Autobiography (18 page)

‘Ohhh
...
I absolutely HATE the Smiths!’
I hear Slade singer Noddy Holder say in a daytime radio interview, as in the same week Cockney Rebel singer Steve Harley tells the
Daily Mail
,
‘
I cannot STAND the Smiths
.
’
In Manchester, the famous
Manchester Evening News
desperately attempts to portray the Smiths as ‘fans’ of Hindley and Brady, and finally relent with the almost-invisible
BAD BOYS ARE
TOPS
when
Meat is Murder
hits number 1. How delightful to be thought ‘bad’, I muse, as I sit by a reading-light, pawing George Eliot’s
Scenes of Clerical Life.
Life is clearly so much better when you can get straight to the point.

Discounting
The Hollies Greatest Hits
(1968),
Meat is Murder
is the first studio album from a Manchester band ever to reach number 1 in England, and although rife with singles-to-be, we are already further at odds with Gentleman Geoff, who is insisting that
Hatful of Hollow
(Rough Trade’s biggest ever earner) does not count as a contractual album (being what, then? A bountiful gift from the land of the fairies? Random sweepings from the flagged floor of the Rough Trade workshop?), and an unfriendly deadlock digs in. In the US, Sire release
How s
oon is now?
as a single, but they cannot get it onto the Billboard 100 even though the song is receiving national airplay and garnishing fantastic attention from coast to coast. Sire then paste together a predictably vomit-inducing promotional video to accompany the single, and my heavy heart sinks further as I witness the cold-blooded mess on VHS. The Smiths will encircle the US twice – to quite outstanding success in large arenas – yet Sire cannot get a television spot for the band. We have no publicist, and we have no support from the label. At a chaotically sold-out Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles I announce:

‘I would like to thank those who made all of this possible
...
the Smiths’
– it is petulant, of course, but it’s the only way to get the point across.

Seymour Stein smiles:
‘We have no idea how you’re selling so many tickets!’
to which smiles and shrugs are meant to follow.

What he is really saying is that Sire have done nothing at all to pitch the Smiths in the US. In Los Angeles, our first visit to the city comprises two sold-out shows at the Palladium, and business elsewhere is even stronger – from Boston Great Woods to 12,000 tickets sold in Toronto. There is no media or press interest. It is unfortunate, and sad. I point Seymour Stein towards our support band James, whom he then signs, and who manage a hit single on the Billboard 100. Even our support band in the UK (Easterhouse) edge onto the Billboard 100, yet Sire cannot manage a hit single for the Smiths themselves – not even after two voluminous tours of screaming hysteria and stage invasions. There is no one in the wings to document or organize, and not even an American photo-session is suggested. Still travelling economy, the Smiths conclude each tour penniless – the funny and the lonely side of it all. Our mouths taped shut, we had no idea that the young audiences of America and Canada would be so feverish.
Rolling Stone
magazine repeatedly said
‘No, thanks,’
and have kept their word for thirty years, yet they will applaud any sub-Smiths progeny who taps on their bunker. But that’s life. Go first and be sure of a hard time.

Pain continues as a source of inspiration. Back in darkness, we begin recording
The Queen is Dead.
Geoff had interestingly suggested George Martin as a producer – which is one of Geoff’s very rare magnanimous proposals. George Martin declines, saying that he only wants to be known for his work with the Beatles. Johnny and I then have tea with Tony Visconti, most famously associated with the supremely noble works of T. Rex and David Bowie, but after our meeting Tony also declines. Free to howl again, I do so, and we record
The Queen is Dead
as we had recorded
Meat is Murder
– with Stephen Street making sense of it all. Johnny is in the full vigor of his greatness. He is a deluge of ideas and motion, and it streams from his every touch on
The Queen is Dead.
The chords are biteable and studlike, and it is Johnny’s soaring attitude that leads Andy and Mike. Although I am now outstripped by the Smiths success (I had no idea that it would jump to such proportions), the lesson deep in my soul remains the same: the music always comes first – before lawyers and accountants – and I am suddenly bolder in demeanor. I am now living at 66 Cadogan Square in Chelsea, as the Smiths zoom empirically, with the press always within earshot, complicating every question and inventing meddlesome Morrissey quotes. It is mostly amusing, and often deadly.

