Morrissey has a certain way of defining those he most admires: he calls them ‘the kind of people you just can’t brush aside’. So it was with the Smiths. From the outset they were audacious and totally independent-minded. Hearing their first broadcast on UK radio, Sting offered them a support on a Police tour only to be turned down by Johnny Marr simply ‘because we’re a hundred times more important than the Police will ever be’. They were incredibly insular, mistrustful of anyone outside Manchester (not that they trusted many Mancunians, come to that), and that insularity, under more and more pressure to go world-wide, certainly sowed many of the seeds of their premature destruction.
Mostly, though, it has to be said they were a real group, the only truly immortal group of the eighties, but their lyrical vision was of course Morrissey’s alone. Just as the basic drive was also his, a drive grounded in a seething desire to enact his revenge on a world that had repeatedly mocked and jeered and ‘brushed aside’ his every former display of self-expression. ‘In the Manchester scene he was like the village idiot,’ Paul Morley once remarked to a colleague of mine disdainfully. ‘In the Joy Division days, when everyone was going around carrying copies of Nietzsche very prominently, you’d see Morrissey at a bus stop somewhere looking hopeless and reading Sven Hassel instead.’
‘Fame is a type of revenge. You hate so many people,’ the singer would counter. ‘It sounds very juvenile now, I suppose, like smashing someone’s windows. But then what else can you do? It was like a weapon, something to make them gnash their teeth. Otherwise people will always have the finger on you. Always.’
This is how Morrissey spoke when I first met him in the cold December of 1984, the last month of a year in which England had suddenly catapulted him from his previous state of provincial nonentity-dom to the condition of a virtual deity. Thus, ‘the past always tends to seem a little embarrassing, even though at the time it was anything but. . . It’s like saying you might be this now but you were once that, you used to do this and you bought this awful record and thought it was wonderful. You see, I can describe the key incidents as far as I was concerned; I recognize them very clearly. The key incident for me was that I never had any friends. And I realized that in order to have friends and impress people, I had to do something extraordinary.’
In order to decode the full dark complexity of the Morrissey enigma, and certainly in order to decipher the nuances of his extraordinary lyrics, one has to do a deal of private research into this most singular of pop lives. Steven Patrick Morrissey was born on 22 May 1959, preceded by a sister Jacqueline, into a working-class family (mother a librarian, his father a hospital porter), then living in the Hulme district of Manchester. Life, according to the singer, was agreeable enough up to the age of seven or eight, when two significant events took place. One was the first spate of discord between his parents that would end in divorce ten years hence. The other was, if anything, even more traumatic to a seven-year-old with an imagination that, where others fixated on Mars bars and Sherbet Dips, seized on the barbaric rituals of those dissolute lost souls drawn to the Manchester fairgrounds of the late sixties in search of love bites and knife wounds, ‘under the shield of the Ferris wheel’. (’Rusholme Ruffians’ relates just such a child’s exposure to the mindless thuggery the grown-up Morrissey so abhors.)
In 1966 Ian Brady, a Glaswegian transplanted to Manchester, and his secretary and mistress, a Mancunian named Myra Hindley, were sent to trial on charges of procuring, torturing (sexually and otherwise, often photographing and taping the atrocities) and ultimately murdering one nine-year-old boy, an eleven-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old youth. Two other youngsters also went missing at the time. The whole of Manchester was aghast and seven-year-old Steven Morrissey was more than susceptible to the shock-waves.
‘I happened to live on the streets where, close by, some of the victims had been picked up. Within the community news of the crime totally dominated all attempts at conversation for quite a few years. It was like the worst thing that had ever happened, and I was very, very aware of everything that occurred. Aware as a child who could have been a victim. All the details . . . You see, it was all so evil; it was, if you can understand this, ungraspably evil. When something reaches that level it becomes almost . . . almost absurd really. I remember it at times like I was living in a soap opera . . .’
By the age of nine the child had become a distinct problem. His father he rarely if ever refers to, but once let slip that the former considered his only begotten son ‘a complete fruitcake’ during those years of frenzied brooding. His mother, however, saw an artistic bent in her son’s otherwise perplexing inertia. A librarian, she introduced him to the works of Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde among many, the latter sparking a particularly fervent infatuation that persists to this day.
