After the Affair
Morrissey interviewed by Suzie Mackenzie
The Guardian, August 2, 1997
As a child, Morrissey was lonely, longing for people to talk to. Every song he has written since is a
conversation he never had. And the brooding and introspection still goes on in his new album,
Maladjusted. He admits to having had two great loves in his life - both of them ended. But there's
always hope After The Affair.
To be fair, it was an inauspicious start. I arrived at Morrissey's hotel room on time at 4pm, he opened the door with a face
crumpled as if tears had just dried upon it. Inside, sitting on the bed, was a beautiful young woman wearing a tight-fitting
chambermaid's outfit and a golden smile. "Hello, I'm Grace," she explained. And, after a brief pause, but no movement, "I am
doing his room."
"You better sit over there," Morrissey said to me, indicating the nether reaches of the room, and so we all sat, in silence, in our
corners. There was something so surreal straight out of Bunuel, about this scene, that I began to wonder if it was part of an
elaborate joke. Some contrived comment on Morrissey's elusive sexuality, or an elliptical stab at the bourgeoisie. "Is she ever
going to go?" I mumbled to Morrissey. "No," he mumbled back in his doom-laden voice. "She will always be with us." When
she had left he said that she "spooked" him, asking for his autograph for her 18-year-old sister and telling him, "I used to like
you but I don't like you any more."
"But then that's the sort of world we live in," he adds, vaingloriously.
Morrissey is incontrovertibly strange. Everybody says so, including the man himself. "God forbid that I should be normal." The
form his strangeness takes is harder to fathom. The entire time I was with him, he tittered away at his own jokes, one plentiful
eyebrow raised; stared out of the bright, blue, combative eyes - full of things he's not going to tell you, should you ever dare to
ask; and exuded a surface impatience not that distinct from outright hostility.
His big square face tilted to one side and sort of perched on his shoulder, so creating the impression that any moment - should
things get any more boring - he might just nod off. And to his bosom he clutched a very large sofa cushion - on the mildly
annoying tacit assumption that I might at any moment lunge for his throat. Meanwhile, he's all the time jousting. "Any pets?" he
says. "Let me guess, a tortoise and a budgerigar," at which he giggles and nibbles away at the palm of his hand. "Do you eat
meat? Would you eat your pets? I rest my case."
At times the conversation dwindles into Morrissey's private jokes about himself. I have, for instance, no idea why we are
talking about Margate. "Margate is a gigantic ham butty," he muses. "Margate is not what it never was." And it is as if I am not
there at all. Does he talk to himself a lot? "It's the only way to get a decent conversation," he quips. To say that he creates a
sense of unease is a massive understatement - the very air around him seems charged with a current of unexpressed fury, or is it
self-hating rage? He can't, or won't, resist the urge to dominate, but at the same time his insistence on his own vulnerability
leaves him always one up. His last words to me are: "Be gentle with me." I left feeling I'd been in the presence of an arch ironist
- and a bitch to boot.
Strange, then, a few days later, listening to the tape of our conversation, to discover another
Morrissey - more placid, less manipulative and, if not kind, at least not cruel. A Morrissey
more of a mixture. Portentous. "I've been called many things, but no one has ever called me
light." But able to send himself up. "So we drill through life pretending to be poets." Evasive
still, but not discourteous. Far funnier than I'd remembered. As if, out of reach of his
looming dark physical presence, another Morrissey comes into view, the mask of amused
indifference slips, and the elegiac tone - so self-conscious when you're with him - now
assumes an air of bewilderment. "All one wants, all one can ever want, is to know oneself."
This Morrissey is far closer to the man we know from lyrics of his songs.
It is Morrissey's favourite pose to effect the certainty of the doomed. Life is a misery, he
says. And the greatest of all life's miseries is that you can never be surprised. But the
guitarist Johnny Marr surprised him - twice. First, on the occasion when they met. "At a
Patti Smith concert in 1979, and not, as most pop historians record, in 1982" - he loves this
self-mythologising pop trivia. Marr impressed him on sight. Not as someone he could like,
"in fact I did not like him then, we were continents apart" - but as someone he could trust. An interesting distinction. Morrissey
is on record as saying over and over again that his main instinct towards his fellow human beings "is basic mistrust".
