Lyrical King - Spin (April, 1991)

Scans of print edition from:
i-D Magazine (April, 1991) - illnessasart.com

Transcript

LYRICAL KING

A fire crackles in the hearth, a fax machine purrs in the distance, and a handful of Italian fashion mags nestle in the rack as Morrissey reclines on his favourite chaise longue, contemplating life without the Smiths.

'I didn't have any high expectations of my solo career. There are lots of lead singers in groups who attempt solo careers and it never happens. Mick Jagger couldn't sell a solo record to save his life, so why should it happen to me? 'I think a lot of people were very, very surprised that I've continued to sell records. The general opinion was that once Johnny Marr unplugged that umbilical cord I would just kind of deflate like a paddling pool.'

There's little smugness in this softly spoken statement, but perhaps there should be. Since the dissolution of that prolific partnership, Morrissey has remained, as ever, just 'Morrissey', while it is guitarist Johnny Marr, hotly tipped as a long- term talent, who bears the markdown tag 'ex-Smith' as he languishes among minor rock royalty, a Jeff Beck for the nineties, eighteenth in line to the Traveling Wilburys' throne.

By the final Smiths album, Strangeways, Here We Come, there were strong hints that Marr had stripmined his record collection once too often, that Morrissey might profitably seek fresh settings for his finely tuned couplets and overwrought emotions. These he found, from the stentorian strings of 'Everyday Is Like Sunday' to the baroque bathos of the current single, 'Our Frank', the best of his post-Smiths work. Morrissey is a man still at the top of his game. Considering the prodigious output of the Smiths, though, these have been an alarmingly peaceful couple of years for Steven Morrissey. The period since Viva Hate has been marked only by the sporadic release of what the singer has called 'funny little singles' (recently assembled on the Bona Drag compilation). To the new studio album, Kill Uncle, we must therefore apply, must we not, the prickly term 'comeback'? 'Well, I haven't been anywhere, but I suppose some people will view it as a new beginning.' How would you, I ask, define the progression from Viva Hate?

'I think it's a much better record, particularly in terms of lyrics. Beyond that I can't really say much because it is still basically my voice, and I only have one voice. And it is still what's considered to be a very traditional musical line-up.'

Do you ever feel constricted by such orthodoxy?

'No I don't. I absolutely don't. I don't really have anything to do with the music industry. I don't possess instruments and amplifiers, I don't have a studio tucked away in the basement. Pushing musical barriers doesn't interest me at all, I just have a particular instinct that I follow. Which is less to do with music than it's to do with other things like the voice and words. I do absolutely understand the construction of the song, but as far as creating a new form of music that has never been heard before...'

That kind of thing is best left to bands such as Nelson and Wilson Phillips. I was thinking, though, in terms of different approaches to production.

'Well, the Smiths were never terribly well-produced, terribly polished - it doesn't mean the records were bad of course, because they weren't - but when I listen to a lot of the Smiths' discography I wince slightly and decry the fact that we were often forced to do things under somewhat threadbare conditions.'

Surely after racking up a few hit albums you could have demanded a modicum of luxury?

'Not really, because we were terribly eager and polite, and therefore you just wake up and do it. You realise later that things could have been slightly better, that if someone had made a significant phone call you could have been reasonably pampered.'

Which, presumably, you are these days.

'Yeah, definitely reasonably pampered.'

Getting one's due, as it were.

'Well it's about time,' he concludes with a trace of indignation.

Though Morrissey's tendency to draw from a comfortable pool of musical references can occasionally be infuriating, he is of course one of the lyrical miracles of our time, someone who can legitimately claim to have expanded the poetic vocabulary of the popular song, dragging it into the heretofore- unexamined realm of hairdressers on fire and girlfriends in comas. Not to mention the sackload of other ticklish taboo subjects he's tackled.

