 SPIN:
Something that I've noticed over the past few weeks is that there's a
funny contradiction between the fact that you are fawned upon, and at
the same time, you're sort of a piece of meat. You're the object that's
being sold.
Morrissey: I am the thing. You can't not become a
thing.
SPIN: Because the same people who are being sycophantic
are also telling you where to go and what to do next.
Morrissey: That's absolutely right. It's not quite
as fierce as you make it seem, but you do sometimes get bypassed as a
living, breathing person. But I wouldn't complain about that, because
it sounds very petty and show biz, doesn't it?
SPIN: The devotion of your fans is so intense. It reminds
me of when [Formula One world champion] Nigel Mansell won the British
Grand Prix this year. The crowd went wild and they ran onto the track
and surrounded his car. He couldn't move and there was a moment at which
it really looked as though they were going to tear him to pieces.
Morrissey: I've been in that situation many, many
times - when I'm in a car that cannot move and all I can see is flesh
pressed against every surrounding window. It's very unnerving, and suddenly,
the temperature in the car rises and you can't breathe and whoever has
set next to you starts to panic, and... it's wonderful! [Laughs]
SPIN: Is this how you thought it would be, when you were
a kid, alone in your bedroom?
Morrissey: I never thought it would be as hysterical
as it is. I thought I would manage to do something quite respectable and
reasonably unknown, and I think I would have been quite happy with that.
So it's gone beyond the, uh, boundaries.
SPIN: I was talking with George [Morrissey's bodyguard]
and he was saying that even when he was on the road with Motley Crue,
when they were shifting millions of records and were the ultimate in hard-rock
excess, that even then the fans didn't have anything like the intensity
of the people that follow you.
Morrissey: I wouldn't, for instance, imagine that
George Michael does. Similarly with Madonna; I can't imagine anyone loving
Madonna and wanting to get onstage, and hold her, and squeeze her, and
not let go. She doesn't inspire that. She may sell millions upon millions
of records - similarly with George Michael or Michael Jackson - but I
don't know that people really, really love them in the way that I feel
that I am loved by the people who come and see me. So, yes, it's baffling.
SPIN: Why do you think that is? I mean, they must be
projecting something onto you.
Morrissey: Well, apart from the actual records and
what they convey, I think that there is a great sense that I have been
always overlooked. I think that the audience is perfectly aware of this
and they feel that I have been enormously shortchanged.
SPIN: By whom?
Morrissey: By the entire music industry and all of
their relatives! [Laughs] I've been dumped into the "out"
tray.
SPIN: Oh, come on. You're sitting here in this amazing
hotel suite.
Morrissey: Yes, and I always have sat in hotels like
this, but it's never ever documented and I don't know why. Last year,
for instance, I sold out Madison Square Garden. There was no publicity
before the concert, no publicity after the concert, and I thought, "I
wonder if many artists in the history of the entire world have ever sold
out this venue with no publicity." The L.A. Forum, too. My experience,
my career, if you like, is littered with items like that, and it never,
ever gets documented. I wonder why certain people are deliberately neglected.
Is it a form of censorship?
SPIN: No, it's just a form of whether you want to play
the game or not.
Morrissey: But that isn't really fair. If you achieve,
you should be recognized in some way.
SPIN: Yes, but you aren't seen, in the way George Michael
is, with Linda Evangelista at video shoots, or at all those artully managed
arrivals at airports, and that's the deal, isn't it?
Morrissey: Yes, it is, but the question in my mind
is, which scenario is more real or more natural? I think mine is and it
always has been. Everything I've achieved, I've earned, and nobody has
handed it to me, and that kind of existence is hard to understand for
the music industry. They don't understand the language of being your own
person. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't change it. But I just feel anger,
because when you repeatedly do things against what seems like all the
odds there comes a time when the size of your audience should be recognized
and you should be treated accordingly.
SPIN: What form would the attention take?
Morrissey: Well, it would have been nice to have read
somewhere, throughout the world, "Morrissey has sold out Madison
Square Garden," and there were no posters and there were no reviews.
That would have been nice, but to my knowledge, I've never seen anything
that pertained to that particular night in history.
SPIN: But this year's tour is going to be that sort of
arena on a regular basis, which is kind of hard to miss.
Morrissey: One hopes. I'm going to wear very bright
shirts! For the first time it seems as though it's completely focused.
