If, so the joke goes, Samuel Beckett had ever written a sequel to
Waiting for Godot it would have begun: “Act One, Scene One: Enter Godot.” He wouldn’t have done, of course, because it would have meant abandoning his subject, which was waiting (not Godot). Similarly, there was surprise, amusement, consternation even, when in April Morrissey, pop music’s “Pope of Mope”, released a No 1-selling album that was not only hailed as a brilliant return to form but appeared to brim with the joys of sexual congress. Rock’s most famous celibate, whose songs used to promise that he would live and die alone and that there was nothing he could do with his desire and that he had forgiven Jesus for this sad fact, was singing about spreading a lover’s legs and being born anew.
Mojo magazine interviewed him in Rome, the city to which he moved last year after seven years’ exile in Los Angeles, and quoted him on its cover: “Yes, it’s true. I am in love.”
Taking tea with him at the Dorchester, I want to know who the lucky man or, indeed, woman is and how he or she affected the album, Ringleader of the Tormentors. He is 47 now, slim, black-clad like Hamlet, but with a large, masculine, Desperate Dan face and a shovel of a chin that looks as if it is ready to sprout stubble even though he has probably just shaved. As an ice breaker, I pass him a letter from a mutual friend, a pal of his from the Manchester music scene in the Eighties, when for five years he fronted the Smiths, regularly now cited as one of the most influential bands of all time.
“What does he want?” he says. I am deflated, for I know Morrissey is not only a man of moods and feuds but also that he has a lacerating tongue: I don’t want to be its whetstone this afternoon just because I have delivered a letter from his past. At his concert the Sunday before, he apparently stopped singing halfway through a song, berated the audience for going to gigs “at your age” and segued into a rant about his lack of airplay on Radio 1 and Virgin. There were no encores — yet, the week after, he was as nice as pie and did three.
Another unnerving problem is, as his former London neighbour Alan Bennett once complained, the difficulty of knowing how to address him. He never uses Steven, his Christian name; “Mr Morrissey” sounds absurdly formal; “Morrissey” too Jennings and Derbyshire. He tells me that like the other boys he was called by his surname at his Manchester secondary modern and came to prefer it. “There’s a certain majesty to ‘Morrissey’. And it’s certainly better than Steve.” Morrissey I shall call him.
And so to his news: his sudden, late-blooming sex life, the ignition of, as he calls them in Dear God Please Help Me, the “explosive kegs between my legs”. Two years ago in I Have Forgiven Jesus he complained that there was no one who would “unlock all this love” in him. Now in You Have Killed Me he sings: “I entered nothing, and nothing entered me/ ’til you came, with the key.” So has he been unlocked?
“It isn’t true,” he protests. “No, it isn’t true. I said to the writer from Mojo, “Yes, I’m in love with the city of Rome” and they printed, “Yes, I’m in love”. And everybody else followed. But no, it isn’t true. Everything remains the same. I am an island.”
Yet even the album’s press release emphasised the songs’ sexuality. What about Dear God Please Help Me? “Then he motions to me with his hand on my knee . . . and now I’m spreading your legs, with mine in between.”
“Yes, but I maintain that from the very early Smiths, the songs were very passionate and sensual. I think it was overlooked because I physically didn’t appear to be so. I was so physically not it, there didn’t seem to be any link between the lyrics and my physicality. But I think they were always sensual, really.”
About longing and unrequited love? “Mostly.” So the sex in his records, is it fantasy or is it reportage? “A sprinkling of everything.” I mention the Smiths’ song Half a Person, which apparently described his six-year pursuit of a woman who kept rejecting him. “Yes, yes, that was absolutely true, yes, absolutely true. So your question is?”
My question is: does this pattern of unrequited love continue? “Well, there was once more yearning than there is now. One can now put things into perspective and can turn away very easily, shrug your shoulders and say, ‘What’s the point?’ There’s other things in my life to be passionate about. But when you’re a teenager and in your early twenties it seems desperately eternal and excruciatingly painful. Whereas as you grow older you realise that most things are excruciatingly painful and that is the human condition. Most of us continue to survive because we’re convinced that somewhere along the line, with grit and determination and perseverance, we will end up in some magical union with somebody. It’s a fallacy, of course, but it’s a form of religion. You have to believe. There is a light that never goes out and it’s called hope.”
