Autobiography (17 page)

‘There appears to be no lighting in this room,’
I say.

‘Uuh, you’ll find a reading light by the bed,’
I am told.

‘Yes, but I don’t want to read. I want to unpack, but I can’t see anything.’

‘Uuh, that’s the only room available.’

I open the curtains and cracks of city light throw slits of hope into the room as I hear a loud fritter behind me. I turn to witness a line of hamster-sized cockroaches race across the wonky thrift-store dresser. To my right three more roaches fish about beneath the television stand, and the scurry of horses’ hooves is heard coming from the bathroom. I lean in, click on the light switch, and five large roaches trammel the sharp corners of the washstand. I telephone Geoff, who is staying on the Upper East Side and concluding dinner at a friend’s apartment, having coaxed Morrissey and Marr – with child-like ease – to sign a deal with Sire Records that will land several platinum discs bearing Rough Trade’s otherwise unsellable logo on the Billboard charts.

‘Geoff, there are cockroaches ON the bed,’
my voice cracks.

‘Well, it’s only for a few nights,’
he says, signing off.

I attempt to find the other Smiths, but there are no replies at each door. I walk outside, not yet in possession of a credit card, and I have no hard cash, so I walk around darkening Manhattan – delaying a return to the hotel for as long as possible. When I finally return I find that my unpacked suitcase has disappeared. I race down to reception, half-tearful, half-manic.

‘Uuh, we moved you to ’nutha room.’

I sleep fully clothed in the new room – all lights burning. I walk onstage the following night at the Danceteria, and as I do so, my blindness and bewilderment lead me directly off the lip of the stage, and I crash at the feet of the assembled human spillage. Unaided, I scramble back up and onto the stage, and I limp directly off – past three blank musicians who are unable to cope with such embarrassment. My right leg is bruised from top to bottom. I step out of the toilet to a cold-blooded stare from Geoff Travis.

‘You know you’re going to have to go back on, don’t you?’
he says, my well-being mattering less and less as the seconds pass. The other three Smiths say nothing, but Andy is laughing. For me, words fitting enough to describe the gloom have yet to be invented. As I walk back out, a shrill female voice from the audience screeches
‘WHAT is WROOOOOOOOONG with yew?’

Hello, America.

The following day we are set to move on to New Jersey (although, offhand, I have no idea why). Geoff tells me that he will not be coming the rest of the way with us – as if this might make any difference. His investment secured by the signatures on the contract, Geoff is not quite interested enough to endure a second American gig. I am then led across the hallway to where Mike has his room, and there he sits upright in bed – a mass of large red sores covering his face and upper body. It is explained to me that Mike had shared his bed last night and that the unlucky dalliance left him with an outbreak of Lebanese warts. This now means that our trips to New Jersey and Boston must be scrapped, yet we cannot leave the country until the infected body is able to travel. I pass several more days in New York by myself. Johnny is nowhere to be seen, and I do not lay eyes on him once during my entire stay at the Algonquin. I am baffled, or mentally deficient, or both, but certainly I am deliberately cut off from everyone, as a prearranged plot kicks into full gear. I am being frozen out. It is a difficult week of rigid iceberg weather, as I dig despairingly at the Strand Bookshop and cough my way through the cheap eateries of Times Square slime, and I now fully realize that the other three Smiths are taking great steps to oust me. Why, I do not know. New York has not yet been daubed with New World flash and brightness – no sign, as yet, of the computer age, and here in the wrong section of Fifth Avenue it is still a quagmire of midnight cowboys and sterile cuckoos. Perhaps it is the best of times for New York City. I am never troubled or approached as I sit alone in Washington Square. Smells abound unique to this city, and a warring settlement moves too fast, and the lonely traveler is engulfed. When we all finally meet at the airport there is enough silence to indicate the end. As we separate in Manchester, fatality shrieks. Behind my back, Joe Moss has coerced Johnny, Andy and Mike into axing the singer, and Joe carts all three buffos off to a legal firm in order to sharpen the blade against the Morrissey monolith. Since Joe himself has written himself out of the picture, he has no wish to see the little tugboat sail on, and the Morrissey monsoon must go. For a while, the other three agree with him.

