1990 11 Morrissey Time Out Interview

BY JINGO!

Miserabilist and fabled celibate Morrissey, pop music’s wounded fawn, ponders the impermanence of fame, the intractability of Twixes, and what it means to be British.

BY NICK COLEMAN

‘I don’t want the world to read this interview — if indeed they have the time — and conjure up the image of a crooked arthritic figure in a little chair with his head between his knees and deep circles beneath unseeing eyes — even though it’s a slightly accurate picture ... considering what I’ve been through, considering that operation, yes, hmm ..

How would you like to be perceived then? If you had to write up the interview you’ve just done, how would you want it to work on your readers?

‘I’d settle for blind adoration. And I’m not trying to be funny. I’m not being funny.’

Morrissey is in a stew. Sitting back on his little chair in the mullioned bay with one knee under his chin, he stares with struggling eyes into the autumn of the Manor gardens. One arm crosses his body to tap intently at the flesh beneath his ear; the other is vee-ed like a bracket in front of his leg, the palm flat as if to catch whatever comes out of his mouth. He swallows hard. His face scrunches. The Twix in his throat is freed. And Morrissey shall not die, gagging on toffee, in an English idyll, in the arms of the press.

And isn’t that desire for blind adoration the inevitable result of the fear of what else might come?

He sniggers. ‘That question isn’t as intelligent as it sounds.’ He sniggers again, shifts his leg down as if weary of its solicitations and fixes his face. Morrissey is in a stew because that’s his job.

The unpriapic fawn is at a funny stage in his career. He is neither coming nor going. At the noon of his life he is eclipsed by the moon of his livelihood. And though he’d claim that his life and livelihood are indivisible, he must at least be wondering. What if the Smiths were meant to be the whole story? What if the rock rag juveniles are right and I am superfluous? And what if England really is choking on the sticky sweetness of its own decay? Lord, who’d run a cricket team!

‘I am personally haunted by the exclamation mark,’ he says, referring to the excitable manner in which his jests are usually recorded, and it’s clear that he is genuinely distressed by this grammatical betrayal. No two ways about it, Morrissey’s lugubrious monotone should be represented in the typeface of parish magazines and punctuated with bathos. It should be transported to the depot in a wheezing Bedford van and distributed on street comers by testy old geezers with red knuckles and poisonous breath. It should be read with love.

Up Mozzer’s Nose

Morrissey’s appeal is complex but, in effect, he is the small child in the shopping mall who has been cruelly separated from his mother. It’s not the child himself but the fact of his isolation, his telegraphed vulnerability, that brings him to our attention, commands our empathy and elicits our desire. And this gets a mile up Mozzer’s nose. This is why he’ll go for the blind adoration every time. It also partly explains why half the time he sounds like a Victorian moralist without a Victorian value to his name.

‘I’m not sure what makes it Victorian,’ he’d said earlier in the interview, sitting comfortably in the window. ‘I’m terribly fond of the Brontes and George Eliot, far more so than of people like Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger. But I often wonder if it’s less a reflection of how I am than a question of how other people tend to behave in the pop celebrity syndrome. It’s as if, as soon as they become successful, they instantly begin to make an effort to prove to the world how outstandingly normal they are. That has never occurred to me.

‘A lot of people get very frightened of being famous and realise that even if your career ends you can never go back. In 20 years you can be hanging around in a carpark behind Marks & Spencer’s and you’ll be recognised. But it will not be for yourself but for that period of your life when you were famous. If you had to pinpoint the curse of fame, that’s probably it.’ He snorts. ‘Of course, it’s less of a curse if you continue to be famous.’

And where are you on fame’s dismal curve?

‘I haven’t a clue.’

But it must be qualitatively different now from when you were in the Smiths? You’ve been sniped at an awful lot since their demise, and particularly over the past year.

Morrissey hitches himself up, as if trying to grow. ‘I am aware of the fact that there is no question of “Piccadilly Palare” [his current single] going on any radio A-list anywhere. I feel that I’m repeatedly overjudged. I find that there are very few people who have been successful, and established themselves in the way that I have — which is in an honest way.. . I find that it’s uncommon for somebody to be so fiercely judged, continually and for ever. I often feel — and this is where neurosis really takes its hold — that there is a specific quality of judgement that is applied to me by journalists, that isn’t applied to anybody else.’

Isn’t that because you yourself are so judgemental, though? 

‘That’s part of it. The other part of it, at a random guess, is that I’m deemed brazen enough not to seem inconsequential.’ 

Steven Morrissey has never been inconsequential; not in his own mind, however much he has disliked himself. And the Smiths were the most English British group of the ’80s. This was because they refused to accept that the index-linkage of pop music with industry — in particular, the leisure industry - was in any way sexy. Hell’s bells, Morrissey would rather do without sex than go down on that one! Furthermore, the Smiths articulated the great English fear of heaven being an English seaside resort, run down, out of season and choking with barren contentment.

Outside the glass the tawny gardens are not stirring.

