Autobiography (25 page)

However, the
NME
manslaughter erupts with their next issue, where my face grabs the cover with the blaring question ‘Is Morrissey flirting with fascism
?’
and their head-shrinking hang-ups waffle on over several pages of burning execution.
EMI
back off nervously saying,
‘If this
NME
thing begins to affect the Pet Shop Boys then we’ll be forced to do something about it,’
with no thought whatsoever of me in the burning wreckage of it all. Branded a racist by the
NME
(who apply just enough question marks alongside their allegations to protect themselves from any specific accusation in a court of law), the finger-pointing goes unanswered from me, but my refusal to feed the
NME
story causes a bushfire of speculation that forms a part of my biography forevermore. No one comes to my defense, and the ex-Smiths are noticeable in their all-lads-together silence.
‘’e’ll get ’is hair cut reg’lar now,’
one can almost hear. It is a time, though, when Marr, Rourke and Joyce will only raise their heads in order to say something damning, which, ahhh, with maturity one is meant to shrug off.

Although all 36,000 tickets for the Hollywood Bowl have sold out within minutes, the
NME
is in full Morrissey concentration mode, and they milk and foster their racist allegations – full of high moral code and judicial thuggery. A picture of me holding a Union Jack is infallible proof for the
NME
that I do not like people whose skin is darker than my own.
‘I wear black on the outside|because black is how I feel on the inside,’
I had sung in 1985.

Suddenly a new generation of pop faces drape themselves in the Union Jack, and the
NME
celebrates them all as the emergence of ‘Brit Pop’; the Union Jack becomes the
NME
’s badge, leaving little doubt that the Morrissey fiasco was a personal vendetta by the
NME
to gain mass attention for the paper and to eke out a historical moment for its own archive. Had I actually been racist, the
NME
comments would reveal nothing and attract no one, but because the accusation was so unlikely it would naturally have enough impact to stop traffic – which was surely the
NME
’s aim. Setting itself up as our moral guardian and jailer, the
NME
is suddenly our parental safeguard and an ever
-vigilant arm of the law. In order to mesmerize the public you must accuse someone of being the opposite of what you have believed them to be, otherwise there’s no story and there’s no plot. Surely if any pop artist were, in fact, racist, it would be wrong of the
NME
to grant them so much suffocating publicity? The deathblow for anyone with a racist message could only surely be exclusion and neglect? Yet, instead, the
NME
smothered its readers week after week with the liquidation of ‘racist’ Morrissey, which, had the story any truth, would have placed the
NME
itself in the foreground for promoting the issue of race hatred so obsessively. The
NME
editor had written a damning review of my concert at Wembley, in which he assures readers that I had done
‘an appalling version’
of the T.
Rex song
Cosmic dancer
– a song that was not actually played on the night of the review! And
then
people say you are becoming neurotic about the press, when all one asks for is the truth.

I am called to a board meeting at Warner Records in Burbank where, in an enormously lavish office of pure glass, the revered head of the label examines me as one would a mummified relic.

‘Heaven will seem very dull after a lifetime in this office,’
I tell him, to which he does not smile, but I was simply trying to lighten the atmosphere – which admittedly is not one of my strong points. I am asked a few impersonal questions, the sub-text well hidden. I am being studied like something accidentally dug up.

‘I don’t exactly know why I’m here,’
I say softly, ‘
on
...
the planet
...
’
My voice trails sideways.
‘No, I’m sorry, I mean in your office.’
I try to straighten myself up. I have attempted a second joke, which must be like trying to strangle two people at once.

Seconds later, I am not in his office. I am politely ushered out. I ask key faces at Reprise what on earth it was all about, and I am reliably informed how Warner need a massively successful ‘act’ who is ‘alternative’, and I was indeed being auditioned for the star part since I had thus far been the most successful ‘alternative’ artist in America.

‘Alternative to what?’
I foolishly ask.

