Autobiography

by Morrissey

  Could things get any worse?

  Why, yes, little one. Be patient.

  The split is our final loss of innocence, and Johnny suddenly appears on television playing behind Bryan Ferry, as if this is what it had all been for, all along. Geoff brings in another guitarist to replace Johnny, and a session takes place in west London with Andy and Mike suddenly pledging allegiance, aware of the impending precipice. The session is de trop, and I have awoken to writs from both Sire and EMI telling me that I am, in legal piffle, their artist, and that I am legally bound to fulfill what are known as ‘the Smiths contracts’. Dim and confused, I meekly obey without fuss, certain that no other ex-Smith had found themselves quite so entrapped. Equal partnerships, anyone? Oh no, not at this stage, when there is nothing to gain but burdens! Leave that all to Morrissey. We other three Smiths are as free as coaltits darting from hedge to hedge, but we’ll be back later on, when the rough seas settle and there’s a financial surplus. Sire and EMI both threaten me with legal action should I refuse to supply an album in order to mop up the Smiths’ liabilities. There is no one I can turn to for sane judgment. In willowy isolation, I reflect on how Johnny and I had signed to Rough Trade, and then, by extension, to Sire Records, with no legal representation. The term ‘sitting ducks’ seemed far too mild – we were without doubt prize sapheads of the most embarrassingly gullible type. My doctor had prescribed a ‘mood’ tablet known as Pastalin, with which I scum-wrestle for a few dreadful months, and I begin not to recognize myself – saying things that I would never usually say – and my recalcitrant behavior is noted with concern by passers-by. I clamber back to Harley Street to complain to the doctor who prescribed this hideous mood pill, but I am told he is dead, and I am hardly surprised.

  ‘If you want the singles from Strangeways to succeed, then you should quickly take part in these promo videos,’ says Geoff, as he encircles the open grave. ‘We have a budget of twelve thousand pounds.’

  Director Tim Broad steps in to make sense of it all, hotch-potching two videos for both Girlfriend in a coma and Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. The results for both are frustratingly unwatchable, although Tim did his best with such a mealy-mouthed budget. In the event, Rough Trade decide against releasing Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before due to the lyric’s reference to ‘mass murder’, and I argue that it is surely a bit late in the day to worry about offending anybody. ‘Yes, but radio won’t play it,’ offers Geoff, his cadaverous smile as colorless as an Islington sky.

  ‘But they don’t ever play ANYTHING anyway!’ I choke, finally ready for the taxidermist.

  Progress is made in the US, where Strangeways zaps to number 55 – Sire finally slapped from mummification now that the Smiths are stuffed. On a late-night talk show, Lorna Luft (daughter of Judy Garland) is asked about modern music. ‘Well, I’ve heard Girlfriend in a coma,’ she laughs (for, would one not laugh?), and the Smiths finally enter having exited. The Collins English Dictionary furnishes its 1987 edition with Smiths: a Manchester pop group, an entry I read and reread until my eyes weaken. I tear the page out and I post it to Johnny. He does not reply because he is now far away and bleached free of emotional attachment – no solo commitment demanded from Johnny by either Sire or EMI, clever, clever boy.

  The brain speculates but the heart knows. Strangeways becomes the fourth Smiths album to enter the UK chart at number 2, and the following year Rough Trade will gasp out a live Rank that will become the fifth chart entry at number 2 for a band of habit-forming sadness, now cold in its grave. It may close as a mournful experience, but at least I had known and felt the possible.

  ‘If five Smiths albums enter the chart at number 2, what is stopping them from entering at number 1?’ I ask Geoff (although, at this stage, with Rough Trade looking more like an old soldiers’ retirement home, I wonder why I bother to fire the question).

  ‘Because when the majors see that we’re coming in at number 1 they up their mid-week promo and they keep us at bay,’ says Geoff, delighted with his prognosis.

  ‘So why don’t WE therefore up our promo in order to keep THEM at bay?’ I go on, like a jockey in search of a bolted horse. To this, Geoff laughs weakly, as if I’d suggested immediate space travel.

  In flies a handwritten letter from honored British music writer Nick Kent, writing to ask that he be auditioned as ‘guitarist/tunesmith’ if the Smiths continue without Johnny. He is deadly serious.

