Autobiography

by Morrissey

  The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories

  And spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell

  And denounce this ‘royal’ line who still salute him

  Oh, whirlpool ’round my heart, this is what they call creative power – when thousands upon thousands sing your words back to you in order to let you know. Two hours later we drive through the night to France. At the festival, Bob Dylan stands side-stage as my best endeavors rip out across an impossibly youthful crowd. Dylan watches in his crumpled, cramped way. As I leave the Belfort Festival I am asked if I would like my photograph taken with Bob. I say ‘Yes, of course.’ Minutes later comes a new announcement: ‘I’m sorry, Bob said he doesn’t want to do it’ and my pecker rises since I didn’t make the request in the first place. A similar scenario would happen a few years later with Paul McCartney, when a knock comes to my dressing room and someone drenched in backstage stickers asks if I would be in a photograph with Paul, to which I say yes, only to be later told that ‘Paul doesn’t want to do it,’ and I said, ‘Well, neither did I until I was invited.’

  By July we are in Hungary, where I am surprised that the venue is half-empty. I am told that the tickets are £85 sterling, which is far too high for undernourished Budapest. ‘Even I wouldn’t pay that,’ I say.

  The following day I am walking by the hotel swimming pool when I trip up and fall sideways into the water like someone directed by Billy Wilder. I resurface and naturally there are three hundred people watching wordlessly with stern Hungarian glares. I smile at no one in particular as I struggle to clamber on land.

  On July 6th Zagreb is cloaked in huge color posters of my huge face busy licking an ice cream as taken on the back streets of Rome. The posters are everywhere, and every wish fulfilled. The hotel staff line up to greet me as a visiting dignitary, and at last I smell the august solemnity of VIP grandeur. Management talks to me as if they have always known me – gravity and courtliness mixed with decorum. I am led to the presidential suite, and from my balcony overlooking the square I see a bag lady surrounded by her treasured tat, squatting beneath the shrubbery with legs outstretched on the park lawn, having endured a lifetime of dying. I gather all of the hotel bathroom luxuries and I empty the mini bar and I drop them all at her feet in yet another bag. She peeps into the bag and smiles a floodtide of smiles.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ says a band member, ‘she might be a recovering alcoholic and you’ve just plonked six bottles of whiskey at her feet.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I say, defiantly wrong.

  Croatia briefly becomes my new Italy. A razzle-dazzle wedding takes place in the hotel courtyard and I watch it all from a safe distance – like Richard Dreyfus at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wonder why they even bother with the ceremony. It seems like such a great deal of trouble for everyone, and merely because two people have found themselves sexually compatible – but with no suspicion that their feelings might change with time. Hidden behind a huge plant, I cannot imagine giving any more to life than I have already given. I can see through the human heart, and I know that life’s biggest prize is to have the day before you as yours alone to do with as you wish.

  By Friday we are in Serbia, sold out at 50,000, and my tired face shoots out from interplanetary screens as soft rains do nothing to halt audience fervor. Two days later I am calm in my beloved Finland, where my entire body sighs and a day of sun makes problems matter less. The Dolls are also on this bill at Turku, and I wonder if they will shuffle by to say hello. But of course they don’t.

  Turku gives me a whole life again, and my Scandinavian bonds bind tighter.

  By Tuesday we are at the Montreux Festival in Switzerland, where I can’t relax because my hair is far too long. The show is our best ever in the one country that had always said ‘No’. In its first week of sales, Vauxhall and I had sold twenty-six copies in Switzerland, and probably none in its second week. Switzerland had forever been the uncrackable nut, with no way in, which seemed unsporting considering our great success in all the countries that bordered it. However, there are many comrades at the Montreux Festival, but possibly all tourists. Round and round and back to Sweden, where two nights in Karlstad have sold out quickly. The band are edgy and my voice sounds tired, but glances and gestures from the crowd remind you that your time and your life could not be better spent. In Sweden, the front row gets younger and younger, whereas I unfairly get older and older.

