saint morrissey mark simpson Mark Simpson is the author of several critically-acclaimed books, including: MALE IMPERSONATORS “Brilliant.” - Observer saint morrissey IT’S A QUEER WORLD “You’d have to be a chronic depressive not to laugh.” - New Statesman & Society THE QUEEN IS DEAD “Something of a masterpiece.” - Independent ANTI-GAY “The year’s most controversial book.” - BBC Radio 5 SEX TERROR “Every page has gem-like sentences Zadie Smith would give her white teeth for.” - Independent on Sunday www.marksimpson.com mark simpson First published in 2004 by SAF Publishing SAF Publishing Ltd. 149 Wakeman Road, London. For the other Steven in my life. NW10 5BH ENGLAND Also a ruffian butterfly collector. email: [email protected] www.safpublishing.com ISBN 0 946719 65 9 Text copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson The right of Mark Simpson to be identifi ed as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. In some cases it has not proved possible to ascertain or trace original illustration copyright holders, and the publishers would be grateful to hear from the photographers concerned. All lyrics quoted are for review, study or critical purposes. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover photographs: Front: Eamonn J McCabe Back: Alex Crick Printed in England by the Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire. acknowledgements contents I’d like to thank Mum and Dad, Mark LeFanu and the Society of 1. preface: i am a living sign ........................................ 9 Authors, the late Shulman Livesey, Alan Jackson, Meirion Todd, Suzi Feay, Paul Simpson, Jake Arnott, Mary Lawton, Lorraine Gannon, 2. introduction: on a hillside desolate ................... 15 Simon Blow, Brian Pera, Dave Clemens, David Baker, Simon Casson, 3. you are your mother’s only son.......................... 31 The Readers Wifes, David Tseng of Morrissey-solo.com, David Toube, 4. dump her on the doorstep, girl........................... 47 Tim Lusher, Daniela Bernardelle, Mr Hughes, Mr Lowe, Mr Bulcock, 5. i need advice............................................................... 63 Mr Mitchell and very particularly Mr Zeeland. 6. others conquered love............................................ 75 7. stay on my arm you little charmer.................... 89 8. a murderous desire.................................................. 97 9. celibate cries.............................................................113 10. it took a tattooed boy............................................129 11. take me back to dear old blighty......................163 12. fame, fame, fatal fame. .........................................195 13. index ............................................................................219 6 copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson 7 ‘Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.’ George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Oscar Wilde, Intentions i am a living sign 8 copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson 9 i am a living sign did end up following in the footsteps of his hospital porter dad). Of course, librarians are very dangerous people, and bear more grudges than High Court judges — so you can imagine what happens when one ends up on Top of the Pops with the words ‘MARRY ME’ scrawled on their scrawny chest in magic marker. Morrissey was the last, greatest and most gravely worrying product of an era when pop music was all there was and all anyone could want. As anyone young enough to remember that time knows, sex, drugs and materialism are pisspoor substitutes for pop music. Gloriously, terrifyingly, pop music was invested with far too much meaning and significance by a whole generation of young people back then. And no one had over-invested pop music with more meaning than Steven Patrick Morrissey, who spent the Seventies in his box bedroom in his 1 mother’s Manchester council-house listening to the New York Dolls and Sandie Shaw and wondering how he was going to become that strange, transfigured, transmitted thing, a pop star. Morrissey. In that brief window of opportunity called the early Eighties the The name, like the artist, like the unmistakable if somewhat ultimate fan somehow spectacularly managed to become the ultimate dated hairdo, stands apart. Aloof in an age of ghastly accessibility. star — one with a global following that to this day displays the kind of Aristocratic in an age of dumb democracy. Inimitable. Indigestible. devotion to him unmatched by the fans of any other contemporary art- Irredeemable. ist. The kind of devotion that only dead stars command. Or deserve. Instead of being famous for being famous, Morrissey has the Worse, this criminally shy working class Anglo-Irish boy from the breathtaking petulance to be famous for being Morrissey. mean Manchester suburbs of Stretford managed to become a pop star And this from a pop performer! The