Autobiography

by Morrissey

  I hold my head in my hands, shrouded in darkness and miles from the nearest asylum. Two hours later we finally reach our destination – which had originally been four minutes away. All heads hang. All questions unanswered. Who was the driver? No one knows. Where were we going? No one knows.

  Barely alive, we make it to Waukegan for October 17th. The Genesee Theater is lit up like a giant roller-coaster, and someone remarks on a slayer serial-killer who had made Waukegan famous, and I am surprised there is only one. By Wednesday we are in Royal Oak at the Music Theater, and once again the crowd is hyper-charged. How exactly I came to represent a goulash of hardball punk force is a mystery, but Royal Oak plays out a gutsy night of bone-crushing peppiness. The following night in Merrillville at the Star Plaza is a Saturday atmosphere gathering the biggest frogs in the pond. The husky and hefty give whatever it takes, and again, as I pull away from the venue, Merrillville streets rain down Morrissey t-shirts and America IS the world, after all.

  In January, six nights at the Roundhouse in London are attempted, but stuck in the stuckness of insufferable winter, my voice has gone as everyone around me coughs and splutters with a hot flash of the chills. In the midst of it all, I am expected to remain immune. Four songs in and I am dead meat. Done for, I walk off, and a harum-scarum crowd fast burn into a conniption fit. Who can calm them down? From the audience, up jump dapper television faces Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and David Walliams, each so certain that slick Wood Lane telly-patter would extinguish the madly nettled crowd. It did not work. With gears grinding, the audience turns on Jonathan and Russell like hounds at a foxhunt, and each wondered how or if they’d get offstage alive. Russell’s tap-dancing chatter stiffed with gasbag finesse, whilst Jonathan’s gassy gobbledygook boomeranged back in his face. He would later tell me that he had never faced such a hard-shelled audience – to which, of course, my chest swells with pride. The intervention of Jonathan, Russell and David touched me greatly and told me that I had friends. They saw a bad situation and tried to make it better. I am indebted. But it didn’t work.

  Tellingly, this kill-crazy flare-up that gathered Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and David Walliams (three of the biggest names in British entertainment) onto a London stage in order to calm an audience ruckus, gathers no media attention whatsoever, and the Morrissey embargo rolls on. Had it been any other pop artist, the newspapers would blast their blast with excitable dribble. But what is the point of running a Morrissey story if neither HEAVEN KNOWS HE’S MISERABLE NOW or BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN have any relevance as headlines? There could never be such a story.

  June flames with an appearance at Dublin’s Museum of Art. When a Dublin audience is in the right mood, anti-ballistic missiles can’t stop them.

  By July 4th we headline at Hyde Park on a Friday of 25,000 strong. The actor Lior Ashkenazi flies over from Israel just to see the concert. Standing next to him backstage, it is difficult for me to shine, for some people are too in-spot to be matched, and Lior is such a person. Chrissie Hynde is there, achingly funny in great flux. I need only catch sight of her in the distance and the great knot of my heart is untied. Irony is Chrissie’s pattern, and though the word is rarely understood in its proper context, Chrissie manages to take people in so that she might ambush them with the truth. It is a play of the mind, or jeu d’esprit. She would pose nude on a ladder if it meant assisting the cause of animal rights – a hero in the modern sense, but not in the forgotten origin of the word (which, oddly, denotes neither virtue nor honor). Chrissie has been thrown in jails the world over for attempting to rescue animals from torture labs, but her unshakable conviction garnishes no humanitarian awards, and she stands her ground unappreciated with the grammarians of modern rock.

  Arriving in Madrid I am cornered by Siouxsie, who is tonight’s opener. She wants to know why she has been dropped from next week’s bill in Tel Aviv. Being Siouxsie, she is ready to wrestle me to the ground and jab my eyes out for use as vestibule knickknacks. She had been listed as third on the bill to myself and the New York Dolls, but had been removed at the last minute because ‘she won’t stay in that hotel.’ What hotel, I have no idea, but I am told that she has pulled out and that the local promoter has filled her slot with someone unlikely to convulse. Siouxsie is on the warpath (well, what else), catsuit all a-wrinkle, having been booted off. I, too, am enraged since the third on the bill is now someone I’ve never heard of and who is, in the event, a roadhouse atrocity, yet who announces to the world that they were lovingly hand-picked ‘by Morrissey’ – I being forever the funmaking funster. Oh, dear God. Obviously someone paid cash to get this thumbs-down moose onto the Tel Aviv bill, and the story about Siouxsie refusing to come along unless her catsuit had its own en-suite was absolute tosh. The Tel Aviv day is further exacerbated when the old Dolls fail to turn up for their soundcheck. In fact, no one knows where they are, or if they’ll even arrive. With minutes to go, they stumble in, ready to flash groove Israel.

