Autobiography (20 page)

As
Shoplifters of the world unite
is released, the Smiths’ dramatizations are finally of national significance. The graveyard school of poetry mixes well with incongruously striking guitar melodies, and such mixed metaphors are suddenly pointed to as a new ‘type’, and a generation of similarly styled cognoscenti appear behind us. The Morrissey Thing is lampooned on television, and music writers collectively sigh as ‘more Smiths copyists’ turn up worldwide. It is the success of self-culture and defiant self-government, and art is used as a weapon. When the
Old Grey Whistle Test
includes a Smiths ‘video’ in their phone-in popularity contest, the Smiths shrink against the titanic bands of the day.

‘Of course you won’t win,’
smiles Geoff, ever hopeful. When it is eventually announced that the Smiths have won, Geoff climbs back into his pen, saying nothing.

I foolishly looked to Geoff for an explanation when the single
Panic
stalled for two weeks at number 11, inching no higher even though it is generally accepted that here is the Smiths’ first unstoppable number 1. Johnny sends me a postcard yelling
‘PANIC: NUMBER ONE !!!!!!!!’
,
a common sentiment, yet once again, here we are, derailed by non-existent competition.

Geoff leans forward and removes his glasses.
‘Do you know why
S
miths singles don’t go any higher?’

I say nothing because the question is horribly rhetorical.

‘Because they’re not good enough.’
He puts his glasses back on and shrugs his shoulders. I glance around his office searching for an axe.

Some murders are well worth their prison term.

Preparing to sing
Shoplifters of the world
unite
on television’s
The Tube
, I am ushered into an urgent Rough Trade meeting, where I am pressed to make a public statement about the upcoming
Tube
slot. The statement must clarify the true meaning of the song, and must dissociate it from the obvious tricky business of shop-theft, which, quite obviously, is the song’s true essence.

Pat Bellis speaks up at the meeting.
‘Look, if you don’t say this then we can’t appear on
The Tube
, and we won’t be played on radio and there’ll be no
Top of the Pops
.’
Around the table, everybody looks at me as if I’d just eaten a small child, and the Rough Trade faces seem newly traditionalist in the mid-afternoon light. Like a bull in a Spanish bullring, I look both left and right for clarity.
‘But the song IS about shoplifting!’
I wheeze out.

‘Ye-ee-ee-s, we KNOW that!’
came forty-eight voices,
‘but if you could just tweak the meaning then we’re in the clear
...
just say something oblique.’

Jo Slee has a face of granite, and Pat Bellis is now playing the near-to-tears card, whereas Geoff is the consummate fiddling parson wondering how he can possibly shift all that stock in the cellar.

‘This is a great single and if you don’t make this statement then we’re all in a mess and you’ll never be trusted on radio again,’
says Pat – her lipstick under no doubts whatsoever. I am already formulating semi-acceptable dribble in my head, wondering how I can squeeze in the term ‘conscious borrowing’ in an effort to ease the entire nation and rid the world forevermore of emphysema. I feel slightly queasy. I have been done over by an aggressive tribe from Palestine and I don’t know what to do. In the event, Paula Yates introduces me on
The Tube
as
‘some prat’
, and Rough Trade sinks at the horror of it all, yet amazingly they manage to force her to apologize on the following week’s show.
‘So you get me to lie on a television programme that introduces me as “some prat”
...
’
I lobby outside Collier Street, partly delighted that Rough Trade’s plan to commingle with
The Tube
went asswards because of Paula Yates. My smile stretches for miles.

Despite lowbrow persuasions from people who should dress better,
Shoplifters of the world unite
is once again ignored by radio, and two weeks at the number 12 position does nothing to assuage DJs’ playlists. As we leave for Dublin to play the song on a television show called
MegaMix
, Nannie dies. At 71, the undignified months leading up to her death had been a form of torture for a woman so shy, and we all bear witness to the usual redundant words of hope. Nannie is the central idea and notion of family, and as she loses hold so too does the meaning of family unity. It is all over.

