Autobiography (19 page)

Yakkety-yak,
thud
.

In fact, the G-Mex event is a great day, and theatrician Wilson is at his best master of ceremonies scarf-flowing staginess. He calls everyone
‘darling’
, but it’s all a part of the public relations aspect of his showboat routine and not at all disingenuous. Before the Smiths go onstage, film-maker Derek Jarman is brought into the dressing room and is introduced. Johnny says
‘Hello,’
and then turns sideways to vomit. It is certainly a moment, but unfortunately it wasn’t caught on film.

Onstage, the Smiths are received as a life-giving source, and this begins to enrage Wilson so much that he flutters and fumes backstage, demanding to technicians that the Smiths’ power be cut off. No backline crew will comply with Wilson, who is effectively gagged at his own festival. At the base of it all, general opinion assessed Wilson’s rage to be the blustering fury in realizing that the Smiths had meant more to the crowd than his nurtured protégés New Order. Suddenly Wilson’s divine right to be Mr Manchester is scuppered, and he spends the remainder of his life with a Morrissey-Smiths wasting disease of the lower limbs, whilst oddly admitting that his big mistake in life was that he didn’t sign the Smiths to Factory.

Yes, well, there we go.

Departing for a tour of Ireland, Johnny turns up at my mother’s house, wobbles, and collapses. Everyone waits outside in the tour bus. It is perhaps 11
AM
. There is much fussing, and I retreat. Johnny is carried upstairs and placed on a bed. Half an hour later my mother comes downstairs and walks over to where I am standing by the window.

‘Well, he’s OK,’
she says,
‘but he owes me an eiderdown.’

On arriving in Dublin, Johnny is whisked away by ambulance. I am concerned, but I have no idea what is happening, and I am told nothing. Bossy nurses take over and shove everyone else out of earshot, as if none of us count. The shows take place, and wherever we play in Ireland – Waterford, Dundalk, Letterkenny, Cork, Limerick – crowds scream and rush the stage with fantastically warped mania. Second by second it is thrilling. At Waterford, the audience hangs from any particle of stage-surround that they can grasp, and the operatic framework of this hoary old theater is ripped apart as – suddenly, the stage itself wobbles, having stood untroubled for more than one hundred years. In Letterkenny, the screams and squeals are of Bay City Rollers damp-knickered shrieks, and the Smiths are bundled in and out in a screwball frenzy. Geoff Travis had delayed the release of
The Queen is Dead
by nine months because of his court action against Morrissey and Marr (but not, let someone note, against Rourke and Joyce), and the bewildering excitement of touring ran alongside the legal demands of our lives being sealed up as the usual heel-dragging, fleshed-out, money-making and deliberately distracting court action takes place, and Johnny and I are fleeced from all directions. The Smiths may have saved Rough Trade from extinction, and may have allowed Geoff to lumber up to the spotlight, but all is fair in love and war as his legal eagles shatter the Morrissey–Marr defense. Johnny Marr, having never once deprived Rough Trade of a second of his outstanding and liberating talent, had been turned into a woeful joke by Geoff and his legal muggers. But life,
somehow
,
goes on.

A letter arrives at Cadogan Square from Geoff. It states that he’s terribly worried about me and wonders what has caused my current depression.

If I can be of any help please let me know. If I am the cause of this plight, and I can’t imagine what I’ve done, please let me know also.

Yours,

Geoff

Absurdly, Geoff had turned up at Johnny and Angie’s marriage earlier that year in San Francisco – sitting and nodding whilst plotting court action. The ceremony went very well – I, with the infinite privilege of passing the wedding ring, yet, as ever I am too dazed to fail to notice the zero contribution to the day’s events by the head of the label. My future conversations with Geoff become of necessity, whereas Johnny was never again seen in Geoff’s company.

I am thrilled to receive a letter from the French actor Alain Delon approving his image for use on the sleeve of
The Queen is Dead
– this coming after a run of refusals from Alan Bates, Albert Finney and George Best. But the album title worries Johnny. His parents are upset to think that anyone would call an album
The Queen is Dead
, and Johnny asks me if I would consider switching the title to
Bigmouth Strikes Again.
I stand my ground and, knowing nothing of the kind, I assure him that all will be well.

