Autobiography

by Morrissey

  ‘Do you mind if I say hello?’ I ask Eartha Kitt. She laughs a head-thrown-back laugh. ‘We’re a group from England called the Smiths,’ throws in Johnny. Eartha gives a second laugh – possibly imagining a large family rather than a musical group.

  At Heathrow Airport I sit next to Sir Richard Attenborough – once a fresh young Pinkie in the 1947 film of Brighton Rock.

  ‘Does it all seem like a hundred years ago?’ I ask him.

  ‘Oh much more than that,’ he smiles, but he then looks understandably dumbfounded as I ask him about James Hayter.

  Nerve deserts me in 1986 as I spot the American writer and social reformer James Baldwin sitting alone in the lobby of a grandiose Barcelona hotel. He is weathered and intense, absorbed in his own thoughts, with a face there could never be enough time to describe. I drink him in, but can do no more. I pin so much prestige to James Baldwin that to risk approach places my life on the line; I’d hang myself at any glimmer of rejection. History books overlook James Baldwin because he presented an unvarnished view of the American essence – as blunt and rousing as print would allow. His public speeches were intoxicating, his motivational palette of words so full of fireworks that you smile as you listen – not because of humor, but because he was so good at voicing the general truth, with which most struggled. His liking for male flesh gave the world a perfect excuse to brush him aside as a social danger, and he was erased away as someone who used his blackness as an excuse for everything. In fact, his purity scared them off, and his honesty ignited irrational fear in an America where men were draped with medals for killing other men yet imprisoned for loving one another. Pitifully, on this Barcelona day, I do not have the steel to approach James Baldwin, because I know very well that I will jabber rubbish, and that his large, soulful eyes will lower at someone ruefully new to the game. Shortly thereafter, he is dead.

  The essence of Smiths Art (MozArt ) was the will to have every Smiths sleeve as well turned out as possible, and it came from an idea I had to take images that were the opposite of glamor and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power – or, possibly, glamor. Bits of neo-realism, bits of brutality, with the task being to present cheerless and cluttered bed-sitter art in a beautiful and proudly frank way (note: The World Won’t Listen).

  Rules, in all things, are simply laid down so that someone might break them. I had learned to guard my secrets carefully, and I had stored boxes of clippings over the years that would all now alight as Smithsonian sleeves. It would be the ache of love sought, but not found; buttoning your overcoat as you stand before an ash-slag fire as you ponder years of wasted devotion amid the endless complaint of boredom. It is, I suppose, the north of England. Of course it must be monochromatic, since the dreary past always was, and a loved but lost son is lifted into a stately frame. The realities of each northern day at the turn of the 1980s played out against a hardened background in late repentance, because the north is a separate country – one of wild night landscapes of affectionate affliction. There are no known technological links apart from the telephone box on the corner, and this can always be relied upon to be out of order. The north is important partly because of London’s distance, and also because of the disregard London pays to the north – a north where the tongue is thought to be too free, and where we are said to show more warmth (although I most sincerely doubt it). In the north of the 1970s everyone had just gone to bed – or is about to go, that lengthy going-to-bed process being such a great relief and escape, for isn’t sleep the brother of death? It snows harder up north, and we rarely see or hear of our hare-brained Westminster politicians or their messy private dabblings. In this pre-internet age, we can’t even second-guess the slanted and skewed double-dealings of 10 Downing Street. We are in the dark at all times. The north, you see, is thought to be ‘away from it all’ (and ‘it’ is ‘everything’), and a friendly street greeting is a morose nod of recognition with all personal names chopped in half for familiarity’s sake. Television still emits only the King’s English, which Manchester naturally dismembers by dropping any G that might be at the end of a word. As the British were raised to gaze adoringly towards America, we in the north were taught to cast a hopeful eye to London, where you might catch sight of people who mattered. Shut-out hopes struggle aboard trains at Piccadilly Station, having wrenched themselves away or explained themselves to death. No mamma, let me go.

