by Morrissey
‘You mentioned Diana Dors in the song It’s too late, and I wondered if you were aware that Diana Dors herself released a song called It’s too late?’ I ask, at full beam.
‘Noooooo,’ came his long sigh, ‘that was so loooooong ago,’ the deep-chested soreness continued.
I fogged the window screen further with: ‘Is it true that Roy Wood had agreed to produce the Dolls’ third album?’
By now, David is pained, yet I wasn’t overly concerned since I thought it unwise of him to expect me to talk about anything other than his Dolls days. I wondered what he had expected me to talk about?
He was soon gone – driven away, possibly feeling like a museum piece.
I would befriend Arthur Kane, who lived just along the way from Sweetzer, and who, like David Johansen, would never once make any reference to my own music. Arthur and I sit one night at Mel’s Diner on Sunset. He is not a sight for small children, looking oddly axe-wielding, yet speaking with the voice of a broken heart.
‘Do you drive?’ asks Arthur.
‘Yes, of course,’ I say.
‘Do you have a car?’ asks Arthur.
‘Yes, of course,’ I say.
‘Will you drive me around to a few job interviews this week?’ he jumps in.
‘No,’ I reply.
Arthur tells me that he has been asked to write the music for an upcoming film called Josie and the Pussycats. It’s the kind of taradiddle you will hear non-stop in Los Angeles. If people only spoke of what they had done as opposed to what they were about to do, it would be the most silent city on the face of the earth.
Frequently I spot Arthur standing on the grass verge in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard, close to the Troubadour spot. I often wonder what he is doing as he watches oncoming traffic until, doodle-brained, the inevitable thumb calls to passing cars.
‘Isn’t that Arthur Kane thumbing a lift?’ asks a friend one day – her mouth dropping open in muddle-headedness.
‘Yes,’ I say, turning up Indie 103.
Arthur would leave long messages on my answer-machine, deftly complaining of loss of earnings and speculating on how he could track down lost income. As a living Doll, Arthur had only ever received $200 per week, yet he would tell me that his Dolls tenure blurred itself out with a non-stop stream of alcohol and what he termed ‘bad behavior’, and I would leave him to make the connection himself. Arthur would never ask me how I was, and he would never make any reference to the fact that I made music. I therefore assumed that he didn’t much care for it, which is not unreasonable, but there was a certain mad-eyed dithering to his countenance that suggested self-imposed brain-damage.
‘You can buy New York Dolls t-shirts at Urban Outfitters for $45,’ he would rage, ‘but why would people do that when they could SLEEP with me for $45?’
I wasn’t cruel enough to explain to him that most people would much rather have the t-shirt.
Brigitte Bardot had respectfully turned down my offer to appear at Meltdown. I had asked her to come onstage each night to introduce ‘a glamorous glut of jazzy talent’, which was possibly not the most tactful way to urge someone out of retirement. Brigitte’s video for her song Bubblegum which also starred Claude Brasseur, remains one of my favorite of many French pastimes. It later struck me that if Sacha Distel and Danny la Rue had appeared at Meltdown it would have been their final appearance as, along with Arthur Kane, they were closer than they realized to that final tap on the shoulder.
A beautiful handwritten letter of thanks from Sacha’s wife is as close to him as I would ever get, until his son Laurent appears backstage in Paris smiling a smile of wonder, examining my face as I speak. Sparks agree to play the songs from their exhilarating Kimono My House album at Meltdown, but I am singing in Italy that night and I miss the light that still guides me. In a flurry Nancy Sinatra, Lypsinka, Alan Bennett, Ennio Marchetto, Ari Up, Gene, Linder Sterling, James Maker and Jane Birkin rush to my aide with their frenzied resources, and something hangs in the air and you want more.
Nothing can fortify you against the Glastonbury mud. It’s an unwinnable struggle against nature’s slop, and the whites of eyes peer back as a black Mercedes bumps me through the crowd. The view outside brings to mind Gdansk trenches of war-torn Poland, where hope would not do. Backstage is an open slum, and I am carried onstage in a humiliating rag doll position lest I slip beneath the sub-soil forever. I immediately address the crowd in the wrong way.