  There isn’t a word of apology or explanation to the production crew, and once the Dolls are finished they dribble their way out of the venue as if this were 1973’s Club 82. The Dolls were often said to have stonewalled their own career with a runaround attitude, and I had never believed such trash until this day in Tel Aviv. We all do our best to piece together a professionally buffed program, but the Dolls fell in and fell out like careless Great Kills itinerants.

  My hotel balcony overlooks a beach, where most of the young crowd are naked but for the thinnest strips of soft flannel. They would like everyone to see – and to enjoy – whatever it is they have, and they would like to see you seeing them. Further along the beach a woman sitting with her three children is shot dead by a passing gang of young funsters, and the incident is reported with casual horror on television, but is not the lead news story. Towards the end of the day I sit fully clothed at the rooftop pool and I am submerged in an oh so familiar sadness.

  Bahrain has been rebuilt in the center of Brussels, by people who moved in but didn’t care too much for what they saw. The change from my first trip to Brussels some twenty-eight years ago is ungraspable. Our Saturday night show has 4,000 Belgians jumping sideways with apparent pleasure, and I am embarrassed by my own happiness. No dreamy reality could ever equal my first ever concert in São Paulo in Brazil, when the crowd lifted a girl over their heads towards me, and as she came closer I could see that she held a white stick, and closer still I could see that she was blind, and as the crowd placed her gently on the stage she handed me a note which read, ‘I cannot see you, but I love you.’

  I am always in Berlin, and here, yet again, at the Tempodrom. I circle estate agents looking for a loft overlooking life, but I’m always distracted by onward travel. By Monday we are sitting in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin, where winsome Damien Dempsey is singing his Margaret Barry songs loudly, dispensing relief and joy to all except the duty manager – who tells him to shut up. He of sweet heart continues, and we inch our chairs closer into a tight circle. The duty manager’s shoulders sag, but Damien captivates and enchants with all the love of one blessed and unselfish. I see myself crying at his funeral, missing him already. The road has no end and suddenly I stand bristling with romance (or, as good as I can muster) at the Pomona Fox in California, as the iloveYouiloveYouiloveYou audience rushes the stage ... Smiths re-formation?What for?

  There is a loud boom in the hall as everyone stamps their feet, and firecrackered air fires up. The following night at San Diego’s Symphony Hall is all too suspiciously perfect; love exchanged, do or die, and I pray words of thanks. Such nights are in place of whatever is absent, and whatever is absent would not mean as much. Our car tears through red traffic lights for fear of being clambered upon by those who must. Let me live before I die. By Wednesday we are on the George Lopez television show in Burbank.

  ‘You know Morrissey’s here when you can’t get into your own dressing room,’ he announces on air (and this is not because I am insi
de pulling at the door handle). I feel fat and ugly, but I pipe my way through Don’t make fun of Daddy’s voice, of the lost canon, an A-side hit in a drawn-out dream. The audience stand up, step up, scream forwards and start to mount the stage as blocked cameras withdraw like Daleks. Very young kissin’ cousins touch the tips of my fingers, and they look at the touch, and shirttail kin move in, Echo Park homefolks, all Silver Lake blood. I am off-key, but I do my best. The band bites each line a knockout blow, and a loud audience roar concludes great television.

  My Moz Angeles love affair is back on, Roman Spring it may be, your place or mine, but the following night at the Gibson Amphitheater is a black cloud of unworkable noise, and the word ‘sabotage’ jumps from conversation to conversation, as if someone may have been down in the basement disconnecting wires. In the city of Handsoff, no one is safe. ‘You don’t cross Handsoff,’ says one too fearful to cross a road. Oh, Handsoff! An empire built on spurious triumph! Whose knaves and cohorts spend their entire lives under tables and know as much about the sound of music as I know about black kids on the needle at the mouth of the Amazon.