Constantly on the watch and suspicious without reservation, Nannie’s life had modest happiness, but was largely one of struggle and self-punishment; tragic importance given to gas bills and bus fares and begging God’s pardon. Nannie pays a high price for virtue, and I always suspected that she sits in the dark of true reflection night after night at Milton Close, full of prayer that all will right itself, but not daring to make futile plans for days without hardship, yet hopeful that she might find someone to help wallpaper the hall for her. Of all of life’s luxuries, Nannie had only ever been allowed to watch. Her duties prevent her from thinking about her feelings, and the bed-like warmth of ironing and the tea caddy now used to collect spare change for her TV license make up her winter musings. The phone rings unanswered during
Crossroads
, and Thatcher is spat out as the name of madness. Nannie is an overly civilized entity, having mastered the art of minding her own business. Peace is reserved for the time beyond the moment of death. I have never kissed Nannie, and only on her deathbed do I hug her because our mutual hope is a heap of dirt. Death is alive in life. I cry at the fixity of Nannie lowered alone into her grave; her very first time alone. She needs us still. The soul is not everything. Her face, her arms, her hands, they need us still, and they are what we know of someone, and all of these have gone. The soul is said to be somewhere, but the soul has only ever been visible through the eyes. It is the body that we know of someone, yet the body is the husk lowered into the earth of tatty Southern Cemetery when we are told that the body is ‘not really’ or ‘no longer’ Nannie.
But it is.
In some ways Nannie had always remained a child. She never knew Paris and she never sat behind the steering wheel, although she laughed with friends and managed many sunlit jaunts to America. The Queen Mother dies with debts of six million pounds, whereas my own grandmother would not be allowed to run up a debt of six solitary pounds without the threat of public dishonor. Nannie only ever received when someone placed a child in her arms, and the drudgery of moral codes clouded Dublin like a thousand zeppelins. Nursing destroys the body, ends the freedom, and no one gives any thought to the tenth month beyond the impregnated ninth. But, what about the sixteenth month – or the maternal madness beyond? Nannie’s final request was that she be buried with her dentures in, but at the final open-coffin inspection, her request had not been followed through, and she looks in death as she had never looked in life.

The righteous heckles of the
Manchester Evening News
are still, in 1987, unable to offer a line of support to the Smiths as they gleefully report how
Shoplifters of the world unite
has ‘been denounced’, but been denounced by whom or why is not mentioned. It is not until the years pass and until local success is redefined by Oasis that the
Evening News
finally understands that they must support local musicians or face the humiliation of antiquity.

I pass away as
The World Won’t Listen
compilation is released, and the artwork of which I am most proud is repulsively reduced for the CD format to an absurd fraction of the larger photograph. The side view of a blow-fish face in black and white looks stingy and paltry – a cheapened impression of the album sleeve, and I storm the gates of Rough Trade in a now familiar maniacal furore. In a state of homicidal seizure I demand to know why the CD image does not repeat the LP image.

‘But we couldn’t fit the entire LP image on the CD because a CD is too small,’
says Richard Boon, unhelpfully.

‘But they managed quite well with
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
!’
I stomp, suddenly wondering why I continued to bother. I could, instead, be skiing in St Moritz. As the years go by, and
The World Won’t Listen
changes labels, the CD image remains heart-sinkingly abysmal compared to the majesty of the LP sleeve. These things count.

Johnny and I conduct another of our despondent and demoralized business meetings at Johnny’s SW7 flat at Roland Gardens. We have been secretly approached by David Munns from
EMI
Records, who adopts a new tune:

Look, enough is enough. You both should be enormous artists and you’re wasting your talents with Rough Trade, who don’t appreciate you and don’t even send you a Christmas hamper even though you’ve finally put them on the map. The Smiths belong at EMI. The Beatles, the Smiths. This is England. The Smiths are the new Beatles. Now, stop wasting time.

