Article by Robert Chalmers
Observer, December, 1992

 

The Smiths were arguably the last great British pop group. Since they split up in 1987, Morrissey, the group's lugubrious and apparently 'asexual' singer has had an uneven solo career. Until now. On the eve of a British tour, ROBERT CHALMERS meets pop's oddest bod.





Last month in Houston, Texas, 4,000 people came to see a man who says he feels dreadfully alone. In the late afternoon, they gathered outside the stadium: listless youths, many of them staring languidly into space and clutching gladioli (an activity for which there is little tradition in Texas). Kimberly, a local college girl, was settling in for a three-hour wait at the stage door. 'Where else should I be?' she said. 'I got time.' Backstage, the schedule turned out to be somewhat less relaxed. Steve, Morrissey's tour manager, explained that the Mancunian vocalist was now unable to give an interview of the duration we had agreed. Not to worry, though. 'With Morrissey,' he explained, 'less time is actually better. This way, he will be able to give you his full attention. Otherwise, you know, he might get bored.'

Preparation for the encounter had been much as it usually is for a Morrissey interview: the submission of numerous examples of my writing for his approval; a fortnight of uncertainty as to when, where and above all if he would consent to a meeting; and, finally, a summons to leave for Texas at less than a day's notice. After ten-and-a-half hours sitting on a British Airways DC-10 whose in-flight entertainment climaxed with a documentary on the logging communities of Sarawak, narrated by Joanna Lumley, the tour manager's news was, as I indicated, something of a disappointment.

'What's the matter with you?' Steve inquired, fixing me with a look of gaunt menace worthy of one of the living dead from Truly Madly Deeply. 'What's your attitude?'

Inside Morrissey's dressing room, something about the décor — perhaps it was the black drapes, the flickering candlelight, and the long, low table draped with a cloth — made it hard to know whether to sit down or to kneel in prayer. 'Hello,' Morrissey said. 'You have those Fleet Street eyes.' (His childhood motto, 'Talk fast and keep smiling,' appears to have undergone some revision.) 'Let's have your first captivating question.'

Morrissey has little enthusiasm for the interview process, and has perfected defensive strategies which include derision, silence, and a way of treating straightforward enquiries as though they were highly devious, which can be unnerving. Looking through his old interviews, I told him, I had noticed the way many interrogators had been driven to asking more and more bizarre questions, such as: 'Do you blame any one or anything for your being alive?'; 'Freud was wrong, wasn't he?'; and 'How far can you push your laconic garlands?' (answers to the nearest kilometre). 'Oh yes, I remember the last one,' he says. 'I think that was Jeremy Paxman.'

Morrissey first came to national prominence in early 1983, as lead singer with the Smiths. His witty, often caustic lyrics and the inspired musical arrangements of guitarist Johnny Marr soon had the pair acknowledged as the most original and important British songwriting team since Lennon and McCartney. Both lyrically and musically, the Smiths had so few detectable influences that they seemed to have come from nowhere. In a period dominated by ponderous groups like Spandau Ballet and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the subject matter of Smiths' songs, like the group's name, was defiantly mundane, and heavy on subjects like vegetarianism and sudden death.

When the Smiths appeared on Top of the Pops, bemused presenters looked on as Morrissey danced round the floor with flowers protruding from his back pocket. The group acquired an obsessive following and was especially appreciated by the more tormented teenage residents of Northern industrial towns, who found that the singer's graveyard humour offered an intelligent alternative to the counterfeit bonhomie of daytime Radio One: Morrissey was inspired to write 'Panic', the Smiths' 1986 single, whose chorus encouraged listeners to 'Hang the DJ', after he heard a Newsbeat item on the Chernobyl disaster which was immediately followed by Wham's 'I'm Your Man'.
Scenes from Morrissey's 'Kill Uncle' tour: above, with his backing band; below, onstage in Dundee

On their record covers, the Smiths broke with the tradition of displaying flattering photographs of themselves; instead their 'cover stars' were figures chosen by Morrissey to reflect his interest in soap opera and high camp: Yootha Joyce, Pat Phoenix, or Jean Marais. With titles like 'Bigmouth Strikes Again', 'Girlfriend In A Coma' and 'Shoplifters Of The World Unite', Morrissey boasts, he reclaimed ordinary language for popular music. When the Smiths split up in 1987, following acrimonious exchanges between Morrissey and Marr, their fans mourned the passing of the last great British pop group.

