Autobiography (30 page)

I do not blame Tim for the silliness of the
Ouija b
oard
video, but it doesn’t help the footing of a record already far too ornate and
burlesco
to interest critics of the first rank. We would travel in April to Death Valley in California, where at last I had Sire’s good grace for a proper video with a grown-up budget. The single is
November spawned a monster
, a pivotal allegro of agitation whose sumptuousness frees me from the recent past. Like it or not, I remain the opposition – regardless of how the rules shift. The dissonant heart appears on
Top of the Pops
, where no sooner does
November spawned a monster
begin than I am drowned away by fake applause and I kindly leave the stage.

The coterie wonder why I bother to wiggle onto the program at all, and the press point to a didactic dirge. The
Sun
newspaper lists the record at number 12 and also at number 15 in the same chart! How one record can occupy two positions must surely bend science sideways. I am criticized by singer Tracey Thorn for
‘singing about people in wheelchairs’
, and John Peel opens his radio show by playing the song in full, and once it dies away he breaks the silence with:
‘Well, what do you think of that, then?’
as if a roasting on an open fire is all that will cure me.

In Death Valley the roadsides were lined with abandoned donkeys that walk and walk in soaring heat, destination nowhere with ribs protruding. Even in the dead of night they continue to walk, the oncoming traffic of no interest to them, and humans of no help. Disowned, they must walk and walk until their legs give way to earth’s final pull – a feast for rats and buzzards. Tim had asked me to do the entire
November spawned a monster
video naked. I explained to him that this would be impossible since my entire lower body had been destroyed by fire in 1965. His expression remained wide-eyed with belief as he replied,
‘Oh.’
After watching the video, my father commented,
‘Shirley Bassey will be furious,’
which left me momentarily puzzled.

Tim had directed the
Sing your l
ife
video at Camden Workers Social Club, an undisturbed private world behind Kentish Town Road. The first time I had visited the club I almost cried with relief at its 1950s mix of High School dancehall and ruthless elitism warding off the trendy-bender copyists. Camden Workers was the real thing, more church than social club, and in a room full of rightly righteous purist rockers, it was not a place where you’d want to be unwanted. The dancefloor is Wigan’s Casino for the sharply chiseled pale profiles stomping a Cajun-reel in Depression-era American workwear; Appalachian spit-curl stomps of Nathan Abshire or Dennis McGee. Every record booms to distortion, and the smell of machismo threatens to bosh a roving eye. It is all inside you. How incredibly these boys dance – and where do they practice? And why does each boy dance alone? Ah, the great unsaid.The sharp duck-tails and the lemon stitching of vintage denim leave me trying to attach the image to the thing seen. Because of Camden Workers, and my new ally Debbie Dannell, I will make an effort with my hair and my clothes to look better for the future. Debbie reveals all the coded details of selvage (‘self edge’) signals on vintage denim, from back pocket rivets to belt loops; red tabs on 506 jackets, and how to spot a genuine chambray shirt. In a beer-fed gallop, the dancefloor shakes with the thunder of unfolding pleasure. Naturally, I can’t join in because someone would laugh at me, but I emerge from it all slightly bolder in demeanor, and Lord may a hand stretch out to greet me.

We had traveled with Tim to Berlin to make the girly-gush
Pregnant for the last time
video, and then to Arizona for the self-damned
My love life
, where I am seen driving through the streets of suburban Phoenix. In fact, local police will not allow the process of driving whilst being filmed, or filming whilst driving, or breathing whilst living, because the economy turns on permits and taxes and unimaginable local county charges, with the revolving lie that all laws exist only in order to protect someone. The world is not ours. The earth is not ours. The car in the video is therefore hoisted onto an automated platform whereon the camera also sits. With all sense behind me, I grab the wheel and attempt to look natural as I drive at 10 mph on a deserted side street (as one quite naturally would).