Does he still hope? “No, no, not at all. I’m too long in the tooth.”
I ask if the misinterpretation robs him of some of his pleasure in Ringleader of the Tormentors, an album he says makes him “hellishly proud”. “Yes, it does because it’s ludicrous. I mean, one magazine said, ‘He’s gone sex-mad.’ I just thought, ‘Oh God!’ ”
Did it annoy him equally that he became an icon of celibacy in the Eighties? “It did annoy me because it’s a terrible word with terrible connotations. You picture the worst human being imaginable, and I was never quite that. I was honest about it briefly and I spoke about it briefly and I do regret it. It still lingers and people ask me about it and it’s not really something that you want to be associated with for life.”
There is nothing more shameful in our society than not having sex, I suggest. “If you announce that nothing ever happens to you then you’re announcing that you’re incapable of roping anybody in — the key phrase being ‘anybody’. Most people do settle for anybody. Certainly, if you’re working-class and you’re male it’s a sin to sleep alone, which is why so many rush into hasty marriages. Working-class males do not ever sleep alone. I was in that environment and I was sleeping alone. So I was an oddity.”
But he has subsequently enjoyed some romance in his life? “Yes, I’ve felt brushes.” It has been suggested that one was with Michael Stipe of REM? “That’s absolute shit, absolute shit and I don’t know why people ever said that, do you?”
I presume he is not about to clear up whether he is gay, straight or bisexual. He says I presume right. I wonder if this refusal stems from a deliberate attempt to create mystique or ordinary embarrassment. “It’s neither of those things. I’m simply myself, which is inexcusable to many people. I’m not trapped by anything.”
Morrissey was probably born an enigma. He was delivered on May 22, 1959, to a pair of Irish immigrants, Peter, a night security guard, and his wife, Elizabeth, a librarian, who settled with him in the Manchester suburb of Stretford when he was still a toddler. They are both still alive but by the time he was 17 they had divorced. It strikes me that Morrissey’s certitude about the impossibility of relationships may have been constructed on the template of their unhappy marriage. “ Yes, yes, I do think that. If people were really meant to live together and be together there wouldn’t really need to be documents and ceremonies. It would just automatically happen. But most relationships fail, as far as I can see.”
At home he spent his evenings in his bedroom, suspecting that his friends had more space and more possessions than he did. (“And they did.”) A failure at school, resentful of being deprived the chance of university, at 17 he found himself all but unemployable. He would look through other families’ net curtains and wonder if in their mundanity they could possibly be happy. Depression was eventually diagnosed.
“It was always very difficult for me because I was never a simple soul. The only natural course is depression, because what else can you do? You’re trapped. You’re with the people that you’re with, economically it’s a disaster and there’s absolutely no hope of you leaving or going anywhere. Hence depression. It’s like being marked out for something else. But at the age of 13 and 14 you can’t categorise or describe it to yourself. You just know that something is hellishly wrong and know that you don’t belong and were designed for something quite different. So naturally I felt depressed, because I was. I was de-pressed. I was re-pressed as anybody is who can’t be themselves.”
How bad was it? Was he given antidepressants? “I wasn’t given any but I asked for them.” Did he consider suicide? “I did, many times, because it occurred to me that most of the people in the arts that I ever admired always came to that conclusion about their own lives. I considered it to be something of an art form and to be a very respectful decision about having maximum control. I never considered it to be cowardly or running away or giving up. I considered it to be a very admirable thing to do, a very difficult thing to do, a very brave thing to do.”
Did he get close to doing it? “Not noticeably, no.”
So he found another way out of his predicament? “Yes, and I saw that only through music. I only felt it through music, nothing else, and that was the key. It remained the key and I was never swayed from the age of 6 or 7 onwards. I wanted to sing. I could see that singing on a stage and singing the songs that you had written was the art form that everybody really aspired to.”