former frontman of on his own terms, in his own right and in his own words: bizarre enough Manchester indie legends The Smiths and long-distance solo artist back then, but an unheard-of outrage in today’s music business. since their demise in 1987, is the anti-Pop Idol: a reminder that pop Bookish, reclusive-but-pugnacious — avowedly celibate — with an music might not just be something you have to do, like expensive den- almost Puritan disdain for cheap glamour and armed with a deeply tistry, or cheap sycophancy, to become what everyone really wants to unhealthy interest in language, wit and ideas Morrissey succeeded in become these days — a TV presenter. perverting pop music for a while and making it that most absurd of A reminder that pop could in fact be literally an end in itself: a things, literary. Some were moved to talk of how much Morrissey owed (dangerously careening) vehicle for someone’s prodigious, provocative, that blousy Anglo-Irish nineteenth century torch-singer and stand-up poisonous perfectly beautiful scorn. Like his hair, Morrissey has suc- comedian Oscar Wilde, the ‘first pop star’. Arguably, poor Oscar ceeded in fashioning his shyness into an elegant weapon. was merely an early failed and somewhat overweight prototype for Truth be told, Morrissey should never have been a pop star at all Morrissey. — he should, by his own admission, have been a librarian, like his mum V V V (though perhaps, given the gallows humour of much of his lyrics, he 10 copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson copyright © 2003 Mark Simpson 11 saint morrissey i am a living sign Now that the Twentieth Century itself has already been counted down ing away except his relationship with hairdriers. Like his private life, like a particularly tedious Sunday evening singles chart and the world his personality remains for most a puzzle to be unlocked. To the world, has woken up to a Hit-me-over-the-head Parade of Boy Blands and Girl Morrissey remains a baffling enigma, an almost occult mystery. Gropes, even to his enemies Morrissey is looking more and more like Yet there is something rather pertinent here which everyone except the man he told us, again and again, he was: the celibate climax to the his fans seem to have overlooked: Morrissey is not a mystery at all. There once-splendid and now well-and-truly spannered tradition of English is no need to train a telephoto lens on his bathroom window or rum- pop. mage through his dustbin looking for evidence of lesbianism. To get The man from whom, in other words, pop music and England to the melancholic heart of Morrissey’s condition, to get inside the never really recovered. wasteland of his head — or his bed — there is only one thing you need You think I exaggerate? You think me partisan? Well, of course…. to do. But even the NME, Britain’s most famous music newspaper and his Listen to him. sworn enemy since the early Nineties when it tried to assassinate him Granted, this requires a certain amount of recklessness. Not only is in one of the greatest crimes passionel in music history, in 2002 finally Morrissey one of the greatest pop lyricists — and probably the greatest faced facts (and all those torrid Morrissey centrefolds they ran in the ever lyricist of desire — that has ever moaned, he is fully present in his Eighties), naming him the ‘most influential artist ever’. songs as few other artists are, in a way which fans of most other per- Morrissey may stand apart and aloof, but he still casts a long dis- formers, quite rightly, wouldn’t tolerate for a moment. In an age when dainful shadow over the current British music scene almost without ‘truth’ is whatever keeps the customer (vaguely) satisfied, Morrissey trying, even from the distant, sybaritic comfort of Hollywood where resolutely delivers only his own. Frequently unpalatable, it is often he has lived since the late Nineties, partly to be closer to his largest fan- as hilarious as it is mortifying; after all, since desire is his subject — or base, partly to be within idolatrous distance of the grave of his secret rather his tormenter — frustration is frequently his material. heroine Bette Davies the ‘difficult’ diva who defied the studio system Morrissey’s work is his life: there is no ‘clocking off’, as he puts it. and almost won, but mostly because of a fabulously sulky desire to That is the key to his greatness and to his tragedy. Morrissey is a record continue punishing the English for their ingratitude by the most pain- to be played, never a life to be lived. One day perhaps, in spite of all ful means possible — depriving them of himself. the evidence to the contrary, a fascinating secret life of scandal and de- But then, one of the central paradoxes of the Morrissey phenom- bauchery may be revealed (and I suspect that no one would be happier enon has been that whilst no one gives more of themselves in their than Morrissey at such an exposé).