Marianne singing was a Morrissey introduction for me. I was still in school, not even in later years of school, I was only 13. And i had only just discovered Morrissey within the last year as well, fully
devastated about him even then already in my child’s mind at this stage that i had completely “missed” him, and i had completely missed the Smiths, and just these two things alone, were already too much to even be able to accept that i had to comprehend.
And so I was at the stage of reading everything i could get ny hands on, and came across somewhere where he mentioned how young he was when he first bought her single, that it was his first childhood record… and he was so much even younger when he did than even I was then, that i immediately went out to find something of hers so i could also listen.
I came home with her Greatest Hits. Was it from ‘69? I remember it was the cream one with red font.
i liked it so much on cold winter mornings when it was still dark out, that even now, i can remember perfectly what the room i was in used to be like at the time, i remember the way the room felt as i would listen to music in the mornings, getting ready for school. Even then, in my room and being alone in it, and listening to music while there was no one around to bother me happened exactly - never. Except in those early, dark and cold mornings. When i could just be alone. I remember those mornings and think of them often in that room even now, because those cold mornings in the dark with my music were pretty much the only times in life that I could ever do just exactly what i wanted.
And I can remember listening to every song on that album in that room, and in every memory, i hear her voice as i pull on my black tights. It’s the same room where all my memories of listening to Morrissey endlessly sing Jeane and Reel Around the Fountain and Well I Wonder and Nowhere Fast on repeat are also forever linked to the memories of getting dressed for school, and of always being in the middle of pulling on my black tights. All those songs from those mornings meant so much, they were life changing. I don’t think i listened to much else for a couple of years during those mornings.
I remember what i was thinking. I used to wonder about her, about her life, about where she might be, i used to wonder about Morrissey. Apart from being interspersed with the Smiths and Viva Hate, for months of the year, every winter, that cream album of hers with the red font was the only album i wanted to hear on those black and freezing mornings. It was almost like i needed the quiet gentleness of her voice on those early songs, to create a barrier around me so i would be physically capable of leaving the house while being sure that i would have enough reserves of
oomph in me that would fuel me sufficiently so that i could make it through the day while blocking out the cacophony that would follow. Because that’s what school days are.
Years and years and years later, more grown up on the outside, but never any different on the inside, i was no longer in my childhood home, and was trying to pretend that i knew how to be an adult.
During one chapter, I was friendly-ish for a time with a guy named Mark, who was an impossibly handsome Adonis and absolutely beautiful former model. He was a lot older me, so by then already in his mid 30s and he was head jewelry designer at a well known shop on my street that used to make handmade bespoke pieces for custom orders for editorial shoots for Vogue and for all the runway shows.
Come with me for a drink, I’m just going to meet my friends around the corner for a a little while, he’d always say, every time when we’d occasionally meet in passing on the street. I always declined. Groups have never been my thing, and shyness followed me everywhere, like my shadow still does.
Except once. One time I said yes. He said his friend Joe was there with his wife, and that his friend Sophie would also be stopping by. We turned the corner, and his friend Joe with his wife who were already sitting outside, turned out to be Joe Corre and Serena Rees. Sophie arriving turned out to be Sophie Dahl, gregariously drowning out even the loudest, most booming male voices in telling (shouting) the most shockingly raucous and crudely indecent anecdote about what she had done the night before that I’ve ever heard in my life - to this day.
It was loud, and then very loud. But the sun was still out. It was late afternoon on a night in early summer. Mark said let’s just go together somewhere else. I said fine, but that I had to go home first to change, “I’ll come with you and wait”. It was just down the street and around the corner. “No, I’ll just meet you in an hour”.
No coincidence that my lifelong best party trick used to be - if i ever said i had to stop by home first to change or to do anything - you could bet your unborn first child’s life that you were never going to see me again that day.
So that’s what happened. I went home, and I never emerged. Ignoring the ringing phone for hours on end was part two of the same party trick. Already multi-faceted in my emerging talents, even then.
Mark came and buzzed my bell the next afternoon. I let him in, dying of embarrassment on the inside, but smiling, asked him how his night had been. He said he went to Soho and was having a drink alone, not thinking that I just wouldn’t ever answer or that i wouldn’t show up at all.
At some later point, when he decided to leave and go home, he was walking down the street alone, and said he stopped when he heard the absolutely most unmistakeable throaty cackle behind him.
And when he turned to confirm, sure enough there was Marianne together with Anita. Twiggy may have been the first girl who never needed a last name, but Marianne and Anita forever remained the
two girls who never needed last names either, and never moreso than whenever mentioned together. I say girls, though they must have been in their mid 50s by then. Both of them tipsy and teetering. Laughing and loitering, and tottering their way down the street together. Linked arm-in-arm, interrupting the city sounds of street nights with hearty giggles and their guffaws, trying to hold each other up, and managing almost …
not quite.
He went to speak to them and they ended up going on to some other bar together, with the night ending with the three of them finally huddled together in a shop front, chain smoking cigarettes together at 3am and still laughing at the world, as the light rain came down dampening everything, except their spirits and their night.
In the years that followed, more songs from her, more albums, endless albums, more films. More Morrissey links, more Morrissey songs, more albums, more concerts for both. The years all fly, until they pass by so quickly that you realize you didn’t ever even know it happened.
Is that truly what you think? No. My love, it’s what I know.
The film where she played a widowed grandmother who takes a job at a sex club as a brothel receptionist to earn money for her seriously ill grandson. In the film she eventually broadens her professional receptionist scope to include also shoving her hand through a hole in the wall to give strangers hand jobs, which is then what she becomes known for. I don’t remember all the details of the film, but I remember everything about her in it. I remember at first thinking that she had enormous hands. Then, I watched her face, and all its lines. Her expression, the furrows. But you could watch her for hours. It’s just the kind of face she has. And as i traced the years on it with my eyes, all I was thinking was how she was infinitely watchable to me. I remember the cadence of that film, and everything about her in it, but not its title.
I also remember that even while watching her when she was in her 60s, I would always still be thinking the entire time about when i used to be 13. In those freezing, cold and dark winter mornings. Pulling on my black tights. With her voice in my head singing As Tears Go By, then This Little Bird, then Come and Stay With Me. Over and over and over again. Just exactly the same as I can hear her singing them all still, right now.
Very, very sad for this news. I know she was ill many times in recent years. I hope there is a better world.
www.morrisseycentral.com