  In Oslo two days later I sit by myself in a city center park. It is mid-day and Oslo is a-jitter with all of the usual Thursday mid-day jitters. There is never enough time. It is always too soon. I reflect on how I have reached the unthinkable stage of forgetting which musicians have played on what. At the Oslo show there are 20,000 in attendance, and I begin by singing a few A-ha lines, which was probably greatly irritating to everyone. Dropping into icy Reykjavik for the first time, I gaze out of my hotel at a noiseless city where everything has the appearance of a vacant slab. I give a brave laugh because even the cladding and panel plywood layers are oddly attractive, even though I can’t lay my eyes on a single soul. I have sold 5,500 tickets – which is a great surprise, so I try to take possession of my usual exhausted self and forge gusto, and yes, the night is an Icelandic wow. There I am, too, in the record shops in the center of town, surrounded by Iceland’s very own vocal dreamers – so far from Manchester.

  Austria gives off a seductive smell. I am backstage at the Salzburg festival, beginning to lose track of where I’ve been. It is August 17th, yet another Thursday in a calendar seemingly made up entirely of Thursdays. The 50,000 throng are singing back at me their sonorous birdsong, all impossibly small and young and sinewy, and smartly attired in their rock-star chic of chains and mock-vintage denim, and I wonder exactly when it was that everyone around me suddenly became younger than me instead of older. I know that you are there somewhere. Forget me completely.

  Wafting across a sun-drenched crowd I once again swallow everyone up in the sheer fright of contemplation, managing to avoid the monotonously clichéd rock festival yatter. I am an older person. It is fitting. I am ready, now, to be swallowed up by Mexico, a country that has occupied my dreams for too long. The Guadalajara VEG Arena is stuffed with 6,000 yelpers, and I swim in a web of giver-receiver mania. Mania! The close of the set jumps to a chaos so calamitous and insane that the building appears to be falling apart, and I am pulled and pushed and pulled and pushed. Sapped, I run off, and the stage is a street-scene of rubble and naked life. Two days later at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes I have sold 12,000 tickets. ‘You have sold twice as many as Oasis,’ the local promoter tells me, yet it is Oasis who are all over Mexican television, whereas I am – as ever – nowhere to be seen. Outside the venue t-shirts bearing Elvis Presley’s face are sold with Morrissey printed across, or down the side, or somewhere. An army of villagers sit outside the venue making anything at all on which they can sew or print the name Morrissey, so that these wooden dolls and kitchen towels might sell as souvenirs. There are children’s dolls, candles, bags of toxic candies – all bearing my name. It is yet another Thursday, and once the intro music has blasted its way, the audience advance a cavalry charge towards and upon the stage, everyone calling out and standing on one another’s heads as tears mount upon tears amid fights and punches. I have no idea where everyone is going. It’s as if flames were blocking the exit doors. The air hangs like Mexico ’70, streamers and unbearable heat, then smoke rising and liberating howls and calls of approval as each song is instantly recognized. This is my physical outlet. I must be explaining something well because here, now, 12,000 people understand. Fascinatingly, they refuse to leave the venue once the show has ended, and swarms of armed police crash in to order everyone home.

  At a television studio I stand before the crowd like a political reformer, and then I catch sight of myself in an enormous camera lens and I look fat. But if I hadn’t noticed fatne
ss I would have noticed something far worse. The critical eye never fails to find a flaw. What I am saying to people is: This is why I adapt poorly to the outside world, and by the way, let me kiss you.

  At the beloved Chicago Aragon Ballroom, compressed kilos once passed between 1930s racketeers; George Raft, fresh from the honey wagon, each hand in each side pocket, legs astride, rattleboned and full of vinegar. Nothing’s changed since then. The Ballroom reeks of brawl and that which Chicagorillas would once call ‘nigger heaven’ – northsiders’ monkey business with southsiders, dirty grandeur ornately down in the mouth. The Aragon lights up the cattle town, and song and dance calls to every never-wuz, and the downwardly mobile phffffft here in The Loop. Of course, I have always loved the Aragon Ballroom, with its gangster slop of menaced glop. When I first played here many lifetimes ago, I sneaked a peek at the queue – confrontationally all over the street, disrupting traffic, shouting back, unctuous and effusive, and there stood an army of male blond quiffs, tattooed arms and Hatful of Hollow t-shirts. Nothing, now, could hurt me. By contrast, the life of a politician looks hopeless.