‘Don’t OD without me,’ are my opening words, and somewhere in the crowd a boy ODs. Loosely reputed to be sane, I feel ashamed. Rhapsodical cheers greet the set, and I do my best to lay aside my awkwardness. How do they stand and stand and stand interlaced with so much mud? As I walk offstage my timorous legs give way and I slide backwards into the waiting gooey glop, which is quite naturally caught on split-second camera. It could only be me. Thank you, God.
By July 3rd another festival awaits in Denmark. This time I headline and the crowd are magnificent, with not a plop of Glastonbury gunk to be seen. Drunk on sun, everyone’s soul is fired up, and singing back to me the crowd is love itself, with eyes too blue to be true. Just landing my feet on Danish soil had always brought me peace, and I don’t know what it is about this part of the world. The spritz of cyclists seems visionary, and the hotel breakfast is such that I disguise myself for three separate sittings. A dead mule might make up someone else’s idea of a hearty Full English, but strawberries in muesli is all I have eyes for. And content I am. Denmark is sadly a hellish place if you happen to be a pig, but the brioche and fruits that tower on the table before me have me hastily attaching a feedbag.
Even when the squares of Copenhagen are rained on, the cyclists all remain joy-ride chipper. What, after all, is a bit of rain? Why curl up and die? By July we return to England and to the Move Festival. I can do no more than guess at the shocking irony of the chosen venue which is Old Trafford Cricket Ground in Stretford, where I had died several unspeakable deaths during the 1970s.
The stage in fact overlooked the Inland Revenue cellar where I had worked for a few weeks at 17, three steps lower than an abattoir, and hastening my plans for self-destruction. Yet the cost of such a life had led me to return in triumph, even if it would only be the sort of gift that God would give to someone whom he knew had suffered. On Great Stone Road, 17,000 people charge in to hear me sing. David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain are there, too, the final remnants of the New York Dolls, climbing onstage to tell us all that the oblivion that had claimed Arthur Kane had not yet claimed them – settling accounts being the dominant mood of the Dolls’ entire history. They played a blistering set and made a mass of new friends. Inches from my old house at Kings Road, all those Doll-dreams ago, the Move Festival proved my point, and there I was, like a schoolboy in a tuck shop, unable to do anything unwitnessed.
Local police whisked me out of the ground and off to the safety of the Lowry Hotel, and the deep-set self-contradiction of life is all too much. You see, I walked without ease|On these|The very streets where I was raised ... and now ... a protective police escort! I’d laugh if I knew how. The Lowry is the sharpest of Manchester’s hotels, many of which I stood outside for hours awaiting a squinted glimpse of Marc Bolan or David Bowie. And now it’s my turn. The bar is cleared as my private party is ushered in to take over. A security guard stands outside the door of my suite all through the night (and then people say you’ve gone slightly egotistical).
December 18th pulls me into Earls Court in London – sold out at over 17,000 – and so much for devious, truculent and unreliable. John Weeks, may you turn in your urn. The concert leaps concurrently with an impressive poster and billboard campaign for You Are the Quarry, which has already become my biggest-selling album worldwide. The Earls Court night becomes a live album, but I hemorrhage rage when I hear a final shop-bought copy and discover that all of my between-song yatter has been cut out. ‘It was for your own go
od,’ says a sanctimonious Sanctuary voice with all the gentle understanding of a village vicar snipping roses. My stack is blown. Censored by one’s own record label!
The tailspin continues as the LP version of the same album features a world record number of printing errors, with ‘The world is full of crashing bores’ printed as ‘The world is full of crashing boars’. Cain cannot be raised any higher, and every silver lining has a cloud. There are so many stupid errors on the artwork that it appears to fall to obvious sabotage since no human could possibly be quite so blasé. The errors of the artwork for You Are the Quarry were also hard to live with: lyrics muddled about, words invented, the gate-fold absent of a group shot thus leaving an enormous and silly space of yellow nothingness. Yet nothing could equal the shoddy clanger of Your Arsenal, which had ‘Track 1 taken from the forthcoming album Your Arsenal’ printed on the label! The dabbling duffers who proof-read such errors should be hung in public squares. The censorious moral guardians of EMI Australia had refused (!) to allow my first solo album to be called Viva Hate, and had decided instead upon Education in Reverse. As a result, civilization enjoyed a new birth having been spared the blackness of Hades.
