Autobiography

by Morrissey

  In the first few days of 1993 my manager Nigel Thomas sat up in bed and spoke a few pleasantries to his wife. At ease, his head lowered and he softly died a strange and gentle death. A month later, Tim Broad, who had directed all of my promotional films, lost his life to what the good folk of WeHo termed ‘the Headache’. Ebbing away in the parlor of his terraced house on Clapham Manor Street, he looked up to ask an attending James O’Brien, ‘Do you think I’ll be remembered?’ as he faded away. A paragon of practicality in so many ways, he was unable to monitor his own urgings. And why should he? The church demands too much. There is no self-discovery in a safe life. Instead, Tim lived whilst alive – such a rarity. But there’s a price for everything. Always full of fun, with the illusion of immun­ity, Tim had no idea how to moan. At his funeral at Mortlake, we are all hunched in an unbearable sadness. Like Jon Daley, Tim has gone at the age of 38. I am close to breakdown at life’s inevitably disgusting final summons, as Tim is flushed away.

  By April Mick Ronson’s death forces me to accept the worst all over again, and I recall twelve months previously when four people sat in the same room discussing exciting plans for the year ahead. Since three of those four people were Mick Ronson, Tim Broad and Nigel Thomas, only I remain alive one year on. As we outlined our world-crushing grand-slam circuit clout for Your Arsenal, only I would live to tell the tale. In the midst of substantial sorrow a deadly writ is issued from a merchandising company called Giant. The final act of Nigel’s wizardry was an impressive deal with Giant who handed over $1 million in return for use of my never-ready smile. After Nigel died, Giant sued for return of the outstanding sum, and I was dragged without resistance to the Supreme Court in Los Angeles where the money paid over was restored. The lead waggler was a famous Los Angeles entrepreneur named Irving Handsoff, who peeped over the head of the table and called for my head on a plate. Any plate would do. It fell to me to return the entire amount, even though $250,000 had gone to Nigel for management commission, and $58,000 had been paid to my London lawyer Tony English in fees. I fought the action on the grounds that there was no need for any of the advance to be returned since, with time, Giant would recoup the cash from upcoming tours. But I felt the unfelicitous ferocity of Irving Handsoff call upon all of his fellow morticians to flatten me like a squashed pug, and as an out-of-towner against the swagmen of Los Strangle-us, I fell to the syndicate of goombahs and goodfellas before I’d even had time to toy with my rosary. Dimly I am pushed along the plank and dimly I oblige. For this joy, I am presented with legal bills of over 200,000 euro, and the joke is everlastingly on me. I suggest to my accountant that Nigel’s family be asked to return the 250,000 allotted to Nigel, who, now dead, had no time to earn his slice.

  ‘You wouldn’t take money from a grieving family!’ my accountant gasped.

  ‘But I’M grieving,’ I reply, and wherever I turn the trap widens. It was true that the art of getting money and acknowledging no superior was the rock on which the black hands of Handsoff had built his empire, and I was gooey putty against his Israelites. His was a mediocre way to spend a life, but it provided yachts a-plenty for his big-eyed militia.

  I do not know Siouxsie, but I ask around to see if she would have any interest in dueting with me. Her manager responds, and I send her four covers to choose from, being Happy (Nancy Sinatra), Loneliness remembers what happiness forgets (Dionne Warwick), Interlude (Timi Yuro) and Morning starship (Jobriath). I call Siouxsie at her home in Condom in France, and each time she recognizes my voice there comes a small, impatient sigh as if I’d just interrupted her evening prayer. ‘Can’t we do something off Ziggy Stardust, like The prettiest star ?’ she suggests.

  ‘The prettiest star wasn’t on Ziggy Stardust,’ Mr Know-all returns. Siouxsie stiffens, and we shall never be friends. She is very much as I had expected – a physical blancmange that is six parts Kate O’Mara, two parts Myra Hindley and two parts Fenella Fielding. She had replaced Croydon for the Black Forest, and she appears to hate even the people that she likes. She looks at everyone and everything only with a sense of what is due to her, and she might stare you out as you lay dying on a zebra crossing. She is certain that her historical value outstrips Queen Victoria’s (which, in my meager opinion, it actually does), and she has a duty to no one. Not for a moment will she forget that she is Siouxsie, who might pick fights with people whom her male friends would then beat up. Your mind’s eye can see her in 1972, outside the pubs of Shirley, lines of cruelty already set in stone, full of sexless decorative art, plying very strange cargo – you’re the pride of our street; black magic spun out and on the march – an Eve cigarette held aloft. The overground train to Victoria leaves behind the Oak Crescents and Acacia Avenues of Bless This House and Terry and June, where a better edition of Susan could never be constructed. It was never a question of becoming a pop singer, more a matter of entering the field of argument; a Nico iceberg who hates blasé dolls, and who will be very careful about whom she is photographed with. There are no penetrating opinions forthcoming, but Siouxsie the star is embarrassed by women, and possibly angry because she is one. What slips out is cultivated offensiveness and, thankfully, a stabbing trail of quite outstanding recordings as Siouxsie stomps through with zero emotional involvement and maintains this indifference for twenty very successful years. Siouxsie doesn’t mind if she poisons the world, and here lies the appeal of the one who had said No as the millions of Yes girls smiled their way into the Top of the Pops cameras. The music she makes is a strict ice-bath of nightmare and caution, the hanging valleys of Bern – a black-eyed shopgirl hidden somewhere in the whistling cathedral towers of Notre Dame, refusing to be dragged back to Boots the Chemist, where both her shift and her insurance stamps remain.

