Celebrating 50 years of Morrissey
OH BABY!: Morrissey's new LP sleeve
WE could wish him “An unhappy birthday”. But we won’t. The world’s greatest living Mancunian – proved by an M.E.N poll – has achieved too much in 50 years for us to sing those sardonic lyrics.
Let’s, instead, look at the enduring appeal of Steven Patrick Morrissey.
Two dates at the Manchester Apollo to mark his 50th birthday sold out in 15 minutes.
The Moz disco held each month at the Star And Garter in Fairfield Street, Manchester, is hosting a special birthday bash on Friday, which has sold out too, attracting fans from New York, Finland and Germany.
Fringe events are arranged at Salford Lads Club, featured on the inner gatefold sleeve of The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead LP.
And Green Badge guide Ed Glinert has invited fans to join him on his Hand In Glove Smiths’ tour, due to set off from Oxford Road Station at 2pm on Friday.
You can even buy Morrissey Is 50 jewellery, although it’s certain he’d never wear it himself.
Clearly, there’s still an awful lot of interest in Mozzer and no sign of his appeal fading.
“His legacy is unmatchable in terms of local music,” suggests Glinert, who turned 50 himself recently.
“The breadth and range and quality of the words and sheer joyfulness of the music meant that The Smiths were one of the best groups Britain has ever produced.”
Today Morrissey is a man of the world. So much so that his publicist says he currently resides at “No fixed abode”.
But it is Manchester which has “so much to answer for”?.
He was born in Park Hospital, Davyhulme, in 1959, while his family lived in Hulme, and was raised in King’s Road, Stretford.
“It was called Queen’s Square. It backed on to a very famous building called Loreto College, which is still there, and was on the border of Old Trafford, Moss Side and Hulme,” he says.
“We had a house, my grandmother had a house, my mother’s sister had a house and her other sister had a house, so we were very much the clan that ruled the place.”
He went to St Wilfred’s infant school, failed his 11-plus, and then on to St Mary’s Secondary Modern School, Stretford.
Pop provided the key to his happiness from a very young age.
He says he knew “everything about British pop … not just about Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black and Billy Fury and The Kinks but people like Rita Pavone and Timi Yuro.”
The first record he bought was Marianne Faithful’s Come Stay With Me. Determined to stand out, he showed off at school with New York Dolls records. The first concert he went to was Marc Bolan’s T-Rex at Belle Vue in July, 1972.
“I could see that singing on stage and singing the songs that you had written was an art form that everybody really aspired to,” he told an interviewer.
He was always precocious, writing pages of scripts for Coronation Street and sending them to Granada with letters critiquing episodes.
“I’d get these enormous letters from the producer, Leslie Duxbury, who was fascinated that someone so young should have such a backlog of memories about the series,” he adds. “He never offered me a position, of course.”
Johnny Marr
The Smiths formed when guitarist Johnny Marr turned up at Morrissey’s house in 1982, and broke up five years later.
Morrissey, famous for his NHS glasses, gladioli and almost militant vegetarianism, courted controversy from the off.
The single Suffer Little Children was dubbed a celebration of infanticide and withdrawn along with The Smiths’ debut album from Woolworths.
“Shocked” headmasters demanded apologies when The Headmaster Ritual highlighted “belligerent ghouls running Manchester schools”.
Morrissey launched an “astonishing and vicious” attack on the royal family, said the Live Aid single was diabolical and “regretted” Margaret Thatcher’s survival of the Brighton bomb.
Former M.E.N music writer Mick Middles also felt Morrissey’s ire after a fanzine report suggesting The Smiths had “spitefully” ditched a band from support slots, coming through the experience with a £900 legal bill but a “good story to tell”.
“We delivered a copy of the magazine to Morrissey’s mum’s house in Hale,” he recalls.
“The next thing I’d received a letter from a lawyer in London saying that Morrissey and Marr were suing me.”
Middles says Morrissey was “charming if evasive”. He adds: “I remember him more as Steven from Stretford, this guy who was always hanging around on his own at the Electric Circus and never really talked to anybody.
