Autobiography

by Morrissey

  Snow-blind motorists meet traffic police who are also guiding everyone to the Morrissey concert, and now I know how the Pope must feel in his little fancy shopping-mobile. It is warming to be a part of Göteborg life, and my heart swells to think of teenagers fastidiously checking their appearance in bedroom mirrors in preparation for tonight and whatever it may bring for them. Touching, too, are the vast car parks, some full, some almost full, their owners already inside the venue waiting for me, in each car a refreshers cassette of You Are the Quarry or Hatful of Hollow lodged in the receiver. In Sweden I appear to be known everywhere, in tones of tender gestures. In Göteborg I indulge myself with the child-like pleasure of taking photographs. I quite possibly will never look at them. With each Swedish concert my love for the country deepens. The crowds are young and they shriek like airplanes streaking down. Their sensuality is strong, and there is a subtle uniqueness in our relationship, because it leans not on the gullibility of the pop audience, but on its intelligence. I am surprised that my life has turned out like this. Nothing but promise erupts from everywhere in Sweden, and the life-giving enthusiasm of the audience feeds me. From the stage I see faces I shall never forget, in a wobblyscope hand-held array of quite beautiful eyes and mouths, clicking along with camera-shutter speed. Life is only now. I begin to worry that my humility can be seen as a part of an act, but then, to edify my natural feelings is to then become an act. What do you do? There must be truth in all of it otherwise you are no different than a door-to-door salesman. To never feel guilt when you look into the eyes of your audience. I will border on silliness – anything at all to avoid self-indulgence replacing the old hunger, for that is the route they all go, and can’t help but go. Why is the crowd at Lisebergshallen so young? Why are they looking at me, when all I ever read about myself is one of intolerable egocentricity and dramatized depression? Each city responds with the same rhythm, and Scandinavian success seems automatic in that there is no struggle. Is this the ‘accidental’ life? Is this the first time when all I need to do is accept? Over in Helsinki the snow is so heavy that the audience is draped in overcoats and scarves and hats even whilst inside the venue (for surely no cloakroom could accept thousands and thousands of horse blankets?). Of course, this is the famous Ice Halle, where rubber sheeting covers the rink as, above, everything vibrates to the transmutation of pop nights. Three thousand five hundred heart-shaped faces beam back at me, withholding nothing in their excitement.

  But my body is changing once again, and I now look avuncular, and it can’t be helped, and I can’t measure the love they transmit as being to the sexual or to the paternal. Either way, it cannot matter, but it is a point nonetheless. See the crushed rows of Helsinki yupsters and nearly-shavers; sonny boy teenies and bubble-gum girl rockers. How do they find their way to me? The young fry and the twixt-teens shout my words up to the ceiling knowing that my own time at their age was spent behind a small door kept locked. Pride and pity hit the blender at the same moment, and the band sound ruthlessly loud, kicking each second forward and faster and forward and faster.

  I never wanted to kill, I am not naturally evil

  Such things I do, are just to make myself more attractive to you ... have I failed?

  and this audience roar a ‘Nooooooooooooooo!’ creating their own part in a song written long ago, in silence, in tangled solitude, with two broken legs. The loving nature of Finland matches Sweden. Each move deeper into the country answers hesitant prayers for love and acceptance. Finland bore the unusual distinction of a Smiths appearance many years ago, and my mind wrestles with the memory of that festival billing and of audience disinterest and of harshly blowing rain. I recall standing at the lip of the stage as if dragged from a river, the microphone slipping out of my wet hand, and no one around to caution how rain and electricity are deadly components to the overheated flesh. We played on and on in the whirring rain as the audience disappeared, yet we clung on as if trying to prove something, yet proving only absolute stupidity and a childish inability to make sensible decisions. All those tears ago. This thought returns to me on the night of the Ice Halle. Post-show, I stand in a spirited hot barrack-style shower for all of thirty minutes, stone flags beneath my feet, snow piled up against fortress windows. Outside, the twitter-twitter of high voices leaving the venue – always in the corner of my ear, the young blood excitement of satisfaction and of things that must be said. A voice sings in the snow. Naked, I walk across the hard floor and my mind stalls and I lie down on Helsinki hardwood, and I am mine.

