1989 03 19 Morrissey The Observer

Still clumsy, less shy

Would you want this man to wear your underwear? Morrissey’s fans do. The ex-Smiths leader sings obsessively of violence and failure, but fandemonium has made him hugely successful. Now, trapped in his image, he admires ‘ordinary boys’ with the freedom to be natural. JON SAVAGE scratches the pop icon and finds a self-conscious man with a hair shirt, who at heart remains an adolescent.

SEVEN p.m., a few Thursdays ago. Watched by up to a fifth of the UK population, 'Top of the Pops' is the country's prime source of pop news. Its format is simple and successful, deliberately reflecting the majority experience of pop. Tonight's acts - Yazz, Samantha Fax and Michael Ball — speak tidily of love and obsession. With varying degrees of panache, their moves conform to the spurious, if reassuring, intimacy of advertising.

Then there is a calculated irruption. The camera pans to four young men: the back three could have stepped from the hordes of gawky, hungry boys that filled Britain's TV screens in the Sixties beat boom. In front, the singer, his hair piled up a Billy Fury quiff, performs a masque of introverted arrogance and awkwardness. Where the previous performers carefully held the camera, he avoids eye contact, where they moved in choreographed sync, he wriggles and writhes in a parody of practised sexuality. Where their material was a seamless flow, his song lurches. ‘I am not naturally evil,' he sings at the song's climax. 'Such things I do just to make myself more attractive to you — have I failed?'

'There's an audience that demands to be treated as an intelligent being,' Steven Morrissey says a few days later. ‘They want to enjoy pop music, but they don't want to be tapped on the head and cheated. I think the records mean a great deal to them and I can understand that. If we have a precious record we feel quite dedicated to the person who made it.'

At 29, Morrissey is the quintessential fan-turned-star. Brought up in a period when pop was powerful and clocked its power in a sequence of bizarre and shocking images, he retains an unfashionable belief in the essential worth of pop culture.  Subject to many obsessions, he has himself become the object of obsession, making real the possibility of transformation that has always been pop's promise.

His reward has been a set of followers who, if not as numerous as those for Bros, are easily their equal in fanaticism. At his recent Wolverhampton concert (his first in over a year), they mobbed the stage, 'I get letters from people of both sexes who feel an obligation to say something terribly strong in order for me to respond,’ he says, 'Or they have sent me underwear and said, “Wear this for a month and send it back to me", which I don't plan to do.’ He pauses. ‘For hygienic reasons.’

If most modem pop idolises success, health and responsibility, Morrissey succeeds by making a fetish of failure, illness  and violence. His nineteenth hit single, ‘The Last of the Famous International Playboys’, which cites the Kray Twins, is the latest to celebrate a whole constellation of beautiful losers, who have been crippled by various forms of class or gender disadvantage, or by their own capacity for self-destruction. ‘They make the best people,' he says simply.

This cosmology is best seen on the series of sleeves which he designed for records by his previous group, The Smiths. The references come from a period between the mid-Fifties and the mid-Sixties when pop culture was vigorous and society seemed to be on the move: Billy Fury, Pat Phoenix, Terence Stamp, Shelagh Delaney.

‘Why don’t you leave me alone?' cries Jo in Delaney’s ‘A Taste of Honey', ‘I feel like throwing myself in the river.' ‘I wouldn’t do that,' replies camp Geoff, 'It's full of rubbish.’ This mixture of extravagant Angst and the deflationary retort is typical of Morrissey. In person, he speaks with confidence and a sure knowledge of his own manipulativeness. He has a dry wit which undercuts his tendency towards preciousness.

'Sixteen, clumsy and shy,' Morrissey sings on The Smiths' ‘Half A Person’; ‘That’s the story of my life.’ He was born in Manchester in May 1959, his father a hospital porter and his mother a librarian. He went to St Mary’s Secondary Modem, Stretford, and, although good at running, suffered from being intelligent in an environment where intelligence was surplus to requirements. He withdrew into books and pop culture.

In Sixties Manchester, ‘kitchen sink’ films and the great beat boom were overshadowed by one terrible event. The slowly unfurling knowledge of the murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley gripped the city in a fear that is now difficult to imagine. ‘Oh Manchester,' Morrissey sings on ‘Suffer Little Children’, ‘So much to answer for.’