It was enough to have made van Gogh chop off both ears.
Life blurs, like newspaper print held too close to the eye. Jesse Tobias, our Mexican panther-like style-baron, is the slick and sleek key to our new presentation. The marriage is perfect. Departed guitarist Alain had curdled somewhat prior to You Are the Quarry when a legal letter arrived demanding that Alain’s face appear on the cover artwork of the new – and every future – Morrissey album. Well, no. Life doesn’t quite work like that, especially not in the land of logic. His lawyers also demanded that Alain be given the right to publish his own book detailing his life with Morrissey. It wasn’t for me to bestow or forbid such rights, but the request certainly made me nervous. I didn’t quite relish the thought of Alain with a notepad watching me as I slept.
By April 1st we return to Göteborg, where we have sold 6,000 tickets at the Scandinavium. It is also Jesse’s birthday, and we all gather backstage to fumble through the usual blundering presentation of makeshift gifts. It is a moment when everyone is always stuck for words, for it requires truth, and who can tackle such a thing? How can we ever tell others how we feel about them, unless we are dying? Certainly, people are as equally incapable of face-to-face praise. There is a large birthday cake for Jesse but he won’t sample it because he doesn’t eat either eggs or cream.
The following night we play the Hovet in Stockholm. The 7,500 attendees are the usual mix of teenage jailbait and superior Smiths scholars – they who are always further back in the arena where their taskmaster duties of taking notes are untroubled by the schizoid scramble at the front of the stage. By the 7th we are in Malmö at the Baltiska Hallen, and the 3,500 within are even younger than before, appearing to me, now, as hip kids of early teens. What is going on? The half-pints and whiz kids open their mouths wider than necessary to sing First of the gang to die, a song which, now, is a call to invade and raid, and the crowd sways like crashing waves shouting at one another.
Tuesday April 11th is the day of yet another appearance at the fiercely royal l’Olympia in Paris. Leaving the hotel for the soundcheck I catch the glare of the very famous Eric Cantona frozen for an age-long few seconds as I emerge from the lift. In the mid-90s Cantona had been asked during an interview the very lazy ‘So, what have you been up to lately?’ question, and he had replied, ‘Listening to Morrissey.’ With my usual tact I had been quoted in Time Out magazine during more or less the same period, saying, ‘I’m very fond of Eric Cantona as long as he doesn’t say anything.’ On this day in Paris, Cantona has clearly measured both quotes, and although I offer him a rarely used smile, he doesn’t want it and he turns away coldly, and I am nixed like a fatty at the church steps. Eric takes his place in the hotel restaurant for the catch of the day, which is evidently not me.
Jean Gabin is everywhere on the streets of Paris. Like all other foreigners I walk around gasping and gawping, and then I feel useless for not having been born here. It is always mid-morning in Paris, and the sun always does its best.
On the drive through Yorkshire I wonder what goes on in all the houses that I pass. The house is a world in itself. Imagining how others live leaves me lost in great questions. Who rattles around these Halifax houses, or these friendly rooms in Leeds full of books and CDs.