'I don't know what makes them taboos - I don't recall anybody appearing on television and saying, "If you happen to be thinking of writing a song tonight, don't forget that you must not . . ." I've never come across any written guidelines, but obviously we know the society we live in, and we know what gets people's backs up. And anything vaguely real tends to ruffle people's feathers.' So these subjects attract you?

'No, not at all,' he says innocently, then titters. 'It's just the world I live in, the state of mind I tend to have.'

Well, songs like 'Bengali In Platforms', and the new one, 'Asian Rut', tend to arouse suspicion. It's highly unusual to write about Britain's Asian community.

'I disagree. There are a lot of Asian people, so why is it unusual?'

I was merely curious. It is an unusual subject, one that certainly wouldn't crop up in, say, a Prefab Sprout song.

'But surely that tells you more about Paddy McAloon [Prefab Sprout's singer/song-writer] than about me. I'm actually a fan of his; I criticised him recently and slightly regretted it, even though I believed what I said. I thought the first record that he made was reasonably priceless.'

Are there any other of your peers worthy of your attention?

'Yes, there are a few. I was terribly fond of Paul Weller.'

From her guest shot on Morrissey's too wacko-for-most single 'November Spawned A Monster' we can assume that quirky Canadian canary Mary Margaret O'Hara can join this stellar company. What brought them together?

'A great gust of wind,' proclaims Morrissey with a flourish.

'I was very attracted by her eccentricity, so I though she'd work quite well; and as it turned out she was quite perfect. I find it fascinating that someone can vocalise without using specific words.'

Like Liz Fraser and the Cocteau Twins, right?

'They make me vomit on sight,' he declares, sobering up instantly. 'I think there's a right way and a wrong way, and I think the Cocteau Twins have always applauded themselves for doing it the wrong way. They're outstandingly unappealing on every human level; they look awful, their interviews are awful, and their records are just utter stupidity.'

Jeepers, I cry. I seem to have touched a nerve.

'It's the way you're sitting.'

'I've calmed down slightly since the Smiths,' Morrissey contends. 'I'm not as desperately eager as I once was, and I'm very happy about that. I think it makes me a slightly more adjusted human being.'

As we gaze out on the well-manicured garden of Morrissey Mansions, situated on the outskirts of Manchester, I wonder if this newfound contentment might not endanger his creative impulse.

'No, because I still make the crucial error of believing that records I make are my life. But these days I want to be slightly more methodical. I do realise that I have an audience and that they would possibly like me to be on television a lot more than I am, but I can only orchestrate things in a natural way. There's nothing show business about me, nothing at all. Sometimes I'm astonished that I manage to do as much as I do when I consider how detached I am. You don't seem very convinced...'

Well, the detached part certainly rings true: One can't help hearing stories about Morrissey breaking off friendships and doing so 'big-style'.

'I'm a terribly glamorous person, you know, I like to do everything big-style. But when I fall out with people there are usually certain contractual things involved.'

Does this carry over into your personal life?

'Usually not, no. Though I don't suffer fools gladly. I feel that if someone lets me down or crosses me, if I phone and they don't reply, well that's it, the drawbridge goes up.' Where do you seek outside stimulus? I see the odd theatrical biography scattered around. 'Oh yes, I'm terribly clichéd,' he grins bashfully. 'It's books and videos... and lawsuits. 'I think I probably do all the things people expect me to do. It's all very private and very quiet, I don't see that many people. I do have some friends. I'm not as overbearingly intense as everybody thinks. 'The life I lead is reasonably routine. I have no notions of travel. I see holiday advertisements on the television, and I don't know what they are. I never, ever go on holiday. Though I'd quite like to lie on a beach in the sun which I don't think I've ever done, being one of the old British Brigade.'

Surely, I probe, the accumulated wealth of the Smiths' years combined with today's major-label moolah must significantly alter the outlook of the man who mined this former petit bourgeois poverty for so many verité nuggets?

'I don't have an exotic lifestyle. I know that people think that if one is vaguely famous then you belong to this celebrity community, but I need hardly say that I have not filled in that application form. Well I did, but it was rejected.'

