Autobiography (45 page)

Of the other great modern writers, they, too, have itched and scratched their way upwards via the world of spinning discs, and they are Michael Bracewell and Paul Morley, writers who make the readers see, and who do not allow themselves to be defined by other writers. Like a team of horses they canter through the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond (for that is where we are now: in the beyond), always three years too young, always full of sensible condemnations – having robbed the modern Faber poets of any accidental meaning. There are, of course, no modern poets in the swill-bucket of British poetry where even the most savage denizen of the deep can become Poet Laureate – to loud yawns of national disinterest, and where all armpit media poets-on-standby ought to be stretched a foot longer than they presently are. It is Burchill who still leads the pack, like Barbara Stanwyck on horseback, restoring horror every time she picks up a pen, which, thankfully, is often. She may very well give genius a bad name, but she can still wow and slay like no other entertainer. Yes,
entertainer.

Peter Wyngarde writes:

Forgive my vanity for not entertaining but I had an attack of psoriasis today which makes me look like a baboons arse. Have been writing a film script on Roger Casement.

When you telephone Peter at his home he will lift the receiver and instantly say
‘Ahh! THERE you are!’
even though he has no idea who’s calling.

I am distraught when the tower of Mikey Farrell leaves the band with the usual and unlikely intention to ‘move on’ (he then accepts a job on
American, I, Dull
), and I am pensive because he is an incredible musician who can manage a ferociously huge sound for any song. But more than that, I have begun to lean on him and his able-bodied barrel chest, his mid-western industrial strength and his parental soundness. When most musicians exit, it is a relief of sorts, since they have already begun to hover darkly, but Mikey complicated my thoughts for a long time to come, and I indulge myself in meditative regret. Once Mikey has left he then says terrible things about me – all of which are true.

Not that I would ever be lacking. The mid-west had also brought Matthew Ira Walker and Solomon Lee Walker into the frame – brothers drenched in distinction. Chicagoan rebels, really, but via heaven. With Matt on drums and Solomon on bass, the live sound was finally ready for anything, and they both played so magnificently that I momentarily fell off-balance. An indescribably strong core, they played as if trying to get out from behind bars, both stamped with a genius that neither seemed aware of, full of Chicago track-and-field force – Matt a big battalion of strong-arm tactics direct from the set of
Our Winning Season
, and Solomon the boot in the face of belt-tightening Spartanism, but with the type of blasé wit that even a hangover couldn’t burn off. Luckily, both are also compellingly precise musicians, and, even better, they cannot be offended, which, given my over-reaching squeaks of tourette’s, is useful.
They brought with them the shipmate fellowship usually (and oddly) associated only with the Smiths period, and along with Jesse – who stalked the stage like a wolf encircling a lame Bison, fraternal Mikey – blood spurting from each finger – and main man Boz, the band were a hundred percenters hard-hat hellhounds at last.

Like bravo desperados we toured nihilistically – an unstoppable destroyer, fearless in the face of press execution. Fasten a green beret on Solomon’s head and he’s ready to clean up North Korea within an hour. With a sailor’s roll, Solomon is so schooled in humor that he is almost unable to talk straight – like a professional comedian who looks worried unless delivering a killer punchline. Matt is the rear-gunner, a delivered message of hope who can even manage a gung-ho gong solo. Onstage, I turn and watch Matt’s
have-come-am-here
earthquake determination and I recover from a lost moment. Inspiration is everything, and Matt is the trainer stirring the fat blob who dreams of pizza with every sit-up count, and calling the team to the 50-yard line. Sadness whispers, now forgotten, through the poplar trees. There are now too many laughs, and the band is a Yale water-polo team when not a musical unit. But outsiders will forever try to run it down, and none of these musicians will gain a scant line of press attention in England. Elsewhere, yes. England, no. Our masterwork
Years of Refusal
had been released in 2009, the final tour de force for producer Jerry Finn, who died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage, not living long enough to see the release of such an accomplished hot rock.

The refusal in question was the refusal to be knocked out, but Jerry would be dead at age 38 – the same age that both Tim Broad and Jon Daley were when they heaved their last. I sit by Jerry in the last two weeks of his life, propped up in his bed at Cedars Sinai, he looking finished with it all, shriveled and ancient. Around the bed everyone speaks loudly when quietly will do. I bear witness as we all say to Jerry the things we would never say were he standing before us in perfect health. Now, Jerry is a child again, his eyes wide with horror, the voice silenced, the mind locked in, unable to answer any question put to him. Touch says more, and I fiddle about with his bedsheets – straightening what doesn’t need to be straightened, tucking in what isn’t trailing out. It is the act of getting close, but without the ability to hug, for, even now, with the close of it all upon Jerry, we remain embarrassed to be human. The earth’s pull has already kicked in, and Jerry is elsewhere. I will soon walk away into the late afternoon sun, with the task of filling up the rest of the day, as Jerry remains trapped and falling to one side, mouth wide open as if screaming at a pitch so high as to be beyond the range of human hearing. I recall the sessions at Conway Studios, amid joy and heat, none of us knowing that Jerry’s body was calling out for its final halt. It will come if it should come. I recall the listening party at Jerry’s house in the foothills, with Chrissie Hynde and Russell Brand looking bemused, and where for the last time I saw Jerry laughing, his health on the skids, scoreboard completed, life’s job done.