  Siouxsie chooses Timi Yuro’s Interlude, and she pulls up at Hook End Manor recording studio in a black Mercedes. She is carrying her own microphone and she wants to get on with it minus any familiar chit-chat. In the event, she is a seasoned professional of exact run-throughs and topnotch precision. There is only one crack in the alabaster as she listens to her final take and softly asks me, ‘Are you sure it’s OK?’ It is the solitary moment when the Soviet Statue breathes. One can suddenly imagine real blood in Siouxsie’s veins – and yet, perhaps not.

  Siouxsie’s manager calls me a few days later. ‘Sioux says I’m too soft on you,’ he begins – inexplicably.

  ‘S-soft?’ I stutter, ‘but you don’t know me, and I don’t know you, and she doesn’t know me, and I don’t ...’ and on I go, trailing away boring myself rigid.

  EMI are delighted with Interlude, and there are torturous mutterings of ‘a number 1 cert’. It certainly achieves its aim as a husky Bond theme, with the slipping-away wheeze of dentist-gas.

  Suddenly a legal letter arrives at EMI from Siouxsie’s label, Polydor, who insist that ‘at very least this is a Siouxsie recording’, and they would like 100 per cent ownership, which should be released with Siouxsie’s name only. Am I to be spared nothing? Although I had paid for the recording, Polydor do not insist on covering any costs! It is all so typically, typically, typically convoluted crap.

  I am now living at 18 Regent’s Park Terrace, half-Camden, half-Regent’s Park, and Siouxsie appears to discuss a video treatment for Interlude. We are gathered with a video director and her assistants, whilst Murray Chalmers makes tea. Siouxsie is wearing reflective sunglasses so that her eyes are not visible to anyone, and instantly her demands are barked out with a voice of punished ferocity. Within eight seconds she seems to have alienated everyone in the room, and as Murray fiddles about with cups and saucers his eyes roll ceilingwards each time Godzilla snaps out her stipulations.

  ‘Look,’ she says to no one in particular, ‘I haven’t got time for this, I’ve got to be writing some B-sides,’ and we all wonder what on earth she is talking about. The video crew visibly sink as Siouxsie outlines her suggestion for the video – a treatment which sees me walking through a park only for S
iouxsie to emerge throwing stones at me, to which I evidently accept. The move is a crafty pecking-order trample that would emphasize Siouxsie’s natural superiority to the world, whereas I, quite clearly, would be seen as a spectacle of misfortune. The suggestion is met by a terrified silence, not least of all because it is delivered with a look of advanced misery from Eve white/Eve black. Aware that she is coming across as a slightly glitzy version of sheer misery, Siouxsie advances to leave – too soon, unresolved, yet getting the drift. On the doorstep she asks me whether right or left would be the best direction to find a taxi, and although her best bet would be left, I suggest she turns right. It is churlish of me, but it is she who has set the pace. I return to the room where everyone sits in a circle, their jaws agape and their eyes sore at the attack of the beast from fifty thousand fathoms. It is disheartening, but there it is.

  I piece together the artwork for Interlude, but the ongoing ownership tussle with Polydor means that the release date moves back, and is then shifted again when no agreement can be reached. In the event, EMI unsurprisingly become bored with the battle of the sea goats and Interlude finally escapes amid cloud and heartache, and success is impossible. Reaching number 24 in the chart, it is supported by one solitary radio play – but nothing else, and not even a photograph of Siouxsie and I together exists to rouse a nation.

  In the US Interlude receives excitable airplay, but Reprise decides against a domestic release for reasons known only to the silent gods. Sleeve notes for a new Timi Yuro compilation gratefully point out how Interlude had recently become a UK hit ‘as recorded by some miscreant’. I expect they meant me.

  Some years later a Siouxsie biography hits the shelves of Waterstones, and alarmingly she gives a highly divergent account of our video meeting at 18 Regent’s Park Terrace, an account which naturally bombasts me with gobbledygook and ignites her own leniency. I am very surprised, and then saddened.

  Gill Smith and I drive up to Cambridge to see Echobelly, whom I love. Gill’s banger dates back to the Apostles so the journey takes at least five days. ‘I don’t like Sonya’s voice,’ she says, ‘she sounds like a posh bird trying to sound tough.’

  ‘It would be nice if YOU could occasionally manage to sound like a posh bird instead of Rita Webb,’ I flick back.

  The following week Gill writes in her weekly pop column how she ‘went out with Morrissey and no one recognized him – a crisp packet would have caused more attention’, and for this I scrub Gill’s name off my In Sympathy At the Loss of Your Pet Goat list.

