1988 03 05 Morrissey "Suedehead" video

FOR MORRISSEY, JAMES DEAN IS NOT DEAD

“WEIRD!" SCREAMED the headline in the Daily Mirror’s White Hot Club. “EXCLUSIVE!" it frothed on, "MORRISSEY sits on James Dean’s Grave”.

Below this is a story - “shock”, “macabre” the usual furniture - about the promotional video for Mozza’s ‘Suedehead’ smash. It's complete with made up quotes and a little tale recounting how the star wept after seeing the grave of his long-time hero. While nowhere near as scuzzy as her classic Beastie Boys stitch-up, the tone of the whole thing makes you glad that Gill Pringle can’t spell “necrophelia”. It’s also quite a lot of fuss over something as common or garden as a video, but then this is no ordinary mime-a-long fashion show...

Most will be familiar with it by now but for those of you whose TVs are on the blink, ‘the film’ (as both its director, Tim Broad, and star prefer it to be called) follows Morrissey from the streets of London to the snowy wastes of Fairmount, Indiana, birthplace of James Dean.

In and around the farm where Dean was raised we see Morrissey taking pictures, reading (poetry and an original letter of Dean’s) and behaving strangely - sitting astride a motorbike, playing bongo drums surrounded by quizzical cattle and driving a tractor.

And, at the film’s weird, shocking, macabre and exclusive culmination, Morrissey visits Dean’s grave while the latter’s ghostily superimposed features look on (the legend watching the legend watching the legend...).

All shot on celluloid and aspiring to something worlds distant from the routine sexy-champagne-and-pop visual, ‘Suedehead’ is indeed unusual, and throws up a mixture of insights and puzzles about everyone's favourite tortured torso...

The film is the third collaboration between Morrissey and Tim Broad - “I did the films for ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ and ‘I Started Something ... ’ which were effectively for Morrissey because The Smiths had already split up.” He’d previously worked on the Mary Chain’s image-intense videos. He laughs at the notion that he's some kind of masochist.

“People say that the Jesus and Mary Chain are difficult and to some extent they are. They say the same thing about Morrissey, particularly in relation to video, but I’ve never experienced that. What he, and the Mary Chain, are particularly concerned with is seeing that nothing goes out with which they aren’t happy.’’

The idea for the ‘Suedehead’ film was Morrissey’s, if I'd been in Broad's position when it was first proposed the mental alarm bells would've been clanging. There seems a very real danger of Morrissey swamping us with his obsessions.

“That wasn't a problem for me. James Dean is an image that’s both familiar and intriguing. It’s unlikely that there’s a person over the age of six who doesn’t recognise Dean, yet there isn’t that much use made of his image. For one thing, there isn’t that much available footage, unlike, say, Marilyn Monroe.

“To my mind, Morrissey is a genius and a poet, but he’s also a die-hard fan. His concern with James Dean or Oscar Wilde will continue because it’s very real, not contrived. It’s very real to him - they’re his heroes, his idols. In some ways I think Dean is his spirit guide.

“In any case, the film is not just to do with Morrissey. Anyone who’s fascinated by Dean will recognise certain images, what we’ve tried to do, in three and a half minutes, is gain a sense of pilgrimage, of the journey taken by Morrissey."

Morrrissey himself doesn't believe that his experiences in Indiana will purge him of his Dean fixation, though he was aware of the dangers inherent in the project.

“Dave Wilde has a quote for all occasions - ‘touch it and the bloom is gone'. Six weeks ago a strong obsession remained untouched. Dreams are often better than reality, and so on. I would hate to think that the film had an ironed out Athena glaze.Tim Broad has a surgeon's hands, I strongly urge any half-dead artist to dial his number.

“As we drove around Fairmount I had the oddest sensation that I’d been there before, however, I hadn't. Will I feel the same push-pull emotion when I meet Steven Wells? I expect so. Many of the scenes were direct from celebrated photographs of Dean taken by Dennis Stock for Time magazine and published in the book James Dean Revisited. The bongos I play were the very ones used by Dean in those photos.”

Work on the film - with the full co-operation of the Dean family - went, Broad recalls, remarkably smoothly.

“On this particular occasion Morrissey was so excited and thrilled, just to be there that he was prepared to do anything. Like getting up on the tractor and driving it, that's going to surprise a lot of people.

“The Dean family were marvellous. They had to approve the finished film and asked us to make only one change. The shot of Dean’s letter had focussed on the words ’I want to die'. They asked us to leave that out so we used the bottom of the page where he’d signed himself 'Jim Brando Clift Dean!’"

The rumour that the success of the filming had prompted talk of Broad and Morrissey doing a far longer work on Dean’s life and death draws a guardedly non-committal response from the former. The latter, unsurprisingly, is far more forthcoming; asked if it’s a real possibility he reckons:

“Yes, any excuse to skate down the BBC’s corridors...”

And, finally, back to the fictional and frightening world of Gill Pringle. Tim Broad was there, but can’t recall Morrissey weeping over Dean’s tombstone.

“His eyes could’ve been watering from the intense wind and cold! Seriously, it was a very, very, emotional thing for him, the end of a very personal quest.

“I think the film conveys some of that emotional thing, particularly in the scene where Morrissey stares at Dean’s footprints, handprints and signature set in the concrete in the barn (it's not widely known, but Dean did those when he was twelve years old), and the last bit with Dean looking over his own grave, and Morrissey... I find that terribly moving..."

The last word on La Pringle’s attempts to find dirt beneath angel’s fingernails goes to Morrissey.

Naturally.

"I was very annoyed by this. Gill Pringle will only commit to paper anything that isn’t true. Having no real access to artists, she consequently creates fictional quotes to disturb the millions of readers who automatically overlook her page."

Danny Kelly