  Steel takes us up to Ventura for a dark December night’s conclusion to a great touring year. The Ventura streets sway away with Morrissey tribes crossing at the lights (this once was me, but now I’m a), loading up at liquor stores – and what it must be to be 17 and leading the right life in the right skin. Always behind glass, I peer out, mental photography of the Morrissey subterraneans seeping out along Ventura streets; a laughing Pete Duel in a Ringleader t-shirt, a Kristeen Young lookunlike waiting for her best friend whom she cannot stand; a James Brolin from Marcus Welby full of healthy aggression in a Smiths is dead t-shirt, and all the lazy dykes commandeering the corner in a universe that denies their existence. The hall drips blood, full hearts sing, the humble guest kneels, the last night of the fair, and I thank our beloved crew, and one day goodbye will be farewell.

  Peter Wyngarde writes:

  It’s becoming the Mad Hatters Tea Party for me ... just phoned the number Samantha gave me [he means Sarah Yeoman, my PA] which I took down wrongly and got a complete stranger’s voice! As I’d scribbled the number down during cooking I’d obviously .... Apologies, but as Vivien [Leigh] says in GWTW ‘ca ira mieux demain’. Wondering if the mental dept would consider seeing me as soon as possible, before it’s too late ....

  Peter is still living in Kensington, in the flat he shared for many years with Alan Bates. It’s an Edwardian warren of clerical ferocity – a tornado of books and papers and swelling pyramids of typescripts, half-finished, half-begun. His voice is still of great clarity and sound, his eyes unchanged since that period known as his prime. But he is no longer on stage or television. Film generally tells us that people of Peter’s age don’t actually exist, or, if they do, they are hopelessly infirm and in the way of the main storyline. He sits before me as one who knew his duty and did it, beyond all praise, alive in the cinema of the mind. He takes the bus down Kensington High Street and jumps off at the Albert Hall, where I have loaded my latest machine-gun. After the concert he comes backstage, all a-buzz, genuinely excited. It is a relief to receive praise from someone who has a true perspective on all things, and who is not easily fooled – if ever fooled at all. Someone, also, who has downplayed accessibility. Out in the hallway people nervously approach him to ask questions.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he cuts across them, ‘if I don’t answer you, but I’m hard of hearing,’ which isn’t true, but is the perfect way of telling people to get knotted, especially as the whispers of ‘It’s Jason King’ ripple loudly. Peter Wyngarde is what the world now calls ‘the real thing’ which, let’s assume, means serious artist. He adapts to different listeners, and the magnified popularity of his most famous television role was never his goal. His favorite actor is Jean Gabin, and Peter’s genius is such that all of his actions work on two levels. Jason King complexly became one of the most well-known names on worldwide television, but the meanness that England always shows to its home-grown talent was the reason why Peter gave up and left for Vienna, where he opened his own acting school. Invariably in search of ghosts, he came back, and he found Kensington still very much as it always had been, with Edwardes Square maintaining its true self in the new world of noise, noise, noise – computer noise, cell phones, pings of ringtones, alarm apathy, and the new mad craze for constant house renovation. The city moves on without you, and nostalgia becomes a problem, and the number of days spent in solitude and stillness suddenly increases tenfold and you realize that day after day you are actually beginning to barricade yourself in. You have lived long enough to finally be able to say that you have survived, but at the foot of the stairs to be climbed to bed, no one meets you. And if your heart should stop? It is only today in which we live – it is not as if we can live today and tomorrow as one. Finally aware of ourselves as forever being in opposition, the solution to all predicaments is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books. I only know of life in the non-human world, which never clashes with genial kindness. Fame can demand upon you a sudden wish to get along unseen, after those riddled years of wanting nothing at all but to be heard. It is important not to make matters of business the final word, and although eccentricity is now permissible – since your art has paid its dues in the swamps of self-torment and the scars of failures, even your mis-steps can suddenly seem honorable. You are, in any case, disqualified from what is known as ‘normal’ society (that is the society in which none qualify as being ‘normal’ since ‘normal’ doesn’t actually exist) because you don’t fit into anyone’s drab philosophy. You have cast yourself in the starring role of an unfilmed despised-while-living-acclaimed-when-dead standard melodrama, and you are only inclined to discuss the rumors about yourself that you most like to have circulated. This is considered egotistical to anyone of famous platform, yet not to window cleaners and anonymous citizens to whom it also applies in precisely the same measure.

