by Morrissey
By January 1995, Tim is in his grave, and James O’Brien directs the Boxers video at York Hall in Bethnal Green. A boy actor from an insurance commercial on television is tracked down to oppose professional Cornelius Carr in the ring. It doesn’t occur to anyone that the second boxer ought to be me, and when I mention this to James he looks unusually blank.
In September of 1995 we film Dagenham Dave in a council house in Dagenham, with Jenny Jay (who had starred in an excellent television play called Two of Us) and Mark Savage (who had been famous in his role as Gripper Stebson in the telly teen drama Grange Hill). James also directed the Sunny video in east London’s Victoria Park in November of the same year. In the midst of such filming, with each video generally brushed aside as twiddling footlings, the grand drapes had been pulled back and the stage has been set for a comic-opera production of The Night of the Long Knives, and something resembling a giant rat is crawling up the stage curtain.
Off in the wings, Michael Joyce had gone through his Smiths years in a smoky dream. Now, many years after the split, he had been shaken into consciousness. His finances frittered away, Joyce decided to turn to those who had served him generously in the past and he decided that they should continue to provide him with cash – now, in the uncertain present – and off he went, a flea in search of a dog. Excused from all adult obligations in his Smiths past, Joyce and his legal practitioners wondered what they could scavenge from all that had gone. With devious cunning, Joyce instructs an array of legal firms (most of whom disappear after a few months of feigned interest) to hound me at addresses that I had long since left, hoping to establish evasion on my part and lawful stealth on his. It worked. With other people’s money (as always), Joyce ran his case on Legal Aid despite sporadic months of employment. This, too, worked to great effect. Certainly, in the years running up to what would become ‘the Smiths trial’ – years during which Joyce ran out of the legal time allotted to file a plea – everyone who knew of Joyce’s meddling was confident of his eventual failure given the wealth of evidence stacked against him. This reasonable assumption was made on the logical but apparently wrong understanding that the trial would force Joyce to prove his claim to be an equal partner. Joyce wanted his moment of confused respectability, even if the road to such fame was a sorry sequence of events. If he had been in possession of any documentation indicating that his royalty split had ever been 25 per cent, then there would never have been any need for a court case. But he had nothing and sadly needed nothing.
If you undo someone, you make history. It is the type of move that will impress only the simple mind, but it is history nonetheless. Here in 1996, Joyce wanted to do what he had never previously done: he wanted to finally look at his life and be responsible for it. With sweet-faced confusion the middle-aged boy said his appropriate Yesses and eventually hit upon a legal firm who would no doubt welcome the publicity, and thus the piggies went to market with their star well-drilled in I-do-not-think-or-remember formulations.
I am lumbered with the additional weight of bad representation. They, too, would like the financial flush of a major court case. Lights, camera, action. In preparation, Joyce makes so many glaring mistakes that his Witness Statement is withdrawn and re-chiseled four times prior to the hearing – not because he hasn’t had enough time since 1987 to get his facts straight, but because he doesn’t know what his facts are. A plea for publishing royalties to be split and shared with Johnny Marr is thought an unwise move, and is dropped from the final Joyce Witness Statement, as is a plea for a financial share of whatever I had been paid for designing Smiths sleeves. This latter is rethought and dropped when it is discovered that I had never been paid for Smiths artwork, yet one sees the mechanics of Joyce’s counsellors trying to squeeze money from anywhere they can. Here was Joyce in his early Witness Statements placing his songwriting contribution equal to Marr’s, and his contribution to Smiths Art unquestionably equal to that of Morrissey. What mind drove such a challenge, when Joyce had not once contributed to Smiths compositions, and had not once expressed the smallest interest in Smiths Art? Such is the certainty of his early facts that he quakes and then annuls his statements without any pressure from the opposition, who are nonetheless aware that he is also conducting a similar case for royalties against another group with whom he has worked briefly. He is running in his own circle. The plea for co-designer of Smiths Art had obviously been removed once Joyce had been advised that no payments had ever existed. Had there been, no doubt the plea would have remained. Joyce maintained his plea for 25 per cent of Smiths merchandising advances, even though any such advances in their entirety served to set up each tour as it came along, and absolutely never fell into the hands of Morrissey and Marr. Joyce maintained and forced this plea even though there would be no evidence that either Morrissey or Marr had benefited on a personal level from such advances, yet Joyce was now happy for both parties to pay him 25 per cent of large sums of money never seen nor received by the very two people who had given him fame. Joyce retained his demand for a 25 per cent cut of all Smiths live earnings on the unproven and insane assumption that 100 per cent of such earnings somehow and magically swept themselves into the personal bank accounts of Morrissey and Marr, and although there were no records indicating that all live fees had ever reached Morrissey and Marr, and although the vast expense of launching each tour would not be considered, Joyce nonetheless wanted money from Morrissey and Marr right now and without question. In essence, Joyce demanded 25 per cent of absolutely everything (excluding publishing) that had ever been created in the Smiths’ name, assuming – without proof – that all sums were handed to Morrissey and Marr as clear profit.