I hear nothing more, but I note the immediate meteoric Warner rise of Alanis Morrissette – the incongruous promotional manifesto enveloping her first album that shifts 27 million copies worldwide. Evidently Alanis had all that I lacked in order to gain a saturated global push.

‘Is THAT why I was interviewed?’
I later ask Howie Klein.

‘YES!’
he half-shouts, as if I ought to know everything.

Forever the bridesmaid, I have failed yet another interview, and I shall evermore only exist in French inverted commas, dreaming of how
Vauxhall and I
could have sold 27 million copies had the head of Warner warmed to the weave of my sleeve. But he didn’t. Still, I was close to that ever-elusive upgrade in the promo stakes.

Mick Ronson had produced
Your Arsenal
as he struggled on his cancer medication. I first met him at Hasker Street in Chelsea, where he had a neat terraced house on loan from a friend. The house is awash with dive-bombing bluebottles, and Mick casually swats them between his palms as we speak. I cannot think of anything to say on the subject of bluebottle protectionism, so I watch Mick splat, splat, splat. The house is just behind my flat at Cadogan Square, and here we are, together living the leisured London life. In his battered motor Mick and I drive to Bath in readiness to record
Your Arsenal.
We are good companions, and much of his life floods out on these journeys. Mick has a very attractive face – everything neatly in proportion, and I can still see the Hull school cherub whistling at the girls (and surely getting them without any fuss). Mick is always optimistic and is easy to be around. He takes me to a masseur who, oddly, works on both of our backs at the same time, and then the daily trip to the turf accountant fixes a firmer smile to his face. On our first recording session, Mick pushes drummer Spencer (whom Mick tags ‘Nelson’), but Spencer is affronted and walks out of the session – his manhood bent. We reconvene the following day and all is well. Linder stands by urging more cut and thrust on the vocal for
The National Front d
isco.
Ian Hunter walks in and joins Linder’s iron-hearted rallying – egging me on as if this were school sports day in Stevenage.

When I’ve finished the vocal, Ian says,
‘Good God, you won’t be going there again!’
and I’m not sure whether he means the National Front disco or, more likely, back into a vocal booth. For the sweeping coda on
I know it’s g
onna happen someday
Mick utilizes a heavily orchestrated pattern which we are certain echoes the falling moments of David Bowie’s
Rock ’n roll suicide.
I am slightly troubled by this resemblance, and I point out to Mick that the envelope has been pushed too far.

‘Yes, well,’
says Mick,
‘I wrote that original piece for
Rock ’n roll suicide
, so there won’t be any legal comeback.’
Mick goes on to say how he wrote the guitar parts for
Starman
and
The man who sold the world
. Mick had been naive in the past, but it was not for me to comment since I continued to be naive in the present.

Suddenly David Bowie telephones the studio and asks to speak to me. I am thrilled, but he tells me that he would like me to do a cover of one of his recent songs, and he stresses that if I don’t do the cover,
‘I will never speak to you again, haha,’
which is hardly much of a loss since David
doesn’t ever
speak to me. The song he’d like me to cover is called
Mr Ed
, and although I listen to the tape that he sends to the studio, nothing within the song shouts out to me. A few months later I am at my mother’s house when the telephone rings. My mother hands me the 1940s shellac antique.

‘It’s for you – it’s David Bowie,’
and boyhood’s fire is all aglow again, although I cannot understand how David found my mother’s number. He explains that he would like to send me something through the post.

‘Do you have an address?’
I ask.

‘Oh, just write to me care of the management,’
he replies.

‘No, I meant do YOU have an address for ME?’
I say.

Dear Morrissey,

Came by to see if you were OK. Called a couple of times but no answer. If I don’t hear from you or don’t see you, have a right smashin’ time in the States, and I will see you in the NY area. Take care of yourself. I’ll look forward to seeing you soon, OK.