  Saturday November 25th in Athens, Greece, brings on the same power, yet the audience are a different set of dream bait longing to be eaten with a spoon; unsmiling Adonis after unsmiling Adonis pile into the hall, spruced up and sweet on the songs. Two days later in Thessaloniki the suave crowd seem to be almost exclusively male. The head-crushing roar dies away and I return to my cell. The next day a young woman is standing in the hotel lobby looking like Arletty gone terribly wrong, nerves leaving only a chopped chatter of words. She talks to me as if I am a priest. She touches my hand with abnormal gentleness, as if stroking alabaster. I leave it alone. I couldn’t bear it if my heart were made off with.

  By December the roll is all too much, and although I do not like arena shows I am here at Newcastle Arena – walking on as if newly hatched and freshly plucked, wondering where I will find the ‘more’ that I must give. I find it in the response.

  There it is again, the following night at Nottingham Arena as 8,500 pairs of eyes burn into my greyness, the dying swan all over again – ah, this list of inner displacements. By Sunday I fall into clean sheets after an incomprehensibly insane show in Luxembourg. I shall never use the same between-song patter twice. A week later I am back in Berlin, lifted way too high to ever come back, my life spared once again by the love of an arena crowd, and further saved at the Color Line Arena in Hamburg on the following night, and ‘I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have’ (Charles Dickens).

  December 22nd and 23rd are Manchester nights, here at G-Mex, where I am greeted as the foot soldier that saved the Empire. Each second is wrapped in eternity, my loud comrades happy to the last sip. I go my way yet leave something behind, for these are the good old days.

  The NME generously issues a CD called Songs to Save Your Life, which they graciously allow me to compile with some of my favorite recordings by other artists. As the CD goes into production the NME adds four tracks by newer groups who are NME favorites – mainly because all of the songs I have chosen date back to the Roaring Twenties. These last four would never be my choice, but the NME argues (not unreasonably) that by adding the newer bands the CD has modern currency against my Bronze Age tastes.

  A postcard arrives at Sweetzer from Ron Mael. He thanks me for being ‘such an inspiration’, and such praise from Caesar makes me collapse in a heap. A lengthy hand-written letter arrives from Julian who sings with the band the Strokes. He is angry and apologetic at a recent NME interview in which he is quoted as calling me ‘a faggot’. Julian writes that no such comment was ever made, and nor would it ever be made, and that the writer had simply faked an entire paragraph.

  You cannot hope

  To bribe or twist,

  Thank god! the

  British journalist.

  But, seeing what

  The man will do

  Unbribed, there’s

  No occasion to.

  Humbert Wolfe (1886–1940)

  A very small, flightless bird is now living in the back yard. I feed it constantly, and at night I place it on a blanket and fence it in using large boxes so that it has freedom to move about but can’t be pounced on by predators. Whenever I handle the bird I use gardening gloves because I have noticed its parents watching from the roof and they will not accept the bird if it has had contact with human flesh. For days and days both parents call down to the bird – encouraging it to fly up and join them. But it can’t. Twice they swoop down to feed their baby, causing it to skip and flutter in drunken excitement at their contact, but as they move away they are still urging the bird to follow, and it freezes in fright. This scenario continues for two weeks, and I won’t go to bed unless I’ve made sure that the fledgling is secure. One morning it is gone, and I am distraught, pulling apart every bush and outdoor plant in search, when suddenly I look up to the roof and there is the bird finally positioned between both parents. Not everything ends horrifically.