  Dear Morrissey,

  ... I am not a good self-salesman but I can confidently boast an encyclopaedic knowledge of the chord structures, dynamics etc. of Johnny’s contributions to date ... My ardour is strictly from aesthetic dictates, not financial, vainglorious etc. ad infinitum.

  Being musically associated with your very good self would signify the very apex of my crusade for immortality ...

  Please keep me in mind.

  Nick Kent

  It is a methodical scrawl on yellowed paper, but I am still in shaky-split twilight zone and I cannot reply, for I scarcely know what to say. Nick Kent’s parting shot appears in The Face magazine’s March 1990 issue, a mediated slap-and-swipe Morrissey burial. I look suitably deathbound on the cover, and the piece within falls midway between tyranny and envy, as Kent outlines the ridiculousness of Morrissey, in unanswerable print. Ah, revenge!

  When a Nick Kent book seeps out, its jacket bears a shambling quote attributed to me as I warn how the contents within will ‘take the curls out of your afro’. I contact the publishers, explaining that this quote is not mine – quite apart from the fact that there are no curls in an afro. The publishers reply with a ‘We will remove the quote in the event of a reprint,’ which is meant to send me skipping off in delight.

  Two years later, in Paris, Nick Kent is visible in the crowd as my new band launch into our comic-opera version of the New York Dolls’ Trash (although comic opera was never the intent). I am confused by Kent’s presence since his repulsion had made itself clear throughout his Morrissey assassination for The Face. Unfortunately for me, during this rendition of Trash, drummer Spencer plays an entirely different song throughout. Looking all Dostoevsky in a caped coat, Nick Kent lets loose a cold-blooded smile as the song blunders on and on and on with nothing to save it from death. Backstage my rage is soaked in sorrow, but Spencer displays only scorn. Weeks later, having heard a bootleg of the Paris night, Spencer now has no choice but to confess. ‘Yes, I was playing a completely different song,’ he laughs.

  Abandon all hope ye who sing here.

  The Smiths fallout continues in Denver, where someone has held an entire radio station at gunpoint until DJs make the promise to play Smiths music. Unwittingly, this gunman is providing the very first active radio promotion on behalf of the Smiths, and evidently a loaded gun is what it takes to get a Smiths song on the airwaves. David Bowie, who feeds on the blood of living mammals, rises like Christopher Lee to present a bouquet of flowers to Johnny. But Johnny is not taken in. If I had felt that the Smiths’ demise had left me on the scaffold, then Johnny surely felt the same. He quickly joins the Pretenders, and he just as quickly is ‘asked to leave’. Chrissie Hynde explains to me that Johnny’s perpetual lateness made progress impossible. For me, rationale comes from James Maker and Kirsty MacColl, both abiding friends, both level and impartial. Meanwhile, Stephen Street drops off a cassette at my flat of his own compositions – an action timed as if on cue, since EMI are muttering how the hour for a Morrissey disc has arrived. Ever helpful, the Manchester Evening News yelp a two-page spread entitled morrissey was hell to work with says johnny marr. If the quote is fictitious, Johnny does nothing to correct it. Ping-pong.

  I am approached with an offer of management by Gail Colson, a forthright Londoner who manages Peter Gabriel, and who is unlikely to take anything on the chin. Although she has never been further north than Watford, I quite like her combination of gruffness and Emma Hornett agitation. I tell Ga
il that I will sign a management contract if she also agrees to manage Stephen Street.

  ‘I don’t want Stephen fuckin’ Street!’ she rattles. But with a bellowing sigh she took him on, and twenty-two years later she smiles: ‘I was offered a job lot.’

  Recording Viva Hate (the first solo album) was very difficult owing to the enslaved echo, coming from virtually everywhere, that told me I could never possibly be as good as the Smiths.

  ‘Well, I think it’s over now, anyway,’ says Gill Smith, expertly folding me away like a winter bedspread.

  Winding in like a serpent, Geoff Travis asks: ‘Do you actually have money?’

  ‘Money?’ I ask, confused.

  ‘Well, it really is over now. Will you be alright, do you think?’ He smiles, his face lit up with formaldehyde.