Not just in my way, but in the way of Sire Records, and that's what makes
it quite fascinating to me, because I've never been in that situation
before. I've always been plowing uphill, and achieving nonetheless, but
never feeling the weight of anything at all behind me other than self-determination.
SPIN: How do you fill your time on the road when you're
not actually working?
Morrissey: The main preoccupation I have is keeping
as physically, reasonably - well, I wouldn't say fit - but, uh, avoiding
illness. I have one suitcase which I try to keep as orderly as possible
and that really, as I'm sure you know in these circumstances, is a full-time
occupation - trying to get things laundered. Trying to actually get food
I can eat, because I have such an incredibly basic intake that it's very,
very hard for me to get food, and when I become ill, it's always because
of lack of food. I can only handle extremely basic food and most menus
in most establishments do not deal with basic tastes.
SPIN: What are you reading at the moment?
Morrissey: Well, Oliver Twist and a few peculiar
magazines, but just because I'm reading them, I'm not necessarily enjoying
them. I'm trying to find out what's in them. But Oliver Twist
is the thing I'm reading on the plane.
SPIN: Why?
Morrissey: Charles Dickens is very exciting to me,
because he was a terribly gloomy character, terribly embittered, and quite
depressed.
SPIN: Terribly successful, too.
Morrissey: Yes! What a fantastic combination. I love
the grim, dim description of the East End, all those murky, winding passages,
full of desperate characters - like our friend Fagin.
SPIN: Which of those characters do you relate to most?
Morrissey: The one who's the most desperate at any
one time, whoever that may be!
SPIN: Isn't unhappiness, to some degree, a matter of
choice?
Morrissey: I think choice has a great deal to do with
it. I can't explain it more than that. It may be unconscious choice. I
think it's a result of somehow being traumatized along the way and you
suddenly decide upon what's best for you, i.e., staying away.
SPIN: One of the impressions that I've had over the past
few days is that there's a self-fulfilling prophecy going on in your life,
which is that you say - to put it crudely - "I'm lonely and nobody
loves me," and then you make it impossible for anyone to disprove
that point. But, in fact, you're a perfectly nice person and you're perfectly
capable of having a charming conversation. But you go to great lengths
to try and prove that you're not.
Morrissey: Well, the way you say it actually sounds
almost amusing. It almost sounds like a nightclub routine - but it isn't.
I've just simply become adaptable. I was, at one stage, not too long ago,
pretty impenetrable. I rarely opened the curtains. I couldn't think of
any reason why. So I have become more adaptable.
SPIN: Do you have depressive periods?
Morrissey: I think I'm always depressed. And I don't
say that in search of a guffaw, but I think I am always depressed.
SPIN: Do you ever have that sense of being encased, like
the boy in the bubble, so that all experience is not direct, but filtered
somehow?
Morrissey: Yes, I do. I feel that I can have a million
conversations, but nobody actually sees me, or speaks to me directly,
and tells me something that's actually valuable to me. But life is...
difficult.
SPIN: What disillusioned you? Was it your parents, do
you think?
Morrissey: Yes, of course. If, as a small child, you're
in an environment where your own parents don't actually get on, you believe
that this is a microcosm of the rest of the world - that that is how life
is. It's quite crippling. Even if you can overcome it, it's very debilitating
and it stays with you.
SPIN: I'm not sure that parents should take the rap,
if you know what I mean.
Morrissey: No, but what happens if you never saw your
parents kiss, or you never saw your parents hug each other?
SPIN: Is that your situation?
Morrissey: Well, I'm intrigued, because when I meet
people here, they always say, "Can I hug you?"
SPIN: I've seen security guys at your singing sessions
standing with their walkie-talkies and talking about "the hugging
thing" and what they were going to do about it.
Morrissey: Well, in Houston, there was a woman reportedly
shouting, "No hugging, no hugging!" and I thought, that's the
most absurd thing I've ever heard. No hugging. Why not?
SPIN: Maybe you're giving them the hugs they don't get
anywhere else.
Morrissey: I thought they were giving me the hug that
I didn't get anywhere else!
SPIN: Well, you're both giving each other the hugs.
Morrissey: Yes, but my need's greater!
SPIN: There you go again. You do need the hugs and you
want them, but you put this wall around you with anyone other than your
fans.
Morrissey: Not necessarily [laughs].
You have to be careful these days! Don't you?
SPIN: If I were in your position, I would feel extremely
angry about having to teach myself things that should have been taught
to me when I was a kid. Since you are obviously intelligent and imaginative,
and since both of those qualities were denied as a child, that must be
a source of frustration.