  Leaving Manchester always meant the train to London – giddy yet sad on a journey all alone. No matter how high-speed the train, the frozen reflection in the window is the collapsed countenance of your own face staring back at you, unchanged with the fast-track passing of miles, questioning, questioning, questioning, like a second you – an inner you, representing the superiority of reason, reminding you that there is nowhere to run. I am a child by a moldering wall; front-entry bus into town, train to London, alight from Euston, rear-entrance bus to confusing habitation. The ungovernable life is here in Manchester, all dark and unloving, with scaffolding and building work everywhere. Manchester’s architectural heritage is demolition. Empty mid-century warehouses have cellars that are now converted into restaurants or nightclubs, neither of which welcome penniless me. February 1971 had divided locals into two distinct groups, one of which still spoke in old currency, the other of which grappled with the new. Unlike the world in which we now live, not many people were interested in music, and very few knew anything about this mysterious life-sucking machine.

  The ever-moving world of music would lead me chin-to-chin with the unexpected, people whom I’d be unlikely to bump into at Stretford’s DHSS inferno. There stands Shelley Winters, alone and dowdy at a carwash on La Cienega; there looms Anthony Perkins, walking alone around the Beverly Center; there is Eve Arden, erecting her own makeshift table at a bookshop where she will hopefully sign copies of her autobiography; there is Paul Newman, sitting quietly at the door of his Sunset Marquis villa; there is Patricia Neal, frail but smiling at La Luna restaurant on Larchmont; there is Paul Simon, sitting with Whoopi Goldberg, to whom the unemployable Stretford canal-bank cleaner is introduced. This all could be a dream, yet it is not sad enough to be a dream.

  In New York, Mick Jagger arrives backstage and extends the hand of friendship. It is a big moment for Johnny, but I, of course, am a nightmare of judgment, and it takes me years to understand the genius secret of the Rolling Stones. Dismissal can be a secret form of arrogance, and I held this proudly against the Stones until the light shifted and I caught myself being utterly wrong. The in-built censorship can also often be a substitute for not actually knowing any better, and I now agonize over my criticisms of the Stones – with blather that was anything but a true reflection of the facts. In any case, Mick Jagger only stayed for four songs into the Smiths’ set, but I felt no hurt at his departure because I could, even then, understand how my general being (which we dare not term a persona) was difficult for a lot of people to take. As the Smiths’ singer I consigned all of my best efforts to conviction, and all of my being went into each song. This can be embarrassing for onlookers – an embarrassment that makes us turn away whenever someone bares their soul in public. But for me there could be no other way, because otherwise there would simply be no point and the Smiths would be eminently average. The ideas were rigid and the laws were as unique as one could expect, and I felt burdened only because I took things as hard as I did, so that whenever I’d overhear how people found me to be ‘a bit much’ (which is a gentle way of saying the word ‘unbearable’), I understood why. To myself I would say: Well, yes, of course I’m a bit much – if I weren’t, I would not be lit up by so many lights. However, at the hour of the Smiths’ birth I had felt at the physical and emotional end of life. I had lost the ability to communicate and had been claimed by emotional oblivion. I had no doubt that my life was ending, as much as I had no notion at all that it was just beginning. Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness
all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything? I had become a stretcher-case to my family, yet this made it easier for me to put them aside at those moments when the wretched either die or go mad. The water was now too muddy, and, being nowhere in view, I am not even known enough to be disliked. The wits had diminished, and I am sexually disinterested in either the male or the feel-male – yet I make this claim on knowing almost nothing about either. Horror lurked beneath horror, and I could only tolerate an afternoon if I took a triple amount of the stated dose of valium prescribed by my GP (who would soon take his own life). Life became a strange hallucination, and I would talk myself through each day as one would nurse a dying friend. The diminishment could go no further, and the face can only be slapped so many times before the slaps cannot be felt. I became too despondent for anyone to cope with, and only my mother would talk to me in understanding tones. Yet there comes the point where the suicidalist must shut it down if only in order to save face, otherwise you accidentally become a nightclub act minus the actual nightclub. This, then, was my true nature as the Smiths began: the corpse swinging wildly at the microphone was every bit as complicated as the narrow circumstances under which he had lived, devoid of the knack of thigh-slapping laughter. Accustomed to people criticizing me, I am unruffled when the barrage comes. By contrast, the other three Smiths were straightforward and had found fun, and they were not to blame for inspecting me as if pinned and mounted under glass.

