My Booky Wook 2 (24 page)

He’s freestyling now. He’s really found his voice. Over the course of the death threat he’s really grown as a writer. That’s what makes him first among all those who threatened to kill me that day. His energy, style, commitment and passion. In fact, I was so moved by White Boy’s death threat that I did something I seldom do. I decided to reply.

From: Russell BrandTo: White BoyDear White Boy,Initially, I assumed your letter was a covert homoerotic advance. If it is, be assured, sweet one, that I’d gladly accept. As long as I’ve got a lap, you’ll never need a place to sit down, you big, beautiful, white brute.Yours with everlasting affection (and, dammit, erection)Bitch Boy

In spite of the laughs and the camaraderie those first few days after the VMAs were terrifying. The American press and paparazzi lurked at the gate like jackals sensing there’d soon be a corpse to snack on.

Nik subtly and with as little fuss as possible organised LAPD police protection as some of the death threats seemed as though they might be acted upon. (Although my secret dream of meeting White Boy has still yet to be realised.) Through this challenging time Nik and I adopted the demeanour of outlaws who knew the final bullet could be in the chamber. We were like Butch and Sundance awaiting the final showdown. The fear was never addressed or expressed, but there was a looming dread, a sense that all our hard work could’ve been squandered in a few misjudged moments. Adam Venit, my agent and the most powerful person in our circle, came round and from his advice we gleaned that my previously unstoppable trajectory might have encountered its first obstacle. “Well, Russell, now everyone in America knows who you are. And not all of them like you.”

Failure is destructive to relationships, like death. Some of the friendships in the group suffered. Me and Matt quarrelled ourselves into silence and our working relationship became untenable. This was a concern as we still had a weekly radio show to consider. Sharon and I became incestuously jagged around each other and decided we needed space. Nik and I never spoke of our fear that the gamble might not have paid off, that we might have to return to England chastised, back to the comfort of John Noel’s patriarchy, and admit that we were wrong; that we couldn’t handle it alone. I had a new perspective on America. My naive excitement at the land of the free was tarnished; the coastal Utopia had closed like a lobster claw, squeezing me into the barren heartlands where all they had for me was death. No more pretty girls and applause – here is the prejudice, aggression and damnation of which you read, the other America. I yearned for England as only an Englishman can. I wanted to be home in London, East London, Upton Park on a Wednesday night in the rain watching West Ham lose 2–1 with ten minutes to go, having pissed away a 1–0 lead. I wanted the grim, grey normal things. To get the District Line home to my nan’s in Dagenham and fuck a bird called Stacey or Tracy or Kasey, or all three, stinking of chips with glittery lips and glottal stops at bus stops, but the bus don’t stop, it never arrives.

This is where you are defined. Here in the machine. Not with success and its transitory glow but when the cogs grind. When your enemies are about you grinning, with blood on their teeth. The British press gloated and chugged. “Brand commits career suicide,” they yawped, passing the blade and enticing me to consider the real thing.

Man, I hate failing. Failing to chat up a girl, or a joke twisting in mid-air like a struck gull and falling before the laughter lands. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have children. This is my wife, my life, my children. I need them to laugh. Sometimes on stage I tell them I love them, and I hope they know it’s true. They must know it’s true, they must feel it. Somewhere inside them they feel the yearning of a man who has nothing else, nowhere else to go. The only home I’ve ever known, up there in front of them; skewered in the spotlight is where I live, the only place I’ve ever lived. If I can’t do that any more, if the laughter stops, I’ve got no other option. There is no plan B, no safety net, no exit strategy. The way back is obscured by the smoke from all the burnt bridges.

“Let’s go home to England,” said Nik. We could just keep things simple, rethink, regroup, lie low for a while, just do some small gigs and the radio show. Stay out of trouble. Me and Matt weren’t talking, so I asked Jonathan Ross if he’d do it with me. So it wasn’t all bad, he’s the best broadcaster in the country. What could possibly go wrong?