  Suedehead, the first solo single, glides into the chart at number 6, selling 75,000 copies in its first week. There are no congratulations from either Geoff Travis or Gill Smith – both eager pallbearers two months previously.

  A surprise letter from Linda McCartney:

  Good one number 6!!!!!! If you ever want to do a song for the animals, get in touch.

  Love, Linda

  James Maker calls down from his observation tower. ‘You’ve done it exactly right. This is the right single to launch the new you with.’

  As Suedehead climbs to number 5, Viva Hate jabs in at number 1, in the same week that Johnny’s collaboration with Talking Heads enters at number 4. In America, Viva Hate springs to number 48, higher than any Smiths album, but Sire cannot get Suedehead onto the Billboard 100 despite surging and impressive radio play. I debut my solo being on Top of the Pops, standing alone for the first time, a Queen is Dead t-shirt beneath a neat blazer, and I sing Everyday is like Sunday, which has entered at number 9.

  The wind, if nothing else, is in my sails, and all is in my favor until Gail Colson telephones me the day after my Top of the Pops debut. ‘That was fucking awful,’ she says, and I drop the receiver on our relationship. Little wheel spin and spin.

  Although Rourke and Joyce had gamefully participated in the 1989 singles The last of the famous international playboys (number 6) and Interesting drug (number 9), the unhappy past descends upon me each time I hear their voices and I decide not to invite them to any further recording sessions. Lawyers for Joyce then write to me, clearly stating that Joyce might take legal action in search of Smiths royalties, but will not do so if I agree to make him a permanent member of the Morrissey Band (a band which, in any case, doesn’t even exist). I ignore the threat, unaware of any legal gripe that Joyce could possibly have against me, but the heavy-handed approach of his lawyers helped me to resolve to leave Joyce to his cleverness. Another page must resolutely be turned once more.

  Because of a song on Viva Hate entitled Margaret on the guillotine, I am then compelled by law to attend a cross-examination by Special Branch Task Force so that they might gauge whether or not I pose a security threat to Margaret Thatcher. For the hearer’s joy, I am drilled and recorded on tape for one hour under the penetrating glare of Special Branch.

  ‘Why exactly are you here?’ I ask them, and they explain that they are following up on an article in the Star newspaper that claimed that I would welcome the assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Following a very civil meeting, the men of Special Branch then request that I sign a photograph ‘for a neighbor’, and no more was heard or said on the Thatcher matter.

  It was undeniable that I found Thatcher’s egocentricity to be intolerable, but her leaking insanity would eventually force her own cabinet to boot her out, and if this would be the action of people who had never actually suffered at Thatcher’s whims, how on earth were the rest of us expected to feel? I was cross-examined for allegedly welcoming the assassination of Thatcher, but when her own cabinet effectively assassinated her they were not subjected to a Special Branch investigation, or even arrested for a hate crime. Of course, politicians have their own laws for themselves (none, specifically), and tend to uphold laws against the public which politicians themselves can skirt in and out of because they have friends in low places. When Thatcher’s daughter-in-law gives birth, Thatcher zooms her face into awaiting cameras. ‘We are a grandmother,’ she announces, embodying Dame Anna Neagle, and now a comic figure. Disconnected and dispassionate, Thatcher’s torrent of hate (for she has no other emotion) drains the young people of England, who see the Thatcher regime as militant and blinkered, and a dangerous tyranny clouds little Britain.

  Life plops me at 2 Caroline Place, an odd little house in Bayswater that will be home (of sorts) for 1989, a disturbingly dry summer when the heat, mixed with the pollution of the Bayswater Road, brings on the panic attacks that I’d thought long-since gone. I sleep with the bedroom windows open, but the air feels defiled and contaminated. Months and months pass without rain. A local cat is a non-stop hunter, and I spend most of my time rescuing damaged birds that will never fly again. I carry them into Hyde Park and leave them within the enclosed and protected birds’ nesting area, so that at least they have a remote chance of composure even if they will never again be on the wing. Cats will be cats.

  I telephone photographer Juergen Teller to thank him for the excellent shots recently taken for the new Bona Drag compilation album, but after an assisting male voice tells me to hold on, I hear Juergen’s voice whisper ‘Oh, tell him I’m not here,’ and I quickly lower the receiver before the lackey has time to return to me.