These events left Morrissey with an obsession with meditated violence that still continues: ‘See, in our lifetime those who kill/ The newsworld hands them stardom,' he sings on ‘Playboys’. ‘It’s really just my life,' he explains, ‘and my vision of the media. I do see a great deal of violence.’ He nevertheless remains fascinated by the macho, working-class culture he has escaped: the video for ‘Playboys’ features the latest in a series of idealised ‘Ordinary Boys’.

‘Above all I envy their sense of freedom,’ he says. They don’t need to use their imagination all that much, they act upon impulse — and that’s very enviable. Theirs is a naturalness which I think is a great art form, which I can’t even aspire to. I don’t feel natural even when I’m fast asleep. The only impulse I have ever served is making records and doing sleeves. That was the opening for it all. Before that it was all twisted.’

An early Morrissey obsession was the androgynous New York Dolls: ‘It was the sort of rock 'n' roll rebellion I wanted to associate myself with.' He was given confidence by another enfranchising pop moment that, although it lacked the mass appeal of the Sixties beat boom, was equally mythic.

In the summer of 1976, two Sex Pistols performances in Manchester inspired a whole generation of local musicians. To Morrissey, the most important group was not the Sex Pistols but the Buzzcocks: ‘I liked the intellectual edge and the wit. I really despised the idea that in order to be in a group and to play hard music you had to be covered in your own vomit.’

While all around him were forming groups, Morrissey was left stranded, seemingly condemned to a life like that of Keith Waterhouse’s ‘Billy Liar’: dreaming of being a successful writer yet unable to translate fantasy into reality. The transformation came in 1982 when he was bullied into activity by a determined young guitarist called Johnny Marr. Together with the rhythm section of Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, Marr and Morrissey called themselves The Smiths: ‘In a formal way this meant that it could be anybody.’

The Smiths’ first single, released in May 1983, was triumphal over Morrissey’s ‘poverty and dislike'. ’Hand In Glove' remains a haunting evocation of desire. Its sheer drive set the pattern that would follow through much of The Smiths’ subsequent four-year career: often self-mockingly lugubrious lyrics set against attacking, inventive guitar lines within a traditional rock format. 

The tension between hard rock and androgyny — best heard on songs like ‘Shakespeare’s Sister' — gave the early Smiths much of their bite. If Johnny Marr was steeped in the Sixties rock of the Byrds or the Kinks, Morrissey was obsessed by singers like Marianne Faithfull and Twinkle, or Sandie Shaw, whom he put in the charts with a version of ‘Hand In Glove'.

More unusually, Morrissey actually had ideas about sex and gender politics: ‘I read Kate Millett, Shere Hite and Jack Nicholls's “Men’s Liberation”, which is still my favourite,’ he says. This came out in songs like the superb ‘Girl Afraid’, where the world was seen from both the male and female point of view. It also enabled The Smiths to pull off that rarity, the convincing ballad, with deceptive ease.

With such a complex package, Morrissey developed the media savvy that has dominated his career. When the nature of his own sexuality was questioned, he changed the issue by asserting his ‘celibacy', 'In the mid-Seventies I was partitioning feminism and masculinism,’ he now says. ‘But later it occurred to me that the root of my feelings about the world was that I never saw any politics or barriers. I would take everybody on a non-sexual level, which is something most people cannot do.'

The Smiths quickly attracted controversy: in 1984 there were press stories about this sick group that wrote songs about child molestation ('Reel Around The Fountain’) or the Moors Murders (‘Suffer Little Children'). Their 1985 LP, ‘Meat Is Murder’, contained a militant plea for vegetarianism with the distinctly republican ‘Nowhere Fast'. At the same time, Morrissey gave interviews denouncing the Royal Family.

This reputation for contentious speaking is part of Morrissey’s media desirability and has trapped him. In 1984, he advocated the assassination of Margarer Thatcher. If this was taken as an extravagant gesture, then a 1986 interview around the time of the most successful Smiths single, ‘Panic’, saw him make statements about black music which some interpreted as racist. The ensuing row was unpleasant and fruitless.