"Most people I find light. I don't lean towards humanity much." What compassion he has, he says, "is for myself alone". But
Marr moved him. Meeting Johnny Marr might have been the first good thing that had happened to him. He was Stephen
Patrick Morrissey, 22, "no spring chicken". A frustrated, brooding man, still living at home with his mother "on and off",
suffused with ambition, "desperate to succeed". Firing off letters to NME, sending tapes of his songs to music managements
with a polite accompanying letter explaining that if his voice sounded a bit soft he was sorry but that was because his mother
was asleep in the next room. He'd had a few jobs that he hated. "Grotesque jobs. I cringe looking back." Some not very good
sex. "I don't remember shivering with delight." And he was stuck in what he calls "the satanic, drizzly, miserable north -
Manfester."
And now here was Marr. Unequivocally beautiful, an extraordinarily talented musician, gregarious and surrounded by people.
He was already with Angie, the childhood sweetheart he'd fallen in love with at 14 and whom he married in 1986. Everybody
loved Marr, and Morrissey was no different. Loved him "not physically", he says, but as his music partner and friend. "In the
beginning it was always Angie, Johnny and I."
Morrissey describes their meeting now as destiny. "An astonishing twist
of fate, an astonishing turn in the proceedings." He knew they would
make something work when together they formed The Smiths in 1982. It
was a partnership of equals, Morrissey says. Marr, the guitarist, wrote
the music; Morrissey sang and wrote the lyrics. Whenever he speaks of
The Smiths, it is himself and Marr that he means. In a recent court case,
in December 1996, in which Morrissey and Marr were ordered by the
court to pay f1 million in back royalties to group member Mike Joyce,
Morrissey was quoted as saying that he considered the other two
members of the group, Joyce and Andy Rourke, "as readily replaceable
as the parts in a lawnmower". Now he says, "The Smiths were our
success, mine and Johnny's. Completely." Morrissey was the frontman but Marr was always the strong one. "Forthright, not
aggressive," he provided Morrissey with the structure he'd never had. "It was strange suddenly to say 'we' instead of 'I'."
The way Morrissey describes The Smiths, these were halcyon days. No fights, no tensions, just fun. Laughter "all the time".
"We had no row during the entire existence of The Smiths. For a long time Johnny and I were intertwined - and that's unusual in
pop music - in his life and certainly in mine." But then The Smiths were unusual. Heralded as the first real English pop group,
they caught the spirit of mid-Eighties alienation far more authentically than bigger-selling bands such as U2 or Dire Straits. They
were fresh, original, and they didn't buy into the whole pop-star ethos. When Morrissey declared himself a teetotal celibate,
you could swear he meant it - unlike Boy George.
The Smiths were lads, their very name said it all. "Tough as old boots. Not a name to mess around with." And Morrissey and
Marr seemed able to do things with songs that you'd never heard before. Songs such as Panic, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable
Now. Lines such as, "I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear" spoke directly to their audience - disaffected
youth, kids in bedsits who previously had no voice. They weren't the tired old love songs of yore. Morrissey's gift is to catch
the intensity of a feeling and at the same time to convey an irony about that intensity. His songs spoke of people's common
history, and in an incredibly evocative way. Funny and sad, The Smiths sounded simply like what pop music should be.
And it was concerned. At one point, talking about his childhood, Morrissey described the poverty he recalled in his school.
"Children fainting through lack of food, absolute subsistence level, the dog ear of welfare. I never saw anybody speaking to me
about my life. I never heard anybody who seemed to account for my experience." But you didn't grow up to be a social
worker, I started to say. "Didn't I?" Morrissey said. If there was an inevitability about what followed, Morrissey didn't see it
coming. His theme was still that The Smiths were like a love-affair, "and like a love-affair, the situation led itself." Then, in May
1987, Marr announced his intention to quit the group. The second surprise. He told Morrissey it was the pressure of work.
"But I was under pressure too, only I refused to give in to it."