Universal had signed me for
Years of Refusal
against their will, and lumpen new management densely release
the album
during the week of illicit industry cardsharping known as the Brit Awards – a fishy con game where the most powerful labels pay each other off with jiggery-pokery awards for the acts that have already been earmarked for calculated enlargement in the year to come. My name belongs nowhere on such a list, and although
Years of Refusal
is mid-week number 1, I am kicked off by the end of the week when Brit Award overkill enhances the chances of others and leaves me bloodied and bruised – over before it began. My lumpen new management had rib-tickled with the news that the leading single
I’m throwing m
y arms around Paris
is gaining exceptional airplay, and
‘We think you’ll be very surprised by its chart entry.’

With such a nod and wink, I am shook heartily, not unreasonably expecting a Top 5 position.

‘You d-d-don’t mean
...
. Number 1?’
I ask my managers, for why would they bother with such excited whispers if not?

‘Just you wait and see!’
is the reply.

I’m throwing my arms around Paris
flops in at number 21, and the child within is finally murdered. The single doesn’t even chart in France, yet here I am with allegedly the most powerful management team in the world. They seem unable to do
anything.

I retreat, alone, to Los Cabos, sitting on a deserted beach at dusk – a small boat rowing towards me as if to meet me. The waves crash quietly, then loudly, then quietly, then loudly, conversing amongst themselves. Another pelican is dying on the beach, folding its enormous wings around its head in order to bring the darkness sooner, and to screen out the watching gulls. Not for the first time I wrap a dying pelican in large bath towels and carry it to the hotel reception. They are not remotely interested, but they wryly entertain me when I tell them that I will pay whatever it takes to have this pelican gently relieved of its painful life. They assure me that it will be taken to a local vet, but as I walk away I imagine it already listed on tomorrow night’s restaurant menu. All resolve and dignity, I have done my best for a pelican whose head was probably chopped off and thrown back into the sea.

A varicose leg appears before me and the cracked-tile smile of a peanut vendor appears on the white sand. The beach is private, but a Mexican on a mission cannot be stopped. A beach at nighttime is silent with secrets – finally given a rest from those dreaded day-people. I, too, subside into fatigue, and it is a fatigue I now feel every moment of my life. By moonlight I stretch on the sand, alone, yet sets of eyes blink somewhere in the distance, like hunting dogs spotting lame prey. Too much happens in my life, and then months and months of nothing. I am always in the back of a car being taken somewhere, with all of my belongings labeled. As if words could ever be found to describe it! Yet the body drags the mind along, and we are fooled into believing that we ever have a choice. It is all done.

In 2010 the Queen of England is caught driving her own car without a fastened seat-belt, and she is nabbed by the usual morass of predatory photographers who, like birds of prey, bloodsuck her every move for their own profit. The newspapers headline is
now, now, ma’am!,
whereas you or I would, of course, be humiliated and fined and jumped on and incarcerated or set alight for the very same conduct. The Queen, quite naturally, does not apologize for her seditious transgression in the year when 1,850 citizens (whom the Queen might fancifully believe are her ‘subjects’) are killed in British road accidents.

At the mercy of chance, I am alone in the South of France, spring having sprung on 2010 as I drive open-topped along the Sainte-Maxime Coastline road along to St Tropez, the singing voice of Kristeen Young at maximum volume as I tear along – she sounding like someone who had been indecently touched by a close relative in a darkened theater, and I an escapee from the petty world. I lodge at a glitzy hotel of higher-income commerce-hoppers, all chivalrous respect and echoes of Coco. Wealthy French people kiss in public, but not in private, like those who put on display romantic affection that must be observed by others because it is untrue. Here, no one is considered apart from their appearance. Days pass and I speak to no one unless to explain my vegetarianism (whereas blood-spurting cannibalism demands no questions). I sit alone in the steam room at the hotel spa. I rise to leave and I push the door open by gripping its handle. The monumentally heavy all-glass door shatters with a loud bang, sending me diving leftwards for protection as tiny shards of glass explode, bursting towards my face and body. Crumpled on the ground and now covered by glass I pull the emergency cord. Paramedics arrive and sprawl me out like a dissected rat as tiny particles of glass are pinched out from my legs and lower body. Humiliation is nothing when your powers of reflex have just spared you from blindness. The glass door had exploded due to the pressure of the heat within.
‘You could ’ave been kill,’
says a Paramedic, and I smile a nothing smile, eyes reddened by Sassicaia. Ah yes, I could ’ave been kill.