The Morrissey gangs outside the pubs that face the venues do not appear, to me at least, to be in battle with life. They take it as it is and enjoy it. At the Victoria Hall in Halifax I make an unfunny joke about Victoria Wood Hall, halfway towards an unnecessary smile. At the turn of the 1980s Victoria Wood had entered the television realm singing Northerners, looking like someone with no advantages, hurt transformed into useful fantasies. This was her first series for Granada Television, and it presented life as seen from behind a tea-tray – full of Alan Bennett inscrutability, it is cabbage-soup humor of genius, but you can sense fat-person pain behind each scream of a joke. Wood sings the words ‘Fog, smog|sitting on the bog|cobbles in the morning mist|Park Drive|dead at 45|from a back-street abortionist’ and whilst it ought not to pay to have great fantasies about television comedians, I cannot ever forget these lines or how they were delivered because of the relief of hearing self-analysis born out of despair. Victoria Wood is now very much the deserved mighty dome of establishment, but in 1981, with her very first weekly TV series, she moved as if running out of time – the flattened heart with no more cards to play. Her sketches were easy to read, and they all told of not a snowball in hell’s chance, with the dimmest view held by Wood for her own Manchester self – as if derision were surely all that she had coming. Born in the Prestwich area of Manchester, she did not betray herself with self-pity, but each written line revealed a lifetime of having been passed over or refused. Consequently, a Genet-type genius bubbles to the surface, and the girl who sang ‘Pretend to be northern|just smile and act dense|pretend to be northern|it doesn’t have to make sense’ changed British comedy for both men and women whilst accidentally also saving herself. As with Alan Bennett’s students, people who studied Victoria Wood became funnier people in themselves. With the first airing of her mythic As Seen on TV the mountain finally came to Mohamed, and rightly so.
Thursday May 11th at Blackburn and I am heckled. I can’t quite make out the complaint, but I have now found that people will do this if they think you might answer them. The heckler is impossible to overlook, but the words jumble themselves. ‘Ignore him!’ shouts someone else from the crowd. I had just announced how prison sentences of twelve years had been bestowed on animal protectionists relating to the famous Huntington Farm case, and I spluttered out how the murder of a child would only land you with six years in prison. Just ice.
The following night at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall I search for clefts in the rocks where I might hide so that none may track me. In other words, I am dogged with flu. It is a mournful experience to walk onstage knowing that much of your vocal range has gone, but much emphasis is placed on the power of the crowd and the sudden medicinal purification of being out there where sore throats are forgotten as hidden strengths are called on. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just cannot.
‘Oh, you’ll be alright once you get out there – the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd ...’ say those who remain safely backstage. Often local promoters will send their doctors to examine you to gauge whether or not you are bluffing (and why on earth you’d want to bluff such a pointless prank is beyond me), and the doctor will always give you a clean bill of health so that you have no easy route to cancel the night and claim on insurance. This has happened to me many times, and I have faced an audience having no choice but to prove that my voice has, in fact, shattered, at which I am usually asked, ‘Well, why did you go on?’ Legally, no choice. Ancient boos from long ago at Dundee’s Caird Hall and Aberdeen’s Capitol Th
eater when it all went wrong – these memories still sting many years on, because all you want to give is your very best even when you feel your very worst.
Two nights after Liverpool, I am crawling back to health at the London Palladium.
I think of Kirsty and daylight leaves the room and I sink to my lowest.
Istanbul hums from all of the scenes that you might expect. There are notably very few females on the street, all of which empty as evening prayer calls in the loud Holy Joes (men only) whose murmured prayers can be heard across the city’s rooftops. The preachers preach and the sinners sin sincerely. Pelicans gather by the bay. At the city’s oldest hammam we cleanse and purge, Brillo-padded to vanilla squeakiness, swabbed down on ancient tiles where the men of Istanbul launder themselves slowly and twice-over lightly, buffed in the buff. Twelve thousand gather for the Morrissey concert, and the promoter smiles to me. ‘You are very big here. I just hear Roy’s keen on the radio.’
My smile crashes. Roy’s keen? A bubble-headed choice.
The young of Istanbul chant the words back at me with clerical address. I had no idea. They urge me on, their arms outstretched in entreating petition. Why didn’t anybody tell me? I like it here, can I stay? I am at my happiest, and I have the smarts as each song begins and screams of recognition run aground at the touch of each opening chord. How soon could I return?
Eighty-five thousand people stand before me at Roskilde on Friday June 30th. The crowd sing so loudly that I struggle to hear my own voice above theirs. Bright and happy faces appear brighter and happier as the sun falls and Irish blood, English heart is thundered word-for-word across what seems like twenty miles of bobbing heads. As always, I am detached, swamped in love, wondering how I could possibly repay it. Once again, all is well in Denmark:
I’ve been dreaming of a time when