For the last five years, Morrissey, a lyricist who is unusually reliant on a musical collaborator, has pursued a solo career of sporadic brilliance. His most recent LP, Your Arsenal, co-written with Alain Whyte, represents his most promising work since the Smiths.

Morrissey's fascination with adolescent concerns such as truth, justice and sulking in your room seems remarkably undiminished by age. At 33, he still talks about feeling isolated, sexually undesirable and socially inept. 'The thing is,' Morrissey says, 'people never believe me when I say I have become quite used to the fact that nobody finds me attractive.' (Three hours later, I would be watching this man straddling a monitor speaker while a team of security guards battled to restrain a pack of hysterical college girls attempting to touch his diaphanous blouse. The girl behind me would have been leading the charge, but was hors de combat after screaming 'I love you' incessantly for 10 minutes and losing consciousness.)

It seems ironic that a dour Northerner should be exciting such unbridled fervour in the United States, a country whose popular culture he has frequently derided. Morrissey describes his success in North America as 'a strange fluke. Other countries, including England, are not particularly interested in me. Response to my forthcoming British concerts has been excellent. But that always seems to be immaterial anyway in the overall context of what an artist is and what a pop artist does,' says Morrissey, whose tendency to elaboration sometimes makes his conversation sound like the final waffling paragraph of a history essay. The singer's speech has, in general, a precious quality, and can verge on the pedantic. In Morrissey's world, people 'converse' more than they talk and 'remain' rather than stay. He tends to become over-attached to certain words, and is famously keen on 'jubilant,' 'dank' and 'celebratory'.

'If I used the word "censorship" for what is happening in England, it would sound extreme and partly neurotic,' the singer adds, perceptively. 'But I have to.' At this, Morrissey inclines his head, smiles to himself, and stares up at the ceiling: a mannerism reminiscent of the late John Le Muserier.

The substance of Morrissey's complaint is that his records do not receive sufficient airtime on British network radio. His domestic reputation has failed to keep pace with his blossoming fortunes in the United States. Last August, on the day he sold out the Hollywood Bowl in under half an hour, breaking the record held by the Beatles, projectiles thrown at the stage forced him to beat an undignified retreat from a stage in Finsbury Park, north London, where he was appearing as support act for the group Madness.

Some observers felt that, in view of the National Front element in evidence at Finsbury Park, Morrissey was at best insensitive to have decorated the stage with a backdrop showing two 'Suedeheads' (an early Seventies variation on the skinhead cult, similarly associated with violence and fascism) and to have brandished a Union Jack.

'I like the flag,' Morrissey says. 'I think it is very attractive. When does a Union Jack become racist? I know there were a lot of people there from the National Front, but I don't think they were particularly interested in me. And even though there were reports of me being booed and pelted off-stage — which of course never happened at all — I don't believe that it was the National Front who did that. I think it was a small selection of rather dull north Londoners. Now the press claim that every skinhead in London wants my blood, which is twaddle. Nobody mentioned that Madness themselves also received missiles,' adds Morrissey, whose unusual choice of verb recalls Inspector Clouseaus' habit of observing that victims of concussion have 'received the beump'.

The New Musical Express responded to the Finsbury Park incident with a lengthy article which suggested that the singer might have racist inclinations. The paper assembled Morrissey quotes collected over the best part of a decade and cited songs such as 'The National Front Disco', from his latest album and 'Bengali In Platforms' from his first solo album Viva Hate, a patronising number that contains the lines 'It's hard enough when you belong here' and 'Shelve your Western plans'.

'Well if anyone reads the lyrics and still has an extreme, or offensive, or...' (Morrissey has lapsed into thesaurus mode) '... objectionable view of it, then all I can believe is that they are determined to think that. The phenomenon of the National Front interests me, like it interests everyone. Just as all manner of sexuality interests everyone. That doesn't mean that you necessarily want to take part.'

Yet Morrissey does seem perversely attracted to the iconography of the far right. 'I don't think that Morrissey has ever quite got his politics worked out,' says Billy Bragg, who once accompanied the singer on an American tour. 'The real problem with neo-fascist symbolism is that it is extremely difficult to retain an attitude which is neutral or ironic, which is what I think he is attempting to do.'

