Morrissey interviewed by Simon Reynolds
Melody Maker, March 12, 1988
With "Suedehead" an even bigger hit than The Smiths' finest and a solo album, Viva Hate, due for imminent release,
things couldn't look rosier for Morrissey. So why is he obsessed with dissatisfaction? Why are his songs still about
adolescence and loss? Simon Reynolds meets the great man, takes a scalpel to his lyrics and his Englishness and comes
away with a unique insight into the most inspirational songwriter of his generation.
I think I've met them all now. For me, there are no more heroes left. And no new ones coming along, by the look of it. It could
be that this is a time marked by a dearth of characters, or that the smart people in rock aren't interested in self-projection but in
obliterating noise. But really, I think, it's the case that, in this job, you don't have the time to develop obsessions, what with the
insane turnover, and all the incentives to pluralism.
The heroes you have kind of linger on from a prior period when only a few records passed through your life, when you had
time to get fixated, spend days living inside a record. It's a real effort to click back to that frame of mind, which is bad
because fanaticism is the true experience of pop - I think of the splendid devotion of all those bright girls who, as soon as
they've got hold of the new Cure or New Order or Bunnymen record, immediately set to learning the lyrics by heart then spend
days exhaustively interpreting the Tablets From On High, struggling to establish some fit between their experience and what is
actually some drunken doggerel cobbled together in a studio off-moment.
Seriously, I approve. I approve the deadly seriousness, the piety, the need for
something sacred in your life. However deluded.
It's become a reflex for critics to castigate the readers for being partisan, for
being sluggish and single-minded in their choices. We exhort you to disconnect,
discard, and move on, acquire a certain agility as consumers. But maybe this
ideal state of inconstancy we advocate only makes for fitter participants in
capitalism. For the one thing that makes rock more than simply an industry, the
one thing that transcends the commodity relation, is fidelity, the idea of a
relationship. There are voices that you turn to as a friend, and you don't just turn
your back on your friends if they go off the rails. You hang around. You give
them the time of day. So - in the year in which we've forced the text-centered
discipline that is rock writing to incorporate everything it has excluded for so
long (the relationship between the star's body and the fan's, the Voice, the
materiality of music) - maybe it's time to make criticism grapple with what
undoes it, "the uncritical".
Happily, my finally getting to meet Morrissey coincides with the release of one of his great records (they seem to alternate quite
evenly with duff ones), so there's no awkward rub between loyalty and the critic's "responsibility".
Viva Hate feels implausibly fresh: the music's breathing again, free of a certain stuffiness and laboriousness that had set in
seemingly irreversibly in The Smiths' twilight period. All due respect to Johnny Marr (though the haircuts never get better...)
but, like most people "blessed" with skill, there was a tendency to be used by one's versatility rather than use it. Songs were
getting written to accommodate guitar conceits, pointless feats and smotheringly unnecessary elaboration. With his producer's
rather than instrumentalist's sensibility, Stephen Street is inclined to give a song only what it needs. And I never much cared for
the bumptious, muscular side of The Smiths - "What Difference Does It Make," "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish" anyway
- so I welcome the spaciness Vini Reilly brings as new guitarist, whether it's the lurid wig-out of "Alsatian Cousin" or the
dew-and-moonbeam ECM iridescence of "Late Night, Maudlin Street".
In American teen slang, Vini is "a space" - a dreamer, someone not all there. Hailed in these pages by Paul Oldfield as "the
missing boy of pop", someone whose resistance takes the form of an absenteeism from life, it strikes me that Reilly's mystical
anorexia is unusually suited to Morrissey's neurasthenia, his supine delinquency.
What do you feel about the album? Whenever you have a new record out, you generally opine that it's the best
thing you've ever done...
"It's quite different for me now - and this might sound absurd - but there really isn't anything to judge it against. Times are very
different and my life has moved on, since The Smiths, in very specific ways, and Viva Hate is in no way the follow-up to
Strangeways. So in a sense I do feel that it is the first record."