  At New York’s Beacon Theater Andy Warhol is present, and I am frozen in a disconnected moment. After the show, Johnny and I find ourselves in the Bowery district with the poet John Giorno, who takes us both to the quietly famous William Burroughs ‘Bunker’. Through clattering warehouse elevators we are in ice-cold lock-up depositories of vast storehouses and stockrooms, where philosophical art-bits are scattered elegantly around mismatched sofas for those who might care to sink. The chill drizzle of New York’s 1890s is here, now, with the chill drizzle of the 1980s. It is here where the art set have suffered with relish, in rooms where turn-of-the-century migrant workers would have been fired for smiling. My infantile reactions do not match Johnny’s; he is bored. His boredom suddenly alerts me to the realization that, yes, I am bored, too. I am introduced to Gregory Corso, which doesn’t make sense since I am certain he is dead, but this is not something to raise when the subject stands before you. I may not necessarily have been wrong – such being the wonders of Warhol who could possibly achieve anything at all with the right stuffing.

  John Giorno begins the process of explanation, and I begin to long for my own bed with clean sheets. John has an odd way of offering a slight giggle before speaking, because he obviously knows what he’s about to say and he somehow can’t wait to hear it, yet as he talks nothing becomes clear. It matters little. These accidental yet under-your-skin brushes spread blood through the tissue, and you are excited to at last be out and about.

  The Smiths at the London Palladium raises emotion beyond the heart. The band’s name is omitted from the actual ticket, and, as usual, those who should know why this has happened voice only bewilderment. We are warned that the audience will not be allowed to stand up during what is erroneously termed a ‘performance’, but the audience immediately stand, and the gang-show Red Coats give me a disapproving glare. Iggy Pop is present and makes his way backstage, but not to wherever it is I am. Opening on this tour are Raymonde, who are fronted by James Maker. Raymonde are an arresting four-piece from south London, whose first single had done well on radio, after which Geoff Travis had made haste towards them in search of a debut album.

  ‘The thing is,’ says Geoff, as if addressing a Transport and General Workers’ strike, ‘James can’t sing,’ which is palpably untrue. But Johnny isn’t keen when James elects to join the Smiths onstage during their set at Cornwall Coliseum, eager to be a part of the fireworks; he is instead led offstage and placed in a chair. The Raymonde album turns out to be excellent, dogged only by its somewhat awkward sleeve-art, wherein the song-titles are printed in scriptio continua, which effectively means that no one can read them.

  Geoff had also interviewed Ludus (fronted by Linder Sterling) as a possible Rough Trade signing, but he told me that he had been put off when guitarist Ian had asked him, ‘What kind of music would you like us to play?’ which Geoff rightly thought an undignified question. These are the days when almost any unsigned artist that I favor instantly awakes to find Geoff Travis sitting at the foot of their bed, a short-form agreement between his teeth. It’s a compliment, of sorts.

  In America, The Smiths album had stalled at number 150, and Meat is Murder spent thirty-two weeks meandering around the 110 position, whereas The Queen is Dead finally clipped into the 100 at number 70, and managed to cling on for thirty-seven weeks. Sire attempted appeasement by assuring me that neither the Sex Pistols’ album nor David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust had entered the Billboard 100 – as if this should be our eternal blueprint. Smiths’ reviews throughout America remain uncharitable, and Sire is eternally absent, and the liberating hysteria at each Smiths concert does nothing to stoke Sire’s interest. Even selling 40,000 tickets in California doesn’t budge Sire’s constipation, and the label remains clueless as to what exactly the Smiths are. At Irving Meadows, the audience rushes the stage so uncontrollably that the show is stopped by security, who point to me as the ringleader of the tormentors. Essential to any form of American business is the blame game. It is never one’s own fault – but always the fault of others.