One thing that certainly doesn't exercise the Morrissey mind these days is inventing pissy quotes for journalists. A handful of less-than-favourable notices in the British pop papers has resulted in a virtual embargo on interviews, depriving Morrissey's apostles of his once-regular epigrammatic epistles.

'The last few times I've been interviewed there has been enormous conviviality between me and the journalist, yet what emerges in print is generally unpleasant because of recent trends.'

Recent trends?

'I think sympathy for me in England has disappeared slightly,' he explains. 'I think there is a general rule that you have your time, and then it has to be somebody else. And I don't think it matters what your standard of work is - you can make bad records when the wind is in your favour, as it were, and you will always be warmly reviewed, then you can make records at another time and nobody cares.'

Surely it was Morrissey who set the tenor of his relationship with the press by his willingness to, at the slightest prompting, let loose with splenetic quips directed at the transient talents of the day. Could it be, I venture, that his role as the portable curmudgeon has backfired on him?

'Not really, because if you say, "I'm not interested," or, "I have no thoughts on..." they just assume that you're slipping slightly and that you're not as in tune as you should be. I don't feel obliged to keep up, and I'm not embarrassed if I don't know. I don't care to be abreast of trends and times.'

Before the present press clampdown, a regular fixture of the Morrissey interview would be a call to insurrection, a plea for the younger generation to take up arms and establish its very own hegemony, an aesthetic coup like the one he and his fellow punk rockers once plotted. Well what do you know, with groups like the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, and their perpetually blooming progeny, it looks like he's got the revolution he ordered, with its source, ironically enough, in his beloved hometown of Manchester. Or has he?

'I feel numb with disappointment,' Morrissey says with customary understatement. 'I honestly believe that the records aren't good enough. Though it's very hard to judge when so much hype surrounds the situation. It's almost as if there came a certain time when the music press, which is where it all started, decided that this must happen in order to give the papers themselves extended life, because things were very dull at the time.'

While I take deep issue with his chronology, I concur with Morrissey's assessment of the smothering attention paid to marginal talents who, faced with the obligatory backlash, will rapidly find themselves back behind the counter of the local 7-Eleven. But is he confident that the young Smiths would have survived such premature acclaim?

'Yes, because a lot of these newer groups don't release records very often, and I don't think have many songs. I find that a lot of their songs are stretched out and fleshed out, which was obviously never the case with the Smiths. 'I think if it's a question of individualism then nobody can stop you. But if you don't have that individualism then it won't happen. So I must be honest and, without being particularly rude to anybody or wishing to sound totally damning of the situation, I'm not aware of any individualism in Manchester at the moment.'

With such ignominious developments on his own doorstep, one would hardly blame Morrissey for simply taking the only way out left to an English gentleman. Yes, touring America. Despite his reversal of fortune in the UK, his star continues to rise stateside, where fans nurture dim memories of the Smiths' last triumphant tour in 1986. ('Let's just say someone lost a leg,' Morrissey says cryptically of the jaunt's premature end.) The 'most poignant' of his fan mail these days bears an American postmark, while he describes last year's on-air appearance at Los Angeles radio station KROQ as 'very, very emotional'. Morrissey appears poised to make significant impact to the world's biggest record-buying market, but he remains rather less than gung-ho at the prospect.

'I totally, absolutely wanted to be a British pop artist, which is what I became. I just wanted British success because I don't travel very well, I tend to have terrible spasms in airports; I can't really pack a suitcase, and I don't leave England very often. So the idea of running around the world in a pair of Lycra bicycle shorts is not very appealing.'

Presumably, though, this has to be faced at some point during your solo career?

'Well yes, it will be. But without the Lycra shorts.'

Intimate apparel aside, does the thought of all that hard slog put you off?

'No, no, it doesn't put me off, I'd like to do it. It's just that keeping a personal grip on the situation is very daunting.'

Does that mean there's a reluctance to go all the way in America?