  Michael Stipe appears at Caroline Place, and we have tea in the back garden as the dunghill wafts of Queensway restaurants foul the air.

  ‘I don’t like this area,’ I tell Michael.

  ‘Then why do you live here?’ he asks.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I reply.

  ‘When I first heard Everyday is like Sunday I felt very jealous,’ he goes on, and he explains how he, too, would like to go solo.

  ‘I didn’t ever want to go solo,’ I say, ‘I thought the Smiths would run for at least thirty albums.’

  We walk through Hyde Park and then slowly across to Hammersmith. We enter the Hammersmith Odeon through the stage door, and six minutes later Michael walks onstage with REM. He is wearing the same clothes that he has worn all day, and he hasn’t brushed his teeth.

  The Smiths and REM had come to light at roughly the same time, and, as a Sire Records executive had remarked, ‘It’s just a question of which of the two will explode in America first.’ As the Smiths choked to death on a chip, the REM rocket accelerated. Michael’s voice is a very cornfed John Denver sound, and in fact his real name is John.

  Linder appears at Caroline Place to tell me that she is pregnant. As the full-stop locks the T in ‘pregnant’, the legs of my bent-wood chair give way and I splat onto the floor. We are both bagged. There can be no composure. Reason is lost for ten full minutes, as Linder and I are unable to look at each other, each fit dying down only to start up again with a further convulsion, and out peals laughter and tears combined.

  ‘Well,’ I begin, with postgraduate’s calm, and suddenly we are both deranged all over again, painful laughter now causing concern, leakage imminent, sealed-up frenzy running loose.

  Murray Chalmers arrives at Caroline Place to find me blocking traffic with waving arms, as an injured starling hops to the center of the road. Having shaken the bird from a cat’s mouth, the bird is now further endangered by oncoming traffic. Murray is not sympathetic, and looks embarrassed as I scramble to get to the bird, who naturally does not want my help. The bird spends the night in my living room in a large, open box. Morning, predictably, brings death. It is always this way. Murray is head of press at EMI, and he tells me that the NME would like to know where I am, having asked Murray: ‘Just tell us if he’s north or south – we’ll make a story out of it.’ Quite remarkable.

  Although the summer of 1989 is traffic-fume toxic and unbearably hot, the year had begun in typically B
ritish gloom. In the 6 PM darkness of a January day, Tim Broad’s resourceful Mercedes carried James O’Brien, Linder and I nervously up to the wild spirit of Saddleworth Moor. We skirt Ashton-under-Lyne, and as we enter the moor we are all silently expectant. The landscape is waterlogged, and the foursome is anxious. In the back seat, I make repeated glances over my shoulder and out into the blackness of the moor, reassured that nothing is visible yet also feeling nervous for the same reason. Next to me, Linder alights with tales of suicide specters – excited, then cutting short. These moors have another life, and that life is very much apart from the one you may have just left in Manchester, Bradford or Huddersfield. We are greeted by a dancing sheet of impenetrable fog waving above and around us; no visible skyline, no tail lights to follow, no toasty pub lights in the distance, no comforting white noise, no sign of life – just this place of trepidation, with us in it. We are drawn to the moors with some shame, because some would have preferred to have left but could not. This 6 PM could be the darkest hour before dawn, as the temperature drops severely. At the wheel, Tim attempts to explain the vulnerability of the moors and our powerless straggling as we trespass. In the passenger seat James hands out torches ‘because you never know’ – and we are absolutely certain that we indeed never know.

  We are now where none could offer prompt rescue, as an even thicker blanket of fog comes rushing to meet us, weaving through beams of fog lights that are our only vision. Beyond that short stretch of light we see only blackness, and we wonder what the blackness hides. We have left behind the evenness of the A653 and have found ourselves at Black Hill, which looks across to Holme – which is anything but. We do not realize it, but we turn north again, without even a solitary remote cottage in the heights that might throw out a porch or landing light to dispel the loneliness. Who would live here? We are relieved at a small gathering of shaggy sheep, huddled together and ever-watchful, eyes upon us in silent knowledge.