2006 03 Q Classic Morrissey and The Story of Manchester - Part 8 - Morrissey

THE HAPPY PRINCE

Morrissey - Wildean, gladioli-waving Smiths frontman turned rock royalty in self-imposed exile - tells Andrew Male about crippling shyness, celluloid escapism and finding there really is more to life than books.

MORRISSEY WAS ALWAYS pulling away from Manchester. Growing up in the south of the city during the ’60s - rain, urban decay, Brady, Hindley - young Steven Patrick Morrissey would regularly, and perhaps understandably, immerse himself in a romantic, fictional netherworld of film, music and comic books. By the mid-’70s this rag-bag of escapist stimuli had coalesced into some kind of philosophy and battleplan, based on the conviction that, in Manchester at least, there was no one else quite like Morrissey.

Look back at the lyrics Morrissey wrote with The Smiths between 1983 and 1987 and you discover a romantic soul forever looking for an emotional way out of this cold, industrial hell, like some lovelorn variant on Patrick McGoohan’s character in The Prisoner. And, as with Number Six, you sensed Morrissey’s liberation would never truly come.

Despite such solo-career highs as 1988’s Viva Hate and 1994’s Vauxhall And I, the late ’90s found Morrissey in a moribund emotional cul-de-sac - ponderous, self-pitying albums and a singer who was, in the lyrics of 1997’s Papa Jack, “slow, grieving and low”. Then, in June 2004, following a seven-year exile in Los Angeles - accumulating a hardcore Chicano fanbase and wrestling with the machinations of a high-court ruling in which the singer and Johnny Marr were ordered to pay former bassist ( um - no! ) Mike Joyce £1.25m in back earnings - the singer was back on a new label, Sanctuary, with a triumphant new album, You Are The Quarry.

However, it’s with his new LP, Ringleader Of The Tormentors, that Morrissey appears to have finally escaped his Manchester ghosts, freeing himself from the wretched and the lovelorn, revelling in songs of emotional uplift, defiance and passion. As a result, sitting with the 46-year-old in the bar of Rome’s Hotel De Russie as he sips a vodka and tonic, it feels a little like an audience with some Cold War defector who has made it over the Berlin Wall - happy to be free but wary of being called back into the cold at any time.

When did the muse strike you?

Well, you won’t believe this, but really when I was seven or eight. I was certainly hatching something and I felt in my own misguided way like a little work of art. And I was very determined, and I knew it would never be conventional. And it’s led me here.

Was it something you wrote or how you thought of yourself in your head?

Back then it was the realisation that all of the things that influenced me in film and in music could be gathered and blended and fed to me, as they were, and the final result would be something very unique because all the things that influenced me were quite haphazard and strange anyway. They weren’t always of a certain set course or direction, and I felt at the age of 14, 15 that there weren’t many people like me. And perhaps we all feel that...

But so many of us also have that other pull, to go and buy that pair of Adidas trainers that everyone else had, and blend in... Did that ever exist for you?

No. I was always very serious about it and I couldn’t laugh at my own vocation and I couldn’t pretend to be one of the gang, because I didn’t want to be.

What was the first film you fell in love with?

Good grief, probably some really creaky ’40s black-and-white British comedy with Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim, but through the ’70s I was obsessed with film. And I would watch as much as I could.

Well, there was film on the telly in the ’70s.

There was, there was, and every day there'd be something interesting on. All the memories I have of life are not of people but of songs or films, and for a while I was equally as impressed and taken by film as I was by song. Even though as a child I collected music very early.

What was the first song you heard where you thought, “My God!”

When I was a child I was obsessed with [the Righteous Brothers’] You've Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, the way the two voices were jumping around. The sound of the voices and, when I saw it on Top Of The Pops, the way they would not look at each other and sing those two parts was extraordinary. So I was always obsessed with vocal melodies and had no will to play a musical instrument. I didn't find that interesting.

But you did want to sing. You could easily have thought, “Why make it, why not write about it?”

I tried. I was a nuisance for a while with the press. I would just write letters to the press and long to be in the press, and I thought it was really glamorous, which... it is! But I was a complete failure.

But why did you think singing was the way?

