoff and his legal muggers. But life, somehow, goes on.
A letter arrives at Cadogan Square from Geoff. It states that he’s terribly worried about me and wonders what has caused my current depression.
If I can be of any help please let me know. If I am the cause of this plight, and I can’t imagine what I’ve done, please let me know also.
Yours,
Geoff
Absurdly, Geoff had turned up at Johnny and Angie’s marriage earlier that year in San Francisco – sitting and nodding whilst plotting court action. The ceremony went very well – I, with the infinite privilege of passing the wedding ring, yet, as ever I am too dazed to fail to notice the zero contribution to the day’s events by the head of the label. My future conversations with Geoff become of necessity, whereas Johnny was never again seen in Geoff’s company.
I am thrilled to receive a letter from the French actor Alain Delon approving his image for use on the sleeve of The Queen is Dead – this coming after a run of refusals from Alan Bates, Albert Finney and George Best. But the album title worries Johnny. His parents are upset to think that anyone would call an album The Queen is Dead, and Johnny asks me if I would consider switching the title to Bigmouth Strikes Again. I stand my ground and, knowing nothing of the kind, I assure him that all will be well.
Reviews had been very supportive apart from Ireland’s Hot Press, whose title warned the crown slips. Well, it hadn’t. It stayed on more firmly fixed than ever before, so thank you, Hot Press. Another review in an American newspaper commented: ‘The first three tracks on this album are probably the worst three songs I have ever heard in my life.’ Ah, platitudes.
Geoff scratches out another spine-chilling letter:
Dear Morrissey,
I just didn’t expect something so accomplished ... something so wonderful, musical and virtuous ... the strength of your delivery is majestic. On The queen you bed down with the language of rock ’n roll and pour scorn on its conventions ... Without doubt the Smiths finest work and a personal triumph ... a new phase of command and vocal power. I love it madly.
All the best,
Geoff.
This atmosphere of respect from Geoff would only ever appear in pr
ivate letter, and seemed never generously shown for public ear or eye, where silence is taken to mean whatever you wish it to mean.
Meekly, I had missed the value of There is a light that never goes out, and I suggested to Johnny that it shouldn’t be included on the album. He laughs a you-silly-thing warranty, and I drop the protest. The humiliation I live with, because this suggestion is everlasting since the song became – and continues to be – greatly loved as one of the most powerful components of the Smiths canon. It is often a relief to be wrong.
Pathetically, The Queen is Dead – like Meat is Murder – fails to cough up a Top 20 single. Something wrong remains wrong.
Whilst in Denver, Colorado, Johnny and I attend a concert by A-ha, whom we have met previously and whom we quite like. The hall is rammed with very small females who squeal at an intolerable volume throughout the concert, drowning out all of the songs. Because of this, the night is a mess. While it’s true that girls screamed at Sparks, there was something utterly pointless about the high-pitched mass squeal that blanketed the hall for A-ha. There was hardly any necessity for the band to actually play. Backstage, A-ha are gracious. They are healthy and athletic and inherently decent, with their rosebud Norwegian propriety, and this is interesting to me because it shows me how the mission to sing isn’t always a result of pain.
In Denver city center a plump girl bangs on the window of the car shouting: ‘Ooh, I always wanted to meet you!’ which strikes me as odd since we have only existed for three years – ‘always’ surely not amounting to that much time at all. Johnny sits back and shouts: ‘Ta’ra, fatty,’ as the car pulls away. I am shocked, but I then fold into convulsive laughter. Some terrible moments are funny.
At an airport in Toronto, Eartha Kitt is standing by herself – she who once famously shared a bed with both James Dean and Paul Newman at the same time (or so plain speaking has it). Full of sensuality, she pulled herself out of southern swampland to float insubordinate gestures across the map of American entertainment, and she succeeded very well. Amusingly, her daughter is called Kitt, which surely makes her Kitt Kitt. There are moments when you must give in, so I blandly stick my bland neck out.