The Smiths were a major part of the reason I moved to
Manchester half my life ago, although I wasn’t expecting to find them still hanging
round the Arndale Centre (or maybe I was…) In any case they were
done and dusted by the time I arrived in September ‘96. The city centre was in
shreds after the Corporation Street bomb in June, the Hacienda was a few months
from shutting up shop for good, and even Morrissey’s solo career highlights were
largely behind him.
I’ve always enjoyed the unique line Morrissey manages to
tread between potential tabloid fodder and pop’s last enigma. The confessionals
are there on the records if you want them, but in terms of the life lived
behind the songs there was always a certain gravitas that came with not knowing too much. Someday soon we will
no doubt be faced with Morrissey: The
Movie made by a twenty-four year old Californian newly-besotted with The
Smiths, and it will be monstrous, and Morrissey is wise to get his version of
events in first. But, as Germaine Greer said of Michael Jackson’s never-to-be
comeback tour, I for one was dreading it…
A great lyricist doesn’t necessarily make for a great prose
writer of course, and when it emerged that Autobiography
would be packaged in advance as a ‘Classic’ – a bit like those two-year old
Disney films you’ve never heard of – I feared Morrissey’s literary aspirations might
bury his story under pretension and hyperbole. The opening pages threaten to do
just that. Where you might expect the standard biographical establishment of
family line, or in this case perhaps a grisly flash-forward to the notorious Smiths’
royalties trial, the introduction is at least original and is given over to the
city of Manchester itself, as Morrissey finds it and as it finds him, ‘where everything lies wherever it was left
over one hundred years ago.’ There is added sentiment for me in his naming lesser-known
Mancunian locations that I know well and could cycle to in minutes: Mayfield Road,
Longford Park, The Three Legs O’ Man. But the city is hard, and is only the
most brutal character in a brutal line up. At home the Dwyer/Morrissey family
cossets, but school and the streets are a Darwinian assault course where the girls
start the fights and the boys, including our hero, take it on the chin.
Morrissey’s prose style is verbose, riddled with adverbs, often
rambling, and, like his later studio albums, you have to take the rough
with the smooth. So for instance, while we might have coped with slightly fewer
film plot synopses, these are offset by glorious descriptive passages on 1960s television, destined
to be quoted in academia. But for the most part, what Morrissey has written is an
accomplished, moving and occasionally hilarious present-tense narrative, which,
when he can take control of his writing, rings with the bold veracity of a
semi-ordinary boyhood and a truly extraordinary adult life. In one scene he is
a child, mesmerised, watching David Bowie establish his extra-terrestrial magic
on the television – in the very next moment he is back in school witnessing the
needless abuse of a classmate for biting his nails. The sensation of yearning
for something bigger, more exciting and more civilised is painfully tangible in the contrast.
Morrissey is at his inflamed best when discussing music. The
New York Dolls are ‘the slum of all
failures, had nothing to lose and could scarcely differentiate between night
and day.’ Siouxsie Sioux is ‘a black-eyed
shopgirl hidden somewhere in the whistling cathedral towers of Notre Dame’, the
music she makes is ‘a strict ice-bath of
nightmare and caution.’ Oddly then, when it comes to his own music, Morrissey’s
powers run dry. Of that batch of immaculate early Smiths songs that seemed ready
to burst, perfectly intact from a Stretford bedroom and drafty rehearsal space,
the author is quiet to the point of frustration, and before you know it The
Smiths are off on their first US tour. While we learn that the Algonquin Hotel is
riddled with cockroaches, or that 80 per cent of global warming is attributable
to the meat industry, That joke isn’t
funny anymore has been written, and Shakespeare’s
sister – described by Morrissey at the time as ‘the song of my life’ – with no mention of how, or why. Now is the time to say! Instead we receive
a statistician’s dull smorgasbord of Billboard positions and venue capacities in
American cities, and suddenly The Smiths are through.
There is plenty of humour along the way though. At a Roxy Music
gig, singer Bryan Ferry ‘shuffles crab-style
from stage left to stage right like someone who’s had his food dish removed.’
Of a flamboyant teenaged acquaintance Morrissey writes, ‘I am astounded at his survival in child-eating Collyhurst.’ Russell
Mael of Sparks, ‘sings in French italics
with the mad urgency of someone tied to a tree.’ These cultural snapshots
suit Morrissey well – in his oblique way he suggests it might even have been the words of poets
John Betjeman or W. H. Auden that persuade him to be a performer – anything
more monumental (Thatcher, Nature, the justice system) and he resorts to histrionics. An uncharacteristically restrained summary of singer Sandie Shaw’s music is later explicated
as a grudge held over Shaw visiting Germany with The Smiths and leaving Morrissey
at home. Morrissey is the man, let’s recall, who knelt at Shaw’s feet clutching
a rosary, and the antennae are thereafter poised for other personally-motivated revisions.
Rough Trade Records emerge as a collection of the stupidest people ever to end
up in the wrong profession. In particular Morrissey is able to recall verbatim the countless idiot statements
that leave the unfortunate mouth of label owner Geoff Travis. Producer Stephen
Street he admires, and Mick Ronson, and Angie Marr, and, for a long time,
Johnny himself – until the trial.
When the trial arrives, in which Smiths drummer Mike Joyce
sues Morrissey and Marr for a quarter of all Smiths royalties (despite there
being no contract to that effect), down comes Johnny from his pedestal for the
crime of collusion, and in Morrissey’s eyes The Smiths are irrevocably toppled
too. It is a convoluted and bizarre miscarriage which you might be forgiven for
thinking is happening in real time. Fifty pages are consumed by it (whereas a
ground-breaking song like Asleep, for
instance, about
which whole essays have been written, warrants not a mention). Throughout the trial,
the book, and his life, Morrissey is unaccountably unable to find a good
manager, a viable lasting record deal, or any decent legal representation
(while his penniless ex-drummer romps to victory on the strength of free Legal
Aid). What this sad litany of underperforming individuals undeniably have in
common is Morrissey himself. The greatest insights in Autobiography might exist between those lines – Morrissey simply cannot
deal with other human beings – but then he did tell us that before, once or
twice...
As in life, there are no chapters, barely any paragraphs and no index, therefore no skipping ahead to Jake Walters or Alan Bennett or the
Finsbury Park debacle. It’s written in US spelling throughout, for whatever
reason, and ‘The Smiths’ are apparently ‘the Smiths’. These
things count. As a special mention, the blurb is atrocious, obsessively listing
chart positions and sales, name-checking Tel-Aviv and My Chemical Romance (!)
but not Johnny Marr. For some reason Morrissey is horribly mean about fat
people and occasionally denigrating about women's bodies. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it… And as for Mike Joyce – who
was apparently able to galvanise all of the dislike towards Morrissey that had ever
existed into crippling monetary fines and a public humiliation – there’s a tiny
bar just a few doors down from my flat in South Manchester where Mike DJs every
Thursday night. Whether he plays for love or money, I couldn’t say.
Listen: Morrissey: Autobiography, the music.