It takes Johnny a few weeks to lance the views of others out of his system, and he then calls me. Hanging by a thread, we resume – deloused of Joe Moss. May 5th 1984 is departure date for a European tour, and at the airport in Manchester I see
diana dors dead
shrieking from the front page of the
Sun
newspaper.
oh my diana
headlines the
Daily Star
, and the
Daily Mirror
keeps alliteration alive with
diana dors dies
. Although the press had always raced to name Diana Dors as a nationally corrupting influence (because she was happy and a free spirit), by her death she has won them over. Death evidently has its uses.

The European tour is a success, although there are no band wages to be had at its close. We are ‘we’ again. Evidently Joe Moss as lead singer wasn’t something that Johnny, Andy or Mike thought helpful. On a flight to Finland I plonk a headset onto Martha DeFoe’s ears so that she will hear
Death
by Klaus Nomi, and whilst listening intently she bursts into tears. As Martha sobs, I do too, and I run into the toilet to avoid the embarrassment of appearing too human.

Engineer Stephen Street had worked on the unkillable
Heaven knows I’m miserable now
, and admirably so. He was shy and receptive and three thoughts ahead of every situation – technically masterful and very patient. I suggest that we make the second album not with John Porter but with Stephen alone, and that we fill in all the artistic bits ourselves. At once, all band members disagreed, and only I give the Stephen Street vote.

Johnny’s affectionate closeness to John Porter had finally clicked beyond price with
How soon is now?
,
and so dazed had I been that I ran from the studio with a final mix and jumped into a black cab, piling out at Collier Street, where I took the stairs five at a time and powered into Geoff’s office. Geoff swivels in a large chair and I balance on a footstool as the song plays.
How soon is now?
struck me as a new landmark, but once the track had ended, Geoff broke the silence:

‘WHAT is Johnny doing?’
he said,
‘THAT is just NOISE.’

The Collier Street clouds lowered, and
How soon is now?
resigned itself to B-side status. With further return, Geoff removes his glasses. This means he is about to tell me something unpalatable and he’d rather do it in darkness.

‘Now, you realize that everyone is saying that every Smiths song sounds the same?’
Geoff had an impressive knack of implying in his question the answer that he’d prefer. But the curtain fell with a clank. I am a puzzled child on the St Anne’s sands, shouting to sea-sounds of wave and gull. I am that stretch of sand that the sea never reaches. Like dumpy relatives, the Smiths were stuck with Geoff, and he with us, until term’s end (a term which he – not we – would take steps to extend).

Undernourished and growing out of the wrong soil, I knew at this time that a lot of people found me hard to take, and for the most part I understood why. Although a passably human creature on the outside, the swirling soul within seemed to speak up for the most awkward people on the planet. Somewhere deep within, my only pleasure was to out-endure people’s patience. Against sane judgment, I risked unpopularity with my adrift physicality; but there it was, and how could the world possibly be in need of yet another Phil Collins? The subject of sex remained theoretical, and no one expressed any interest in me, which I didn’t mind as long as I could create.

Gill Smith suddenly wound her way in as a hottie of blouse-ripping biological urge, but I take too long as I measure chemistry against meaning and she moves on like a hot-blooded goat in search of a rutting ram.
Shakespeare’s sister
bursts out one night in a snowbound studio in Surrey. I felt that we had outstripped ourselves once again, and I loved Andy’s cello denouement. To his credit, Geoff jumped into his battered Astra and chugged his way through a blizzard to hear the song at the studio, but he is not impressed with it
.
He lays out his compromise:
‘I’ll release this as a single
if you give your approval for
How soon is now?
to come out first – as an A-side.’

This was quite rich considering how Geoff had dismissed
How soon is now?
as ‘just noise’ a few months previously. The gabbing tongue gabs, and having gabbed, gabs on.

In the event, neither
Shakespeare’s sister
nor
How soon is now?
troubles the Top 20, and even worse is the fate of
That j
oke isn’t funny anymore
– dead in the water at number 46. The Smiths are repeatedly pointed to as the hottest band in the
country, yet we cannot respond with a visible hit
single.