Morrissey: It's a very peculiar world. You can't serve
an apprenticeship, really. You just have to go into it with your own private
ideas. It's all a matter of just exorcising private obsessions - from
a record sleeve, to a song, to a stage-set. And before you exorcise them,
you can't really even discuss them with anybody else. They're private
up until the very last minute. They're private until the minute you perform
them or sing them or design them. But perhaps the unfortunate aspect of
being a pop artist - I really don't know how else to describe it, because
all the terms just sound trite to me - is that, up until the point where
you do fulfill your obsessions, it can only be recognized as madness.
When you do fulfill them, it is afforded some seal of, not necessarily
approval, but vague understanding. Pop music for pop artists is really
salvation. It's either that, or extreme social ridicule.
SPIN: Or both!
Morrissey: Yes... and a lot of great musicians and
songwriters don't become successful and they actually go mad. Making records
seems to legitimize one's insanity, which is very useful! [Laughs]
SPIN: You're one of those artists that attracts obsessiveness,
not just in fans, but in critics, too. Reading old interviews with you,
they're full of writers who seem to be pressing you to validate their
impression of what it's all about.
Morrissey: This is why, when I give several
interviews in the course of a few days, which happens very rarely, but
does happen, I do feel a bit unbalanced at the end of it, because it's
so, well, intense is just a fraction of it. [What I do] is not pop music,
it's not rock music, and this is why I feel insulted if I am viewed as
a "rock star" or a "pop star," because it's not that.
And you may almost smile as I say that [laughs], but it's just
beyond that. Or it's not beyond that, it's actually something else.
SPIN: Do you ever feel burdened by people's expectations?
I remember once interviewing Van Morrison, and he absolutely insisted
that his music was just a job, even though it was obviously much more
than that, because he couldn't bear the weight of responsibility that
people like me put upon him.
Morrissey: I do understand that attitude. Because
otherwise what do you do? Do you sit at home in a white cloak all day
on a huge chair, listening to your own records over and over again. Because
in a way, that's almost what people are, well, not asking you to do, or
expecting you to do, but I don't think they'd be that surprised if you
said that's what you did.
SPIN: Do you still have the demon? The sense that you
have to do it?
Morrissey: Yes, and the biggest demon of all is the
self-critic, the little person inside of you who's always saying, "No,
no, no, that's not good enough. No, no, no, you don't look good, that
wasn't great, start again, you've not done anything yet." That, I
think, is the hardest part. This is why any pop journalist who wishes
to do a savage critique of anything I've done is wasting their time, because
I get there before they do. I'm not living in some luxurious, glamorous,
fantasy bubble, where I see myself in a purely successful, glamorous way.
SPIN: Why don't you give yourself a break?
Morrissey: You can't, and you know you can't. You
have to go on and you have to do things.
SPIN: Yes, but there must be times when you know that
something you've done is really good.
Morrissey: Yes, but that's the first part of the sentence.
And the next part of the sentence is "however, if you had done this,
it would be better, and that's what you have to do now." That's always
a part of it for me. I always look behind me and, personally, I can say,
it's just not good enough, I have to do something more valuable. However,
other people can't say that.
SPIN: Why don't you play any of the old Smiths songs
any more? They're good songs. You can be proud of them.
Morrissey: I am very proud of them, and they are me.
People refer to "Smiths songs" understandably, but it's almost
as though they were done by other people. But they were as much me as
Your Arsenal is me. There is no difference really. I have several
pretty useless reasons why I don't do them, and when the Smiths ended
and I was being faced with lawyers saying, "If you use the Smiths
name we will sue you. And if you carry on, we will sue you. And if you
do this or that, we will sue you," it just seemed like a huge mystical
message to me to put on a new hat and so forth.
SPIN: Are you lonely?
Morrissey: Yes, I am extremely lonely.
SPIN: How would you think about solving that?
Morrissey: I don't think about that now, because when
you've struck the grand old age of 33, you have to come to some basic
conclusions about your lifestyle and practically every night of my life
has been the same, so it's not as if I've had ups and downs. The day always
ends the same way, with exactly the same scenario. I'm closing the door
and putting the lights out and fumbling for a book. And that's it. I find
that very unfortunate, but then, I could have a wooden leg.
SPIN: But isn't the point that everyone is, just by the
nature of human existence, so incredibly lonely, that the only thing you
can do is try to mitigate that somehow?
Morrissey: Yes, but most people try to do that by
pretending that the word "lonely" doesn't exist in the dictionary.
