Autobiography (40 page)

Thursday May 11th at Blackburn and I am heckled. I can’t quite make out the complaint, but I have now found that people will do this if they think you might answer them. The heckler is impossible to overlook, but the words jumble themselves.
‘Ignore him!’
shouts someone else from the crowd. I had just announced how prison sentences of twelve years had been bestowed on animal protectionists relating to the famous Huntington Farm case, and I spluttered out how the murder of a child would only land you with six years in prison. Just ice.

The following night at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall I search for clefts in the rocks where I might hide so that none may track me. In other words, I am dogged with flu. It is a mournful experience to walk onstage knowing that much of your vocal range has gone, but much emphasis is placed on the power of the crowd and the sudden medicinal purification of being out there where sore throats are forgotten as hidden strengths are called on. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just cannot.

‘Oh, you’ll be alright once you get out there – the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd
...
’
say those who remain safely backstage. Often local promoters will send their doctors to examine you to gauge whether or not you are bluffing (and why on earth you’d want to bluff such a pointless prank is beyond me), and the doctor will always give you a clean bill of health so that you have no easy route to cancel the night and claim on insurance. This has happened to me many times, and I have faced an audience having no choice but to prove that my voice has, in fact, shattered, at which I am usually asked
, ‘Well, why did you go on?’
Legally, no choice. Ancient boos from long ago at Dundee’s Caird Hall and Aberdeen’s Capitol Theater when it all went wrong – these memories still sting many years on, because all you want to give is your very best even when you feel your very worst.

Two nights after Liverpool, I am crawling back to health at the London Palladium.

I think of Kirsty and daylight leaves the room and I sink to my lowest.

Istanbul hums from all of the scenes that you might expect. There are notably very few females on the street, all of which empty as evening prayer calls in the loud Holy Joes (men only) whose murmured prayers can be heard across the city’s rooftops. The preachers preach and the sinners sin sincerely. Pelicans gather by the bay. At the city’s oldest hammam we cleanse and purge, Brillo-padded to vanilla squeakiness, swabbed down on ancient tiles where the men of Istanbul launder themselves slowly and twice-over lightly, buffed in the buff. Twelve thousand gather for the Morrissey concert, and the promoter smiles to me
. ‘You are very big here. I just hear
Roy’s keen
on the radio.’

My smile crashes.
Roy’s keen
? A bubble-headed choice.

The young of Istanbul chant the words back at me with clerical address. I had no idea. They urge me on, their arms outstretched in entreating petition.
Why didn’t anybody tell me? I like it here, can I stay?
I am at my happiest, and I have the smarts as each song begins and screams of recognition run aground at the touch of each opening chord. How soon could I return?

Eighty-five thousand people stand before me at Roskilde
on Friday June 30th. The crowd sing so loudly that I struggle
to hear my own voice above theirs. Bright and happy faces appear brighter and happier as the sun falls and
Irish blood, English heart
is thundered word-for-word across what seems like twenty miles of bobbing heads. As always, I am detached, swamped in love, wondering how I could possibly repay it. Once again, all is well in Denmark:

I’ve been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour and Tories
And spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell
And denounce this ‘royal’ line who still salute him

Oh, whirlpool ’round my heart, this is what they call creative power – when thousands upon thousands sing your words back to you in order to let you know. Two hours later we drive through the night to France. At the festival, Bob Dylan stands side-stage as my best endeavors rip out across an impossibly youthful crowd. Dylan watches in his crumpled, cramped way. As I leave the Belfort Festival I am asked if I would like my photograph taken with Bob. I say
‘Yes, of course.’
Minutes later comes a new announcement:
‘I’m sorry, Bob said he doesn’t want to do it’
and my pecker rises since I didn’t make the request in the first place. A similar scenario would happen a few years later with Paul McCartney, when a knock comes to my dressing room and someone drenched in backstage stickers asks if I would be in a photograph with Paul, to which I say yes, only to be later told that
‘Paul doesn’t want to do it,
’
and I said,
‘Well, neither did I until I was invited.’