Well, why not? It’s the combination of the words, the voice, the visuals. It’s everything thrown into the same pot, whereas if you just scribble you’re in a darkened room in a flat in Croydon - nobody knows what you look like or sound like. So to me the process of singing just took every glamorous element - film, [laughs]  travel, vegetables, everything - and it was there in this massive... wok.

But what was there in your upbringing that gave you that self-belief? Was there no one saying, “He hasn’t got a chance”?

Well, people always said that to me, of course, because the very idea of being a pop star when you’re eleven and a half and you're covered in acne is ludicrous. And in those days it seemed like such a powerful thing to do, there was so much mystique attached to it, whereas there isn’t now. But then it was such a godly thing to achieve, and I was incredibly inhibited, I was incredibly clumsy, and determined.

The two things don’t necessarily go together, do they? Clumsy and determined?

Believe me, I blended them expertly. So I don’t really blame people for queuing up and saying, “Forget it, you idiot”, but it just made me more determined because I knew, deep down, that I was reasonably glamorous, even if nobody else could see it.

Now there’s a thing. When I bought This Charming Man in 1984, I thought it was you on the cover, but it was Jean Marais...

It was, spiritually.

But also, the actor Patric Doonan, namechecked in Now My Heart Is Full [on 1994’s Vauxhall And I] ... he looks like you.

I’m flattered.

Did this conviction of your own glamour mean that you sought out the Morrissey look in other faces, other people?

Yes, I think I did -1 think I do. Do you know much about Patric Doonan? He killed himself in a road in Chelsea called Margaretta Terrace, just off Oakley Street, I think it was number four, and he gassed himself in the basement. I wrote to the people and [laughs] I said, “Do you realise? Do you know anything about the fact that Patric Doonan took his life in your basement?”

And they said, “How did you get this address? Please stop writing to us”...

No, they didn’t even bother to say that much, unfortunately. His brother, Tony, is still alive and is an actor, but it’s very difficult to find out anything about him. But the people that I saw great beauty and value and glamour in, other people didn’t share it. They really didn’t. So it was a lonely time really, and it’s just fascinating to me that all of this loneliness and this lack of prepossession, that in 2006 it all seems to make sense. Really. How come?

Was your interest because you knew these faces, these values were already on the wane in the ’70s, that they wouldn’t be around for much longer?

I think so, because it was part of the feeling that surely the things I feel can’t really amount to nothing, they can’t possibly - even though in bleak industrial-estate Manchester in 1970 it certainly seemed that way.

The first significant piece about you was in Sounds...

Yes it was, by a writer called Dave McCullough.

How did it feel at the time to read the first written piece about The Smiths?

It felt fantastic because he was ablaze with excitement and there was a fantastic run of photographs of me. I had always believed until that second in my life that I was not remotely photogenic, so I was amazed to see this strange creature...

Did you recognise him?

Not initially. I couldn’t believe I inhabited this body and I was here doing this thing. And so it was just unspeakably exciting. And in the very early days of The Smiths there wasn’t any paying dues involved. It was incredibly automatic. And the excitement of the emergence seemed to be felt by so many people, and everybody was joining in. Now when I view the commercial British chart, for want of a better expression, it now seems like the indie chart of the '80s has transferred itself to the British mainstream chart. Very surprising, but unfortunately it means that certain people of indie history who were excellent never had a chance and now anyone who remotely emulates that sound, in a vague sense, has an automatic entry at Number 9. And although it’s exciting that everything’s changed, it’s also slightly annoying that the spoils are awarded to diminutive cast members.

When the Smiths were first on Top Of The Pops, the school bus the next day was full of confused boys. Anger, hatred, excitement, all as a result of your appearance...

Mission accomplished!

Would you still get that now?

No, not at all, because the public taste has broadened and everybody’s more educated and much more unshockable.

So, daft question, do you think The Smiths could have only happened when they did?

Absolutely, and it was while the rest of the world wasn't looking. And that’s the only way that you can surprise people. You can’t surprise people if your arrival is trumpeted and announced by a record company. You have to creep up behind people, tap them on the shoulder and catch their expression when they turn round. As I do frequently.

