Miserable Now *

On the eve of his first UK appearance in years, Mark Simpson profiles the anti-celebrity Morrissey and his secret Bette Davies obsession .

Independent on Sunday 1/9/02 (unedited text)

[*Title not chosen by the author....]

Morrissey. The name, like the artist, stands alone and apart. Aloof in an age of ghastly accessibility, aristocratic in an epoch of dumb democracy. Morrissey, love him or loathe him – and it’s one or the other – may be a household name, he may be for some still a star, but he could never, ever be accused of being a ‘celebrity’.

Morrissey, the former front man of 1980s Manchester Indie legends The Smiths and long-distance solo artist, is famous for saying ‘no’ in a business in which one must always say ‘yes please!’, famous for not appearing in Hello or on Ready Steady Cook, famous for refusing the world rather than fellating it, is the anti-Pop Idol, and this month he plays the Royal Albert Hall.

Typically, Mozzer decided to limit the UK leg of his current tour to just two teasing appearances at the famous venue. Undoubtedly his ultra-loyal British fan-base would have supported a series of national dates, but Steven Patrick Morrissey likes to leave the public wanting more.

Though probably what most of his fans want is a new album; he hasn’t released one since Maladjusted in 1997. Aged forty three and effectively exiled from Britain to that sunny mortuary called L.A. since the early Nineties by the UK music press, Morrissey has been without a record contract for five years. Like the world of boxing to which he is drawn, the music world is a young man’s game – and getting younger all the time. Can Ol’ Mozzer make a comeback at his shadowboxing prizefight at the Royal Albert Hall? Does he even want to?

He’s achieved the impossible before. After all, Morrissey should never have been a pop star in the first place – he should, by his own admission, have been a librarian, like his mum. Most bizarrely of all, this criminally shy working class Anglo-Irish Stretford boy managed to become a pop star on his own terms: an unheard-of perversion in today’s music business. But then, the early Eighties, when Morrissey first assaulted the public with a bunch of battered gladioli secreted with Stanley-knive lyrics (‘the sun shines out of our behinds’), was a peculiar time.

Back then pop music was not necessarily just about training to become a TV presenter. For some young people, pop music was The Answer. They listened, I mean really, really listened to pop music in a way which today’s download-and-shuffle generation would consider merely ‘sad’. This was partly down to boredom, but mostly it was down to David Bowie and punk, who infused pop music lyrics with a promise it could never quite deliver.

Until, that is, Morrissey. Perhaps because he’d been a fan himself, hiding in his bedroom for a thousand years, he wrote lyrics that finally justified this kind of hopeless attention. Morrissey’s lyrics were inspired, warm, but deadly accurate. And very, very funny: ‘Now I know how Joan of Arc felt/As the flames rose to her roman nose and her hearing aid started to melt’. Bookish Morrissey’s success in making pop music literary has led some to explain how much Morrissey owed to the ‘first pop star’ Oscar Wilde: in fact, Mr Wilde was merely a failed early Morrissey prototype.

Now that we have seen the Twentieth Century itself counted down like a particularly tedious singles chart, and the world has woken up to a Hit-me-over-the-head Parade of Boy Blands, Girl Gropes and Prance, it seems as if Mr Morrissey was indeed all he told us, again and again, that he was: the ultimate culmination of the once-splendid and now well-and-truly spannered tradition of English pop. The man from whom, in other words, pop music never really recovered. (The NME recently declared him and The Smiths ‘the most influential artist of all time’ – ahead of even the Beatles.)

Perhaps this was why the eponymous debut album, The Smiths, with intoxicating tracks such as ‘Hand in Glove’, ‘Reel Around the Fountain’, and ‘Still Ill’, was not so much an album as a serious illness – in the grip of its fevers and sweats, it transforms your view of the world and leaves you so charmingly debilitated, that afterwards you almost find the idea of yourself quite likeable. ‘It’s grue-some that some-one so hand-some should care’. This was an alliteration of the soul. Next to this kind of passion, a band like Coldplay is just mood music for bedwetters.

Morrissey’s Smiths-period songs penned with guitarist Johnny Marr, and his post 1987 split early solo work, has an evangelical brilliance, an urgency and sweet malice that fills you with a lust to go out shoplifting expensive perfume with which to spray bus-shelters. There’s a feyness there, but it’s a feyness you underestimate at your peril, Beryl. Morrissey’s work has always been jammed right up against the edge of society and he is as tough as they come. ‘Piccadilly Parlare’ (1990) extols the seedy glamour of waster working class boys on the game instead of the Labour Exchange; ‘Interesting Drug’ deals with the social reality of drug-taking (‘On a Government scheme designed to kill your dream’), ‘Last of the International Playboys’ (1989), the overheated hero-worship of hard men (‘Ronnie Kray do you know my face? Oh, please say you do’). In fact, Morrissey’s Smiths’ oeuvre anticipated both the New Man of the late Eighties, while his early solo material anticipated the New Lad and ‘gangster chic’ of the Nineties – and was rather more interesting that most of what was to follow.

Morrissey stomped in big glittery glam platforms on all those who predicted his demise, sans Marr’s magical melodies – until, that is, his excruciatingly awful second solo album Kill Uncle (1991) was released. Even though the following albums Your Arsenal (1992) and Vauxhall & I (1994) at least equalled his last Smiths album Strangeways Here We Come, and the voice-of-god (or is it the other fella?) Vauxhall & I topped the album chart, his card had been marked.

Morrissey was In The Way. He had to be assassinated so that the 1990s and Brit Pop, which owed everything to him and Marr, could happen. Of course, it was the NME, the paper which had put him on the cover almost every week for ten years, which wielded the stiletto in the early Nineties. In their kangaroo court, his always-self-conscious interest in skinheads, low-life and the Union Jack - all of which of course were to become emblems of Brit Pop - were cited as ‘proof’ that he was ‘racist’. His refusal to play their tabloid game and grant them the abject interview they craved was then presented as ‘confirmation’.

Morrissey, whose US career was going stratospheric, while his British career was imploding, just said ‘no’, again, and moved to Hollywood, within idolatrous distance of the grave of his secret heroine Bette Davies, the ‘difficult’ diva who defied the studio system and almost won. He has remained there ever since, enjoying saying ‘No’ to the weekly interview requests from the British music press.

However, rehabilitation is in the Blighty air. The Nineties and Brit Pop are over and in the remaindered bin. Moreover, Morrissey’s American career appears to have well and truly stalled – despite his massive popularity with intensely tattooed Hispanic L.A. gangs. There’s rumoured to be an album’s worth of new material recorded; that he remains label-less is probably down to his Davis-like ability to say ‘no’ – even in his forties.

Maybe a British record label could persuade his pal Alan Bennet to kidnap him while he’s over here and tickle him with Diana Dors memorabilia until he finally, reluctantly, gasps ‘yes’. England need Morrissey, if only to stop that bloody Neil Tennant getting any more awards. And maybe, just maybe, Mozzer needs England more than two nights at the Albert Hall suggests.