Autobiography (26 page)

A note arrives at the Mark Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York. It is addressed to my pseudonym Vince Eager, and is from David Bowie. That evening I am called over to David’s recording studio, where he guides me into a favored chair at the control desk – central to the speakers. David flicks on the tape and the mammoth waft of his version of my own
I know it’s g
onna happen someday
attacks the room with tsunami turbulence. Seated beside me in spiritual quietude, Linder is pale with emotional understanding. David’s beautiful wife, Iman, folds herself away in a corner seat. Iman had been plucked from the streets of Kenya to illuminate catwalks all over the world, and had become one of the first women of color to grace the covers of style magazines that had not previously given space to women who were non-Caucasian. Iman has a gentle patience and a friendly perception. She does not edge into the conversation until invited, yet her comments are always thoughtful and precise. I like her a great deal. Now launching her own skin-care range, I ask her what products other than her own does she use on her skin.
‘Oh, I just mix bits of everything,’
she says.

The sound coming from the speakers is the gift of life, and nothing will keep me level after David’s bestowal. Here is the unimaginable culmination of a mad process that began for me sometime in 1970, as
On the
Buses
chirped annoyingly in the background. Jets of steam rise in the New York streets as Linder and I walk slowly back to the hotel, scrutinizing events. David had been an infallible guide, and these are the years when he still developed his ideas with pride, and always at considerable distance from the sparkling modernities of pop. I am all parts gratitude.

With no movement on the Smiths chessboard since the almighty crack of 1987, I decide to write to Johnny – hacking into mountains of ice. His handwritten reply instantly follows.

Dear Moz,

Sincere thanks for your letter last week and for your concern. I do realize that it must have taken a lot of brainache/heartache to have gotten in touch. The main thing that I want you to know is that I really regret us not being friends. I’ve only recently come to realize that you genuinely don’t know all the reasons for my leaving. To get into it would be horrible, but I will say that I honestly hated the sort of people we became. I have no ambitions to be a solo guitar player. I will never point the finger at anyone but myself, and I am glad I took a step towards making my life sane.

After getting your postcard I felt that the only way to explain things would be to come round and see you personally. I also felt bad that you were so unhappy and it’s only circumstances that made it possible.

I hope I see you soon.

Love, Johnny

A week later his Mercedes pulls up outside my mother’s house and we are both briefly united. Behind the wheel, he makes for Saddleworth Moor, and the social unit slots back together again.

‘You really don’t know the full story of what happened at the end, do you?’
Johnny asks me as rain whacks the window screen. If anyone has a right to raise their voice, it is me. So I do.

‘I know NOTHING!!!’
I shout.

Does anyone go to war and win?

No.

Everything I had said at the Smiths’ demise had led me directly towards trouble, chiefly because I could not explain to anyone exactly why the roof had fallen in. I couldn’t even manage eloquent evasion. You begin to imagine facts where originally there were none. A hurt sensation rises like dough every time your own name is mentioned. People who have been close do not need to say very much in order to wound each other. The Smiths were my first life’s pleasure, and were turned into incomprehensible sorrow. Groups disband because they dry up; the Smiths broke up as their powers increased. Even amidst whirlwind success you might ask yourself if you actually have a life. The seething rot that had shot the Smiths down remained undisclosed by Johnny on this drive to Saddleworth Moor (oh, Saddleworth Moor, so much to answer for), and instead we let our minds run on the joy of the songs created – songs that were still growing in stature, working wonders for the strangled spirit. I wanted a day without blame, since I had carried so much of it like an unfed donkey on the streets of Delhi. It is a simple truth that everything in life ends badly – few people die in a fit of hysterics, so why should the Smiths be exempt. In months to come, Johnny will appear on television several times under scorching lights. He struggles with the truth, half-forgetting, he says he split the Smiths up, and then in a later television spot he says he did no such thing. Johnny spits out my name, changing his story as he shifts from foot to foot; he says he had no idea, and then he says he fully intended to ‘move on’. Always saying too much, something has happened to Johnny once again, and each appearance gives an entirely different account. He no longer listens to the Smiths’ music and he criticizes it. Morrissey is a bad smell in the attic. Morrissey is a death-machine. Morrissey is evil and should be stuffed. But as Johnny spouts he looks all wrong. His clothes are crooked and the eyes are in torment. What had happened since the serenity of our drive to Saddleworth Moor, when the coffin-lid shifted and the old spark rose like a small miracle? Someone, by now, is preparing to save Johnny’s soul as the nightmare of the Joyce Case flexes itself in readiness. The petty guidance of advisors are grooming Johnny for his upcoming role as sacrificial lamb – always a hit with judges who demand subservience above truth. Darting schizophrenically in the pursuit of self-interest, Johnny now looks pale on the scaffold – the opportunism of wolves giving him a notably punished look. Revenge is calling, and I am the quarry.