Recording what would become the
Meat is Murder
album in a predictably cheap studio in Liverpool, I saw relief in everyone to be away from John Porter. Mike, at last, was free to play his drums his own way – rock-steady, yet with horse-race pace. Andy’s brilliance flourished without the schoolmasterly ear of John Porter. The key to everything, Johnny finally made his first album. I could see John’s worth on
How soon is now?
, but Johnny, Andy or Mike were not musicians who needed to be told what to play. When they allowed this to happen – with
The Smiths
– the results were flat. I share the shame of being led. John had asked me to record
Reel around the fountain
line by line – that is, singing one line and then stopping the tape, singing the second line and then stopping the tape. I found this to be a horrific idea, but I bowed to someone who I assumed had something pictorial up his sleeve. He didn’t.

With
Meat is Murder
we thrashed through all of the new songs back-to-back in order to see – just for the hell of it – where everything would land. Out poured the signature Smiths’ powerhouse full-tilt that had been lost on the debut. Straight away the hard Ardwick aria spits out as
The headmaster ritual
; a live-wire spitfire guitar sound that takes on all-comers; bass domination instant on
Rusholme r
uffians
; weighty and bruiser drums on
I want the one I can’t have.
The Smiths began to stand upright. The aspirant moment is the title track, each musical notation an image, the subject dropped into the pop arena for the first time, and I relish to the point of tears this chance to give voice to the millions of beings that are butchered every single day in order to provide money for agriculturalist butchers.
Meat is Murder
enters the UK album chart at number 1, kicking Bruce Springsteen’s
Born in the USA
off the top spot. Although the title track of Springsteen’s album continues to blast from radio stations on constant rotation, no radio station ever plays
Meat is Murder.
In the year of 1985, abuse and torture of animals is protected under various British laws, and if you therefore want to act in defense of animals then you are forced to break the law. To publicly make the observation that meat is murder is, in fact, to claim that the law is wrong. It is also to suggest that all British judges who enjoy hunting and shooting and fishing, and who have personal investments in animal industries, are themselves terrorists, which, when viewed from any perspective, is undeniable. The horror of animal abuse is now common knowledge due to such famous cases as Huntington Life Sciences, and the global conspiracy of animal abuse is so financially profitable to the highborn and the upscale that the judiciary reserve their most aggressive and severely exaggerated prison sentences for anyone who selflessly attempts to rescue animals from unimaginable conditions of torture. The debate has opened up considerably in recent years, and it is no longer denied by anyone that eating animals and fish are cruel things to do. You either approve of violence or you don’t, and nothing on earth is more violent or extreme than the meat industry. Generally, the media still believe that animals deserve all that they get – after all, they are not human, so how could their feelings matter? In return, the meat industry offers the human race a menu of colon cancer, heart disease, swine flu, E. coli, salmonella, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, mad cow disease, listeriosis, shellfish poisoning, bird flu, tongue cancer, and so on. Either slowly or quickly, all of the above kill carnivores, none of which matters much as long as money rolls in for the farming fatcats. Mad cow disease is, of course, mad farmer’s disease – since it is the madness of the farmer that destroys the cow. The cow itself does nothing to make itself mad. In the US, the homeland meat industry causes more deaths to Americans than any other known entity, and its array of contaminations place the heaviest burden on medical care. In the
UK
, the
NHS
has expressed anger towards people who smoke because such an avoidable habit ultimately saps
NHS
resources. Yet the same can be said of people who eat pigs and sheep. Environmentally, the meat industry damages the earth’s resources more than any other known threat, and 80 per cent of global warming has been attributed to meat production. Yet people are still encouraged to eat death, and to have death inside their bodies – long after tobacco warnings have cautioned people into fits of fear. Although many people are certain that the planet is for human use only, and that sea life should be called seafood, the British judiciary continues to label animal protectionists as ‘extremists’, whilst being unable to consider the Holocaust carnage inside every abattoir to be extreme. If the
RSPCA
were a credible organization they would not allow abattoirs to exist.