Joyce was making these demands now, in 1996, but had never made such demands during the Smiths’ existence. Never in his wildest dreams could Joyce have believed that fate would combine to present him with an antiquated deputy designed to force success on the plaintiff, a judge who would unleash a torrent of invectives against me and never be required to explain why. John Weeks was the name of the Circuit Judge wheeled in from Bristol to preside over the Smiths case. Appointed to circuit judge under Margaret Thatcher, John Weeks lived in the richly ornate Brympton d’Evercy mansion house in Yeovil, a Grade 1 listed building hidden behind 33 acres of parkland. With its coats of arms and tracery and its Henry VIII wing, Brympton was considered to be England’s most beautiful showpiece manor house. A home for the highest echelons of British aristocracy, its rooms also had connections with royal blood, having been built in 1220. Lavish television dramas such as Middlemarch and Mansfield Park had been filmed at the home of John Weeks. From this, John Weeks presents his elderly, small and shriveled frame as the ideal, unsmiling Lord of the Hunt, with an immutable understanding of the world of the Smiths. It seemed to me a less qualified judge could scarcely have existed. This was an ‘entertainment case’, but John Weeks appeared to operate with the sense that an enormous criminal trial was about to take place, and considering his own background and connections, I wondered how much he or any judge would know of the Morrissey in the dock, not only anti-royal and anti-Thatcher, but also an animal protectionist – all of which could provide grounds for hanging even before a single word of this case is uttered in camera. How on earth did Joyce manage to get his case to the High Court? Why has this case been accepted? Like an old, weathered tree-trunk, John Weeks made his entrance as a famous star – wig trimmed by Edith Head. He is a bent little man with big eyes in a small face, an unfortunate vision that even his personal wealth cannot save. All he lacks is a gun over his shoulder. His first task is to watch the assembled gathering during the customary judicial bow. Whereas the head of Joyce touches his toes, my own head remains motionless, and for this, I would imagine, deputy Weeks marks my card. The prosecutor of defenseless people opens his miserable mouth, and gives a wave to his jesters to begin. So this is what hell looks like.
Two days prior to the trial, my solicitor sends a fax to me explaining that she cannot a
ttend court due to illness, but she promises the robust surety of her junior as an adequate stand-in. I have never met the junior, and I would never again see my solicitor who, as far as I am able to tell, has simply run off. Furthermore, the barrister chosen to guard my human rights also steps down, and his replacement is appointed just a few hours before the first hearing. My head spins at the sudden shambles – now of unimaginable proportions – and I walk into court with a small set of complete strangers. There, though, is Johnny, who walks directly up to me with a wink.
‘Don’t worry, Moz, we’re gonna win this. He hasn’t got a leg to stand on.’ Minutes later Johnny is leaning in to a seated Joyce, and they are both in unified grin.