By September, Morrissey was in the studio recording his first solo album and The Smiths
were over. Maybe they couldn't go on forever. "But then nothing does," he says. "But as far
as I could see forever being, I thought it would go on." He expected that Marr would discuss
things with him, "make a shared decision". He felt abandoned, hurt and dismayed. "It was a
tremendously painful time. I don't resent him at all, but I was angry then and I wondered what
it was in his life he was replacing The Smiths with. Or, more importantly, replacing me with. I
still don't know. To this day, I don't know."
To an outsider, it seems obvious. Marr had a wife, he wanted a family - he now has two
children. He wanted a life outside The Smiths. But probably, more than anything, he didn't
want to confine himself to being one thing. Morrissey's impulse is the exact opposite. The
consummate individualist, he insists he is a unified being, in control. The splitting of Morrissey
into aspects of himself, different voices, is something he resists utterly. If he cannot be one
thing, then he is nothing. There is a danger in so much certainty, it can lead to inexperience, to
naivety. He has convinced himself it was "influences around Marr" who prised him away
because they saw him, Morrissey, as a threat. In what way a threat? "A lot of people see me as malign because they find that
easy. They thought I exerted undue influence over Johnny." It has also been said that Marr wanted to leave the group before
Morrissey, that he feared Morrissey was preparing to go solo as a singer. But Morrissey says this was not his intention. "I never
saw myself as a solo singer." And I can't help believing him.
He didn't argue with Marr, he didn't plead, he didn't cry. "I don't argue with people, I never, never plead and I never cry.
What's the point?" he says. He simply sacked everyone around him, all the doom merchants who were predicting this was the
end - asking him if he had enough money. Ravelled himself up into himself, went out on his own - a familiar place to be -
continued to write his songs. About life, its trivialities and its compromises. The frustrations and failings of the modern world.
Became more Morrissey than Morrissey even.
Is it all a pose? Is he just being ironic, people sometimes ask. Of course he is. He uses humour as a defensive weapon, keep
the enemy on the run. Irony, after all, is only distance. Bliss, he says, would be "to live in a haunted house that people would
back way from in revulsion", where he would exist "surrounded by spirits". He's there already, but then he would say we all are.
The portcullis is down and the marauding hordes are at bay. Except there is no paranormal. We're haunting ourselves.
He knows this. He's far too intuitive to miss something so apparent. And, as he says, "We
all have our patterns to repeat, our burdens to bear... which we bear as much as we can
and which won't disappear." Does anybody get it right? I don't think so. Is it possible to get
it right? I don't think so. We are all confined in a world in which we are doomed to repeat
our errors - and not even our own errors, he adds, but those handed down by our forbears,
each of us failing miserably to make sense of things.
The best we can do is to get to know ourselves - not to arrive at some deeper
understanding of the world. "Because if you know yourself, you can avoid damaging or
hurtful situations. Isn't that what life's all about, making yourself comfortable and protecting
yourself?" Comfortable is the word he uses most. He is "comfortable being seen as weird."
He doesn't feel "comfortable" flying. The greatest "comfort" of all is solitude. But then he
tells me that his greatest weakness is his unsociability. "I tend to be hermetic." And, "We are
not bound to solve the contradictions we raise, are we?" If you protect yourself from
everything, how do you avoid staying in the same place, I ask him. "By avoiding jumping
into familiar traps," he says pointedly. "A random thought for a random Monday." It's Friday.
His voice, a sonorous drawl, punctuated as it is by long pauses, can almost always catch you unawares. Suddenly, he'll take a
cliche - "Life's a trap, it's a cruel world out there" - and turn it into something interesting. "Most people are not equipped for
ordinary life and I can't imagine why not. Why shouldn't they be? And, even more perversely, being by oneself. Why do most
people find that so hard?"
This trick, this ability to twist or turn on a thought is what he does with his lyrics, showing time and again that banality can be as
revealing as complexity. It's the reason the best of his songs don't date. As time passes the profundities peel way and the
triviality remains to enchant us. "Noel Coward died in vain," he says to me at one point. Listening to Morrissey talk you'd have
to say this isn't true. There's an exactly opposite sensation when you meet him, when you come away with a feeling of his
molten heaviness.
It would be easy to cast Morrissey as a sad figure. In terms of relationships, his adult life has been largely uneventful. He lives
alone, says he has few friends and at the moment he is homeless, though he likes the idea of Kent. And he loves Los Angeles.