May 1992 found us in a very sunny Wapping, filming
We hate it when our friends become successful
,
an almost delightful video capturing one of those lost British afternoons of timelessness, and Tim’s
You’re the o
ne for me, fatty
catches the same spirit the following month, with sunlight late in the day at Battersea Park. Much later, Tim confided to me that the title of the song was undisclosed to the girl who played the part of ‘fatty’, and I thought this very uncivil of Tim, even if quite funny. In December we shoot
Certain people I know
in Chicago. Gary and Alain were very late for the shoot, and without apology, which enraged me and made it difficult for me to give a convincing account of the song.

By January 1995, Tim is in his grave, and James O’Brien directs the
Boxers
video at York Hall in Bethnal Green. A boy actor from an insurance commercial on television is tracked down to oppose professional Cornelius Carr in the ring. It doesn’t occur to anyone that the second boxer ought to be me, and when I mention this to James he looks unusually blank.

In September of 1995 we film
Dagenham Dave
in a council house in Dagenham, with Jenny Jay (who had starred in an excellent television play called
Two of U
s
) and Mark Savage (who had been famous in his role as Gripper Stebson in the telly teen drama
Grange Hill
). James also directed the
Sunny
video in east London’s Victoria Park in November of the same year. In the midst of such filming, with each video generally brushed aside as twiddling footlings, the grand drapes had been pulled back and the stage has been set for a comic-opera production of
The Night of the Long Knives
,
and something resembling a giant rat is crawling up the stage curtain.

Off in the wings, Michael Joyce had gone through his Smiths years in a smoky dream. Now, many years after the split, he had been shaken into consciousness. His finances frittered away, Joyce decided to turn to those who had served him generously in the past and he decided that they should continue to provide him with cash – now, in the uncertain present – and off he went, a flea in search of a dog.
Excused from all adult obligations in his Smiths past, Joyce and his legal practitioners wondered what they could scavenge from all that had gone. With devious cunning, Joyce instructs an array of legal firms (most of whom disappear after a few months of feigned interest) to hound me at addresses that I had long since left, hoping to establish evasion on my part and lawful stealth on his. It worked. With other people’s money (as always), Joyce ran his case on Legal Aid despite sporadic months of employment. This, too, worked to great effect. Certainly, in the years running up to what would become ‘the Smiths trial’ – years during which Joyce ran out of the legal time allotted to file a plea – everyone who knew of Joyce’s meddling was confident of his eventual failure given the wealth of evidence stacked against him. This reasonable assumption was made on the logical but apparently wrong understanding that the trial would force Joyce to prove his claim to be an equal partner. Joyce wanted his moment of confused respectability, even if the road to such fame was a sorry sequence of events. If he had been in possession of any documentation indicating that his royalty split had ever been 25 per cent, then there would never have been any need for a court case. But he had nothing and sadly needed nothing.

If you undo someone, you make history. It is the type of move that will impress only the simple mind, but it is history nonetheless. Here in 1996, Joyce wanted to do what he had never previously done: he wanted to finally look at his life and be responsible for it. With sweet-faced confusion the middle-aged boy said his appropriate Yesses and eventually hit upon a legal firm who would no doubt welcome the publicity, and thus the piggies went to market with their star well-drilled in
I-do-not-think-or-remember
formulations.

