"I always knew something, shall we say, peculiar was going to happen.
I think real, true artists do have that instinct."
From the age of what, nine, 10?
"Much earlier. In some form. I saw a multitude of options and the dilemma was just which one
to concentrate on. Obviously, I
wrote. At the age of six I compiled a personal magazine every week. I was intensely interested
in journalism, and all the things
around it, whether it was performing or actually playing records. I intensely envied dee-jays.
To simply sit on this cushion at the
BBC day after day and flip on anything they thought was moving - well, I thought that was the
most sacred and powerful
position in the universe. To me, it was more important than politics."
You wanted to be a dee-jay?!
"At a tender age, I craved that power - to impose one's record collection on people in
launderettes and on scaffolding. But now
I think it's such a terrible job that dee-jays should be the highest paid people in the country
. To have to sit in an office all day
playing the same records - all of which are awful - over and over and over again - well,
it's not funny, is it?! We shouldn't pick
on these people. We should send them parcels!"
About this early magazine...
"I was only six, so... the art direction let it down a bit, really. It was simply the Top 10,
then certain pin-ups of artists of my
personal choice... sketched, in fact, by the editor himself."
What kind of circulation did it have?
"There was just the one copy, which limited readership somewhat."
So you quickly became an avid reader and writer?
"I very quickly became obsessed by music papers and pop journalism, and collected
them ravenously."
So did you turn to music as an avenue for writing, or were you driven by musica
l instincts?
"By staunch instincts of very brittle criticism. Developed through having had this
magazine of my own since the age of six, and
listening to the Top 30 every Tuesday only to run off instantly to the typewriter in orde
r to compile my own personal Top 30
which totally conflicted with how the world really was. But in my sense, my Top 30 was
how the world should have been. It
was a Top 30 of contemporary records, but the new entries were very unlikely, and
obviously I favoured certain artists, like T.
Rex.
"I can remember writing an extravagant critique of 'Cinderella Rockefeller'. I was
always a totally dissatisfied consumer, aflood
with complaints. It seemed to me that the world of pop music, which I worshipped, was
there to be altered and corrected."
That feeling - that pop belongs to "us", so how come it's blocked up with
all this other people's
stuff - has been an abiding
feeling on the rock "left" for some 15 years. (Punk had very little impact
on the charts, on what
sold.) So Morrissey's infantile
gainsaying of pop reality, was the chrysalis for indie pop's wistful,
wishful fantasies of a "perfect
pop"
returning to oust the
imposters in the hit parade.
"I think it's fact, things have reached an unthinkable state, where things are
orchestrated entirely by
unsympathetic and
unmusical hands and ears. The people in key positions are people who don't
consider pop culture to
have any serious
importance whatsoever."
So you believe pop is, or can be, art - but it's a belief that is only sustained
by very rare instances.
You seem to have very
specific ideas about what constitutes art. The other day it occurred to me
that there are maybe two
kinds of intelligence in the
world: one that's very open, that tries to take on everything, and accordingly
gets paralysed by
choice;
another kind that's
narrow, that finds strength by focusing on some things and
xcluding most
everything else...
"If I liked everything, I'd be very hard to understand. I always
found
the idea of people who
were very
hard to please,
including journalists who were very critical - I always found
they were
almost right when they
found something praiseworthy. I
find people who are unbudgeably fair, quite time-consuming.
I find agreeable
people immensely
disagreeable."
Is that the idea of "Viva Hate": that we need bigotries in order
to make sense of the world, make
it actionable? (The hankering
for a punk-style commotion is for precisely such an illiberalism,
a taking of sides, a new order.)
"Sadly, a lot of people need to be told, rather than asked. Also,
I often feel I can gain from
venomously critical views of me as
an artist, more than I can from dithery, sloppily fawning, supportive views."
Going back to fame, to your intimate knowledge of the processes of
identification and obsession..
. having been through various
manic fixations, you have progressed to being a star, the subject of
fixations yourself.