Are these changes personal, or artistic...?
"Certainly in a personal way, it's entirely changed. All the people that surrounded me 12 months ago have entirely changed,
whether it's the group, the people around The Smiths, or Rough Trade. Practically everybody that surrounds me now wasn't
there a year ago. And, yes, I'm very pleased with what I find."
Stephen Street is one constant, though...
"But working with Stephen as a producer is quite different from writing with him, and even his personality has changed
dramatically, within this sphere; he's more relaxed, and more exciting."
What are the respective merits of Marr and Street?
"Johnny was very hard, as a musician: he played in a very interesting, aggressive way. Stephen does not. but the gentle side of
Stephen is something I find totally precious."
And what about Vini - had you followed his career in Durutti Column?
"With a vague interest. Nothing deep. I'd never met him, or saw him play. But I had all his records. When it came to working
on the album, it turned out that Stephen had produced Vini's last record. Stephen suggested him, and it was perfect. What I
liked was the extremity of his beauty, and the erratic quality. He's also extremely humorous. The whole session was extremely
humorous. But Vini's not terribly interested in >
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ely steeped in every manifestation of pop."
Why Viva Hate? What's the thinking behind the title?
"Like many other titles, it simply suggested itself and had to be. It was absolutely how I felt post-Smiths and the way I continue
to feel. That's just the way the world is. I find hate omnipresent, and love very difficult to find. Hate makes the world go round."
Does that sadden you? Or do you have a need to hate? Is hate one of the things we do to reinforce the sense of our
own identity, our separateness?
"I do find people quite hateful, naturally. I think people feel hate very easily, and they need it in their lives, they need to distrust
and to criticise."
Is that bad? Natural?
"Well, it's just there really. But then I always thought the human race was very very over-rated - by rock critics generally."
Why did you ask for His Master's Voice to be reactivated as your label?
"I was presented with a great choice of defunct labels and designs... things like Decca. I didn't want to be on EMI, and
Parlophone seemed like the obvious mod suggestion, which I didn't really want either. His Master's Voice, I thought, had a
certain perverted grandiosity and thus spoke to me very directly. I'm the only artist on it."
And the last one was Joyce Grenfell, 20 years ago...
"Yes. Spot the difference!"
That pleases you a great deal?
"Yes. I hope other groups don't sign to the HMV label. People like... The Icicle Works. That would be awful! I have hundreds
of HMV records in my collection. People like Paul Jones and Johnny Leyton. His most known hits were 'Johnny, Remember
Me' and 'Wild Winds', which got to Number 1 and Number 2 respectively, but he had a ragbag of semi-failures like 'I'll Cut
Your Tail Off' which, for some unknown reason, staggered and died in the lower forties."
Viva Hate, unsurprisingly, returns again and again to the Englishness which obsesses Morrissey.
For instance, the probable next single "Everyday Is Like Sunday" pores over the drab details of
some benighted seaside resort... "Hide on the promenade/Scatch out a postcard/How I dearly
wish I was not here... trudging slowly over wet sand... win yourself a cheap tray... share
some greased tea with me"... Typically, Morrissey seems to cherish the very constraints and
despondency of a now disappearing England, fetishise the lost limits.
What is this love/hate relationship you have with Englishness?
"There are very few aspects of Englishness I actually hate. I can see the narrowness, and love to
sing about it. But I don't hate Englishness in any way. All aspects of affluence, I find very
interesting and entertaining. And it's still, I feel, cliche as it may seem, the sanest country in the
world."
But there is the echo of Betjeman-on-Slough in the line "Come! come! come - nuclear
bomb!" I mean, if it was such a rotten holiday, why hark back to it?
"That never really occurred to me. The pleasure is getting it out of your system, saying 'never
again' instead of 'same time next year'. And the British holiday resort is just like a symbol of
Britain's absurdity really. The idea of a resort in Britain doesn't seem natural."