Reviews had been very supportive apart from Ireland’s
Hot Press
, whose title warned
the crown slips
.
Well, it hadn’t.
It stayed on more firmly fixed than ever before, so thank you,
Hot Press
. Another review in an American newspaper commented:
‘The first three tracks on this album are probably the worst three songs I have ever heard in my life.’
Ah, platitudes.

Geoff scratches out another spine-chilling letter:

Dear Morrissey,

I just didn’t expect something so accomplished
...
something so wonderful, musical and virtuous
...
the strength of your delivery is majestic. On
The queen
you bed down with the language of rock ’n roll and pour scorn on its conventions
...
Without doubt the Smiths finest work and a personal triumph
...
a new phase of command and vocal power. I love it madly.

All the best,

Geoff.

This atmosphere of respect from Geoff would only ever appear in private letter, and seemed never generously shown for public ear or eye, where silence is taken to mean whatever you wish it to mean.

Meekly, I had missed the value of
There is a light that never goes out
,
and I suggested to Johnny that it shouldn’t be included on the album. He laughs a
you-silly-thing
warranty, and I drop the protest. The humiliation I live with, because this suggestion is everlasting since the song became – and continues to be – greatly loved as one of the most powerful components of the Smiths canon. It is often a relief to be wrong.

Pathetically,
The Queen is Dead
– like
Meat is Murder
– fails to cough up a Top 20 single. Something wrong remains wrong.

Whilst in Denver, Colorado, Johnny and I attend a concert by A-ha, whom we have met previously and whom we quite like. The hall is rammed with very small females who squeal at an intolerable volume throughout the concert, drowning out all of the songs. Because of this, the night is a mess. While it’s true that girls screamed at Sparks, there was something utterly pointless about the high-pitched mass squeal that blanketed the hall for A-ha. There was hardly any necessity for the band to actually play. Backstage, A-ha are gracious. They are healthy and athletic and inherently decent, with their rosebud Norwegian propriety, and this is interesting to me because it shows me how the mission to sing isn’t always a result of pain.

In Denver city center a plump girl bangs on the window of the car shouting:
‘Ooh, I always wanted to meet you!’
which strikes me as odd since we have only existed for three years – ‘always’ surely not amounting to that much time at all. Johnny sits back and shouts:
‘Ta’ra, fatty,’
as the car pulls away. I am shocked, but I then fold into convulsive laughter. Some terrible moments
are
funny.

At an airport in Toronto, Eartha Kitt is standing by herself – she who once famously shared a bed with both James Dean and Paul Newman at the same time (or so plain speaking has it). Full of sensuality, she pulled herself out of southern swampland to float insubordinate gestures across the map of American entertainment, and she succeeded very well. Amusingly, her daughter is called Kitt, which surely makes her Kitt Kitt. There are moments when you must give in, so I blandly stick my bland neck out.

‘Do you mind if I say hello?’
I ask Eartha Kitt. She laughs a head-thrown-back laugh.
‘We’re a group from England called the Smiths,’
throws in Johnny. Eartha gives a second laugh – possibly imagining a large family rather than a musical group.

At Heathrow Airport I sit next to Sir Richard Attenborough – once a fresh young Pinkie in the 1947 film of
Brighton Rock.

‘Does it all seem like a hundred years ago?’
I ask him.

‘Oh much more than that,’
he smiles, but he then looks understandably dumbfounded as I ask him about James Hayter.

Nerve deserts me in 1986 as I spot the American writer and social reformer James Baldwin sitting alone in the lobby of a grandiose Barcelona hotel. He is weathered and intense, absorbed in his own thoughts, with a face there could never be enough time to describe. I drink him in, but can do no more. I pin so much prestige to James Baldwin that to risk approach places my life on the line; I’d hang myself at any glimmer of rejection. History books overlook James Baldwin because he presented an unvarnished view of the American essence – as blunt and rousing as print would allow. His public speeches were intoxicating, his motivational palette of words so full of fireworks that you smile as you listen – not because of humor, but because he was so good at voicing the general truth, with which most struggled. His liking for male flesh gave the world a perfect excuse to brush him aside as a social danger, and he was erased away as someone who used his blackness as an excuse for everything. In fact, his purity scared them off, and his honesty ignited irrational fear in an America where men were draped with medals for killing other men yet imprisoned for loving one another. Pitifully, on this Barcelona day, I do not have the steel to approach James Baldwin, because I know very well that I will jabber rubbish, and that his large, soulful eyes will lower at someone ruefully new to the game. Shortly thereafter, he is dead.