Yet Morrissey had blundered into a truth that was contained in The Smiths' music. At the time, the London-based style media was busy pumping out the image of a club-going youth united in modish consumption: this ignored the experience of many young people around the country who were neither aspirant nor wished to he. Throughout their career, The Smiths mapped out an England of ‘disused railway lines’, ‘humdrum towns’, of ‘Leeds, Carlisle, Humberside'.

Songs like ‘London’ showed the contemporary reality of those Sixties ‘kitchen sink’ films, of youths forced ‘to travel south again’ to find work or fulfil their dreams. Against a background of crunching hard rock, Morrissey crooned his credo: ‘Life is very long, when you’re lonely.'

The Smiths’ fragile high-wire act collapsed in the autumn of 1987, just after a ‘South Bank Show’ special acted as an imprimatur of the group’s status. Morrissey’s celebrity had at times made him veer towards self-parody, overshadowing the contributions of the rest of the group. The Smiths had failed to settle on a manager: the appointment of Ken Friedman exacerbated the differences between Morrissey and Marr, whose guitar prowess made him part of the international rock aristocracy.

The group was also dissatisfied with Rough Trade, the independent label which had fostered their career but which could hardly get them a Top Ten single. ‘Independence' was a central ideological plank to The Smiths: their signing to EMI was seen as the end of an era.

In the end, Morrissey says, 'wc were just tired. We had done so much so quickly that we needed a period away from each other. We were snapping for pathetic reasons, and ultimately I'm slightly embarrassed that I cannot produce reason why The Smiths broke up.'

Since then Morrissey has struggled to find the right partner. Last year’s ‘Viva Hate', written with Stephen Street, contained material that at its best — like ‘Everything Is Like Sunday’ — matched anything The Smiths had ever done. Other songs like ‘Late Night Maudlin Street' seemed repetitive. ‘I knew I’d done it before,’ Morrissey says simply, ‘but I wanted to do it again.’ On ‘Playboys' he reconstituted The Smiths without Johnny Marr, deliberately posing the question of a reunion.

Today Morrissey is in a unique, if equivocal, position. He is a performer whose celebrity outweighs his record sales. This has made him nervous; like many people who have turned themselves into the ‘living sign' of celebrity, he flirts with the media, while being obsessively private. He lives alone in a suburb of south Manchester and has ‘a secret sect of friends. I find it very hard unravelling and getting to know new people.’ 

‘Fame, fatal fame,’ he sang in 1986; ‘It can play hideous tricks on the brain.' Does it? ‘Practically all of what I write is autobiographical,’ he says. ‘It’s quite confusing meeting strangers, knowing that they possibly know a great deal about you and you absolutely nothing about them. They’ve got the jump on you in good ways and bad ways; they know your strengths and weaknesses, you want to trust them but you don’t know them.'

This isolation has also made him capricious: he participates in the merry-go-round of music industry promotion at whim, attempting to stage-manage his press at the same time as he cancels appointments at the last minute.

He still has no manager; he knows this has limited his career in an export industry. 'I can’t plan my diary for the next 12 months and have things filled up,’ he says. ‘I have to do what I want to do when I want to do it. I have no inclination to be a global face.’

Morrissey’s current short-term strategy is to concentrate on ‘revitalising’ the teenage singles market. Called ‘Interesting Drug’, his next single records his views on Acid House, culture whose music he despises but which he finds optimistic. ‘The Government refers to people with contempt, particularly in the North,’ he says. 'I think people arc fighting against it, saying, “We’re not going to accept this depression any more.” I like that sense of rebellion.'

In many ways, Morrissey is the last teenage pop star. If pop culture was originally predicated on a commercialised adolescence, its stars embodied powerful adolescent emotions, which today’s pop culture, in its quest for an ‘adult’ market, denies. In revolt against this adulthood, Morrissey has asserted the primacy of adolescence. In his continued revenge on the world, he has delivered a series of epigrams which defines a marginalised England.

By that process, he has marginalised himself, but it’s not a phase, it’s his life. ‘It stretches beyond adolescence,’ he says, 'I never felt any obligation to “settle down”. I still have great, passionate obsessions and hope that I will always feel the same way.'

'Interesting Drug' is released by EMI next month.