Steven Patrick Morrissey was born in Manchester in 1959. His father was a hospital porter; his mother, a librarian, introduced him to the work of Oscar Wilde. Morrissey, who weighs his words in interviews like a man playing the 'Yes-No Interlude', became almost spontaneous when enthusing about the Richard Ellmann biography of Wilde. In the past, the singer has been prone to dispense Wildean bons mots such as 'I could not exist in any place unless it pleased me in every aspect' (bold talk for a bloke from Old Trafford), and adopted the gladiolus for his motif much as Wilde chose the lily. Morrissey's enthusiasm for the writer has communicated itself to his own fans: bemused staff at the Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris periodically arrive for work to find the Epstein sculpture on Wilde's tomb decorated with slogans such as 'Manchester for Ever'.

At school, few of Morrissey's peers shared his passion for the aphorism. When Morrissey talks about his days as St. Mary's Secondary Modern, it is hard not to imagine him walking the streets in fear of having his head kicked in while trying to ponder the dénouement of Lady Windermere's Fan.

'Manchester in the Sixties was a very violent place,' Morrissey recalls. 'I remember being at a fair at Stretford Road; it was very early, about 5 pm, and I was just standing by the speedway. And somebody just came over to me and head-butted me. He was much older than me, and much bigger. I was dazed for at least five minutes. What I find remarkable is the way you just accepted it. That was just the kind of thing that happened. I don't think it was even that I looked different in those days. There never needed to be a reason.'

On leaving school, he spent a year at technical college before drifting into a job with the Inland Revenue. At this stage, his ambitions were literary: he wrote an adulatory history of the New York Dolls (a glam-rock group once managed by Malcolm McLaren) and an equally sympathetic book about James Dean. As 'Sheridan Whiteside' he contributed concert reviews to the Record Mirror. His pseudonym was the name of the cantankerous radio celebrity played by Monty Woolley, who torments Bette Davis in the 1941 film The Man Who Came To Dinner. (Morrissey is probably the first failed music journalist to find consolation in a career as a successful international rock star.)

He jettisoned his Christian name at the start of his pop career in the early Eighties. 'The thing was that I was always getting called Steve,' Morrissey says. 'And I was never a Steve. I thought, well, I only need one name anyway. And it was such an unusual name that I thought I wouldn't ever be confused with anybody else. I mean do you know anybody else called Morrissey? These days I only hear the name from strangers, as a term of supposed intimacy.'

One of the attractions of the abbreviated nom de guerre, you suspect, is that it instantly bestowed legend, in the tradition of Garbo, Dylan and Bowie. Why, I wondered, had he not chosen another, more suitable first name: Derek, perhaps, or Ralph? 'Well,' Morrissey says. 'I did seriously consider Derek for a while.' (One of the most extraordinary things about Morrissey is the way that his arrogance and pomposity are tempered by an engaging capacity for self-deprecation.)

Whatever he thinks of Richard Ellmann, Morrissey — like most public figures who have substantially reinvented their lives — has little fondness for his own biographers. The most recent target of his wrath has been Johnny Rogan, whose book Morrissey and Marr: the Severed Alliance, includes a painstaking account of the singer's life written from the perspective of the Ardent Fan. Morrissey describes the book as '75 per cent lies', a judgment not echoed by other witnesses (although Rogan's book does refer to a Greek writer called Platus). Despite the book's highly sympathetic tone — within the first 10 pages Morrissey is twice the object of the verb 'to marvel', and is compared favourably to Elvis Presley, Rodin's 'Thinker' and Charlie Chaplin — the singer responded to its publication by saying that he hoped its author would perish in a pile-up on the M3, or be burned to death in a house fire.

Casual spite has become as integral a part of Morrissey's act as self-aggrandisement was for Muhammad Ali, or weeping at functions has for Richard Attenborough. When he discovered that Tony Wilson of Factory Records had described him as 'the Jeanette Winterson of pop music: a woman trapped in a man's body', Morrissey responded by saying that 'the day somebody shoves Wilson in the boot of a car and drives his body to Saddleworth Moor, that is the day Manchester music will be revived', and that Wilson was nothing but 'a pig trapped inside a man's body'.

'Actually I was misquoted on that one,' Morrissey says. 'What I actually said was that he is a man trapped in a pig's body.' Nevertheless, this latest reflex fatwa on Rogan seemed surprisingly graceless, especially coming from a man who claims that he has not read the book.