The essence of Smiths Art (
MozArt
)
was the will to have every Smiths sleeve as well turned out as possible, and it came from an idea I had to take images that were the opposite of glamor and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power – or, possibly, glamor. Bits of neo-realism, bits of brutality, with the task being to present cheerless and cluttered bed-sitter art in a beautiful and proudly frank way (note:
The World Won’t Listen
).

Rules, in all things, are simply laid down so that someone might break them. I had learned to guard my secrets carefully, and I had stored boxes of clippings over the years that would all now alight as Smithsonian sleeves. It would be the ache of love sought, but not found; buttoning your overcoat as you stand before an ash-slag fire as you ponder years of wasted devotion amid the endless complaint of boredom. It is, I suppose, the north of England. Of course it must be monochromatic, since the dreary past always was, and a loved but lost son is lifted into a stately frame. The realities of each northern day at the turn of the 1980s played out against a hardened background in late repentance, because the north is a separate country – one of wild night landscapes of affectionate affliction. There are no known technological links apart from the telephone box on the corner, and this can always be relied upon to be out of order. The north is important partly because of London’s distance, and also because of the disregard London pays to the north – a north where the tongue is thought to be too free, and where we are said to show more warmth (although I most sincerely doubt it). In the north of the 1970s everyone had just gone to bed – or is about to go, that lengthy going-to-bed process being such a great relief and escape, for isn’t sleep the brother of death?
It snows harder up north, and we rarely see or hear of our hare-brained Westminster politicians or their messy private dabblings. In this pre-internet age, we can’t even second-guess the slanted and skewed double-dealings of 10 Downing Street. We are in the dark at all times. The north, you see, is thought to be ‘away from it all’ (and ‘it’ is ‘everything’), and a friendly street greeting is a morose nod of recognition with all personal names chopped in half for familiarity’s sake. Television still emits only the King’s English, which Manchester naturally dismembers by dropping any G that might be at the end of a word. As the British were raised to gaze adoringly towards America, we in the north were taught to cast a hopeful eye to London, where you might catch sight of people who mattered. Shut-out hopes struggle aboard trains at Piccadilly Station, having wrenched themselves away or explained themselves to death.
No mamma, let me go
.

Leaving Manchester always meant the train to London – giddy yet sad on a journey all alone. No matter how high-speed the train, the frozen reflection in the window is the collapsed countenance of your own face staring back at you, unchanged with the fast-track passing of miles, questioning, questioning, questioning, like a second you – an inner you, representing the superiority of reason, reminding you that there is nowhere to run. I am a child by a moldering wall; front-entry bus into town, train to London, alight from Euston, rear-entrance bus to confusing habitation. The ungovernable life is here in Manchester, all dark and unloving, with scaffolding and building work everywhere. Manchester’s architectural heritage is demolition. Empty mid-century warehouses have cellars that are now converted into restaurants or nightclubs, neither of which welcome penniless me. February 1971 had divided locals into two distinct groups, one of which still spoke in old currency, the other of which grappled with the new. Unlike the world in which we now live, not many people were interested in music, and very few knew anything about this mysterious life-sucking machine.

The ever-moving world of music would lead me chin-to-chin with the unexpected, people whom I’d be unlikely to bump into at Stretford’s
DHSS
inferno
. There stands Shelley Winters, alone and dowdy at a carwash on La Cienega; there looms Anthony Perkins, walking alone around the Beverly Center; there is Eve Arden, erecting her own makeshift table at a bookshop where she will hopefully sign copies of her autobiography; there is Paul Newman, sitting quietly at the door of his Sunset Marquis villa; there is Patricia Neal, frail but smiling at La Luna restaurant on Larchmont; there is Paul Simon, sitting with Whoopi Goldberg, to whom the unemployable Stretford canal-bank cleaner is introduced. This all could be a dream, yet it is not sad enough to be a dream.