  The frenzied panic at Smiths shows goes largely unreported. Berserk and wildly funny, the shows outstrip anything else that we are told is hysteria. Backstage in Los Angeles, the actor Richard Davalos walks towards me, and, saying nothing, places a square-faced silver ring on the third finger of my left hand. Looking not an hour older than when he famously played James Dean’s screen brother in East of Eden in 1955, Davalos now lives in Echo Park and tends to his garden. A series of beautifully printed letters from Richard arrive at Cadogan Square:

  by way of thanks for your magnetic performance here in Los Angeles. It was a truly remarkable evening. You are so very special. RICHARD.

  Richard’s ring fastened itself to my finger for the next few years, until I suddenly wondered what it was doing there.

  Back in London, John Porter surprisingly springs out of the bushes to mix a new Smiths track. I arrive much too early at the studio in Chalk Farm, and I find shrewd John huddled with both Johnny and, surprisingly, Bryan Ferry. I walk into the room and all three freeze with Colonel Mustard unease. Ferry, the bogus man, immediately rises and grabs his belongings, and John Porter turns away, unable to look into the eyes of Mozzer-a-Becket. Johnny splutters a few surprised compliments, but minus any deftness. Saying nothing at all, Ferry smiles an unhappy smile and leaves. As if jealously guarding a can of sardines, Billy Bunter and his playmates are rumbled, and the Smiths battleship springs its first mutinous leak, with John Porter as sly Captain Bligh, and Johnny as the always-innocent young cabin-boy, hoping old Moby Dick will use his tune. And, to everyone’s disadvantage, he does. Of course, I wasn’t expected to burst in ahead of schedule, and Mary, Mungo and Midge were caught at it. I could almost hear John Porter as the monster in the middle cannily edging Johnny on with a ‘Well, you know you don’t need this Morrissey silliness ...’ and a crisis of spirits kicks in. When the Bryan Ferry single finally emerges, Johnny is there in the video looking lost, minus only a pair of slaves’ sandals, and he is evidently only important for the gifts that he brings to the sherry-fed Ferry, who stumbles up to the spotlight as if direct from a pink-gin all-nighter at Redcliffe Square. Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

  As Shoplifters of the world unite is released, the Smiths’ dramatizations are finally of national significance. The graveyard school of poetry mixes well with incongruously striking guitar melodies, and such mixed metaphors are sudde
nly pointed to as a new ‘type’, and a generation of similarly styled cognoscenti appear behind us. The Morrissey Thing is lampooned on television, and music writers collectively sigh as ‘more Smiths copyists’ turn up worldwide. It is the success of self-culture and defiant self-government, and art is used as a weapon. When the Old Grey Whistle Test includes a Smiths ‘video’ in their phone-in popularity contest, the Smiths shrink against the titanic bands of the day.

  ‘Of course you won’t win,’ smiles Geoff, ever hopeful. When it is eventually announced that the Smiths have won, Geoff climbs back into his pen, saying nothing.

  I foolishly looked to Geoff for an explanation when the single Panic stalled for two weeks at number 11, inching no higher even though it is generally accepted that here is the Smiths’ first unstoppable number 1. Johnny sends me a postcard yelling ‘PANIC: NUMBER ONE !!!!!!!!’, a common sentiment, yet once again, here we are, derailed by non-existent competition.

  Geoff leans forward and removes his glasses. ‘Do you know why Smiths singles don’t go any higher?’

  I say nothing because the question is horribly rhetorical.

  ‘Because they’re not good enough.’ He puts his glasses back on and shrugs his shoulders. I glance around his office searching for an axe.

  Some murders are well worth their prison term.

  Preparing to sing Shoplifters of the world unite on television’s The Tube, I am ushered into an urgent Rough Trade meeting, where I am pressed to make a public statement about the upcoming Tube slot. The statement must clarify the true meaning of the song, and must dissociate it from the obvious tricky business of shop-theft, which, quite obviously, is the song’s true essence.