By July we are in Hungary, where I am surprised that the venue is half-empty. I am told that the tickets are £85 sterling, which is far too high for undernourished Budapest.
‘Even I wouldn’t pay that,’
I say.

The following day I am walking by the hotel swimming pool when I trip up and fall sideways into the water like someone directed by Billy Wilder. I resurface and naturally there are three hundred people watching wordlessly with stern Hungarian glares. I smile at no one in particular as I struggle to clamber on land.

On July 6th Zagreb is cloaked in huge color posters of my huge face busy licking an ice cream as taken on the back streets of Rome. The posters are everywhere, and every wish fulfilled. The hotel staff line up to greet me as a visiting dignitary, and at last I smell the august solemnity of VIP grandeur. Management talks to me as if they have always known me – gravity and courtliness mixed with decorum. I am led to the presidential suite, and from my balcony overlooking the square I see a bag lady surrounded by her treasured tat, squatting beneath the shrubbery with legs outstretched on the park lawn, having endured a lifetime of dying. I gather all of the hotel bathroom luxuries and I empty the mini bar and I drop them all at her feet in yet another bag. She peeps into the bag and smiles a floodtide of smiles.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’
says a band member,
‘she might be a recovering alcoholic and you’ve just plonked six bottles of whiskey at her feet.’

‘Yes, well,’
I say, defiantly wrong.

Croatia briefly becomes my new Italy. A razzle-dazzle wedding takes place in the hotel courtyard and I watch it all from a safe distance – like Richard Dreyfus at the end of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
I wonder why they even bother with the ceremony. It seems like such a great deal of trouble for everyone, and merely because two people have found themselves sexually compatible – but with no suspicion that their feelings might change with time. Hidden behind a huge plant, I cannot imagine giving any more to life than I have already given. I can see through the human heart, and I know that life’s biggest prize is to have the day before you as yours alone to do with as you wish.

By Friday we are in Serbia, sold out at 50,000, and my tired face shoots out from interplanetary screens as soft rains do nothing to halt audience fervor. Two days later I am calm in my beloved Finland, where my entire body sighs and a day of sun makes problems matter less. The Dolls are also on this bill at Turku, and I wonder if they will shuffle by to say hello. But of course they don’t.

Turku gives me a whole life again, and my Scandinavian bonds bind tighter.

By Tuesday we are at the Montreux Festival in Switzerland, where I can’t relax because my hair is far too long. The show is our best ever in the one country that had always said
‘No’
. In its first week of sales,
Vauxhall and I
had sold twenty-six copies in Switzerland, and probably none in its second week. Switzerland had forever been the uncrackable nut, with no way in, which seemed unsporting considering our great success in all the countries that bordered it. However, there are many comrades at the Montreux Festival, but possibly all tourists. Round and round and back to Sweden, where two nights in Karlstad have sold out quickly. The band are edgy and my voice sounds tired, but glances and gestures from the crowd remind you that your time and your life could not be better spent. In Sweden, the front row gets younger and younger, whereas I unfairly get older and older.

In Oslo two days later I sit by myself in a city center park. It is mid-day and Oslo is a-jitter with all of the usual Thursday mid-day jitters. There is never enough time. It is always too soon. I reflect on how I have reached the unthinkable stage of forgetting which musicians have played on what. At the Oslo show there are 20,000 in attendance, and I begin by singing a few A-ha lines, which was probably greatly irritating to everyone. Dropping into icy Reykjavik for the first time, I gaze out of my hotel at a noiseless city where everything has the appearance of a vacant slab. I give a brave laugh because even the cladding and panel plywood layers are oddly attractive, even though I can’t lay my eyes on a single soul. I have sold 5,500 tickets – which is a great surprise, so I try to take possession of my usual exhausted self and forge gusto, and yes, the night is an Icelandic wow. There I am, too, in the record shops in the center of town, surrounded by Iceland’s very own vocal dreamers – so far from Manchester.