Once
The Queen is Dead
has been recorded, Geoff serves a writ upon me at Cadogan Square which states that the album will not be released until a court hearing decides whether or not
Hatful of Hollow
counts as a contractual album.
There would of course be no need for a court hearing if contractually there were no grey areas on the matter. But there were, and so it was now merely a question of bully-tactics in a public courtroom
...
see the luck I’ve had
...
The writ is served upon me, but not on Johnny, Andy or Mike. However, Johnny very bravely attends the court hearing by himself – so certain that the law can’t fault the truth. He is, of course, butchered and ridiculed by Geoff’s uncivil barristers, and the common ownership kibbutz of Rough Trade kicks the shit out of the Smiths.
The artist is the enemy.

Geoff had approached me after
Meat is Murder
had entered at number 1, and he leaked a little touch of sentiment that almost verged on the human as he said,
‘I’ve dreamt of this happening all of my life,’
which seemed to me to be unlikely, since Rough Trade had never even remotely been in the running for a number 1 album, and with this gush of acknowledgement Geoff handed me a bag of biscuits bearing a 2 pounds and 75 pence sticker still affixed. I gave no answer. How could there
be
one? I assumed and hoped I was mid-dream.

Such sentiment had long since died away as I stood in the telephone box across from Peter Jones department store on the Kings Road at 9:15 one Tuesday morning, calling Rough Trade to find out whether or not
The Queen is Dead
had made its projected number 1 chart position. Although sales and press fervor are strong enough to ensure a number 1 position, my body sinks to hear Geoff briskly say,
‘It’s number 2. Phil Collins kept us off,’
and feet of clay carry me back to 66 Cadogan Square – somehow certain that the album had been disallowed number 1 status because of its title. I lit the fire and sat hunched and contorted for the rest of the day.
The Queen is Dead
is the album of the moment in England, but there remains zero airplay and it seems impossible to get all cylinders working at the same time. Radio One continues to ignore the Smiths, as does Capital Radio, and there
appears to be nothing at all that anyone can do about it.

‘The success of the Smiths is down to however many magazines you can get your face on,’
says Geoff, wrongly. I push for Johnny to take on half of the press requests, but Pat Bellis says that magazine covers are only on offer if the interviewee is me.
Uh.
The creak of Morrissey attacking Thatcher is what the press would prefer, even though her name is annoyingly printed as ‘Maggie’ whenever I refer to her as ‘Thatcher’.

I ask Pat Bellis,
‘If I repeatedly say Thatcher, why do they print Maggie?’

‘We-ee-ll,’
says Pat,
‘people are getting a bit fed up with your list of complaints.’

‘A
nd who do I complain to about THAT?’
I ask.

In Scott Piering’s office I ask the same question.
‘I’d never call her Maggie, so why do they print what I didn’t say?
Thatcher is her name. I didn’t invent that.’
But the press is in a world of its own, and you might add to it but you can’t disturb it.

The daily tabloids fabricate bare-teeth stories with utterly stupid headlines –
MORRISSEY: ROYAL ROW,
MORRISSEY SAYS SORRY TO THE QUEEN, MORRISSEY APOLOGIZES
...
as my spirit is stoked and tended like a downstairs furnace. I smash into Pat Bellis’s office:
‘Morrissey says sorry to the Queen? When? For what? Who has the right to print such lies??!’

‘We-ee-ll,’
says Pat, her lipstick stuck to her teeth, as Scott Piering juts in with the untrue
‘all publicity is good publicity’
.