In the first few days of 1993 my manager Nigel Thomas sat up in bed and spoke a few pleasantries to his wife. At ease, his head lowered and he softly died a strange and gentle death. A month later, Tim Broad, who had directed all of my promotional films, lost his life to what the good folk of WeHo termed ‘the Headache’. Ebbing away in the parlor of his terraced house on Clapham Manor Street, he looked up to ask an attending James O’Brien,
‘D
o you think I’ll be remembered?’
as he faded away. A paragon of practicality in so many ways, he was unable to monitor his own urgings. And why should he? The church demands too much. There is no self-discovery in a safe life. Instead, Tim lived whilst alive – such a rarity. But there’s a price for everything. Always full of fun, with the illusion of immunity, Tim had no idea how to moan. At his funeral at Mortlake, we are all hunched in an unbearable sadness. Like Jon Daley, Tim has gone at the age of 38. I am close to breakdown at life’s inevitably disgusting final summons, as Tim is flushed away.

By April Mick Ronson’s death forces me to accept the worst all over again, and I recall twelve months previously when four people sat in the same room discussing exciting plans for the year ahead. Since three of those four people were Mick Ronson, Tim Broad and Nigel Thomas, only I remain alive one year on. As we outlined our world-crushing grand-slam circuit clout for
Your Arsenal
, only I would live to tell the tale. In the midst of substantial sorrow a deadly writ is issued from a merchandising company called Giant. The final act of Nigel’s wizardry was an impressive deal with Giant who handed over $1 million in return for use of my never-ready smile. After Nigel died, Giant sued for return of the outstanding sum, and I was dragged without resistance to the Supreme Court in Los Angeles where the money paid over was restored. The lead waggler was a famous Los Angeles entrepreneur named Irving Handsoff,
who peeped over the head of the table and called for my head on a plate. Any plate would do. It fell to me to return the entire amount, even though $250,000 had gone to Nigel for management commission, and $58,000 had been paid to my London lawyer Tony English in fees. I fought the action on the grounds that there was no need for any of the advance to be returned since, with time, Giant would recoup the cash from upcoming tours. But I felt the unfelicitous ferocity of Irving Handsoff call upon all of his fellow morticians to flatten me like a squashed pug, and as an out-of-towner against the swagmen of Los Strangle-us, I fell to the syndicate of goombahs and goodfellas before I’d even had time to toy with my rosary. Dimly I am pushed along the plank and dimly I oblige. For this joy, I am
presented with legal bills of over 200,000 euro, and the
joke is everlastingly on me. I suggest to my accountant that Nigel’s family be asked to return the 250,000 allotted to Nigel, who, now dead, had no time to earn his slice.

‘You wouldn’t take money from a grieving family!’
my accountant gasped.

‘But I’M grieving,’
I reply, and wherever I turn the trap widens. It was true that the art of getting money and acknowledging no superior was the rock on which the black hands of Handsoff had built his empire, and I was gooey putty against his Israelites. His was a mediocre way to spend a life, but it provided yachts a-plenty for his big-eyed militia.

I do not know Siouxsie, but I ask around to see if she would have any interest in dueting with me. Her manager responds, and I send her four covers to choose from, being
Happy
(Nancy Sinatra),
Loneliness remembers what happiness forgets
(Dionne Warwick),
Interlude
(Timi Yuro) and
Morning starship
(Jobriath). I call Siouxsie at her home in Condom in France, and each time she recognizes my voice there comes a small, impatient sigh as if I’d just interrupted her evening prayer.
‘Can’t we do something off
Ziggy Stardust
, like
The prettiest star
?’
she suggests.