On the same subject, there's the line in "Bengali In Platforms": "Shelve your Western plans/And understand/That
life is hard enough when you belong here". Don't you think the song could be taken as condescending?
"Yeeeees... I do think it could be taken that way, and another journalist has said that it probably will. But it's not being
deliberately provocative. It's just about people who, in order to be embraced or feel at home, buy the most absurd English
clothes."
"An ankle star that blinds me... a lemon sole so very high..." - this is the first of the many Seventies references
that permeate the album. Presumably your adolescence always was conterminous with the Seventies... but why
have you now started to make explicit references to power-cuts and suedeheads? Why is it that you and everyone
else have embarked on this reassessment of that decade, all at the same juncture?
"It's a great accident. I just felt the need to sing about 1972."
So what was the zeitgeist, the vibe?
"The Seventies were like two decades really, the first half and the second were like two different times. And obviously the
middle was dreadful. The first half was curious. Obviously it was still very much linked to the Sixties, an extension of them. But
[the] glam rock explosion was, for me, fascinating. It had never happened before and that made it so intriguing and so
despised. And then, in the mid-Seventies, it became discofied and easy and American. And then, in the late Seventies, there
was once again that sense of great obstreperousness, which made life so interesting - which it hasn't been since. There was a
great deal of talent and imagination and that doesn't happen very often. It was also very privately English, which I thought was
very helpful, because, once again, it was a matter of the rest of the world catching up with England, instead of the reverse. And
it was a national thing, it brought the provinces alive, and people began to focus on Manchester and other places in a very
intense way. Punk was very fair."
This is the standard view of the Seventies, of course, as calcified still further by the NME's feeble gesture of
"reappraisal", and the abiding tenet is that everyone was waiting out of the Seventies for something to happen. But
I wonder, did people really feel at the time as though they were living through tawdry and impoverished times?
"Not really. I think that was just the tempo of the times. And old photographs are always embarrassing. Perhaps in 10 years
you'll look back and think the way you look is immensely humiliating." (Maybe sooner.) "And I might feel the same way also.
But one can't deny that the style of the Seventies was the pinnacle of debauched nonsense and human ugliness."
Again, on "Late Night, Maudlin Street", you say: "I never stole a happy hour around here" - but the whole effect
of the song, the way your murmured reveries drift in and out of Vini's entranced playing, just makes the whole time
and place seem magical, otherworldly, and incredibly precious...
"It is a trick of memory, looking back and thinking maybe things weren't that bad, but of course, if you concentrate, you realise
they were. But I don't want to sing about football results or importune people to dance. There are too many other people doing
that, and I feel sad there aren't people making serious statements. I feel slightly let down. If feel I should look about and see
streams of groups being angry and extremely hateful - but it's just not happening at all."
For me, the s>
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But you seem not so much angry, as succumbing to memories, drowning in them, leaving this world behind...
"But, I think, finally exorcising the ghost of that past and those small times."
It reminded me of the comparison The Stud Brothers made between you
and Sinead O'Connor: the "rigorous autobiography", the way both of you
seem to have stopped living in order to document more completely your
adolescence.
"But my life never really started at any stage - which I know you won't believe, but
it's true - so it never really got stopped at any point. But obviously the past is what
makes any person. It's because of your past that you're sitting there now, with your
list on your knee. Not because of the future or the present. I can't help thinking
about the past."
"Where the world's ugliest boy, became what you see here, I am - the world's ugliest man". Isn't that a little coy?
You must be fairly confident about your looks, by now?
"Well, thank you, but no - if I see a picture of myself in a magazine, I quickly press on and get to the classified ads. And if by
some quirk I see myself on television, I instantly change channels."
The line "Women only like me for my mind" is clever...
"It's the final complaint, I suppose, in the long list of complaints about the past."
It's still not widely appreciated that men can want to be objects, as much as agents, of desire.
