Morrissey II
From October 2013
I don't get along with myself
And I'm not too keen on anyone else
Wide To Receive, Morrissey (1997)
After the break up of a relationship it can often be difficult to let go. That's how it feels with me and Steven Patrick Morrissey: Burt Bacharch and Hal David got it right when they wrote (There's) Always Something There To Remind Me.
And so - just when I was putting all the pain behind me - here is Morrissey's autobiography, tantalising titled "Autobiography". 457 pages unencumbered by fripperies such as chapters or an index, published by (but who else?) Penguin Classics, home to other great thinkers Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. The first paragraph alone is almost 5 pages long, his musical partner Johnny Marr doesn't make an appearance until page 141.
But is it any good? The lad can certainly write and it is an easy read. The first 140 pages in which Morrissey tells of his childhood and adolescence in Manchester are utterly superb. I haven't laughed (yes, LAUGHED) so much in a long time: John Lydon of the Sex Pistols is "a pop-eyed Wilfred Bramble", a friend looks "sensational, as if plucked from the interplanetary beyond, living the trans earth Bowie reflection as beautiful creature". During this period his influences come to the fore. The obvious: Oscar Wilde, The New York Dolls, Patti Smith and the not so obvious: A.E. Houseman, Peter Wyngarde (Jason King) and The Otterbury Incident, although quite how C. Day Lewis's children's novel fits in with the scheme of things, the reader is left to guess.
Where the books starts to disappoint is, disappointingly, when The Smiths kick into action. It's almost as if he's talking about a different band. Still it's fun to read him stick the knife into Geoff Travis of Rough Trade records. "Rough Trade set out to assert autonomy whilst at the same time challenging the established order. They did this largely by pressing records that no one wanted to buy." Tony Wilson (RIP) of Factory Records doesn't come out of it too well. Nor Margaret Thatcher. Nor Siouxsie Sioux. Nor Nick Kent, Julie Birchill or indeed any journalist living or (mostly, like everyone Morrissey has ever met) dead. The late Kirsty MacColl gets the thumbs up.
After the end of The Smiths there are about 50 pages about the Mike Joyce / Andy Rourke court case. Entertaining enough even if Morrissey's dislike of Judge John Weeks is a tad laboured. Lesson to be learned for all those in partnership: get a partnership agreement drawn up.
And then the book goes into freefall, jumbled memories of recording solo albums in Rome, a day hanging out on the set of Friends (?), railing at the oh-so-unfair pop charts, smiling at Eric Cantona, chatting up The New York Bloody Dolls and performing to wild adulation in El Paso, Athens, Luxembourg, Oslo, Stockholm, Zagreb, Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside, Stockholm again. Sadly, descriptions of wild adulation get a bit boring and nothing can compare to actually being at a Morrissey gig (I should know - I've been to 8) or, failing that, looking at Linder Sterling's 1994 photo-book Morrissey Shot.
The book ends pretty much like. This.