Mick

A letter arrives from Spencer, who encloses a book of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry:

Dear Monsieur Moz,

I do apologize for making a mess at the Wool Hall. It was stupid and immature, no excuses. I know we don’t talk much which is a great shame (well, to me anyway). Even though there is a lack of communication, that doesn’t mean lack of feeling, understanding, and above all, respect.

All my best,

Spencer

The time with Mick in New York is brief. We play the Paramount Theater, which is a great success, but Mick chips in with,
‘I don’t know why you don’t do any Smiths songs. People want to hear them.’
I know this is true, but the imp in me wants to establish a solo footing lest I be intellectually battered for leaning too readily on the past.

Mick’s health is in speedy decline, so I am surprised when he telephones me to let me know that he is in great shape. It is not a steady voice, and these will be our parting words, since Mick will soon be dead. He tells me that he has exhausted funding for his medical care, and my imagination contaminates itself with the despairing notion that Mick’s life might end in struggle. But the end comes sooner than he, or I, dared anticipate. The order of the universe calls upon Mick in April 1993, the year still so young, but already it has taken three close friends from my dishearteningly slim roster. The telephone rang and it was Suzi Fussey – once the girl of a Beckenham High Street hair salon who had created David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy’ cut, and then married Mick. Twenty-three years on from that day, Suzi says ‘
My baby has gone,’
and I knew Mick was no more. I am asked to write about Mick in the
Guardian
newspaper, and talk about him on Radio One, but indecent haste forbids.

Mick certainly saved
Your Arsenal
, and by extension he saved me. Mid-week of release, EMI tell me that the album is going in at number 1, but as I prepare myself for glory it lands at number 4. An old Manchester rear gunner, Paul Morley, reviews the album’s opening single (
We hate it w
hen our friends become successful
), which he explains is a title taken from Oscar Wilde, which, of course, it isn’t. At
Top of the Pops
, 50s singer Marty Wilde approaches to shake my hand. Singing live, I fluff the words –
oh my dear God.
DJ Tony Blackburn would later say,
‘I am not a Morrissey fan, but he was right when he said we hate it when our friends become successful.’

There, now!

The solid basis of
Your Arsenal
threw the line back after the confusion of
Kill Uncle
,
which could wrest nothing from the spirit. It didn’t seem to matter now. In the US Reprise issue the track
Tomorrow
as a single, and stylish chief Steven Baker writes to me:
‘If we can’t
make this a hit then we can’t do anything.’

Needless to say, they didn’t make
Tomorrow
a hit. It emerges in a sleeve on which I languish by a swimming pool reading
Variety
magazine. In the background is bassist Gary Day, whom I most certainly have nothing against, but I ask that he be chopped off because he looks like a prop. I am told that no one knows how to take him out of the proofs (this is, after all, 1066), and so Gary remains on the sleeve and I feel slightly silly. Art must wait.

In the
Sun
newspaper in England a headline rings out, $
5,700
FOR GIRL FAN SCARRED BY MORRISSEY
,
and I am utterly perplexed. The writer is Piers Morgan, who details how a tambourine ‘thrown into the crowd by Morrissey’ at a show in Texas ripped into the face of 21-year-old Shirley, who then ‘failed to receive a personal apology from the singer’. The singer in question, I hastily assume, is me. Until the moment of this article I had never heard of Shirley or the incident, and I had always anticipated possible accidents by throwing tambourines
minus
their loose metallic discs. However, tambourines were constantly ripped from my hands, or grabbed off the drum-riser by someone who would then dive head first into the crowd, and we suspect that this is how 21-year-old Shirley managed to get whacked. However, from the Piers Morgan headline, the world would be forgiven for assuming that I had stalked Houston side streets at midnight wrapped in a black cloak concealing a sabre, ripe to slash to ribbons the next available plump face.

‘It’s a shame he hasn’t written to me,’
commented Shirley, now evidently fully recovered and giving international press conferences. Her slip shows as she concludes,
‘I’ve got the money,’
which one assumes is far more useful than an unscarred face. Ah, the greasy grind of the press – the scribblers and scratchers, the slingers and spillers.