"But I think men are seen like that, actually - now. Men are aware of their sexuality in a way they previously weren't, or weren't
supposed to be. I think women have become very open about their needs and desires, and this was entirely due to feminism.
By women being open about sex, it made life much easier for men. And this is why feminism helps everybody, to be slightly
more relaxed about life."
There's the line about taking "strange pills"... is suicide something you personally have approached?
"Yes, occasionally. Obviously, I've dwelt on it with magnificent interest."
And you see it as often a noble decision?
"I do, I still do. Obviously, the traditional viewpoint is to scowl, but I don't understand that."
There are certain situations where I can imagine it's a very strong statement about your power over your own body,
and a gesture of throwing off the "jurisdiction" of the medical and therapeutic "authorities"...
"Yes, and it's also a very hard thing to do. It takes enormous courage and strength. Sometimes, obviously, I think it very
unfortunate that people reach that stage. It would be very ideal if life was repetitiously joyous. But is it?"
Nope.
Mindful of Morrissey's Genet-style, um, interest in ruffians, as evinced by "Suedehead", I ask: have you always
been drawn to people who are tough and streetwise and unlike yourself?
"I'm enormously attracted to people who can look after themselves. I'm obsessed by the physical, in the sense that it almost
always works. It's a great power to be very physical, to be able to storm through life with swaying shoulders, instead of
creeping and just simply relying on your Thesaurus. It doesn't work! I've had so many conversations with people trying to
convince them of a particular point, and although I find words central to my life..."
You'd like to be capable of violence...
"Nothing shifts or stirs people like a slight underhand threat. They jump. But most of the friends I have are very verbal and
cross-legged individuals and not very demonstrative in any way. So I've never belonged to any physical set. The song 'Break
Up The Family' is strongly linked with 'Suedehead' and 'Maudlin Street', that whole period in 1972, when I was 12, 13. 'Break
Up' is about a string of friends I had who were very intense people and at that age, when your friends talk about the slim
separation between life and death - and you set that against the fact that this period of your youth is supposed to be the most
playful and reckless - well, if you utilised that period in a very intense way, well, that feeling never really leaves you."
Did you all consider the family a bad idea?
"No, we didn't feel that at all. The family in the song is the circle of friends, where it
almost seemed, because we were so identical, that for anybody to make any
progress in life, we'd have to split up. Because there was no strength in our unity.
And that's what happened, we did all go our separate ways, and quite naturally came
to no good. I saw one of them quite recently, and it was a very headscratching
experience."
Because he'd turned into the complete opposite of what you all had been?
"No, not at all. Which is the confusion."
And your gang, were you outcasts, victimised by "The Ordinary Boys"?
"Yes, but half of it, I have to confess, was the effect of deliberate choosing. We chose to reject the normality of life, and be
intense and individual."
Do you think, in 10 or 20 years, your life will still be structured around these playground antagonisms?
"Yes. People don't really change, do they? They don't change. And the playground antagonisms are replaced by other... more
adult antagonisms."
Office antagonisms.
"Yes. Canteen antagonisms... getting heavily antagonised while you're queuing up to purchase a doughnut. But surely you have
a happy question?"
The last track on Viva Hate is a rueful little ballad with the self-explanatory title "Margaret On The Guillotine",
which describes "the wonderful dream" (ie, the gory and spectacular public execution of our P.M.) that all "the
kind people" harbour. The chorus, repeated five times, is the plaintive, rhetorical question: "When will you die?"
You realise all of this will cause you no end of trouble?
"Anything that's very clearcut and very strong causes difficulty, doesn't it? But why should it? I'm not looking for attention. In
this case, attention is the last thing I really need. I don't want to be in the Daily Mirror. There is something in this above
controversy and outrage and all these over-familiar words. It's too easy to be controversial."
So you mean it? You'd like to see her dead?
"Instantly."
In a cruel, bloody sort of way?
"Yes."
Would you carry out the execution?
"I have got the uniform, ready."