The strain for me is that most people don't talk in a personal way. I
don't want to sit down with head bent and shoulders arched, with a crack
in the voice, 24 hours a day, talking about every human ill imaginable.
But I would like people to talk to me directly. And I would like people
to say, well, "Why do you live this way?"
SPIN: But I just have!
Morrissey: But nobody else ever does.
SPIN: Maybe they're just frightened.
Morrissey: But what of? I know what you're going to
say [laughs], but I just want to hear you say it.
SPIN: Because, for example, people are constantly telling
me all the things that Morrissey doesn't do. You know: "He doesn't
want to talk about the Smiths. He won't discuss the Rogan book [Morrissey
& Marr: The Severed Alliance]. He doesn't have drinks. He won't
come out to dinner." And one thinks, what the hell am I supposed
to talk about? And all the time there's this self-fulfilling prophecy
going on: "I'm incredibly lonely, but could you please fuck off."
Morrissey: Very elegantly put [laughs].
SPIN: But if I were your therapist, I might say that,
at some point, it might be advisable for you to break that cycle for your
own peace of mind.
Morrissey: Well, yes, I do actually realize that.
I realized that in 1970. However, well, it's only life.
SPIN: Yes, but it's the only one you've got.
Morrissey: Yes, but it will end. And all this will
seem so frivolous.
SPIN: Do you like yourself?
Morrissey: No, I don't. That is the actual truth,
but I know that there is no way that that sentence can be printed and
not seem like anything other than extreme nonsense.
SPIN: But, objectively, it doesn't seem to me that you
have a reason not to like yourself.
Morrissey: More to the point, I don't have a reason
to like myself. I did an interview once with Mavis Nicholson.
And after the interview, she whispered to a friend of mine, "There's
nothing he likes about himself, is there?" And it was a crushing
moment. I thought, well, Mavis, 30 minutes is all it took you to find
out.
SPIN: Oh come on. You're indulging yourself.
Morrissey: Why?
SPIN: Because it's a security blanket to say that. You've
got the parameters of your life all laid out. It's like your suitcase.
Morrissey: Yes, but if I worked for British Rail,
I'd just have another suitcase. So you shouldn't pick on me!
SPIN: Fair enough, but if I were interviewing the guy
from British Rail, I'd ask him the same questions. It's just that, if
you were just another person in a pub, and we were talking, I'd think,
"He seems like a decent bloke, let's have a drink, or grab a bite
to eat." But because of the job you do, and the authorized version
of your life, that option is closed off. And actually, it's closed off
for you as well.
Morrissey: It's true. The things I have to work hardest
at in life are the things you've just described, and I don't exactly know
why.
SPIN: But everybody finds that stuff difficult. It's
like when you're a kid and you dance for the first time - you think you
look awful, but since every other kid is thinking exactly the same thing
about themselves, it doesn't really matter and you shouldn't worry about
it.
Morrissey: I know, but you can't really tell yourself
that. It's like with so many interviews: Once the tape recorder is switched
off, there's complete silence. And it's the silent handshake, and the
silent walk to the lift, and the silent walk to the lobby. It's almost
as if there's nothing else to say, or no other language or conversation
to be had.
SPIN: At what point in your life was your innocence lost?
I don't mean sexually, but psychologically.
Morrissey: I never, ever felt innocent in the way
I think you mean. I never felt open in any way. I would never impulsively
ring people and assume that they'd want to see me, or just go 'round.
I always had to sit down and think very hard before I knocked on anybody's
door. And consequently, I never really knocked. There was no sense of
frivolity in my young life at all, ever. There was no such thing as going
crazy, or getting drunk, or falling over, or going to a beach or - well,
the list goes on. That never occurred. Everything in my life was just
hopelessly premeditated.
SPIN: Can you be spontaneous now?
Morrissey: No, not at all.
SPIN: Is that a control thing?
Morrissey: I think it's because you assume that your
personality, as it stands, isn't really naturally acceptable to most people
- that you have to control it or fashion it slightly, and similarly, your
language. It's just a matter of being obsessively self-judgemental, which
is completely ruinous, because I think you eventually find that the people
with whom you feel most close or think are the most like you are the ones
with whom you can say anything that comes into your head, and be as silly
and useless as you like.
SPIN: Do you think that, at some level, you're just not
capable of trust?
Morrissey: I don't know. I don't think I am.
It's a bit too late, really. It's simply come too late. |