"Which most people don't." He idealises originality, cultivates mystery, thinks "mediocrity is a terminal illness". And pays no
lip-service at all to the view that genuine originality consists in trying to behave like everyone else without succeeding. "I am
extraordinary," he says.
I guess it's because of the ordinariness of his background that, when I ask him to describe his childhood, there is an almost total
absence of biography. All I get is detail.
He has a number of stories at the ready. The suicide of a friend when he
was 15. "She was six years older but 5,000 years wiser. I'm sure she's
very happy now, on that pavement." The Moors Murders, which
occurred when he was six. "It could only have been Manchester." He
remembers lying in bed thinking about the children, what they must have
been through. He wrote a song about it, Suffer The Little Children [sic].
And the sadism of the Roman Catholic church, "which was thrust upon
me". Every week he would have to go to confession and sit and invent
sins that he hadn't committed, "to please the priest".
"God forbid that they feel redundant."
He dislikes the Church with a passion. "It is probably the worst thing you
can do to a child, to make it feel guilty, and guilt is astonishingly embedded in Catholic children without them knowing why. It is
a ferocious burden to carry. How evil can children be?"
Family life, he says, was fine but not fond. "Solemn, sedate. But never intimate." His description of his home borders on the
contemptuous. "Cheaply cheerful, lacking the faintest whiff of art." And of Manchester. "Very thrusting, very fundamental, very
guttural, extremely rough and forever ready. Dockland without the docks." Such lines trip off his tongue. He remains close to
his sister, "two long years older". As children they would explore together the disused houses around the town. But he was
always a lonely child. He remembers longing for conversations, longing to talk to people about the things that interested him.
"The only obsession I ever had was with the human singing voice." All he ever wanted to do was sing. And every song he has
ever written is a conversation he never had.
It is now more than ten years since The Smiths split up, and though old scars fade, he says they never completely go. "Some
things stay with you." He doesn't see Johnny Marr. Doesn't know where he is or what he's doing. But he likes to think that if
they were to meet they'd still be mates. "It was a business falling-out, that's all." He shrugs off the idea of re-forming a band with
Marr. "Re-formations don't work. Pop music is all about timing and the element of surprise, springing something on the public
that they won't expect."
This month, he releases Maladjusted, his ninth solo album and his first in two years. And what
a relief. For here he is, still sounding like nobody else, still investigating those same odd corners
of his mind, writing it all down - the anguish, the very real boredom.
The fine Alma Matters, released as a single, finds him at his existential, brooding best: "So the
choice I have made may seem wrong to you, but I've never been surer, it's my life to ruin my
own way." The whole album - elegant, elegaic, with nods to the past, to The Smiths in the
excellent Ambitious Outsiders - is in fact a hymn to himself. Morrissey. Burbling dolefully on
like a sad but resilient saint inventing his own religion.
Adversity suits him, he says. "Don't you think that what we need is another war, bring people
together?" He sees himself as the supreme survivor. "Don't ask me how, but I know that if a
plane crashed at 38,000 feet, within ten minutes I'd be walking on the ground. And if there
were eight survivors and one had to be eaten, it wouldn't be me."
Two years ago, this man who yearns for surprises got the surprise of his life. He fell in love. He didn't expect to. Love crept up
behind him just when he'd got used to the idea that it would never happen. "Well it never had for such a long time." Then he
was smitten. Gloriously, madly, feverishly smitten. Morrissey in love must be a terrible thing. Not at all, he says. "I'm delightful in
love. I am excellent at everything, cooking, conversation, planning, eliminating..." Rivals? I stupidly ask. "Friends," he responds.
He doesn't talk about celibacy anymore. "Can't think why I ever did. It's incredibly boring." It wasn't as if he didn't like sex. "I
just didn't have it." The relationship ended recently without his wanting it to. The other person stopped loving him, "as they do",
and broke his heart. But he has got used to consoling himself, he says. So he likes to think, if it can happen once, it can happen
again. "That's what a priest told me anyway."
The above interview was originally published in the August 2, 1997 issue of The Guardian. It is reprinted without permission for non-profit
use only.
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