'Hmm, all the way... I'll definitely get as far as Connecticut. I don't feel that if I tour America I'll instantly become one of the world's biggest recording artists - I don't think I ever will because of the way I am as a person. I could never have huge, suffocating mass appeal because, to begin with, I'm too intelligent.' Even if you say so yourself...

'No, that's the opinion of others! I think that if and when I go to America it will be quite successful, but I don't think I'd ever make a very good American rock star. At all cost, however I'm displayed, it must be me and how I am. Once again, it must be strictly on my own terms.'

Alas, Morrissey professes to be nowhere near finding that elusive 'body of people' with whom he could confidently undertake a tour.

'It's very difficult because I don't socialise and it wouldn't occur to me to advertise. So when you don't socialise and you don't advertise' - he trails off laughing - 'you're reasonably limited.

'I have very strict guidelines, very strict rules of basic taste in human beings as well as in music, which narrows life somewhat. Either the situation is right or, as in most cases, it's wrong. 'I get a lot of approaches from people who want to manage me, but they seem to always spell my name wrong or say something wrong. I'm not interested in a money mogul or anybody who wants to ram me down the public's throat. I have never been rammed down anybody's throat, and I think that's why the audience has remained very loyal. They appreciate the fact that it was a very honest success.'

But who are these 'loyal' supporters who have buoyed Morrissey's fortunes even amid the direct predictions of artistic bankruptcy and commercial decline?

'I'm not sure, I can't tell. I prefer not to think that they're all of a particular breed. I don't think that's true. In fact I'm very surprised at the style of certain people who are interested in me.'

Of course there is, I note, the stereotypical view of the typical Morrissey fan. 'Yes, yes, the hysteric depressive who rarely leaves the closet under the stairs.' But you find otherwise?

'No.'

Sorry? I thought you just said - 'Yes, I do.' So they're normal people then?

'I'm hesitant to use the word normal, but since you've used it I will.' Everyday folks... 'Everyday folks with everyday tales of everyday sadness.' We both howl with laughter at this.

Does Morrissey think that he is as important in the lives of his followers as the New York Dolls and Patti Smith were to him back in the day?

'I think I'm more important because to begin with I sell more records than they ever did, and by the tone of letters and conversations a lot of them know me more intimately than they know their own friends. Well, they believe they know me more intimately, though in fact they don't really.'

Do you find it all a bit disconcerting?

'It's a very awkward situation. I get very embarrassed and self-conscious because I feel that if I were to sneeze when I met one of them it would be described halfway around America.'

He must by now accept that for many of these obsessive fans, sex is an intense part of his appeal. Does his oft-stated unavailability serve to heighten this?

'I don't think it increases it, I think it's part of it. The confessional aspect is part of it; being very, very open about innermost feelings is, I think, quite unusual. I simply don't believe it when somebody tells me that physically I am what they've always wanted. If they don't know me personally, which is usually the case, then it becomes very abstract. I certainly never, ever feel, even in my most self-opinionated moment, that I am a sex symbol. But to some people I am.'

You often say that the energy that others expend on love and sex, you put into your work...

'That's very, very true because I think human beings are only capable of concentrating on one thing... mostly. I think you either go one way or the other.'

Given Morrissey's cerebral bent and his well-known aversion to dance music, did it irk him to see former confederate Johnny Marr working with the New Order/Pet Shop Boys aggregate Electronic?

'I stayed awake for three nights worrying,' he remarks tartly. 'No, I don't think anything at all crossed my mind. I don't monitor Johnny's movements. I don't know anything about his life other than what people tell me. I thought the record Electronic released was totally useless.' 'Getting Away With It'?

'Yes, very apt title.'

This is more like it. You don't have much time for the Pet Shop Boys then?

'No, not at all.'

Some see you as kindred spirits, I prod.

'I get very angry with artists who have it easy,' says Morrissey gravely, 'who don't really put that much into what they do, who fall into favour with people who expect nothing of them.' But for all you know, Neil Tennant may be stretching to the utmost of his abilitis. 'I didn't mention Neil Tennant - I was talking about Engelbert Humperdink.'