I am lumbered with the additional weight of bad representation. They, too, would like the financial flush of a major court case. Lights, camera, action. In preparation, Joyce makes so many glaring mistakes that his Witness Statement is withdrawn and re-chiseled four times prior to the hearing – not because he hasn’t had enough time since 1987 to get his facts straight, but because he doesn’t know what his facts
are.
A plea for publishing royalties to be split and shared with Johnny Marr is thought an unwise move, and is dropped from the final Joyce Witness Statement, as is a plea for a financial share of whatever I had been paid for designing Smiths sleeves. This latter is rethought and dropped when it is discovered that I had never been paid for Smiths artwork, yet one sees the mechanics of Joyce’s counsellors trying to squeeze money from anywhere they can. Here was Joyce in his early Witness Statements placing his songwriting contribution equal to Marr’s, and his contribution to Smiths Art unquestionably equal to that of Morrissey. What mind drove such a challenge, when Joyce had not once contributed to Smiths compositions, and had not once expressed the smallest interest in Smiths Art? Such is the certainty of his early facts that he quakes and then annuls his statements
without
any pressure from the opposition, who are nonetheless aware that he is also conducting a similar case for royalties against another group with whom he has worked briefly. He is running in his own circle. The plea for co-designer of Smiths Art had obviously been removed once Joyce had been advised that no payments had ever existed. Had there been, no doubt the plea would have remained. Joyce maintained his plea for 25 per cent of Smiths merchandising advances, even though any such advances in their entirety served to set up each tour as it came along, and absolutely never fell into the hands of Morrissey and Marr. Joyce maintained and forced this plea even though there would be no evidence that either Morrissey or Marr had benefited on a personal level from such advances, yet Joyce was now happy for both parties to pay him 25 per cent of large sums of money never seen nor received by the very two people who had given him fame. Joyce retained his demand for a 25 per cent cut of all Smiths live earnings on the unproven and insane assumption that 100 per cent of such earnings somehow and magically swept themselves into the personal bank accounts of Morrissey and Marr, and although there were no records indicating that all live fees had ever reached Morrissey and Marr, and although the vast expense of launching each tour would not be considered, Joyce nonetheless wanted money from Morrissey and Marr right now and without question. In essence, Joyce demanded 25 per cent of absolutely everything (excluding publishing) that had ever been created in the Smiths’ name, assuming – without proof – that all sums were handed to Morrissey and Marr as clear profit.

Joyce was making these demands now, in 1996, but had never made such demands during the Smiths’ existence. Never in his wildest dreams could Joyce have believed that fate would combine to present him with an antiquated deputy designed to force success on the plaintiff, a judge who would unleash a torrent of invectives against me and never be required to explain why. John Weeks was the name of the Circuit Judge wheeled in from Bristol to preside over the Smiths case. Appointed to circuit judge under Margaret Thatcher, John Weeks lived in the richly ornate Brympton d’Evercy mansion house in Yeovil, a Grade 1 listed building hidden behind 33 acres of parkland. With its coats of arms and tracery and its Henry
VIII
wing, Brympton was considered to be England’s most beautiful showpiece manor house. A home for the highest echelons of British aristocracy, its rooms also had connections with royal blood, having been built in 1220. Lavish television dramas such as
Middlemarch
and
Mansfield Park
had been filmed at the home of John Weeks. From this, John Weeks presents his elderly, small and shriveled frame as the ideal, unsmiling Lord of the Hunt, with an immutable understanding of the world of the Smiths. It seemed to me a less qualified judge could scarcely have existed. This was an ‘entertainment case’, but John Weeks appeared to operate with the sense that an enormous criminal trial was about to take place, and considering his own background and connections, I wondered how much he or any judge would know of the Morrissey in the dock, not only anti-royal and anti-Thatcher, but also an animal protectionist – all of which could provide grounds for hanging even before a single word of this case is uttered in camera. How on earth did Joyce manage to get his case to the High Court? Why has this case been accepted?
Like an old, weathered tree-trunk, John Weeks made his entrance as a famous star – wig trimmed by Edith Head. He is a bent little man with big eyes in a small face, an unfortunate vision that even his personal wealth cannot save. All he lacks is a gun over his shoulder. His first task is to watch the assembled gathering during the customary judicial bow. Whereas the head of Joyce touches his toes, my own head remains motionless, and for this, I would imagine, deputy Weeks marks my card. The prosecutor of defenseless people opens his miserable mouth, and gives a wave to his jesters to begin. So
this
is what hell looks like.

Two days prior to the trial, my solicitor
sends a fax to me explaining that she cannot attend court due to illness, but she promises the robust surety of her junior as an adequate stand-in. I have never met the junior, and I would never again see my solicitor who, as far as I am able to tell, has simply run off. Furthermore, the barrister chosen to guard my human rights also steps down, and his replacement is appointed just a few hours before the first hearing. My head spins at the sudden shambles – now of unimaginable proportions – and I walk into court with a small set of complete strangers. There, though, is Johnny, who walks directly up to me with a wink.