  The following day I cross the market square with snow wrapped around my knees. The cheap lights of the market stalls contrast amusingly with the rampaging snowfall, but nobody minds, everyone is happy, and the snow hides the dirt. A cluttered record shop piles up Eastern Bloc rock – artificial pop-poop, fish music, or Death Metal. In the midst of the shuffled jumble the only name I recognize is mine – a privileged placing for a hankering catalogue.

  ‘I luff you,’ says a girl with a rosebud mouth, and away she sludges.

  For December 10th we have taken over Battersea Power Station in London. It is a beloved monument clinging to life and surrounded by bits of forgotten land that no one seems to know what to do with. There are bent lamp-posts on cobbled streets where this happy breed surely lived out their lowly lives. It’s all about to fall, yet doesn’t quite. The Power Station is the pride of south London and fills the heart with love, yet nobody knows more about it than that. All 6,000 tickets have sold, and the night is full of trenches tension and the call to arms. Again, the cheer that greets me as I walk onstage is so loud that my hearing distorts and I momentarily lose balance. The roar is male, the crowd a manful facet, and every lyric is chanted loudly as if by sloshed Tibetan monks. The audience mosh – which is very funny to watch from the apparent safety of the stage. It is a helter-skelter free-for-all of dangerous dives (where to?) and blindsided charges. Bodies vault an impossibly high barrier and lunge at the edge of the stage – howling as they land into the holy mess of the front row. Some heads are squashed. Some aren’t. The security struggles in the mix, but all I see is one great caress. Were Smiths concerts ever as wild? Sometimes. Must it all be intellectualized? Yes.

  I will later be down on my knees beside a little white table. The audience understand even if the critics refuse to, and much rather this way than the other way around. As I am driven away from Battersea Power Station the main road is a long chain of Moz-posse walking home, happy (it seems) with emotional involvement. It could be a football crowd if not for the mass of t-shirts bearing the Morrissey mug. As I watch and study, I am mirrored by a handsome legion of the tough and the flash, and with this vision all of my efforts succeed.

  It was all for this. It stares me in the face. I need not be told because I can see it for myself. This magnificent stream of humanity represents the power of accomplishment, and fifteen minutes later I am dropped at the hotel. Alone in my room, I am bewildered, yet more purified than mournful.

  Soon, the pretty town of Eugene, Oregon, as the Morrissey trucks roll in like Andy Warhol’s Pork, out to whip the insane and forever mark the young. Lusty lives queue to get into the McDonald Theater on this August evening of brilliant light, with just a flicker of subtle oppression pansying around us. Stepping off the bus and heading in through the stage door – watch, and be careful, for they can tell everything about you from your eyes. Like many a Bible-belter before me I was sent here to Eugene – but not to raise the Good Book, but to finally get under the skin with the power of song. It is the song of the unresolved heart, and is so disconnected with sorrow that the sorrow turns in on itself and becomes triumph. Save the last dance for me. Backstage, I drum my fingers through the lyrics, like a stage actor memorizing Macbeth. I am simply waiting my turn.

  This old theater smells of new paint, and my dressing room has that quaint American touch of an old stove and leaden pipes. Who on earth sat constipated on this antiquated lavatory in 1923 or 1931, m
aking up their mind as they sat? And then rose to join the world in emotional decline once again. The grand theaters of American Music Hall are now simply famous graveyards for that generation of trophy dancers and trombone jugglers, with Sophie Tucker and Julian Eltinge solidly under the sod, their place taken by such as I. This drops me into the dubious bracket of entertainer, and I will readily agree with anyone who argues against this observation. Yet no politician receives the love that greets me in Oregon, no court judge could ever possibly know what it is like, and no gee-whiz journalist should dare to understand it. Nowhere are there more natural smiles than those of a welcoming audience. In response, my heart sings and breaks.