Although Joyce, Rourke and Marr are all seated in the first two rows, I am alloted a seat way at the back, yet central to the eyeline of Weeks – who will watch my reaction to everything that is said. You are of course directed to sit in specific seating, and I wonder who determines such positioning and with what aim. Like a stillborn play, the dismal proceedings begin. For everyone, I am the center of interest. As the opening pleas are made, it feels like deputy Weeks is fixed entirely upon my face to read my reactions to each statement, but he hardly seems to cast an eye towards Marr, Rourke or Joyce. The muddy black pools of legal precision are insufferably overdone, and even at these opening stages I feel as though the outcome has been strategized in backrooms of closed curtains where my epoch has been cut short. The protagonists of punishment determine that the only function of the unfolding court drama is to force each peg into an unsuitable hole, and make the cold-blooded destruction of one unfortunate party seem fair – and how dare you feel contemptuous of this court, and how dare you raise your voice to the level of the cross-examining barrister, and why exactly would you feel moral indignation towards a regime that cannot succeed in balance, but only in the punishment of one party against the other (never both, and never neither). My heart shrivels up at the black despair of it all.
First into the witness box, Joyce cannot at any stage find the right words with which to explain his position. A blubbering mass of blubbering mess, Joyce cannot even recall the date of his own marriage, as he mispronounces simple words. With feet glued and voice dying, Joyce finds that his mouth doesn’t work properly, and the half-asleep replies chime out a sonata of false notes which leaves him groping in the dark for the light switch. With the drooping sag of bloodlust, John Weeks listens to the humiliated plaintiff. Joyce is nothing and knows nothing, and, small and lost as he is, I feel sorrow for him as he struggles hopelessly by repeating over and over again – in a voice getting smaller by the second – ‘I just assumed I’d get 25 per cent,’ a comment that would close any case if this were a case of fair judicial outline. The voice of Joyce disappears into a pained whisper, as victims must always whine. In order to get into the High Court, one might assume, a plaintiff should have some documentation to wave about. Joyce had nothing. Yet, there he was, explaining to everyone that he was here in court because ‘a friend’ (who is not herself present at the High Court) had told him he should be getting 25 per cent. An individual with no forensic powers would need only take a quick glance at Joyce in order to see an aggressor posing as a victim. His tatty ‘I just assumed’ gabble, after several hours, had told us nothing at all – except that he had ‘just assumed’. Luckily for Joyce, almost anything that he says during these hearings proves to be immaterial. He is not the quarry. He is not even qualified enough to be a nonentity. What he is best at is confusion. You can spin as many theories as you like, but the ardent zest to finally topple and silence an outspoken pop artist took its place firmly and unashamedly as this trial began.
Like a well-fed Roman emperor, Andy Rourke took to the witness stand complaining of financial starvation. Too funny to be taken seriously, his evidence blew about in a thousand directions, his throat sounding tighter and tighter, each sentence abandoned halfway through as though he realized the silliness of his own words. Heavy-hearted, Rourke himself could not explain how things either were or are. As he tried to defend a 25 per cent cut for Joyce there were moments in his replies when his brain collapsed, and this shut-down swept the room with an intense and terrible hopelessness, and I imagined that we were all suddenly wondering: what sort of lives are we now leading? Whose deeds bring us here?
‘It is not about money,’ Joyce had said – but far too quickly, and with a seemingly over-rehearsed child-like openness. What, then, was it all about? Cookery? Science?
Johnny, too, was a bad witness, crumbling neatly from the top down. Although he and I were ostensibly on trial together as business partners, we were not actually business partners, and we had not even met once over recent years to discuss the Joyce claim, or the protocol of trial. I got the impression that Johnny’s verbal disclosures jumped about willy-nilly and concluded with his exhausted inclination to accept anything at all that was said against me – in what I assumed was the hope that he might be separated from the one target who did not beg for sympathy. Financially, if Morrissey shouldered the blame, then Marr could be seen as a victim, too, and could run off and play. In the tiredness of stale and over-long cross-examinations, Johnny finally caves in and appears suddenly agreeable to any discredit lobbed my way, just as long as he can be let out of that damned witness box. He will, by now, apparently say almost anything at all in order to stay free, and seems willing to push anyone into the water in order to save himself. Collapsed, he attempts to answer a thousand questions about my behavior, and notably fewer questions about his own behavior. Divide and rule. If we can squeeze in between Morrissey and Marr then any cracks in their relationship will beam and glare like incorrectly described flying objects. It is Johnny, not I, who allows this to happen, and over he trots to the other side, having emptied his bucket. The walls hummed with silence, and yesterday is long ago.