One line in the song seems to me to be very revealing: when you say you want to see her killed "Because people
like you/make me feel so tired... so old inside". If you compare The Smiths with the previous Great White Hopes,
the Pivotal Rock Bands of preceding eras, it's clear that the rebellion of the Stones, Who, Pistols, Jam, was based
in some kind of activism or at least action, an optimism about the potential of collective or individual agency. But
The Smiths' "rebellion" is more like resistance through withdrawal, through subsiding into enervation.
The fantasy in "Margaret On The Guillotine" is more like wishful thinking, than the resolve to do violence, or even
personify violence threatrically, onstage. Isn't the effect of "Margaret" just to encourage wistful resignation?
"Maybe, but I do also firmly believe in action. But also there's a great sense of doorstep rebellion, and stamping of feet. I think,
above all, that dealing with people's manipulations is very tiring. You grow old very quickly when every day of your life you're
trying to win arguments. Politically, I do feel exhausted. I do feel there are no more demonstrations, no more petitions to be
signed. I think those things and group meetings and creches, are completely boring and a waste of time. I do feel a sense of
apathy."
I'm interested you talk about "stamping of feet", because this fantasy of offing Mrs. Thatcher, as though this
would somehow solve everything, as if the "evil" in this country weren't a tad more structural and entrenched -
well, there's something a bit childish and petulant about it.
"Believe me, I'm totally aware of that. But there's also something important about it. The song is silly, it's also very heavy, and
it's also very brave. And I sit back and smile. Surely you can see that the very serious elements in it puts the kind of
straightforward, demonstration, 'Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out' protest song, in its place and makes it seem trite and a
little bit cosy?"
The thing with protest songs is that pop's always been about the immediate,
spontaneous, and puerile, it hasn't the patience to slog through
sub-committees and lobbying and making orderly demands through proper
channels. Pop isn't programmatic, it wants the world and it wants it now, and
it's much more satisfying to hear about your enemy being slaughtered. Even
if it's just a fantasy...
"Is it? You obviously haven't listened. I think it's possible. The times are quite ropey.
Things are touch-and-go. You don't believe me?"
But it's like you say, there's this battening down that's seeping throughout society and the result is enervation and
retrenchment. You can feel it on every level of life. A "trivial" example: when you get on a bus. They've got rid of
the conductors, to save costs, and you have these pay-as-you-enter buses, and getting on and off takes longer and
is more stressful, journeys are longer, and you can see ordinary people get more harrassed, bottling it up. But the
effect of being shat on is to set people against each other. While the nasty people have banded together, the money
people.
"Well, yes, there's a lot of organised suffering in England right now."
I feel a fool doing this, it's like defending eyesight or breathing, but the ghost of The Stud Brothers are leering at me in the
corner of my vision, cackling in a saturnine sort of way about "jessie tendencies", so I feel I must put pen to paper on the
subject of POIGNANCY. It seems to me that, in its own gentle way, poignancy is as profound an intimation of the
contradictions of being, of the screwiness of this world, as any of the mindf*** experiences or headlong plunges into the
horror-of-it-all that we conspiratorially celebrate.
Poignancy (and this is why its domain is the minor key) is the exquisite meshing of two
contradictory feelings. It's a piercing beauty, or a sweet ache. Anyone who's ever
treasured their pain, tried to prolong it, toyed with exacerbating it or been driven to
dwell on inside it long after recovery was an option, preferring the company of ghosts
to the dreamlessness of everyday society - that person understands poignancy.
But poignancy isn't just retrospective, it's also a mourning of the Moment as it passes,
the rapture that's the same as grief, a radiant apprehension of death.