And then there was music. He bought his first disc at age six – a year before Hindley and Brady’s gambols on the moors commenced. The record featured the virginal entreaties of a very young Marianne Faithfull singing ‘Come and Stay with Me’. The mild sexual overtones of the lyric went well with the halcyon blend of folk guitar and baroque pop. Indeed, Ms Faithfull was Morrissey’s first love, and in a world where first loves never die it’s intriguing that the only two non-originals the Smiths have attempted were her ‘Summer Nights’ (a thrilling harpsichord-led piece that foreshadows some early Smiths songs) and the ‘Sha La La Song’. Quintessential British pop, an influence either due to the radio or elder sister Jacqueline or his own simple rationale: ‘I was brought up in a house full of books and records . . . I devoured everything.’
Though he found himself ‘disgusted by the savagery of funfairs [he] went to in the sixties’, he sought out music that embodied that atmosphere: the treble-and-reverb lamentations of Billy Fury, king of the fairground swing. Similarly a cute doily of a song, the Tams’ ‘Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy’ he always cherished.
‘Because of the sentiment. Not that I could ever relate to it. But then maybe that’s why I found it so appealing in the first place.’ Morrissey’s placement at St Mary’s Secondary Modern was, from all reports, the grimmest fate conceivable for one of such a haphazard temperament. He carved out a niche of sorts, but not by reciting Oscar Wilde or displaying his growing aptitude for the written word.
‘I happened to be very good at certain sports. I was really quite a fine runner, for example. This in turn made me act in a somewhat cocky and outspoken way – simply as a reaction against the philistine nature of my surroundings. This the masters simply couldn’t take. It was all right if you just curled up and underachieved your way into a stupor. That was pretty much what was expected really. Because if you’re too smart, they hate and resent you and they will break you. When I found out that I wasn’t being picked for the things I clearly excelled at, it became a slow but sure way of destroying my resilience. They succeeded in almost killing off all the self-confidence I had.’
Music again offered escape and excitement. Early in 1972, at the age of thirteen, Morrissey witnessed his first live gig: Marc Bolan’s T. Rex at Manchester’s Bellevue Theatre. ‘All the kids at my school were into either Marc Bolan or David Bowie,’ he recalls. ‘You couldn’t like both of them. But it was the New York Dolls who were the real beginning for me. They were so precious . . .
‘You see, rock and roll, or the traditional, incurable rock and roller, never interested me remotely. He was simply a rather foolish, empty-headed figure who was peddling his brand of self-projection and very arch machismo that I could never relate to. The Dolls on the other hand . . . Well, firstly I always saw them as an absolutely male group. I never saw them as being remotely fey or effeminate. They were characters you simply did not brush aside. Like the mafia of rock and roll.’
Upon falling out of St Mary’s into the outstretched arms of the dole queue in 1975, Steven Morrissey’s life appears to have revolved around the music of the New York Dolls and sixties girl singers, the crucial ‘symbolic’ importance of James Dean, and the continuing lure of the written word. He claims at fourteen to have been initiated into the doctrines of feminism, citing a book titled Men’s Liberation as shaping what has since become a key concept in his own lyrical observations. But it was the New York Dolls connection that afforded him a certain notoriety. His small ads in the music press seeking to swap fax and info with fellow Dolls fans caused him to become one of the few ersatz personalities to feature in the punk explosion that hit Manchester, the first stop of the Sex Pistols’ infamous Anarchy Tour in 1976.
‘With punk I was always “observing”. I mean, I seem to recall being a spectator at almost every seminal performance in the movement’s evolution, especially in the North. But the aggression was just bully boy tactics. It was, I feel now, a musical movement without music. I mean, how many records were really important? How many can be remembered with fondness? Not many . . . The Ramones’ first album I recall as one. Also the Buzzcocks, who, I must be honest, seemed, out of this massive sea of angst-ridden groups, the only ones who possibly had sat down beforehand and worked out what they intended to do.’
By this time it would be fair to assume that Morrissey harboured genuine musical ambitions. His main obstacle, apart from ‘a shyness that was criminally vulgar’, was his fear that a rock music backdrop would place him ‘in circumstances where I would be a very . . . timid performer’. Perhaps, then, he would be temperamentally better suited to music journalism. Turned down no fewer than five times by a certain NME section editor, he went on to supply record reviews to Record Mirror under the nom de plume Sheridan White-head. Various punk fanzines were also created by him, and he is remembered by Richard Boon (the Buzzcocks’ manager) as being a frequent visitor to the Buzzcocks’ office. In 1978, owing possibly to his parents’ final bust-up, Boon recalls Morrissey becoming extremely close to the group Ludus, principally the singer, Linder, for whom he seemed to be nursing a growing infatuation.