In New York, Mick Jagger arrives backstage and extends the hand of friendship. It is a big moment for Johnny, but I, of course, am a nightmare of judgment, and it takes me years to understand the genius secret of the Rolling Stones. Dismissal can be a secret form of arrogance, and I held this proudly against the Stones until the light shifted and I caught myself being utterly wrong. The in-built censorship can also often be a substitute for not actually knowing any better, and I now agonize over my criticisms of the Stones – with blather that was anything but a true reflection of the facts. In any case, Mick Jagger only stayed for four songs into the Smiths’ set, but I felt no hurt at his departure because I could, even then, understand how my general being (which we dare not term a persona) was difficult for a lot of people to take. As the Smiths’ singer I consigned all of my best efforts to conviction, and all of my being went into each song. This can be embarrassing for onlookers – an embarrassment that makes us turn away whenever someone bares their soul in public. But for me there could be no other way, because otherwise there would simply be no point and the Smiths would be eminently average. The ideas were rigid and the laws were as unique as one could expect, and I felt burdened only because I took things as hard as I did, so that whenever I’d overhear how people found me to be ‘a bit much’ (which is a gentle way of saying the word ‘unbearable’), I understood why. To myself I would say:
Well, yes, of course I’m a bit much – if I weren’t, I would not be lit up by so many lights
. However, at the hour of the Smiths’ birth I had felt at the physical and emotional end of life. I had lost the ability to communicate and had been claimed by emotional oblivion. I had no doubt that my life was ending, as much as I had no notion at all that it was just beginning. Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there? Why was anything
anything
? I had become a stretcher-case to my family, yet this made it easier for me to put them aside at those moments when the wretched either die or go mad. The water was now too muddy, and, being nowhere in view, I am not even known enough to be disliked. The wits had diminished, and I am sexually disinterested in either the male or the feel-male – yet I make this claim on knowing almost nothing about either. Horror lurked beneath horror, and I could only tolerate an afternoon if I took a triple amount of the stated dose of valium prescribed by my
GP
(who would soon take his own life). Life became a strange hallucination, and I would talk myself through each day as one would nurse a dying friend. The diminishment could go no further, and the face can only be slapped so many times before the slaps cannot be felt.
I became too despondent for anyone to cope with, and only my mother would talk to me in understanding tones. Yet there comes the point where the suicidalist must shut it down if only in order to save face, otherwise you accidentally become a nightclub act minus the actual nightclub. This, then, was my true nature as the Smiths began: the corpse swinging wildly at the microphone was every bit as complicated as the narrow circumstances under which he had lived, devoid of the knack of thigh-slapping laughter. Accustomed to people criticizing me, I am unruffled when the barrage comes. By contrast, the other three Smiths were straightforward and had found fun, and they were not to blame for inspecting me as if pinned and mounted under glass.

At New York’s Beacon Theater Andy Warhol is present, and I am frozen in a disconnected moment. After the show, Johnny and I find ourselves in the Bowery district with the poet John Giorno, who takes us both to the quietly famous William Burroughs ‘Bunker’. Through clattering warehouse elevators we are in ice-cold lock-up depositories of vast storehouses and stockrooms, where philosophical art-bits are scattered elegantly around mismatched sofas for those who might care to sink. The chill drizzle of New York’s 1890s is here, now, with the chill drizzle of the 1980s. It is here where the art set have suffered with relish, in rooms where turn-of-the-century migrant workers would have been fired for smiling. My infantile reactions do not match Johnny’s; he is bored. His boredom suddenly alerts me to the realization that, yes, I am bored, too. I am introduced to Gregory Corso, which doesn’t make sense since I am certain he is dead, but this is not something to raise when the subject stands before you. I may not necessarily have been wrong – such being the wonders of Warhol who could possibly achieve anything at all with the right stuffing.

John Giorno begins the process of explanation, and I begin to long for my own bed with clean sheets. John has an odd way of offering a slight giggle before speaking, because he obviously knows what he’s about to say and he somehow can’t wait to hear it, yet as he talks nothing becomes clear. It matters little. These accidental yet under-your-skin brushes spread blood through the tissue, and you are excited to at last be out and about.

The Smiths at the London Palladium raises emotion beyond the heart. The band’s name is omitted from the actual ticket, and, as usual, those who should know why this has happened voice only bewilderment. We are warned that the audience will not be allowed to stand up during what is erroneously termed a ‘performance’, but the audience immediately stand, and the gang-show Red Coats give me a disapproving glare. Iggy Pop is present and makes his way backstage, but not to wherever it is I am. Opening on this tour are Raymonde, who are fronted by James Maker. Raymonde are an arresting four-piece from south London, whose first single had done well on radio, after which Geoff Travis had made haste towards them in search of a debut album.