‘
The prettiest star
wasn’t on
Ziggy Stardust
,’
Mr Know-all returns. Siouxsie stiffens, and we shall never be friends. She is very much as I had expected – a physical blancmange that is six parts Kate O’Mara, two parts Myra Hindley and two parts Fenella Fielding. She had replaced Croydon for the Black Forest, and she appears to hate even the people that she likes. She looks at everyone and everything only with a sense of what is due to her, and she might stare you out as you lay dying on a zebra crossing. She is certain that her historical value outstrips Queen Victoria’s (which, in my meager opinion, it actually does), and she has a duty to no one. Not for a moment will she forget that she is Siouxsie, who might pick fights with people whom her male friends would then beat up. Your mind’s eye can see her in 1972, outside the pubs of Shirley, lines of cruelty already set in stone, full of sexless decorative art, plying very strange cargo – you’re the pride of our street; black magic spun out and on the march – an Eve cigarette held aloft. The overground train to Victoria leaves behind the Oak Crescents and Acacia Avenues of
Bless This House
and
Terry and J
une
,
where a better edition of Susan could never be constructed. It was never a question of becoming a pop singer, more a matter of entering the field of argument; a Nico iceberg who hates blasé dolls, and who will be very careful about whom she is photographed with. There are no penetrating opinions forthcoming, but Siouxsie the star is embarrassed by women, and possibly angry because she is one. What slips out is cultivated offensiveness and, thankfully, a stabbing trail of quite outstanding recordings as Siouxsie stomps through with zero emotional involvement and maintains this indifference for twenty very successful years. Siouxsie doesn’t mind if she poisons the world, and here lies the appeal of the one who had said
No
as the millions of
Yes
girls smiled their way into the
Top of the Pops
cameras. The music she makes is a strict ice-bath of nightmare and caution, the hanging valleys of Bern – a black-eyed shopgirl hidden somewhere in the whistling cathedral towers of Notre Dame, refusing to be dragged back to Boots the Chemist, where both her shift and her insurance stamps remain.

Siouxsie chooses Timi Yuro’s
Interlude
, and she pulls up at Hook End Manor recording studio in a black Mercedes. She is carrying her own microphone and she wants to get on with it minus any familiar chit-chat. In the event, she is a seasoned professional of exact run-throughs and topnotch precision. There is only one crack in the alabaster as she listens to her final take and softly asks me,
‘Are you sure it’s OK?’
It is the solitary moment when the Soviet Statue breathes. One can suddenly imagine real blood in Siouxsie’s veins – and yet, perhaps not.

Siouxsie’s manager calls me a few days later.
‘Sioux says I’m too soft on you,’
he begins – inexplicably.

‘S-soft?’
I stutter,
‘but you don’t know me, and I don’t know you, and she doesn’t know me, and I don’t
...
’
and on I go, trailing away boring myself rigid.

EMI
are delighted with
Interlude
, and there are torturous mutterings of ‘a number 1 cert’. It certainly achieves its aim as a husky Bond theme, with the slipping-away wheeze of dentist-gas.

Suddenly a legal letter arrives at
EMI
from Siouxsie’s label, Polydor, who insist that ‘at very least this is a Siouxsie recording’, and they would like 100 per cent ownership, which should be released with Siouxsie’s name only.
Am I to be spared nothing?
Although I had paid for the recording, Polydor do not insist on covering any costs! It is all so typically, typically, typically convoluted crap.

I am now living at 18 Regent’s Park Terrace, half-Camden, half-Regent’s Park, and Siouxsie appears to discuss a video treatment for
Interlude.
We are gathered with a video director and her assistants, whilst Murray Chalmers makes tea. Siouxsie is wearing reflective sunglasses so that her eyes are not visible to anyone, and instantly her demands are barked out with a voice of punished ferocity. Within eight seconds she seems to have alienated everyone in the room, and as Murray fiddles about with cups and saucers his eyes roll ceilingwards each time Godzilla snaps out her stipulations.