Another well-worn Morrissey theme is that pop, as we knew it, has ceased to exist, that for one reason or another the form has been systematically drained of every drop of vitality.

'I still believe that, and as time goes by I believe it more strongly; I do see an enormous amount of mental decay. I think it's over, I really do.'

Cause of death, Quincy?

'I think possibly the realisation that the albums and the concerts which have become important are those which cost a lot of money and are a lot of trouble to produce. I think that's because so many artists are managed by accountants now. Music isn't as special in 1991 as it was in the years when you could watch punk unfolding. Because punk was something that was happening for the very, very first time; there is very little that occurs now in music that is really happening for the first time.'

Thus, Morrissey explains, the recurring fascination with the cultural fertile period of his early youth.

'You look back at the films and music of that time and you just hear a certain appealing naïveté, an innocence that no longer exists. Now we all know far too much for our own good. Back then it didn't matter if you didn't become a millionaire, it didn't matter if you didn't eke out some fantastic career for yourself. It was just good enough to exist, and to have a bit of fun.

'I think the world has speeded up in every way, and that people in 1991 are heavily burdened with this enormous pressure to be perfect, to be enormously interesting and successful. I think that's unfortunate and it makes people very unhappy.'

Continuing on this dolorous note, Morrissey laments the passing of another much-eulogised commodity - Englishness.

'England is not England in any real sense of the world, it has been internationalised, and that's screechingly evident wherever you look around the country. The English people are not strong enough to defend their sense of history. Patriotism doesn't really matter anymore. So I think England has died.'

Last year he found his Anglocentric sentiments echoed in the unlikeliest of places: 'The only time I thought Mrs. Thatcher made a sensible statement in her entire career was her defence of sterling. She was laughed out of Parliament.' He refers to Thatcher's stand against the prospect of a single European currency, which Morrissey thinks 'has to happen. If we meet in two years, you and I will be speaking French.' So what was Morrissey's reaction when the Iron Lady was finally hauled off to the scrap yard?

'Well, not the reaction that people may expect me to have. I thought the way she was quite literally publicly beheaded was outrageous. I found it astonishingly un-English and very strange.'

Momentito - have we all been misinterpreting 'Margaret On The Guillotine' all these years? 'Her policies, I thought, were the work of the Devil. I thought she was purely, intentionally evil,' Morrissey grins. 'But it's impossible to deny that she was a phenomenon, and you couldn't help but overdiscuss her. The blunder wasn't that she was decapitated, but that she hasn't effectively been replaced. I think that John Major is in nobody's mind a Prime Minister; he seems to have no human presence at all.' To my shame I repeat a current rumour concerning the sex life of the apparently personality-free Major.

'Well, that's the first interesting thing I've heard about him. Now he deserves to be Prime Minister.'

There follows an ill-advised attempt on my part to pursue a line of questioning about northern English culture - not in relation to the current Manchester scene, but as it pertains to Morrissey's work, to his iconography.

'What, like James Dean and Joe D'Allesandro?'

No, obviously I... knew...

'Well, I don't consider myself part of a line of great northern comedians, if that's what you mean.'

Oh, I don't know -

'I think that has to be the last word.'

As I don my galoshes for the trek back toward central Manchester, I ask whether Morrissey has yet had a chance to see The Krays, the celluloid biography of the twin London gangsters referenced in the exquisite 'The Last Of The Famous International Playboys'. He hasn't, but remains curious as to its content. It transpires that Morrissey was himself name-checked by Reggie Kray in his recently published book. He plucks the tome from his enviable library and indicates the relevant passage: 'There was even a hit single about us, Morrissey's "The Last Of The Famous International Playboys" in January 1989. I liked the tune, but the lyrics in their entirety were lacking a little. They came quite close...' 'Just my luck,' sighs Morrissey. 'I can't get away from critics.'

Spin, April 1991