‘Joan Sims? [just one of many of the heroic figures of Little England to appear in his videos] I admire the mould from which she was cast.’ In fact, he ‘admires the sense of Englishness which has now gone’, and despairs because it is now so difficult to understand what the word ‘British’ means. ‘Even newscasters speak in these very clipped tones and will say things like Bridish, like Americans. It’s just not possible to understand what England was or was supposed to be without delving somewhat into the past. Because it isn’t there anymore. You can’t see it. Not even in modern British films, because they’re made to please American backers. British pop music is largely designed to sell in other countries. So Joan Sims is definitely from the period of England that I find most attractive; when England seemed to be unshakeably English.’

I remind him about what Orson Welles once said about the necessity of Falstaff always having blue eyes, but he’s not to be drawn. He knows the ground we’re on like the back of his hand and he’s not about to step on any mines — though he does look askance at my theory that, for the past decade, the ’50s have represented to the English collective unconscious a notional Merrie England. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he contends. ‘All wasn’t quite lost even at the beginning of the '70s, but by the beginning of the ’80s it was gone, completely.’ He’s missing the point. Merrie England has never existed, except in the imaginary blue of a fat old man’s disappointed gaze.

But still, he’s right when he says that American culture, by comparison, has not had to ‘change its aesthetics’ in the slightest to cope with the late twentieth century.

Foppy Nostalgia

‘What makes England so sad in 1990,’ he says, turning up the volume a little, ‘is that people do actually mourn the loss of its identity more than they’ll admit. It can sound like foppy nostalgia, I know. It can sound like one has actually stopped and isn’t physically in the present, and it can also be considered part of that typical ageing process, like when people in the ’50s mourned the turn of the century. But with me it’s none of these things. I know that England in 1990 is a very sad country because, now, it’s simply a function of other people’s ideas. This is also true of pop music but it’s on the wider scale that it’s frighteningly true.’

Does this business ever seem like fun?

‘Fun and fear. Fear of how trivial the people who have key positions in the music industry consider pop music to be. Sometimes I feel it’s pointless my trying to impress upon these people how important I want pop music to be. Because they won’t have it. A lot of people have a very closed approach to who or what is important in the history of pop and who or what isn’t. Often I feel that it’s only with extreme hindsight that we can consider who has contributed successfully to it. That’s why, in all our minds in 1990, the legendary names of pop music are still Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Stones, plus a few other names generally plucked from that era.’

But surely that’s simply because they shaped the language.

‘Yes, but also because pop is a distant thing now and it’s all over.’

Can anyone be that ‘legendary’ again?

‘I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t think it would be allowed. I think the book is very firmly closed.’

If you think that the book is firmly closed, why are you still doing it?

‘Not necessarily with the hope of being included in the index. But there are other reasons. . .’

Minor Twisted Pleasure

The Victorians loved the idea of people being too good for this world. Morrissey does too. To him it is not an ivy-hung graveyard of a notion.

‘I like this statement and I understand it well. And I would like to feel that somebody in this country... well, that they might apply it to me.’

Do you damage yourself?

‘Yes, I do a great deal of damage. I don’t make life very easy. I make it difficult in fact. There’s a certain minor twisted pleasure in doing so. It’s never a matter of trying to be outrageous. 1 think if you write songs that are by some definition considered to work against audience sympathy, then you are taking a dangerous path. I like to go by the confused route.’ And he explains how songwriting is a peculiar craft but also how ‘when it’s done right, it’s all that ever needs to be said about the life you live.

‘A lot of the people I have liked were, for me, only historical for one record.’ He smiles. ‘It would be really interesting to come across one astonishingly interesting, clever artist who only ever wanted to make one record.’ And he would be quite happy for ‘November Spawned A Monster’ to have been that record. It was a ‘pinnacle’. In its invasion of the mind of a ‘poor twisted child, so ugly, so ugly’, trapped and unlovable in its wheelchair, ‘it expresses me most accurately in a way that I’ve wanted to express something. It’s the record I have striven to make.’

Hook End Manor, where Morrissey has worked for the past few weeks on his next album, continues to bathe indulgently in autumn sunshine. After an hour or so the singer has relaxed sufficiently to not laugh at his own answers before he’s finished them. He reaches for the plate of Twixes. ‘Fun-size!’, he says.

And then nerves get the better of him and the toffee sticks in his throat. He hunches and ducks his head down low, as if to elongate his neck beyond the compass of the vile solution that is choking him. Rather than risk slapping him on the back, I offer to make my next question a long one. He nods mutely, and then gurgles: ‘Uh 'hink uh bit off more than uh c’n chew.’

Okay, Morrissey, your next solo album proper is due out in February, if I'm not mistaken, contingent on the many variables to which the music industry is prey. Tell me why you’re working with Mark Nevin, erstwhile co-leading light of Fairground Attraction, and Bedders, once the bass player in Madness?

Morrissey continues to tap at his throat, hunching and swallowing.

‘Uh. C’n you make the qu’stion a b't longah?’

Umm. Okay. What is the particular pleasure in working with the person who wrote ‘Perfect’?

‘Now c’n you ask the qu’stion backwards?’

Morrissey’s latest alburn, ‘Bona Drag’, and single, ‘Piccadilly Palare’, are out on HMV.