'Well, all right, I've skimmed it in a scholarly way,' Morrissey concedes. 'But I only read the bits about me.' Such behaviour has inevitably fostered suspicion that there must be some dreadful secret in Morrissey's life. 'People tend to presume that he goes around doing awful things with animals and children,' says an associate who has known the singer well since the days of the Smiths. 'But I think the truth is simply that he is a real control freak. Whatever is happening, Morrissey has to feel that he is in charge. That's what's at the bottom of it all.'
En route between engagements in California: 'I'm actually a conservative and boring person'

The concept of control is one that crops up regularly in relation to Morrissey. 'The real problem,' says Scott Piering, one of several managers who attempted to handle the Smiths to the satisfaction of both Morrissey and his mother, who took a lively interest in the band's affairs, 'was that you were never allowed sufficient power to make a decision. That, and Morrissey's unpredictability.' On the morning of a major European tour, Piering recalls, 'We were all at the airport, passports in hand. Morrissey suddenly decided he didn't want to go. The tour was cancelled right there. Later, we had to make up a lot of the European television shows, because they still wanted us to do them. I went over to his flat to collect him. Morrissey wouldn't answer. He was hiding in the bedroom. After 10 minutes of banging and pleading I had to climb over the ledge from another flat to get at him. I thought he might be dead. If he decides he's not into something, you have serious problems.'

Members of the Smiths and the band's entourage recall how they arrived at the BBC on the day they were due to appear on a Wogan show, only to discover that Morrissey had decided not to appear. The singer, aware perhaps that such reports have helped earn his tabloid nickname of 'Mad Mozzer', told me the story was 'complete rubbish'. But, I objected, so many people had spoken about it on the record. 'Yes I know,' replied Morrissey, whose favourite Oscar Wilde text is The Decay Of Lying. 'Where's my machete?' Did he, I wondered, always tell the truth in interviews? 'On important issues, yes.' And was the Wogan show an important issue? 'Was it ever?' said Morrissey.

Unfortunately for some of the Smiths, the absence of managerial interference failed to encourage a more equitable distribution of profits than in many other groups: according to Mike Joyce, the Smiths' drummer, Morrissey and Marr divided songwriting royalties between them, and also took 40 percent each of the 'mechanical royalties' (basically record sales), which left 10 per cent each for Joyce and Andy Rourke, the bass player. 'They say I agreed to that, but there was no deal ever finalised as far as I was concerned,' says Joyce. 'I was just swept along by the excitement of it all. I was happy to be in the band; that was enough.' Joyce and Rourke instigated legal proceedings in an attempt to recover money they believed was owed them by Morrissey and Marr. Rourke has now settled out of court; Joyce is determined to fight on. 'Andy was getting married. He wanted a car, a house; the things normal people want.'

Would Morrissey now accept that his rhythm section had had a raw deal? 'Not at all,' he says. 'I think they were lucky.' 'Lucky?' I repeated. 'Yes. Lucky. You know what lucky means, don't you? I believe that if Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce had had another singer they would never have gotten further than Salford shopping centre.'

'Clearly I could respond to that with something just as evil,' says Joyce. 'It's not in me to be like that. But it is in Morrissey. A lot of things might have been different with another singer. Like I might have got my 25 per cent.'

Stephen Street, who co-wrote and produced the Viva Hate album, which contains classic songs such as 'Everyday Is Like Sunday', 'Suedehead' and 'Late Night, Maudlin Street', attests to the singer's keen business sense.

'After we did the LP, I contested the percentage I was offered, and there was a year of acrimony.'

'There were very nasty letters flying between lawyers. And I thought, hold on, I've been working with this man since 1984. This is no way to behave. But this is how he is. He shits on people. He expects them to work with him for the love of it, and he doesn't like it when they turn around and say, "Where's my money?" I'm not the only person who's been treated that way.'

If there is a great mystery in Morrissey's life, however, it relates not to his business acumen but to his sexuality: a subject of endless fascination to his admirers ever since 1983 when Morrissey announced that he was celibate, thus apparently committing himself to a discipline attempted by only a few exceptional historical figures: men such as John Paul II, John Ruskin and Stephen Fry. How was it going?

'Well, I don't have physical relationships, if that's what you mean,' Morrissey said. 'But to use the word celibacy, to apply it to oneself is like implying that one has made a very firm decision. And that is not the case in my life. But physical relationships I never had. And if you never had, you never do,' he added, cryptically. 'The amount of activity I have actually experienced in my life could be crammed down to a rather pathetic couple of hours.'

His previous pronouncements on the subject have, I suggested, been rather confusing. In interviews he has said, variously, that 'I can't imagine my body ever feeling sexual excitement', that 'I wasn't aware of sexual experience until I was 28', and that 'I lost my virginity at 13'. These statements seemed somewhat inconsistent.