Morrissey has always lived and breathed the poignant, always secretly treasured the
gulf between him and the loved one, the difference that makes love possible but makes possession illusory, a delusion, so that,
in the end, we are all unrequited lovers. And poignancy is why he obsessively prizes and keeps open ancient wounds. And it
seems to me that The Stud Brothers understand poignancy, and the reasons why its proper language is the ease of elegance,
perfectly well, actually - it's just that they vest the power of poignancy entirely in women, which is all very well, but doesn't
exactly go against the schizoid grain of the entirety of Western Civilization, and that, when the poignant registers in the
vocabulary of a pop male, it's a repugnant indication of some appalling limpness of being, whereas with Sinead/All About
Eve/Heart it is alluringly frail.
I just think, ultimately, that the Lester Bangs aesthetic universe, for all its solipsistic majesty, is such a long way from being the
be-all, that in the end, you do choose to reach out, you do choose the tentative and the touching over the blinding and the
bludgeoning every time.
Like most great groups, The Smiths left a trail of imitators in their wake. It's as though groups see something that's
great, and can't get past the greatness, can only duplicate it. I mean, do you think The Smiths have been a bad
influence?
"A lot of groups don't really know what to do, and aren't terribly sure of their footing, and they do mimic, and they do
over-estimate and over-utilise their influences. But originality, you must have noticed, is extremely rare, and it's quite natural
really. And look at all the singers who copy Madonna."
But all those groups, like The Wedding Present, with their rather minor version of the pensiveness and
wistfulness...
"Well, I can only applaud, really, because it is quite an unusual standpoint, still - and anything that hits against the blaring,
bloated Bon Jovi mechanisms, I'll... stand beside."
I think there's a rather ill-thought-out assumption that, because you've bared your
soul and this fascinating set of problems has emerged, that, if they do exactly the
same, their misery, or awkwardness, is going to be as interesting as yours.
"A lot of groups of obviously Smiths-leanings have deliberately tried to trash The Smiths, and
all of those groups to my knowledge, have been instantly bottled... but I'm always totally
flattered and amused when I hear a voice that is... indebted."
This idea that honest, unmediated misery is per se gripping, I think stems from the
simplistic notion that your fans identify straightforwardly with the scenarios in your
songs. But how do they connect with such a statistically-remote calamity as
"Girlfriend In A Coma"?
"Oh, you'd be surprised! You should read the letters I get. But what are you really saying?"
Isn't there something almost aspirational about their identification with such
irregular forms of martyrdom? A craving for the hardest hit of self-pity?
"I don't feel they're extreme. If anything, I feel they're understated. I think people live very
urgent lives. I don't feel I'm in any sense vaudevillian or melodramatic."
When writing, haven't you ever doubted that, what your vigorous introspection was
turning up, was going to be of value to someone?
"No, I haven't really. I've always thought I've had a very clear view of what I'm doing. And if things do get slightly dodgy, I
think I'll notice."
Do you think there are limits to the kind of people who get something from what you do?
"Mmmm - but that's true for anybody, really. I'm just pleased that the limits still amount to a sizeable audience. I don't feel the
need for more, I don't feel the need to be totally massively global."
On "Rubber Ring", you seemed aware that, for many of your fans, the relationship is going to be a temporary if
intense, even lifesaving one. Do you think that maybe most of your fans are going through a phase, and that most
of them will emerge the other end, and leave you behind?
"Well, it probably is a phase. But if people move on, it's understandable. In the event that everyone moves on, and I'm left
dangling in the recording studio - then it would seem to confirm everything I've ever thought about the cruelties of life!"
It seems to me the only people who do persist in that phase and make something tenable out of an unsatisfied,
unsettled life, are rock musicians, and rock critics. But has satisfaction ever threatened to loom in your life?
"It's never been something I've been immediately faced by. It's definitely a possession of other people. I have a very long list of
things I want to do."
Artistic or personal?
"Artistic. Nothing else counts."
Does a notion of "artistic growth" have any place in your scheme?
"Not really. Can you give me an example of where that's happened?"
You're right: in rock and pop, it seems people just have their thing...
"And they hone it. Or they start bad and merely get better. Artistic growth? I don't really have any ambitions to change in any
drastic