†

Opportunity Sucks

When you first become famous, you see how other famous people, your new famous friends, handle paparazzi – abruptly and aggressively – and you think, “I’ll never be like that. I shall fashion myself in some new fame strain where with perpetual gratitude I accept the intrusion of the press and paps as an inadvertent consequence of success.” And for a while you stick to it. You joke with them and pull daft faces, you’re polite and tell them of approaching kerbs and obstacles as they backward gambol, cheeking and snapping. Then one day you grow tired, the novelty fades like a once lurid transfer on a kid’s elbow. “Fuck off and give me some space,” you think. You then realise that what you’d assumed to be your “oh so different, oh so Gandhi” novel take on handling the press was just the naive first step on the journey to behaving like everybody else. They too probably initially felt grateful and hubristically joshed and preened, but for them as for you, as for me, the day came where you want your privacy back. As Jonathan Ross told me at Mount Fame’s corpse-strewn foothills, the privacy was gone and, like Captain Oates, it “may be gone some time …”

The advantages of fame are many and obvious – the girls, the incessant, piping hot whistle of the self-e-steem-kettle, the restaurant table in the corner at the back – but if you’re pursuing fame as an end itself I urge you not to bother. Look within, find God, or Buddha, a flickering Yogic light, because – and yes, it is easy for me to say – fame ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you’re an artist and you simply must sing or dance or weave baskets then carry on, but make sure the focus is the singing or the dancing or the baskets. Otherwise when you get here you’re in for a terrible shock; your problems that you were trying to bludgeon with a shimmering neon rod will be here waiting stronger than ever.

The bright side is, if you have your art, that will never leave you. If you respect it. And you might get to be friends with some of your childhood heroes. Like Jonathan Ross or, if you’re really lucky, Morrissey.

You must have noticed that throughout this book, glinting at you through the sludge, the scandal and muck, are lyrics and lines from the mouth and mind of Steven Patrick Morrissey. This is because those words served for me as sermons, buoying me through murky adolescence and anguished early adulthood. For me as for many, Morrissey was a prophet who showed me there was a light at the end of the tunnel of self-banishment, and, as he said himself, that light “never goes out”.

I interviewed him first on one of my flung-together TV dog’s dinners and meeting him was like meeting, ahem, the Queen. I had ground-floor vertigo when I met him in his dressing-room at the BBC in Shepherd’s Bush. Waiting at the door like I was about to freefall from the aeroplane of fandom into the sky-blue plunge of friendship with an icon.

Never meet your heroes, they say; well they’re wrong, do. They’re usually great. Maybe I just selected good heroes. Tony Cottee, Paolo Di Canio, Jonathan, David Baddiel and Morrissey have all been completely fulfilling. But the first four on that list I always secretly knew were human, with Morrissey one has doubts.

“What’s he like?” people ask me. Well, he’s EXACTLY LIKE HIS SONGS! EXACTLY. Like the living embodiment of every rhyming quip, pun, poem and wail. He says things that transport you magically back to “The Queen Is Dead” or “Vauxhall and I”, in mid conversation.

Like his work he is tender, humorous, adolescent, unspoiled, melodramatic, English, insightful, self-absorbed and utterly fucking brilliant.

After the interview in which I sycophantically grilled him, we exchanged email addresses and began a correspondence. Morrissey, obviously, does not have a phone. The first time he came to see me do stand-up was in LA in a titchy fleapit theatre on Hollywood Boulevard called the Paul Gleason, which I thought must be named after a dead legend. It turns out it’s named after Paul Gleason, the bloke who owns it. “I’d like to pay a tribute to Paul Gleason,” thought Paul Gleason, “something to honour him, and all he stands for. What would be a fitting tribute to him? I’ll just go and ask me what I think.” It seats about fifty people and the toilet is conveniently placed between the front row and the stage, which is very helpful during performance and smells great. When performing to a room of fifty, one of whom is Morrissey, it is difficult to maintain focus. It’s like doing a gig on the tip of Michael Jackson’s shoe.

Somehow I held it together that night and did a good show, ignoring his iconic silhouette, his famous quiff looming above the other forty-nine spectators like Mickey Mouse’s ears or the Taj Mahal. Afterwards he came to see me backstage. The backstage area of the O2 arena is crap, so imagine if you can the backstage area of the Paul Gleason. If you were dragged there to be whacked by mobsters you’d turn your nose up at it. “Can’t you just kill me in the car park?” you’d ask.

Set list for my first US gig, which Moz attended. A lot of favourites – seagulling, death/life (finally explained) and, of course, Hitler.