  On the issue of unqualified madness, I had been called upon to visit the writer/diverter Julie Burchill at her mansion flat near Russell Square. The area had shrunk back from its glory years as an imaginative space once warmed by queues of prostitutes (and the word ‘prostitute’ does not automatically mean ‘female’). As bombs burst overhead during World War 2, Russell Square registered its value with explosive bursts of men and women who wanted to buy or sell sex – and immediately. The spirit under fire is no cause to forget the flesh. Now, in the age of meaninglessness, the conversational tone of Julie Burchill soaks through these walls in an awakened state. She is both master and servant to all of her life’s pleasures, yet she only evolves by confrontation. I knew of her, naturally, when I, too, was crying at the foot of the stairs, and her early writings for the New Musical Express (which is not at all the same thing as the NME) were always a performance worth catching even if her chosen subject held no interest to you. Her personality indicated unleashed enslavement, and she was always unhappy about something – which suited me very well. Like all bullies, she had never thought much of herself, and instead of changing the inner self she decided to complain to anyone who would sit still long enough to listen. It worked. Now, twenty-five years on, I sit before her, and I, now, am today’s crab sandwich. Julie Burchill is, of course, not loveable, and has pitifully late-middle-aged legs, but her aim is to show the way for the rest of us, and this she does – biddy disease or no biddy disease. No Kit-kat cuddles ever take place in this flat that has a touch of Beryl Reid as loose-covers fall off armchairs, and a kitchen that bomb-disposal experts would refuse to enter. You see, she is a busy modern writer, so you can’t expect less than eight chips around the rim of the British Rail mug that she hands to you as great slops of muddy black tea professionally spill into your groin. There is, quite naturally, no chance of a Rich Tea biscuit, so don’t bother asking. When her questions fire, her head goes right back – as if she is squinting to read something that she once wrote on the ceiling, and we are asked to have confiden
ce as we await a jolt of literary lightning. Her naked self probably kills off marine plankton in the North Sea. God stopped her body from being right. Unchained from the cellar, Burchill will make sure that you remember her. She leaves the room mid-flow, and I look around at the Loch Ness mess that could be thought to be the home of someone who couldn’t walk properly. In fact, it is. Sweeping back in like a bundle of smells, Burchill has thought of another question, so here it is. She dresses like a spiritual advisor, one ready to accuse ‘thou liest!’ should a need for truth be called upon.

  It’s the unfortunate period where the whale-bearing hips throw the woman out of shape and the only sensible diet involves barbed wire interlaced prosaically from top lip to lower lip. I imagine she crawls out onto the scaffold outside the living room window in order to sleep at night. She speaks as if her role on earth is to be God’s mouth, and since she would now never be seen in a music venue, all of that life now relies on the lap of memory.

  I ask her why she wrote ‘Patti Doesn’t Wash Here Any More’, a dreadful executioner’s piece on Patti Smith in 1979 when, after all, Patti Smith alone had saved Burchill from becoming under-manager’s assistant at World of Leather in the Bristol of 1975. The old goat squirms in her seat (and on it, too), as if we aren’t allowed to ask, as if one isn’t allowed to know, as if writing is one thing but flesh-to-flesh debate is quite another, and never the strain shall meet. I tell her that Patti Smith read the piece backstage somewhere just before going on to sing, and that she ached in every bone of her body as a result of Burchill’s revenge. For that’s what it is – I want what you’ve got revenge, with a hyena’s code of conduct. It is Burchill who is punished though, feeling certain that she will soon be trapped by whomever she loves. Better to kill off Patti the Confessor with premature haste and with all the inky fingers of Margery Allingham than wait for Patti to ask ‘Julie who?’