  Laughed off by lawyers and accountants, pounder Joyce is now digging his heels in with his sudden claim for 25 per cent of Smiths earnings, swelling disfavor wherever he goes. I am legally advised to let him ramble on, skipping as he does from law firm to law firm – most of whom abandon his plea after a customary threatening introduction. ‘It is what we fear that happens to us,’ said Oscar Wilde, which is true, but gives me no heart in 1994. Well, why should it?

  I had jumped from a squatty terrace at Chelsea’s Markham Street and had invested in something far better at Regent’s Park Terrace, with the noise of Camden bubbling over the way, and I am illuminated by an accidental introduction to Jake Owen Walters.

  Seated at dinner in a badly lit restaurant in Notting Hill, Jake’s face is one amongst many, and as his food order arrives I stare intently at what appears to be a sloppy dish of dog food on his plate. Jake and I have scarcely spoken to one another, so he can’t possibly know that I have long-since passed the stage of attending any table where dead animals are served up as food. I therefore automatically stand up and walk out of the restaurant. I walk all the way back to Regent’s Park Terrace. Suddenly, you come to a certain situation and you are unable to live with it, and the only protest you can make on behalf of the butchered animal is to depart the scene. Whether this be considered irritating or rude by the gluttonous carnivore is of no interest to me. Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied – they don’t after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else. Once inside the house, the doorbell rings. It is Jake. He obviously understood my sudden exit, and he had been curious enough to follow me home. He steps inside and he stays for two years. Conversation is the bond of companionship (according to the Wildean scripture), and Jake and I neither sought nor needed company other than our own for the whirlwind stretch to come, and for the first time in my life the eternal ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, as, finally, I can get on with someone.

  ‘Why did you mention Battersea in that song?’ is his opening gambit.

  ‘Because it rhymed with Fatty,’ I reply with magnanimous Philip Larkin don’t-trouble-me-now-child eminence. Jake pulls down his lower lip with two fingers and the word BATTERSEA is tattooed into the painfully fragile skin inside the mouth. Suddenly life becomes a world without hours. Jake is stubbornly macho and has lived a colorful twenty-nine years as no stranger to fearlessness. He has no interest in being nice, therefore his leap towards me is as new and uncharted as mine to him. An ex-schoolboy sadist with a flair for complicity, Jake is the perfect buffer, lacking only what I have in abundance – and vice versa. He lived where he had been born, in the only detached house on Battersea High Street, where his sculptor father remained. Non-surrendering, Jake is a profiteer with a certain confidence of wit.

  ‘What are your parents’ names?’ he asks on that first night.

  ‘Barbara and Candy,’ I lie.

  ‘Your father’s name is Barbara?’ he snips, foolishly attempting humor.

  It’s horse-hockey claptrap, and every minute has the high drama of first love, only far more exhilarating, and at last I have someone to answer the telephone.

  As I lie in the bath, Jake serves me tea.

  Life’s sharpest corners are turned, and Jake finally allows someone to sap his vitality. ‘You’ve met your match for the first time,’ his close friend Josie tells him.

  Masculinity is marked out by a million intolerably exhaustive guidelines – defined by a sea of should-nots, must-nots, do-nots – and male friendships are bogged down by a welter of touch-me-not rules. With this it is assumed that the world is saved. Yet Jake and I fell together in deep collusion whereby the thorough and personal could be the only possible way, and we ate up each minute of the day. Socially, we harmonize with the intuitive intimacy that fully communicates across the crowd by a series of secretive blinks and winks and raised eyebrows; a concurrent widening of the eyes and Jake would suddenly be outside with the engine running whilst I delicately take leave. There will be no secrets of flesh or fantasy; he is me and I am he.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman in the British Airways lounge, ‘you’re either very close brothers or lovers.’

  ‘Can’t brothers be lovers?’ I impudently reply – always ready with the pointlessly pert, whether sensible or not.

  ‘Well,’ she now talks very softly, ‘I always envied that confidential friendship thing because ...’ and now her voice wobbles quietly, ‘I just never had it in my life.’

  Indulgently Jake and I test how far each of us can go before ‘being dwelt in’ causes cries of intolerable struggle, but our closeness transcends such visitations. I had bought a black Saab from a Wapping showroom, and this serves for many adventures around England’s south-west when the intolerable becomes absolutely intolerable.

  I am photographed for Creem magazine with my head resting on Jake’s exposed belly.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ asks new manager Arnold Stiefel.

  ‘No?’ I say in a small voice.

  ‘Well, that’s a very intimate shot.’

  ‘Oh?’ I say, baffled.

  ‘A man doesn’t rest his head on another man’s stomach,’ Arnold goes on.

  ‘No?’ I answer, all adrift on the cruel sea.

  Jake
and I are both lying in the afternoon Dublin sun. Exactly where the sun has come from and how it ends up in Dublin is an environmental mystery. Everyone is darting about, trying to stop the day from slipping away, yet we are still and composed and constantly on the edge of bursts of private laughter. I have just been to see eminent Irish psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare in his drab consulting room. ‘Remember, he’s only a man,’ Sinead O’Connor had cautioned me before I had entered his sunless bastille. He is indeed only a man, and not a very interesting one at that. He disapproves of everything I say without a speck of tender perception.