‘Me apologizing to the Queen isn’t good publicity!!!!’
I explode. A great wash of humiliating and penalizing editorials flutter through the daily newspapers, all superficial, and all stupid.
SICK MORRISSEY
alerts the
Daily Mail
, who write how the sick Morrissey has claimed that it’s OK for boys to like boys as well as girls. With the tabloid press, nothing appears to work, and I examine what appears to be an increasing sense of my own lunacy – as if I should only be dealt with through a small door kept locked. Chewing my way out of the psychiatric wing, I evidently sputter out apologies to the Queen’s horses, and it all overflows beyond ridiculousness. In the
NME
, a writer opens a major piece by claiming that he rang my doorbell and I appeared at the door wearing a tutu, and no effort is made to assure readers that the writer is jesting, and I am shocked to discover that people assumed it to be true. Morrissey quotes shoot out from the press like darts, distorted and exaggerated, and something sniggers to me that my life is no longer my own. What registers is that I appear to be playing the naughtiness game, when, really, I am consumed with a question that is more difficult than it seems:
what can I salvage from all of this?
A
Melody Maker
interview is written by a failed Manchester musician under an assumed name, and becomes one of the first major hatchet jobs, wherein the writer’s own questions are impressively printed as loquacious eloquence, and my own replies are printed as stunted fumblings. In truth, the writer’s questions bore none of the intellectual swoop that his own typewriter later bestowed, and my real-time replies contained none of the stumble and fidget squirminess that journalistic license later decided they should have. Added to this the writer invents
as fact
the idea that I had spent my youth hanging around public toilets in Manchester. I protest about all of this to Rough Trade, and Pat once again rounds her shoulders with,
‘We-ee-ll, it’s a front cover
...
’
and the new face of the Independents is interchangeable with that of the old Majors.
‘But this is slander, or libel, whichever way you look at it
...
and
...
’

‘Defamation,’
whispers one of the many now gathered.

‘Yes, defamation, and I don’t consider a
Melody Maker
cover a good enough treat for the
reputation of hanging around public toilets
...
’
I am now hysterical.

‘We-ee-ll,’
says Pat, saying nothing.

But Johnny finds the right words:
‘We’re gonna get him,’
and he bangs a fist into an open palm, like Burt Ward as Robin the Boy Wonder. Because of the public-toilet disparagement, there are of course legal grounds to take action against
Melody Maker
, but Rough Trade are now making useful inroads with the press because of the Smiths, and they don’t want to cause a fuss, and I am still too green around the gills to ignore their reluctance. I could attempt to tackle
Melody Maker
myself, but without the label behind me, I am at sea.

The meeting for the
Melody Maker
piece had taken place in Cleveland, Ohio, and after the face-to-face interview had concluded I had retired to the joy of pure cotton sheets. In the middle of the night the telephone rings and it is the journalist. I say nothing, confused, and I put the phone down and return to sleep. Whatever was it that the writer thought he might learn or access by dialing my number? Didn’t the peevish printed article boom of enraged loss? Isn’t it the case that wildly vitriolic reviews of hate usually have their waterlogged roots in personal rebuff – now and forever,
Amen.

The summer of 1986 brought Anthony Wilson’s Festival of the Tenth Summer, which took place at Manchester’s G-Mex with a roundabout intent to salute Anthony Wilson as Manchester’s occupying power. At first I said no to the event, because I thought the ticket prices were too high, when in shuffles a typed letter from Anthony H. Wilson:

This isn’t about Factory, this isn’t about Tony Wilson or Steven Patrick Morrissey; it’s about Manchester, and Manchester only. I know you’re worried about a Smiths fan having to pay thirteen pounds to see the Smiths. But this isn’t a Smiths concert. It is designed as an event which reflects the achievement of the youth of this city, and the ticket price merely reflects our achievements. Our only reference in pricing was to go as we all do in our concerts for the lower end of the norm, but with regard to that norm.

It would have needed a fifteen pound ticket to have financed properly but we felt that thirteen pounds
...
was as far as we could go. I felt rather in the mood to call the whole thing off. I have summoned up my energies one more time because I think the young people of this area deserve to know themselves, to understand how important they are. I think City Fun’s greatest hits and Shy Talk and Out There should be reprinted, and have Cummins pic of the Electric Circus hanging on the wall; I think the works of Garrett and Saville and Mulvey and Boone should be displayed and
...