Most of your fans though, will remain
condemned in a lonely monologue with their distant idol...
"Condemned sounds a bit rough... but, nonetheless, I can't help but agree, really."
You encourage the obsessiveness, though, don't you? I remember you
once saying you were delighted
people sent you
underwear, or demands for underwear...
"Yes, both! No, I do get lots of very fascinating and fascinated letters,
and lots of fascinating gifts.
I can very clearly
understand obsessiveness, and the people who write to me see that
I understand obsession and
preciousness. And I respond in
the same way. I still get very nervous when I meet people who I admire..."
Like who?
Avril Angus..."
Who?
"Well, exactly - Avril Angus! She acts. I get very nervous when I meet people
from the theatre.
I think that's a very hallowed,
sacred thing to be in. And I still have scrapbooks."
What does it feel like to see your proliferated image about, on hoardings,
in magazines, to hear
your voice on the radio?
"It's very odd. I was in a shop once, buying scented candles, and on the
radio came Steve Wright
with a collage of Smiths
songs, and I got a distinct chill, almost as though the hand of Death was
pping me on the
shoulder, saying: 'put yer candles
down, it's time to go!'"
About the split... there seems to be a desire, on the part of both you and Marr, to represen
t the end of The Smiths as though
there was little or no acrimony involved. But if a band ends, after a period in which the
main protagonists hadn't communicated
for some three or four months, surely some kind of serious conflict was going down...
"I expect it's hard to believe there weren't some elements of hatred slipping in and out
. I don't think I'd believe that there was no
acrimony. But it became a situation where people around the band began to take sites,
and there was even a belief that within
the audience there was a Morrissey contingent and a Marr contingent. And critics began
to separate, and praise one and
condemn the other.
"I personally did not find this a strain. But I find acrimony and even dwelling on the
final events very futile; although in a sense I
feel reportable, in another, more affecting way, I don't. And I think explanations create
their own suspicions that things were
much worse than they were. And that's what happened. Because there were so many
people around the group, everyone had
their own exaggerations, and stories began to breed."
Was the question of conquering America a problem, Marr being keener to undertake
a world tour than you were?
"Once again, this was fabricated. Although I had very little passion to do a proposed
world tour, and had less passion than any
other member, I always thought my opinion was totally, totally valid. But it's true, if
I'd nodded, a world tour would have
happened. But I wasn't prepared to become that stale pop baggage, simply checking
in and checking out, not knowing where I
was or what clothes I was wearing, and quite ritually standing onstage singing."
The other Smiths had more of a taste for that?
"Not exactly, but they were more realistic and adaptable."
It wouldn't have been so wearing for them as for you?
"No."
Do you think Johnny is possibly even more into being famous than you are?
"It's very difficult for me to answer that question. People often tap me on the
shoulder and ask me that, and it's a general
assumption that he must have been. But my general impression is that he wasn't.
He had many opportunities to talk to the press,
and I was always the only person who encouraged him to do extra-curricular
activities. But I also do become very confused
by the number of people he does become involved with..."
Do you blame Ken Friedman (ex-Smiths manager and now Marr's persona
l manager)
for the split?
"Um... I'd rather not discuss that."
Is it hard to maintain a barrier between your inner self and
the worldiness of the biz and its
machinations?
"There is a lot that's unavoidable. Money is a constantly
draining occupation - trying to deal
with it, keep it, get it. I find the business side very distasteful,
harrowing and soul-destroying.
I could talk about tax, which I find quite frightening. But this
always sounds like a soft and
phoney complaint. Because even though I'm taxed to an
extreme and impossible degree, I
still at the end have a lot of money. I do get the sense, though
, that it's illegal to earn money
in this country."
Surely you're not with Margaret on this one, up there on the
guillotine? Presumably you
believe the disadvantaged ought to be supported and enabled?
"It's very difficult. I always had a very basic view that if you
earned money it belongs to you.
But that is obviously not the case. People have very slim right
s over the money they earn.