It suddenly felt like a case of writing yourself a leading part in your own play, or else remaining in a spear-carrying role in the bearded background. It’s all very dignified to downplay popularity as an artistic goal, but if you love your songs as much as we did then there seemed to be no further point in avoiding accessibility. The aim was to keep listeners occupied for years and years and years, yet it was Johnny and I who struggled with the moral intent of Rough Trade even though the label themselves did nothing to celebrate the popularity of the band. Behind closed doors it was I alone who had been asked by Rough Trade to replace artistic intent with an all-round entertainer’s fez. Very accidentally, I had become the most famous face of the Rough Trade enterprise, and like a Rank Charm School starlet I had an arranged marriage with the press, whose
NME
was now known as the New Morrissey Express. As long as the arresting quotes took flight there was no need for Rough Trade to invest in advertising. The press had also tagged the Smiths ‘Mozzer’s men’, a docket that enraged Johnny and which hacked at our umbilical cord. In the complete pop context, a picture of my face would be printed with the Smiths name beneath it, and on the pictorial rundown for
Top of the Pops
, the single
Bigmouth strikes again
features my face only in the slot for the Smiths. Johnny fumes and makes steps to have the picture rectified by the following week, by which time the single has fallen off the chart anyway. This Blondie sphere rattled Johnny’s chains, yet it has never been the case that someone other than the lead singer becomes the public face of a group (David Johansen was the
last
member to join the New York Dolls), yet the agitation can throw musicians into such a hissy fit that the group could weaken and snap. It must have been at this time that Johnny believed that
‘If
...
well, ummm
...
if I just step from stage left to, ummm, center stage, then I, too, could gather lilacs.’
This, I think, causes many lead guitarists to incline towards the berko and quit a successful band with the hope of being the camera’s desired one. Well, Johnny was not quite so addled, although the Smiths’ apocalypse in this year of 1987 would seem to nail the assumption that stage left to center stage is not a desperately giant leap, after all. It is, in fiddling fact, so
very
far that it might span all your born days. Johnny and I had signed to EMI Records as ‘the Smiths’ for an advance of £60,000 each. The signing took place in secret, since there would be one more contractual album for Rough Trade. The secret lasted approximately two days. Leaping into black-widowed cat-suit action, Geoff Travis elbowed his way into a
Guardian
newspaper blast that quoted him as saying,
‘The Smiths have signed to EMI for reasons of greed.’
Always ready to splice, I found Geoff had zero appreciation for the songs that had saved him from life’s lavatory, and he had no warmth for the songwriting duo whose allure would ensure his own success for the rest of his life.

In the year that preceded the final album, the Smiths had become a quintet, for reasons that furrowed my brow. It was Johnny’s will, and that seemed good enough on face value, but the reality of Craig Gannon was a fascinating bungle. Ripe from a Salford two-up two-down, Craig had a sullen expression, and said nothing. He lumbered onto the payroll and the Smiths were no longer a foursome. I understood Johnny’s need to be released of basic rhythm parts and to then be free for more complicated lead riffs, but I struggled to notice any specific assistance to the sound. It seemed to me that Johnny was still playing everything. Craig undertook a lengthy US tour, and the continual difficulty was in trying to arouse him from bed. He would sleep for what seemed like fifteen hours a night and would pay no regard to call-times and departure times. Before going to bed Craig would feel duty-bound to either cause damage in the hotel or cause chaos in his hotel room – disorders for which the Smiths had no previous reputation. Suddenly there were bills for Craig’s madcap habit of upturning large potted plants in hotel foyers, or generally being the behavior crackpot. Having played in Atlanta we were then set to fly to Florida for the next show, but Craig refused to get out of bed and we were forced to fly without him. One night our security, Jim Connolly, is showering when Craig pounds wildly on the door of his hotel room shouting Jim’s name. Jim races into Craig’s room, where Craig has positioned all items of hotel furniture onto his bed in a teetering pile. Word quickly circulates that Craig is probably unhinged at this point and – worse – that he has little interest in being a Smith. Once the US tour has ended, Johnny suggests that we do not make contact with Craig, in order to test whether he would actually bother to contact any of us. Unsurprisingly, Craig does not contact anyone, and it becomes evident that nothing useful vibrates in Craig’s upper storey. The lift doesn’t quite reach the top floor. Johnny’s experiment sees Craig sealing his own fate as a Smith because Craig makes no effort to call either Johnny, Andy or Mike, and thus Craig silently fades away.