  Last night at the State Theater in New Brunswick I sang to save my life, and I am overfed with varnished love from an audience of all ages and shapes and colors. New Jersey throws back a desperate generosity – returned by the singer. The singer sings to the dreamer, and the dreamer confirms unfolding pleasure. The following night we are at Lowell Memorial Hall, where 2,862 tickets were grabbed with witch-trial madness. Lowell is there – somewhere, under great mounds of snow, and privileged suburbia twinkles its decorative lights and moneyed upscale tush from wooden antiquarian homes of welcoming porches alive with signs of megabuck kids and chipped pets. Surely Gordon MacRae is ready to charge out from a handsome doorway all beaver-coated and beau-hunk, part lover boy part pretty boy with a song on his manly lips – bored on the fourth of July, and nothing to do but ‘be’ in order to win it all. I spy the delights of wealthy American safety, so drummed into the popular mind since the troubled waters of the corny cornball 1940s. The lie of American film entranced the world and made everyone expect a handsome ransom from life, on which the economic arrangements of the western world seemed to settle themselves for good – which is all very well if you are William Reynolds in All That Heaven Allows, but not quite so if you are carrying a large pot on your head in Somalia. Here, Lowell life imitates art. And very well! Lowell is, in fact, a Has Anybody Seen My Gal? university town of ballgames and sleepovers and star-spangled tripe. The old glory oozes and the downright neighborly are as righteously swell as home-cooking. I am, of course, seduced. Would they let me stay? Could I begin a life without pain? Could I cast aside this dark lantern? Would I be allowed into the buddy club? Could I become so sweet that I, too, dripped diabetes? The Memorial Hall is utterly and sensibly organized, and in my cozy dressing room I mentally race through all of tonight’s lyrics – an unexpected echo in these American legion rooms. I step onto the stage and the heave forwards from the crowd is like a mudslide as hockey tonsils roar back at me. It is an avalanche of heavy petting, and what discreet Lowellians might refer to as ‘night baseball’. Jesus, I am loved. Having never found love from one, I instead find it from thousands – at the same time, in the same room. The inquisitives want a closer look, and the well-meaning want to know what this strange man is about, whereas the outstretched front legion are flirting a face-rape pass at me. The touch of their hands to mine ignites electricity, and I wonder how on earth I had ever become anyone’s idea of a hot number. In the midst of it all I am expected to behave – usually with sympathetic understanding and moral balance – yet I can’t for the life of me think why I should. Morrissey? Wasn’t that the sneeringly caustic way by which those crude St Mary’s schoolteachers had called to me – each bark full of shitheel slander?

  Yes, it was.

  Torn down, put down and shot down, it survives the skinned-alive ethics of the working-class secondary modern and becomes a word loved instead. Oh Manchester, so much you can’t answer for.

  Ton
ight at Lowell a young woman is present backstage. She is flanked by police officers, is British, and had been working locally as a Nanny when a baby in her charge had died. She is an ongoing news topic throughout the world as she awaits trial. She is nonetheless escorted here tonight to hear November spawned a monster on this November night as speculators assess whether or not she is, or isn’t, a monster. The world still loves a good hanging. By Monday 24th we wind over to rough Buffalo where, again, all 2,699 tickets have been snapped up. It is not a high figure for most artists, but to me it sounds extraordinary, since I am flatly denied big-league entry onto page-one America. Never mind. You see, I do not sing about chicks or screws or eight-track studettes, so I am left adrift, too complicated to be taken on. I walk onto the stage at Kleinhans Music Hall and I witlessly shout ‘Hello, Paris!’ (since Buffalo and Paris could not be more sharply dissimilar, you see), and the next day a review in the local newspaper says, ‘What a shame he forgot which city he was in.’ I bang my head on cold concrete with frustration. Can one attempt to be witty in Buffalo? Is it allowed?

  As we leave, a girl pulls at me. ‘I can’t believe you’re here ... I can’t believe you came to Buffalo,’ and the ice wind blows both of our spectacles off.

  In the daytime the wide city streets are north-star miserable with the homeless constantly on the march (where to? where from? what for?), and the rain falls harder on the dark-skinned folk.

  December 1st steers us into Sweden, which always feels like a reward. We are finally released from the American highway with its unending stream of identikit fast-diarrhea diners with their deathly menus offering only murder or sugar – not food at all, and it isn’t half-baked to accuse such ‘fast food’ outlets as being responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans. Now, here in Sweden, food resembles food – and even looks edible, although I would never give in to herring. Fish are not food. Driving along Göteborg’s motorways we persistently see lighted signs directing traffic to ‘Morrissey concert, next left’ or ‘Morrissey concert, this way’, as if I am finally a landmarked grave. It is chilling.