"You have to get up very early and concentrate very hard to
ever see any of it. The Smiths
never earned any money touring. We'd come off remarkably
successful tours and have to sit
down and sign 80 cheques. Johnny and I would just look at
each other and all of a sudden
get very... old."
Did it feel like it was all getting out of control?
"Oh, it got entirely out of control, totally, totally out of control. This, if anything
, was the cause of The Smiths' death. Especially
the monetary side. We were making huge amounts of money and it was
going everywhere but in the personal bank accounts of
the four group members. Johnny and I would be walking offstage in the
Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, after playing an
insanely devastating performance, and instantly have to sign cheques,
while we were still euphoric and dripping with sweat,
otherwise we couldn't put our trousers on.
"And finally, I think, Johnny had to back off from that, and put his entire life
into the hands of his manager, because there was
too much pressure. And there were too many people around the group saying,
'pacify me, say something nice, make me feel
needed.' All people surrounding groups are like that, they need to be needed,
they need to telephone you at strange hours to
find out if they are still liked and still included. And that's very annoying,
because the only two people who needed to be
supported were Johnny and me."
So The Smiths: ye olde stories of something unspoilt being strangled by the
success engendered by its very novelty, of love,
crushed by the wheels of industry. It's the tragedy at the core of rock: how
can something essentially private withstand the
pressure of going pubic. Morrissey's answer is to retreat still further into
his memories.
The Smiths were prime movers in what you could call the depoliticisation
of personal life after punk's initial scornful
demystification. Remember 1980: "personal politics" was the phrase tha
t tripped off every lip, groups like Gang Of Four ("Love
Like Anthrax") and Au Pairs worked towards their dream of the equal relationship
liberated from the veils of romantic "false
consciousness" - unconsciously mimicking the pragmatism of therapists and
counsellors, with their notion of love as contract.
Then 1982: attention shifted to the public language of love, to pop's iconography
- the buzzwords were "the language of love",
"the lexicon of love", "the lover's discourse", demystification was superceded
by deconstruction and ambiguity.
Finally, with Nick Cave's misogynist agonies, the Jesus And Mary Chain's
candyskin classicism, and The Smiths' eternally
unrequited gaze, came the return of romanticism in all its purity and privacy
. Pop had returned to what it has always been
about: the privileging of the personal as the realm in which the meaning of your
life is resolved. The motor-idea of romanticism -
the dream of the redemptive love that will make everything alright, resolve
all difference - has, in the 20th Century, replaced
religion as the opium of the people.
But it's the dream that continues to speak most deeply to us. And maybe the
superstition of love is our last reservoir of
spirituality in the face of those "specialists of the soul" who would seek
to reform relationships in accordance with their ghastly
notions of "negotiation", "support", "partnership".
I always come back to the Stones when I think of The Smiths, because of the
camp, but mainly because of the way each band
illuminates their era for us. For the Stones, satisfaction was the goal:
everything would be alright if we shed the inhibitions that
held us back and down. Revolution meant good sex on the 'morrow.
But the Stones were the product of expansive times, The Smiths the
product of contracted and beleaguered times. With The
Smiths it was a question not of desire but of longing - the yearning to belong
to or with someone, to belong somewhere. The
dream that two half-a-persons can make a whole, fit hand-in-glove. The Stones
and their time were all about leaving home; The
Smiths and our time are about pining for a home.
It's a sign of the times, maybe, that pop-as-reinvention-of-the-self is something
that resonates for fewer and fewer people in the
little world that is the music press readership; that the pollwinner, the figur
you most identify with is Morrissey, victim of his
past, chained to his memories. And as he says, artists don't really "develop"
, they have their act, gift, whatever, and stick with it.
That peal of exile first heard in "Hand In Glove" still rings true in moments
on "Viva Hate", and no doubt always will, no matter
what follows, in the same way that traces of wantonness persist in Jagger's
voice beneath all the mannered overlay of time.
As I neurotically double-check if the tape is running, I mutter by way of
apology,
"I've had some bad experiences with tape
recorders."