  Drawing into Fresno on September 10th, darker evenings close in. Outside the Rainbow Ballroom, Fresno is Hollywood and Vine condensed into a single image of gangs, gangs, gangs everywhere. Gangs watching other gangs, smartly prepared in fastidious attire – bare arms of black and red tattoos on hard-bitten storytellers; big boys with small girls. The homies walk and talk it, their chicks click and clink with accessories, and no language heard but Spanish slang. The streets flood with Morrissey. I do not know what to do with all of this happiness. Viva Hate emblems; art-hound T’s, tank tops and bags graffitied in Morrissey-code. Most of all, every arm, every neck, every hand mobbered with a Morrissey tattoo. Fresno! Fresno! Fresno! Here is the light! And never go out! Shaven-headed buddies and lazy dykes, and all around that taste of fantastic danger. Peeping from side streets, the police hide – watching this crowd to see if they can possibly make any money from it by way of tickets and taggings – every arrest a potential notch and a sexual thrill for the cop crotch. Could I disembark at Fresno and join the good-looking stud-muffins? No. I am as cut off from the crowd as I was in 1973, stressed in Stretford.

  Inside the Rainbow Ballroom the walls drip with sweat and hi! hey! yo! sup? how’s by you? Fresno is Morrissey Central and the good buddies are out in their mainman force, each posse and tribe bonded by their busting fresh flyboy look. Yet chuchala-muchala is all, as amigo and little brother hamma squeeze together. Why do you come here? I face my race. I wonder how they found me. All Mexican mellow, yet ready to put the chill on. Here in Fresno I find it – with wall-to-wall Chicanos and Chicanas as my syndicate. I walk onstage and the roar that greets me nearly kills me – would Italian godfathers find better respect? For once I have my family. The songs halt at times as fights break out in the room, and smoke rises amongst the rings. Hairpins scream and suddenly it’s a risky business, but the more the red flag waves the more the steam box sweats. Snazzy and spiffy boys point to me, sticky hands squeeze any part of me, and my bluff is called. Dare I take one on? The fire-eater within me leaps out, and I belong nowhere except over the line. Sex is advertised yet withheld – go on, make my day. It is gritty prison-cell sex, and I am shaking with courage. Outside, much later, no one is going home. Fresno streets are blocked by the spunky and the nervy Moz-posse, turned out in black and white or expertly battered denim. There are no Caucasian faces – which is a remarkable answer to those dap snappy London music editors, each boxed up in Bow, who would have me hanged as racist for daring to sing about racism.

  The new Morrissey audience is not white – not here, at least – and they are the frenzied flipside of the Smiths’ pale woolgatherers. These new V-men will go to the wall, or the mat, heavy sluggers with fat lips. Do you get the audience that you deserve? I sincerely hope so. Did you see the slugfest out front? Did you see the scrappers in the foyer? Yes, and love them I do, with noble heart. They were alight, too, at El Paso, where we had played on September 2nd and 3rd. Every runaway and throwaway crammed inside as if waiting for a call to war. El Paso’s heavy artillery of players and beefed-up drifters amongst the Juarez boychicks and the butch bitch diesel dykes. The rug-munchers rule, and I’d lay down my life for the lost boys of El Paso – the sad shootists and pack-a-rods.

  Meanwhile, back in England, they still write Heaven Knows He’s Miserable Now and call me an ex-Smith (for who would know me otherwise?). My new Latino hearts are lost on the know-alls, those self-appointed fusspots and the pernickety chickenshits. I smile at the thought of a Smiths reunion, for I’ve got everything now.

  At Santa Barbara Bowl on Tuesday 5th I am told that Peter Noone is watching from side-stage. Peter is from Manchester and attended Stretford Road School near my iron pile slammer, St Wilfrid’s. Peter, of course, sang for Herman’s Hermits, and I had covered their East west, which had probably piqued his curiosity. On a television show a few weeks later, he proudly name-checks me and I blush for a fortnight.

  ‘You must call your next album Steven,’ says Manchester luvvie Tony Wilson, and I stare back at him – wondering if he had ever actually had a good idea in his life.

  Wilson repeatedly turns up at Morrissey concerts and then automatically lambasts me in print or on radio almost as if he enjoys his hatreds more than he enjoys his joys. ‘Let’s face it,’ he says on Australian radio, ‘Morrissey really IS a horrible person.’ Weeks later I am behind the wheel of my sky-blue Jag in Los Angeles, stalled at traffic lights. I spot whom I think to be Jerry Springer walking across the street in front of me (Miller Drive, should you care), but of course it is Urmston’s answer to nothing, and Wilson bows his head towards me and offers a smile – as three-faced as ever he was.