'Well — they are inconsistent,' he says. 'But not all of our lives are as cut and dried and black and white as they should be. Or as they might even seem to be.' So there you have it. Morrissey, who was heavily influenced by the feminist literature of the late Seventies, still argues that he as 'never seen the world as a gender-specific place'.

The abundance of homo-erotic imagery in his lyrics and album covers (Your Arsenal, for example, shows him brandishing a microphone in a highly suggestive manner) should not, he says, be taken as a veiled declaration of homosexuality. 'I'm not running ahead and leaving clues hidden behind bus stops, as it were,' he says. 'One of my physical encounters was with a man. That was 10 years ago. It was just a very brief, absurd and amusing moment,' adds Morrissey, in his best Oscar Wilde. 'It wasn't love. I have never experienced that.'

Has he slept with women? 'Yes. I feel completely open. If I met somebody tomorrow, male or female, and they loved me and I loved them, I would openly proclaim that I loved them, regardless of what they were. I think people should be loved whatever their gender, whatever their age. I am open to everything. I accept that my experience is different from that of most men. But I feel reasonably normal. I don't feel like a freak. My world is bigger. I never lived in a small town with small morals. I don't want to take drugs. I don't, so far as I am aware, want to take part in activities such as group sex. I'm actually a reasonably conservative, boring person.'

Many observers with less enlightened views of sex roles have found Morrissey's runic utterances on sexual politics extremely enervating. 'You big Jessie, Morrissey', Frank Owen wrote in Melody Maker in 1986. 'You big girl's shirt'. Five years ago when rock journalist Nick Kent, speaking on a South Bank Show programme, explained that 'Morrissey is striving to define a third sex,' the Independent's reviewer wrote: 'That's right Nick: men, women and prats.'

It would seem reasonable to assume that Morrissey was attracted to the notion of celibacy as the last newsworthy sexual stance in a world that has become virtually unshockable. But those who know him say that the truth may be more complicated. Morrissey, they suggest, genuinely goes to bed at night, as he recently claimed, 'closing the door, putting the lights out and fumbling for a book', and close friends such as Liverpudlian photographer Linder Sterling (whose photographs accompany this feature) are thin on the ground. 'At the very least, he is extremely careful,' one former associate told me. 'In all my time with him, I never saw the slightest sign of a secret life of passion. And don't think I wasn't looking out for it. We all were. We were fantastically curious.'
Finishing touches: Morrissey backstage at Wembley Arena, July 1991

In this area of Morrissey's life, as in others, you are reminded of one of Albert Finney's lines from Saturday Night And Sunday Morning — a film the singer has seen more than 100 times — which has become something of a dictum for Morrissey: 'Whatever people say I am, that's what I am not. Because they don't know a bloody thing about me. God knows what I am.'

According to the disc jockey John Peel, whose early interest in the Smiths helped establish Morrissey's career, we should not waste too much more time trying to work him out. 'If Gene Vincent, for instance, had volunteered the information that he was planning to be celibate, people would have just pissed themselves,' Peel says. 'Which I think is a very healthy reaction, frankly. One of the aspects of pop music that I find least acceptable is when people find their pronouncements are taken so seriously that they feel they can start behaving like the Duke of Edinburgh, and imagine that they can be astonishingly rude to any commoner they come across.

'And because of this, the victims then start to believe it themselves. It saddens me that someone so genuinely talented, and who has such a great capacity to be funny, and rejoices in the use of language, does seem to fall prey to the temptation of behaving like a tyrant of the dressing room.'

Capable though he is of being vain, capricious and maddeningly unpredictable, everybody I spoke to about Morrissey — even those who, like Mike Joyce, believe they have been treated unfairly — find that his talent, humour and charm make him impossible to dislike. As Scott Piering says: 'I just can't help but like him. On a professional level, he's a total nightmare. I don't think if he came to me on bended knees [a scenario which Piering, who is now a record plugger in King's Cross, concedes is unlikely] I would ever want to work with him again.'

Among the crowd leaving the stadium in Houston, there were no such reservations. 'Morrissey provides a voice for the downtrodden and the lonely,' says Rob, who has travelled from California and seen every concert on the singer's North American tour, paying his way by selling fanzines. 'He is not like any other singer.' That — whatever points of uncertainty remain in the strange career of Steven Patrick Morrissey — might be the one sure point of consensus.

This article was originally published in a December 1992 issue of Observer magazine. Contributed by Mel.
Reprinted without permission for personal use only.