Given how much you were initially influenced by writers like Shelagh Delaney and Elizabeth Smart, what was the first unfettered song you wrote? A song where you thought, “These people have helped me but now I can fly free,” as it were.

It’s a good question, and it probably didn't happen until very late, because a spark of me was always very, erm, unsure. And that’s when I think you rely on other people’s ideas and so forth. I know I overdid it with Shelagh Delaney. It took me a long, long time to shed that particular one.

But the impression was that she was yours as well. She wasn’t anyone else’s.

[Laughs] No, she wasn't! So yes, it was probably quite late but...

You couldn’t pinpoint an exact song?

Nope, not me. No one is ever quite as original as they think they are. I always considered the great mesh of all of my influences had emerged in me as something that was unique enough . The unfettered bits - as you call them - I think of as echoes .

What kind of things did you write at school?

I went to a very bad school, no creativity anywhere. So it wasn't until I went home that I could... plot.

Who encouraged you?

In school? Nobody. Nobody would dare encourage me. I really was one of those peculiar young people. “Don’t encourage him! Best not to. He’s bound to grow out of it... when he’s in his mid-forties.”

You say that there was a part of you that was unsure. Was there a Billy Liar moment, the temptation to run back and get the pint of milk and not go through with it?

Not at all. Once it began it was like a runaway train. There was no time to pause, and once I’d done a string of interviews I was certainly committed to something. And the interviews themselves were totally unusual. And I was really... not harnessed, but slightly branded.

Did you feel that you gave away too much of yourself in those early interviews?

I did, but it had to be that way. It couldn’t be any other way, otherwise we would have been the Nightingales or the June Brides or the Jasmine Minks. Jolly as those groups were, the world didn’t need another. I felt that I had to simply, er, dive in and to hell with what might happen.

In the foreword to Jeff Turner’s book on The Cockney Rejects, you say Turner sounded like he was singing to avoid murdering someone. What were you singing to avoid?

Being murdered.

Hmm, I kind of gave you that one...

Well you did rather...

The Meltdown Festival in 2004 seemed like a vindication - Morrissey’s crackpot passions turned into a glorious festival...

Well, it was. It was great to have the [New York] Dolls there. I never fell out of love with the Dolls. Have you seen the Bob Gruen DVD [All Dolled Up] ? It’s excellent, astonishing. There’s so much intimate footage, and it simply confirms all these things I’ve been saying about them for years. David Johansen was so clever for a 19-year-old, so witty, so literate, so unstoppable. And you don’t get that now with 19-year-old musicians anywhere on the planet. You don’t even get that with 30-year-old musicians.

Did you like the Dolls because they confounded ideas of taste, normality...?

Yeah, but they made it seem so casual. And fun. Probably too much fun for them, because they didn’t live as long as they should have and in this Bob Gruen film you can see that they’re, erm, shall we say slightly skew-whiff? You begin to see why they didn’t make it, because riding the crest of an incredible first album for so many prestigious gigs and important soundchecks, they were mentally absent, shall we say? What we’re really talking about here is battling with public taste, which is always so turgid, resistant to anybody’s who’s interesting. That was always frustrating, that the rest of the world wouldn’t take the things that were setting me alight. Why is the rest of the world so unprepared?

What are you reading at the moment?

I don’t really read any more. I feel very frustrated in bookshops. There are so many books and everything looks interesting. The covers are so fantastic, and I’m just so tired of buying books only to be disappointed. So I’ve lost faith in the novel and I don’t really go back to the classics.

What has maturity brought you?

Well, it’s certainly surprised me. For people of 17 or 18, someone of my age would seem reasonably prehistoric, but I don’t feel it. But I do feel... that the journey’s been interesting.

I always thought that the pathway to 30 was, erm, horrendous and the pathway to 40 was almost bearable. But within recent years I feel that there’s some kind of joy to be had in life.

That’s probably a statement you never imagined yourself saying.

Never. But I never imagined being this age.

That you would decide to make an exit.

That I would be asked to leave.

What are your defence mechanisms?

Sudden illness. It never fails.

What would you compromise for?

Nothing. What would there be?

Someone else?

They’d have to be incredibly good at darts. ■