Linder was deeply affected by the work of certain feminist writers and was prone to carry around such tomes as Genealogy and The Wise Wound. Morrissey duly moved with Linder and Ludus guitarist Ian into a less than salubrious abode in the red light area of Walley Range, where they lived for approximately one year. This is the location that inspired songs like the pummelling ‘Miserable Lie’ from the first album. Similarly, certain sources intimate that ‘Wonderful Woman’ and ‘Jean’ refer to this relationship.
After the Walley Range episode Morrissey actually took the audacious step of flying to New York, where he stayed with his ‘Aunty Mary’. He recalls seeing Patti Smith, then newly retired from rock, giving a poetry reading in which she ‘made farting noises for almost one hour . . . it was both peculiar and singularly depressing’. He soon returned. Around this time he almost got involved with joining a group. However . . .
‘There was always an obvious ideological imbalance with whoever else approached me. The one occasion I walked into this group as a potential singer, I said – the very first thing – “Let’s do ‘Needle in a Haystack’ by the Marvelettes.” These were four individuals who seemed in tune with this mode of thinking. It wasn’t “camp surrealism” or “wackiness”. It was pure intellectual devotion that made me want to do a song like that.’
Perhaps it was this ensemble that Howard Devoto swears he witnessed supporting Magazine once in a Manchester club. Devoto doesn’t recall much: a guitar, drums and bass line-up, with Morrissey singing while lashing his hair out of his eyes. And so it goes. If it happened at all, it was short-lived.
‘The main reason for my not being able to do anything really constructive before Johnny Marr’s arrival’, Morrissey now concludes, ‘is that, with all the desire I had been harbouring for years, if anyone else existed out there who shared the same creative urges, that person was invariably incredibly depressed, totally disorganized and somehow unsalvageably doomed. In other words, a complete slut.’
Richard Boon recalls the last pre-Smiths utterance from Morrissey. This came in 1980 in the form of a demo tape on which was recorded firstly a spoken apology for both the lack of any backing instruments and the low fidelity of Morrissey’s singing voice. This was due to the fact that someone was asleep in the next room. Of two songs he definitely remembers hearing one was a version of ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ sung to a different melody. The second was a truly ironic choice. Just two years before Marr would come and pull our ailing hero out of some sick sleep and into a partnership that would take them to places they never imagined even existing, the gaunt young Mancunian had chosen to interpret a little-known Bessie Smith number. Its title? ‘Wake Up Johnny’.
Johnny Marr had first woken up as John Martin Maher on the last day of October 1963. He modified his surname in his teens in order not to be mistaken for the Buzzcocks’ bass player of the same name, but also to avoid police investigation into his reputed involvement with some jewel thieves who heisted a series of T.S. Lowry prints from a museum. He was born in Ardwick Green to a working-class couple of Irish descent, the father employed in the construction trade. His parents are still together and he has a younger brother and sister. Unlike his more erudite lyricist he passed his II-plus but ended up in a comprehensive school – Withenshaw – where he found himself more interested in experimenting with the soft drugs that a predominantly older crowd of local musicians were introducing him to. He left school with no O-levels, a vendetta between himself and his father since resolved, and a ‘friend’ he’d been originally asked to keep an eye out for by the school’s headmaster when the latter had discovered that ‘this posh kiddie with a chip on his shoulder’ was courting a potential barbiturate problem.
The latter ‘posh kiddie’ had been future Smiths bass player Andy Rourke at the age of thirteen. At the ages of fourteen (when various friends and Marr toyed with the idea of working with a girl group) and seventeen (when he and Rourke were again put off by ‘how bad everybody was’) attempts had been made to form bands. Joe Moss, owner of Crazy Face, a Manchester boutique where Marr had also worked, and also where the guitarist gained most of his musical education from Moss’s extensive record collection, is the figure everyone points to as the one who brought Morrissey and Marr together in the first place. Moss coaxed the guitarist to journey over to where Morrissey lived.