  Stephen Street appears on British television: ‘... which is why Morrissey is big in America’ – and then he catches himself floundering with a compliment – ‘well, in certain pockets of America.’

  God forbid that Stephen would grant me the full map, especially if certain pockets might exist that are resistant! Oh, Stephen, waddle yourself to Morrissey nights in Fresno or El Paso or Chicago and you’d quake yourself spitless. People will not let you move on if it means that your progress shoves them further into the past.

  As the tour bus hums and clips its way through the Bakersfield night, I remembered how Alain would apply hair-gel in preparation for bed. I had never come across such an over-developed sense of vanity – funny though it was.

  ‘Why do people always say Rome wasn’t built in a day?’ Alain once asked me.

  ‘It’s just a silly expression because, in fact, Rome WAS actually built in just one day,’ I lied, straight-faced and honest-toned.

  ‘Reeeeeally?’ Alain gasped – the child alive in his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ I confirm, and I wobbled down to my end of the bus.

  Hush, now.

  Merck has arranged for Ringleader of the Tormentors to be recorded in Rome, the city of vaults. An ancient church in a Parioli square just north of the city center will be our squat for several months. Outside, in Piazza Euclide the stylish youth of Rome stand about stylishly doing nothing – their scooters parked irresponsibly as the hunting teens tear into alcohol and pastries, and freedom is 80 per cent of what life is. No doleful sights here, no slum mums defined by their murky children. The young people of Rome know precisely what delights await them because of their choking beauty, and this because of their global position of sun and wind combined to shade their skin a smooth and healthy hew. It is that tone, and the pink lips and slender frames and the heritage of natural style that is the Italian soul. It is all a question of beat, and the kids of Rome do not look elsewhere because what they feel is acted out, and never do they watch television since they are too busy living out their own storylines. And this they are free to do since street crime in Rome is rare, and police presence is never a threat. It is the only city I have ever traveled to where the police appear to want to help, and where they have a certain confidence in their public charges. In Rome, people appear not to hate the police at all, whereas in Los Angeles you must prepare yourself for trouble from any emerging police car. In Rome, people will even smile at police officers as they walk past, whereas attempt to smile at an LAPD officer and you would be pinned to the ground in the city where everyone is guilty until proven guilty.

  It is a glorious
relief to be away from all of that now, here in Rome, where the harshest sound is laughter, and from which American authority could learn so much – if ever it would allow itself to be taught anything. Italians are blunt, but this is because they are relaxed, whereas in Los Angeles a sickbed politeness permeates all conversation – rendering it not conversation at all. The very proximity of people happily walking so close to one another in Rome is in itself a revelation to most Americans, who live their lives at yardage distance from one another lest a slight brush instigate court action. Yet America demands worldwide respect for being the country that got it right – on all matters, even though fear remains the central key in everything that it does.

  The reclusive cardinal of Italian music is Ennio Morricone. Although historical and royal, he has agreed to conduct his orchestra on the track Dear God, please help me. This is unusual, since the maestro of maestros has refused U2 and David Bowie, but somehow says yes to porky me. The grandeur engulfs us, and my heart is pushed to the point of collapse as I watch Ennio in studio action. I find myself wishing for tears that don’t come. Oddly, I introduce Ennio to Tony Visconti, to whom Ennio gives one very quick up-and-down disdainful look, says nothing, and turns away. Tony is not troubled by this, whereas I would slit my own throat at the shock of such a rebuff.

  Rome has been my city for several years, with all of its soft sorrows of browns and reds. I live for almost one year at the Hotel de Russie, guided by the olive-dark face of Gelato, whom I had met at Dublin Airport. Gelato is classically Italian in appearance, peeled off the Pasolini screen with studied sloppiness, the Florentine face knowing very well what people see in him to like. He runs a wine shop and teaches youth soccer, and he is younger than me – as all people now are. His motorbike takes us around Rome – too fast, of course, too precarious, of course – and the battered graffiti walls are a red mass of haunting melancholy. After Los Angeles, the chattering enthusiasm of Rome is simply incredible; millions of teens at ease in dreams in the eternal nocturnal city. Temples and tombs rub against Prada, columns and arches look down on Gucci, and everywhere there are shadowy marks of the dead because every single step of the way is a grave.