As the unstable months of 2011 drew their final sighs we are in Mexico for six concerts. Over and over I watch Kirk Douglas in
Two Weeks in Another Town
, waking at odd hours of the night thinking that I am him. But I am not. His belly is flat and mine is fat. His frame is slender and his hair is strong. His clothes are the unlikely perfection that no truly busy human could adequately muster without three fussy Edward Everett Horton faithful fusspots at hand. Even now, I unwisely compare myself to those in the prime of their best. I live by such signals. I die by such signals. In
Two Weeks in Another Town
, Kirk Douglas darts about luxuriant Technicolor Rome –
my
ruined Rome – with all those blazing reds that I know too well, every inch a rich crypt. However little he wants it, he has fame and money and a catalogue of fur-lined women, a rubyfruit jungle at every turn. He has, I gather, endured a sanatorium and outlived a life-threatening depression, and having been a big Hollywood star his light has now gone out. Of course, for a star in descent, he is the very picture of prosperity and control. Something in me believes this story even though his carriage is weapon-strong, his face is power, there is no sign that depression had been his pillow, and no infirmities overlap. I cannot, for example, imagine this character surviving vertically in 1970s Manchester.
Two Weeks in A
nother Town
is Hollywood’s idea of male depression – which, as you have already guessed, is nowhere near the real thing. In fact, it strikes me as a fitly perfection. Whenever a man sits he must arrange the box of gadgets between his legs, or at least be aware of how his rocks and stones fall. Any low-slung apparatus could be sat upon awkwardly and cause an unbecoming shriek. Kirk Douglas sits perfectly in
Two Weeks in Another Town
,
never betrayed by tics and quirks, or by rough-hewn readjustments; his body inexperienced in misfortune, and polished to consummate perfection. The way a man uses his legs tells the entire story of the groin and the body above, because every move made by a man comes from the center, therefore a hug when the center doesn’t meet is a hug with fear. How the zone between the legs is used, or unused, shows in everything that a man does. Most of the screen characters played by Kirk Douglas are concerned with ambition, and nothing else, because everything else is usually in its place already. He has a presumed authenticity in every move he makes. Interviewed on the
Dick Cavett Show
in the early 1970s, off-screen Kirk is much as you’d expect. He is what America likes to think of as its own experience; a boy born into nothing who becomes everything. Relaxed and solid, Kirk Douglas measures his words slowly, but the easy smile is power, and it becomes America having been born without American imprint. It is funny how those who least represent at birth can become those who most represent in later life. The amiable genius of Dick Cavett exemplifies trust and goodness used to clever purpose, and this gets the best out of Douglas, and we get to understand how what passes as self-esteem is really born out of sorrows and the fear of being put back to wherever you once unfortunately were. Kirk Douglas spent an anchored life in the grip of Satanic Hollywood, always looking like something to be dished up, always delivering gold-plated acting, yet strangely treated with scant respect from an industry to which he gave so much. His
‘how deep it goes’
speech from
The Bad and the Beautiful
, his fate endured in
Lonely Are the Brave
, acting up and fully out to William Campbell’s man-crush in
Man Without a Star
–
‘Y
ou sure have a great saddle,’
says Campbell as he gives Douglas the once-over. It was a career of ten Oscar performances, yet minus those ten Oscars. With these thoughts, I awake in Monterrey in absolute panic, but I need fear nothing, as the cheer that awaits me at tonight’s show drags doubts to heel. I appear to be more well known in Mexico than even in Sweden, Peru or Chile. Nothing the world holds could match the love awaiting me in Mexico City – two sold-out shows where my own voice goes unheard above the singing from the hall.

Let me kiss you
has flag-waving meaning in Mexico, and each audience yawps
out the words with a shivaree blast as I look out like a shepherd unable to restrain the haroosh. Arms and arms and chests and hands of Morrissey messages inked in for life – tattooed across nakedness, each one an essay, and it’s all I can do to take deep breaths. A tattoo means I am always there – even when people shower, my words or pasty face will gaze up from soaped bodies. Puebla has sold out faster than any known concert in the history of the city. The youth of Puebla throw their bodies stagewards as an act of love. They give me the right to live.