He was nineteen years old, wore his hair in a pompadour and his fingers left chocolate stains on the front window that almost caused him to be ejected on the spot without any further discussion. Morrissey warily let him enter, and in his bedroom, beneath a huge crucifixion poster of James Dean, Marr spoke excitedly about the reality of the two of them possibly forming a songwriting partnership as well as a group. Morrissey listened without saying much and then asked him to choose a record from his sprawling collection. Marr chose ‘Paper Boy’ by the Marvelettes and it was this decision that first cemented their union. He returned next time with a guitar and after two failed attempts to write a song was shown the lyrics to ‘Suffer Little Children’, his remarkable meditation on the monstrosity of the Moors Murders. Marr wrote a lush and complicated set of chord changes for the lyric. Morrissey settled finally on utilizing only one quarter of what Marr had written and their partnership was consummated.
But oh, what an odd couple they made. There was Marr with a joint in his mouth and two freshly rolled behind his ears, the exuberant little hedonist full of restless energy and unneurotic enthusiasm for life. And then there was Morrissey, the human daffodil with his down-beat ardour and his fastidious craving to remain celibate and distant from all physical contact. ‘I don’t have relationships at all,’ he told me once. ‘It’s out of the question . . . Partly because I was always attracted to men or women who were never attracted to me. And I was never attracted to women and men who were attracted to me. I’ve never met the right person. I’d like to take [one mad plunge]. But not just with anyone; it just doesn’t come naturally to me.
‘Throughout the Smiths’ career, I was entirely crippled [sexually]. I was bound to a wheelchair; I have no doubt of that. When the Smiths performed live . . . I don’t remember any of those nights, to be honest with you. Every memory to me is that I was simply a Catherine wheel. That was as far as it went. I can remember a few times when I was literally pushed on to the stage. I was pale. I was ill. I needed a meal. I needed a lie-in: all those natural things you need when you’re being pawed about.’
‘He is very shy, youVe got to understand that/ Marr would always emphasize, clearly as enamoured of his partner’s creative side as he is deeply puzzled by some of his personal eccentricities. We all look out for Morrissey. It’s a very brotherly feeling. When we first rehearsed, I’d have done anything for him. And, as a person, Morrissey is really capable of a truly loving relationship. Every day he’s so open, so romantic and sensitive to other people’s emotions. But’, the young guitarist quickly adds, pausing only to take a deep draw from the newly lit joint he’s just removed from behind his left ear, ‘I must say that when he gets really upset, frankly I think it’s just because he needs a good humping.’
Morrissey and Marr broke up messily and rather stupidly in 1987 when their individual paranoias and differing lifestyles mixed in with a lot of fatigue and over-excitable ego conspired to break the spell that had drawn these two disparate individuals to find a common purpose in composing the most haunting and beguiling collection of songs written during the otherwise garish and soul-stunted eighties. Marr, the villain among Smiths fans basically because it was his leaving that broke up the quartet, has since collaborated with numerous groups and musicians, including the Pretenders, Matt Johnson’s The The, Kirsty McColl, New Order’s Barney Sumner, with whom he created the duo Electronic, the Pet Shop Boys and most recently, Ian McCulloch, formerly of Echo and the Bunnymen. Everything he’s been involved in has been solid enough, hard to criticize for its breezy melodic quality or for the delight it displays in experimenting with the latest technology. But not a single note of it has resonated with the same magical quality that informed almost all his Smiths music.
Meanwhile Morrissey has continued as a solo artist, recording prolifically and picking up musically pretty much where the Smiths left off. His first solo album, Viva Hate had its moments, and though the follow-up, Kill Uncle, was an out-and-out dud, Your Arsenal, the album he recorded with his Camden Town quarry of former rockabilly musicians and with ex-glam rocker Mick Ronson as producer, was every bit as good if not better than Strangeways Here We Come, the Smiths’ disappointing final studio album. Still, after six years without contact, both seem to realize that they’re bonded by destiny just like Burt Bacharach and Hal David or Lennon and McCartney. So in 1993 they began cautiously socializing again.
‘If Johnny phoned and asked to work with me again,’ Morrissey had confessed the last time I ever saw him, back in late 1989 when he and Marr were at their most disconnected, ‘it’s no secret I would be on the next bus over to his house. He wrote great music and the union was perfect. I write all the time but obviously now, post-Smiths, it’s only whenever I can get hold of a tune that really starts me humming. But’, he added slowly, gravely, his eyes cast downwards and cloudy with sorrow and regret, ‘that exuberant music, it’s very few and far between, right now.’