It saved him? “Yes, it saved me.” Although pop stardom has destroyed others? “The elements of danger in it I also see as quite positive because musicians, singers and groups and so forth are in a zone of their own. They’re largely untouchable. It’s a magnificent way to live.”
Morrissey generates huge affection from his fans, who from their lonely bedrooms and frustrated chastity arrive at his concerts as if in search of a religious experience. Heterosexual men throw themselves at his feet; in California he gained a bizarre following of Mexican males. It has also been noted that he is tactile with band members on stage. In a 2002 documentary on his life in LA, Nancy Sinatra went so far as to call him a “great hugger”. The evidence is that his magnificent untouchability is a choice that he has not only made but worked hard to honour.
He has truly worked at keeping his enemies. Two decades on he has still not repaired relations with Johnny Marr, whose decision to leave the Smiths in 1987 meant the end of the group and left a melodic hole in Morrissey’s solo career that he has never quite filled. As a result, Morrissey claims, he was left to fulfil a recording contract with EMI, a label that never appreciated him. (Marr was let off, “because he always is”.) Then, in 1996, a judge ordered him to pay his former drummer, Mike Joyce, £1.25 million in royalties. No reconciliation there either? “How could there possibly be, unless he gives me back all the money he’s taken from me, which I don’t think he ever will.”
I tell him I suspect that he recently turned down a promoter’s offer of £5million to re-form the Smiths as much to spite his old friends as anything else. “No,” he says cattily, “I’m not placed on the Earth to torment ex-musicians. My life is gratifying at the moment musically, so why become part of the Smiths again? What’s the point? I feel as if I’ve worked very hard since the demise of the Smiths and the others haven’t, so why hand them attention that they haven’t earned? We are not friends, we don’t see each other. Why on earth would we be on a stage together?”
Following the poisonous publicity of the trial (the judge called him “devious, truculent and unreliable”) and with no record deal, in 1998 he left London for Sunset Boulevard. In 2004 he made an album for his current label, You Are the Quarry, and it sold a million copies, four singles from it entering the British Top Ten. By now, however, Morrissey was finding his privacy compromised by fans led to his home on tours of celebrities’ homes. Last year he moved to Rome, a city he has come to love, as we have discovered, with a carnal passion.
Although he has now lived abroad long enough to qualify as an expatriate, he retains enough views about Britain to feed a phone-in for a month. “I’m personally not fooled by the monarchy,” he says, nursing an old grudge. “Whereas one can set the Queen aside and acknowledge that she means a great deal to many people, that is not the case with the rest of the so-called Royal Family. We don’t need to support all those people. I’m not fooled by William or Harry, who just seem like arrogant, despicable people. They’re not of the modern world.”
Yet when the subject of his old love, Coronation Street, somehow arises, he can himself seem estranged from the modern world. “In 1970s Coronation Street, if we must discuss it, the inhabitants were all aspiring to gentility. Now everybody is thrilled to be as common as muck and everybody strives to be seen as completely backward and aggressive and lunatic. It is like television commercials. Every single one now features a very aggressive voice, whereas in my youth it was always very gentle and soothing.”
I sense that the man who was pelted with missiles when he appeared on stage wrapped in a Union Jack still hopes to reclaim Britishness as a positive thing. “There’s no point. England is a memory. Britain is a memory. We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth.”
Does he feel like an exile? “I always felt like an exile, even as a teenager. It is a state of mind.” And so I ask the following brilliant non-sequitur: “Are you happy, Morrissey?” He considers this novel proposition. “Am I happy, Morrissey? Occasionally, yes. A bit more. But I’ll be happier when Tony Blair goes, which is merely a matter of hours, surely.”
I have waited for this much-postponed interview almost as long as Estragon and Vladimir did for Godot, but the line that keeps occurring to me is not by Beckett but from Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory: “He who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.” Morrissey, it seems, exists in a permanent state of inoculation. He picks up the letter from his old friend. “I’ll take that away and have a good laugh at it,” he says, making this his valedictory. Heaven knows — even by the standards of geniuses — he can be miserable still.
A new single from Ringleader of the Tormentors, The Youngest Was the Most Loved, will be released on June 5.