Austria gives off a seductive smell. I am backstage at the Salzburg festival, beginning to lose track of where I’ve been. It is August 17th, yet another Thursday in a calendar seemingly made up entirely of Thursdays. The 50,000 throng are singing back at me their sonorous birdsong, all impossibly small and young and sinewy, and smartly attired in their rock-star chic of chains and mock-vintage denim, and I wonder exactly when it was that everyone around me suddenly became younger than me instead of older. I know that you are there somewhere. Forget me completely.

Wafting across a sun-drenched crowd I once again swallow everyone up in the sheer fright of contemplation, managing to avoid the monotonously clichéd rock festival yatter. I am an older person. It is fitting. I am ready, now, to be swallowed up by Mexico, a country that has occupied my dreams for too long. The Guadalajara
VEG
Arena is stuffed with 6,000 yelpers, and I swim in a web of giver-receiver mania.
Mania!
The close of the set jumps to a chaos so calamitous and insane that the building appears to be falling apart, and I am pulled and pushed and pulled and pushed. Sapped, I run off, and the stage is a street-scene of rubble and naked life. Two days later at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes I have sold 12,000 tickets.
‘You have sold twice as many as Oasis,’
the local promoter tells me, yet it is Oasis who are all over Mexican television, whereas I am – as ever – nowhere to be seen. Outside the venue t-shirts bearing Elvis Presley’s face are sold with
Morrissey
printed across, or down the side, or somewhere. An army of villagers sit outside the venue making anything at all on which they can sew or print the name
Morrissey
, so that these wooden dolls and kitchen towels might sell as souvenirs. There are children’s dolls, candles, bags of toxic candies – all bearing my name. It is yet another Thursday, and once the intro music has blasted its way, the audience advance a cavalry charge towards and upon the stage, everyone calling out and standing on one another’s heads as tears mount upon tears amid fights and punches. I have no idea where everyone is going. It’s as if flames were blocking the exit doors. The air hangs like Mexico ’70, streamers and unbearable heat, then smoke rising and liberating howls and calls of approval as each song is instantly recognized. This is my physical outlet. I must be explaining something well because here, now, 12,000 people understand. Fascinatingly, they refuse to leave the venue once the show has ended, and swarms of armed police crash in to order everyone home.

At a television studio I stand before the crowd like a political reformer, and then I catch sight of myself in an enormous camera lens and I look fat. But if I hadn’t noticed fatness I would have noticed something far worse. The critical eye never fails to find a flaw. What I am saying to people is:
This is why I adapt poorly to the outside world, and by the way, let me kiss you.

At the beloved Chicago Aragon Ballroom, compressed kilos once passed between 1930s racketeers; George Raft, fresh from the honey wagon, each hand in each side pocket, legs astride, rattleboned and full of vinegar. Nothing’s changed since then. The Ballroom reeks of brawl and that which Chicagorillas would once call ‘nigger heaven’ – northsiders’ monkey business with southsiders, dirty grandeur ornately down in the mouth. The Aragon lights up the cattle town, and song and dance calls to every never-wuz, and the downwardly mobile
phffffft
here in The Loop. Of course, I have always loved the Aragon Ballroom, with its gangster slop of menaced glop. When I first played here many lifetimes ago, I sneaked a peek at the queue – confrontationally all over the street, disrupting traffic, shouting back, unctuous and effusive, and there stood an army of male blond quiffs, tattooed arms and
Hatful of Hollow
t-shirts. Nothing, now, could hurt me. By contrast, the life of a politician looks hopeless.

Saturday November 25th in Athens, Greece, brings on the same power, yet the audience are a different set of dream bait longing to be eaten with a spoon; unsmiling Adonis after unsmiling Adonis pile into the hall, spruced up and sweet on the songs. Two days later in Thessaloniki the suave crowd seem to be almost exclusively male. The head-crushing roar dies away and I return to my cell. The next day a young woman is standing in the hotel lobby looking like Arletty gone terribly wrong, nerves leaving only a chopped chatter of words. She talks to me as if I am a priest. She touches my hand with abnormal gentleness, as if stroking alabaster. I leave it alone. I couldn’t bear it if my heart were made off with.