“When I heard that he was in The Smiths, my initial reaction was: ‘Not that shy kid from Stretford’.”
Ian Tilton photographed Morrissey at the height of The Smiths’ success and remembers both his eccentricity and shrewd eye for business.
“He was one of the only people I ever photographed who refused to allow me to keep the copyright for the pictures I’d taken,” says Tilton, who took pictures for CityLife magazine and the cover of the Rank album.
“We went round to his flat in Altrincham after the shoot because the deal was that he got the final choice of the pictures that we would use for the cover.
“His flat was really bare and immaculately clean. I don’t think it was an affectation – this was just his way of doing things.”
Salford Lads Club
Another photographer, Stephen Wright took the iconic image of The Smiths at Salford Lads Club, when he was 24.
He will be back at the club at 2pm on Saturday – a regular tourist destination now – to take a giant “Moz-alike” picture.
“We need quiffs, cardigans and big girls’ blouses – in fact a whole range of Moz attire, to celebrate Morrissey’s 50th birthday,” a spokesman says.
But not everyone is so in love with the Moz Father.
Perhaps the highest profile dent to Morrissey’s reputation came at the end of his legal battle with The Smiths’ drummer Mike Joyce.
Joyce and the band’s bass player, Andy Rourke, were paid only a 10 per cent share of royalties after the band split up, by Morrissey and Marr.
Rourke settled out of court but Joyce won his case that the two were not, as Morrissey and Marr’s counsel said, “mere session musicians – as readily replaceable as parts of a lawn mower”.
Joyce got £1m for his troubles. with Judge Weeks describing Morrissey as “devious, truculent and unreliable”.
Morrissey also became embroiled in accusations of racism.
He left Dublin after the court case for Los Angeles and by 1999 was living in an LA house designed by Clark Gable for Carole Lombard and later owned by F Scott Fitzgerald.
Johnny Depp was his next door neighbour.
In 2005, he moved to Rome because he felt his privacy was being compromised by “celebrity sight-seeing tours”.
More recently he sang about “Throwing his arms around Paris.”
Asked about re-forming The Smiths, he says: “I’ve worked very hard since the demise of The Smiths and others haven’t, so why hand them the attention that they haven’t earned? We are not friends. We don’t see each other. Why on earth would we be on stage together?”
Liverpudlian former journalist Dickie Felton has written a new book called The Day I Met Morrissey – he did it four times – and says that it paints an unusual and revealing picture of the music icon through a collection of real-life random encounters.
Felton, 35, who once got Morrissey to sign his arm and then had it tattooed, says: “There’s a chance encounter at Wilmslow train station in 1985. More dramatic Morrissey meetings come in perfumeries, airport lounges and by the pick’n mix in Woolworths.”
Clearly Morrissey’s appeal goes beyond his music. But isn’t it time he stopped complaining?
Robert Graham, a lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, was working for CityLife magazine when The Smiths’ eponymous debut LP was released in 1984 and went on to write a play about The Smiths entitled If You Have Five Seconds To Spare. He says Morrissey’s lyrics are as potent as ever.
“The gist of the play was that it wasn’t that great an ideas to idolise people,” he remembers.
“Unsurprisingly, Morrissey refused to go and see the play, perhaps because he idolised people himself and is an idol to many still.”
Graham says that Morrissey’s lyrics remain as potent as ever but shares the opinion of many critics that he has perhaps meddled too much with the music of his solo offerings.
“You can’t argue with how good he is – very high profile and adored by I don’t know many people around the world for 27 years.
“But he is ridiculously thin-skinned and lashes out at anybody who seems to be the enemy in a way that people who are 50 are less likely to do than somebody of 23.”
Heaven knows that’s probably true, but maybe that’s why so many still love him.
Morrissey plays the Apollo again on Saturday, May 23. £32.50. Telephone: 0844 477 7677 and 0871 2200 260 or at gigsandtours.com to check for returns. Noise Is The Best Revenge, Doll & The Kicks support.
Published: Thu, 22 May, 2008
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