‘The thing is,’
says Geoff, as if addressing a Transport and General Workers’ strike,
‘James can’t sing,’
which is palpably untrue. But Johnny isn’t keen when James elects to join the Smiths onstage during their set at Cornwall Coliseum, eager to be a part of the fireworks; he is instead led offstage and placed in a chair. The Raymonde album turns out to be excellent, dogged only by its somewhat awkward sleeve-art, wherein
the song-titles are printed in scriptio continua, which effectively means that no one can read them.

Geoff had also interviewed Ludus (fronted by Linder Sterling) as a possible Rough Trade signing, but he told me that he had been put off when guitarist Ian had asked him
, ‘What kind of music would you like us to play?’
which Geoff rightly thought an undignified question. These are the days when almost any unsigned artist that I favor instantly awakes to find Geoff Travis sitting at the foot of their bed, a short-form agreement between his teeth. It’s a compliment, of sorts.

In America,
The Smiths
album had stalled at number 150, and
Meat is M
urder
spent thirty-two weeks meandering around the 110 position, whereas
The Queen is Dead
finally clipped into the 100 at number 70, and managed to cling on for thirty-seven weeks. Sire attempted appeasement by assuring me that neither the Sex Pistols’ album nor David Bowie’s
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
had entered the Billboard 100 – as if this should be our eternal blueprint. Smiths’ reviews throughout America remain uncharitable, and Sire is eternally absent, and the liberating hysteria at each Smiths concert does nothing to stoke Sire’s interest. Even selling 40,000 tickets in California doesn’t budge Sire’s constipation, and the label remains clueless as to what exactly the Smiths are. At Irving Meadows, the audience rushes the stage so uncontrollably that the show is stopped by security, who point to me as the ringleader of the tormentors. Essential to any form of American business is the blame game. It is never one’s own fault – but always the fault of others.

The frenzied panic at Smiths shows goes largely unreported. Berserk and wildly funny, the shows outstrip anything else that we are told is hysteria. Backstage in Los Angeles, the actor Richard Davalos walks towards me, and, saying nothing, places a square-faced silver ring on the third finger of my left hand. Looking not an hour older than when he famously played James Dean’s screen brother in
East of Eden
in 1955, Davalos now lives in Echo Park and tends to his garden. A series of beautifully printed letters from Richard arrive at Cadogan Square:

by way of thanks for your magnetic performance here in Los Angeles. It was
a truly remarkable evening. You are so very special. RICHARD.

Richard’s ring fastened itself to my finger for the next few years, until I suddenly wondered what it was doing there.

Back in London, John Porter surprisingly springs out of the bushes to mix a new Smiths track. I arrive much too early at the studio in Chalk Farm, and I find shrewd John huddled with both Johnny and, surprisingly, Bryan Ferry. I walk into the room and all three freeze with Colonel Mustard unease. Ferry, the bogus man, immediately rises and grabs his belongings, and John Porter turns away, unable to look into the eyes of Mozzer-a-Becket. Johnny splutters a few surprised compliments, but minus any deftness. Saying nothing at all, Ferry smiles an unhappy smile and leaves. As if jealously guarding a can of sardines, Billy Bunter and his playmates are rumbled, and the Smiths battleship springs its first mutinous leak, with John Porter as sly Captain Bligh, and Johnny as the always-innocent young cabin-boy, hoping old Moby Dick will use his tune. And, to everyone’s disadvantage,
he does.
Of course, I wasn’t expected to burst in ahead of schedule, and Mary, Mungo and Midge were caught at it. I could almost hear John Porter as the monster in the middle cannily edging Johnny on with a
‘Well, you know you don’t need this Morrissey silliness
...
’
and a crisis of spirits kicks in. When the Bryan Ferry single finally emerges, Johnny is there in the video looking lost, minus only a pair of slaves’ sandals, and he is evidently only important for the gifts that he brings to the sherry-fed Ferry, who stumbles up to the spotlight as if direct from a pink-gin all-nighter at Redcliffe Square.
Johnny, I hardly knew ye.