At the close of each day, we are told that we must not make contact with one another overnight (lest, no doubt, we resolve the issues between ourselves and rob the judiciary of its prey). John Weeks, like everyone else, appears to want his day on stage, and somehow the conclusion must be his alone to make, and most certainly not tied up in a friendly fashion by Marr and Joyce and Morrissey in a Wapping pub whilst the squeezers and benders of an oh-so-civil courtroom sleep their cognac sleep.
Johnny telephones me at my squatty room in the nearby Tower Thistle Hotel where I sit alone, wondering how Hand in glove led to this. Oddly, the hotel is inches away from where the very first Smiths album was recorded. Things were different now. Johnny asks me if I would meet his legal team tomorrow evening, and I agree, for it was difficult at this stage to see what the court itself was actually doing for me. Something I say to Johnny makes him laugh loudly, and I hear the Johnny that was once an air of adventure, and because this is now such an unusual recollection I therefore realize how we have moved too far away from one another to ever again have corresponding interests, yet justice had already fouled by listing Morrissey and Marr as a one-and-the-same unit without any conflicting interests, which was blatantly incorrect to anyone who would want to notice such a thing. If anything at all, since Morrissey and Marr were not a working partnership there was no obvious reason why they ought to have stood trial as one, and there were a thousand reasons why they ought to have been tried separately, which was a critical point that was raised by no one. Read one way, the Joyce case should never have reached civil proceedings. Read another way, any case against Morrissey or against Marr should have been declined by the courts since in the eyes of everyone the partnership of the two had ceased eight years earlier, yet the legal process would grind along as if Morrissey and Marr remained an active and unified business, and a judgment would be made on that very basis, which in itself seemed unfair when one considered the truth of the situation. Johnny promised to call me back with a time and place where I would – for the first time ever – sit down with his legal team for an off-the-legal-record meeting, but the call did not come, and in
the courtroom the next day, neither Johnny nor his set of vultures will look my way. Someone must have changed Johnny’s mind, and any notion of camaraderie disappeared, and so much for walking in a pack.
Daily newspaper reports of the ongoing case are plentiful, the lyric ‘Beware! I bear more grudges than lonely high court judges’ appears as a headline, and as John Weeks quite possibly noticed, the reports feature my name and no one else’s in their captions; a photograph of my face, but never of Johnny’s. In a case already seeped in eternity, Wobbly Weeks hasn’t the right to hang anyone, but he will get someone as close to the rope as allowable.
As I take to the witness stand I feel a communal intake of breath, as if now is the absolute point of the entire circus. Joyce’s legal team suddenly sits upright, having spent the last few days dozing like overfed apes. I am now close enough to Weeks to smell the moth-balls. I am asked, unfairly in my view, to give my home address – with no apparent understanding (or, perhaps, with every understanding) of how endangered this places me. It is the first humiliating step in reducing the spirit of the witness.
Absurdly, I am asked to swear on the Holy Bible, an action that had not stabilized the evidence of either Joyce or Rourke, but which is trotted out as yet another court procedure aimed to humble and shrink the witness, and to falsely imply that none but the honorable shall succeed in these rooms. Acting for Joyce, the cross-examining barrister is one Nigel Davis, with a face I could never be cruel enough to describe. His task (for which he is paid money) is to impugn the evidence of the witness, therefore whatever I say to Davis by way of reply must be ridiculed by Davis in front of this gathered gaggle. Nigel Davis must only possess patience above wisdom in order to weaken his witness.