Desperate for approval and notes I stared at the concrete floor with me mum, Sharon, Nicola, Nik, Jack and Gareth when Her Majesty swept in with her ladies-in-waiting. I tried to stand up but was already standing so just stretched like a deer feeding off frosty leaves just beyond reach. Even though it was my gig and I ought to have been in charge of hospitality, it was Moz who gestured to the two plastic garden chairs with a regal sweep of his arm. The two of us sat opposite each other, like Letterman shot on location in The Book of Eli.

“Introduce yourself,” he instructed me, nodding to his entourage, who like mine remained well back on the periphery watching the pair of us like anxious spaniel breeders.

“How are you?” I politely enquired. This talk was too small for Morrissey.

“Well done,” he said with sincerity. Then, with genuine wonder, “How do you do it?”

“What? That?” I spluttered. “It was nothing.” I had to stop myself telling him that he was the inspiration behind every joke. He wouldn’t have needed informing of the influence of his performance, I swish the mic cable during every significant laugh in an act of self-aggrandisement that even Paul Gleason would consider ostentatious. We talked for a while about a documentary about him we planned to make together. Morrissey at the time was a resident in a Los Angeles hotel. “It’s difficult to schedule, Morrissey,” I said, “with you having nowhere to live.”

“Nor nothing to live for,” he immediately responded. “Wow!!! Morrissey!! It’s Morrissey!!”

Our email exchanges follow a similar pattern – regard:

From: MorrisseySent: 09 July 2008 15:58:34To: RussellSubject: Empty TVRustle:I’m delighted for you with your MTV hosting thing; as you say, it will be good for America - so please don’t hold back - educate them, drag them forwards. Naturally, I’ve never been mentioned at the MTV Awards, or Awarded, or whatever it is they do, so I don’t know what It’s like, but assume it’s awful. This is where you change things. You Can, you will, you must. Off you go, Fatso. Everly,

Misery.

What a thing to discover that in your inbox after growing up so entirely enamoured of him. And what helpful advice – after preventing me from killing myself as a teen he was actively encouraging me as an adult. Luckily I didn’t overdo the “gushing” in my response …

From: RussellSent: 10 July 2008 02:57:35To: Morrissey Subject: MmmmMMMmmmmTVeMissary,I shall dedicate the evening to you and your cause/causes - I’ll harangue anyone flogging hot dogs and stinking up the world with fleshy aroma, I’ll make it clear that I regard with disdain all inhabitants of the legal establishment but my most coruscating venom I’ll reserve for that unforgivable wretch; a soul so rancid I scarce dare write her name, I refer of course to that foul blemish on the face of humanity “Cancer’s poster girl” *********** mbe.Then I’ll get that baby off the cover of “years of refusal” and arrange for him to ascend into a tunnel of light while “Yes I am blind” is played by Jean Michel Jarre.You were wonderful at Hyde Park with many nominating it as their favourite live (“as oppose to dead”) performance of yours. I enjoyed What she said and, yes, all of the new stuff. Naturally I expect you to have devised a new set by the next time I see you, perhaps incorporating those Israeli fellas who were at the after gig garden party - they seemed game.Why don’t you come to one of the records for my TV shows? There’s one Monday, come. Also I know an acupuncturist who would dearly love to prick you, this is not a euphemism - let me know if you’re interested. Finally, be sure to watch me on Richard and Judy this Friday. Scandalous loverazzle.

It was all I could do not to send him one of my earlobes. Morrissey however remained untroubled by the flattery and amusing.

From: MorrisseySent: 10 July 2008 11:40:03To: RussellSubject: RE: MmmmMMMmmmmTVRustle:Oh, the pain, the pain. Richard Mad said of me (last year): “he is

Insufferable and poofed-up” - so he’s bound to say the same about

You. I replied: “this is a bit much coming from a man who married

His own mother,” and the quote was printed in the Daily Mirror!

of course I’ll come on your telly show. Only if I can dress up.I sat by the pool yesterday (I’m in Switzerland) listening to a CD of

Alan Carr (your ONLY competition in the hee-haw stakes), and I had

3 vodkas and belly-laughed for about an hour. Am I still ill?A very sexy French woman came up to me and said “how much are

YOU?” and .... Well, I’ll complete this story on your telly show. Lashings of luv

Monotony. That’s how people throw up.

That’s my favourite one. I think it’s safe to include the Madeley line as he himself has already said it publicly. Plus he seems still to revel in rabble-rousing. Consider this one after I’d given him a pair of underpants as a birthday gift.