Article by Allan Jones
Melody Maker, March 3, 1984



Later, we would be talking about the poetry of squalor and the ways in which even the most profound and heart-rending depressions might sometimes be illuminated by a kind of beauty, a sense of grace. It was worth thinking about, he said, perhaps these moods were tests of our endeavour and the skill of living was simply learning how to cope with the depths and bitterness of our desperations; overcoming them, we might be capable of so much more.
When he was 18, he remembered - pulling up his knees beneath him an the hotel bed - and he was suffering the punishments of a sensitive adolescence, he had tried to retreat from the world and its daily grit, living on a diet of sleeping pills, incapable then of even getting out of bed to face the day, lost in barbiturate dreams. This had been the bleakest of times, months of his life spent in debilitating isolation, a foul depression that had forced him to confront the nature of his own darkness, to try to understand it and learn to live with it, if he was going to live at all.
"I can't even remember deciding that this was the way things should be," he said. "It just seemed suddenly that the years were passing and I was peering out from behind the bedroom curtains. It was the kind of quite dangerous isolation that's totally unhealthy. I think, yes, there was in some ways a wilful isolation. It was like a volunteered redundancy, in a way. Most of the teenagers that surrounded me, and the things that pleased them and interested them, well, they bored me stiff. It was like saying "Yes, I see that this is what all teenagers are supposed to do, but I don't want any part of this drudgery."
"Talking about it, I can see that it might bore people," he continued. "It's like saying, "Oh, isn't life terribly tragic? Please pamper me, I'm terribly delicate." It's that kind of boorishness. But, to me, it was like living through the most difficult adolescence imaginable. But all things becomes quite laughable. Because I wasn't handicapped in a traditional way. I didn't have any severe physical disability, therefore the whole thing sounds like pompous twaddle. I just about survived it, let's just say that."
Nevertheless, it seemed that even with all this behind his now, he remained as a writer clearly preoccupied with states of isolation, dreams of transcendence through flurries of pain; the notion that, in the end, the weight of the world could not be shared, would have to be borne - and why not proudly? - on lonely shoulders.
"Yes," he said firmly, without hesitation. "I'm very interested in the idea of being alone, and people being isolated. Which is the way I think most people feel at the end of the day. It's a general condition under which most people live, and I often feel that it has something to do with death. Because one is ultimately alone when one dies. Even though you might be surrounded by people, nobody can understand how you're feeling.
"It's like when you're critically ill and people try to nurse you to health and assist you. They cannot possibly understand how you feel. And even if somebody kind of sits in the bed and slaps a comforting hand on your forehead and says, 'Yes, I understand...,' it doesn't matter. You're still feeling the illness and you are still on your own.
"It seems that in the very, very serious and critical things in life, one is absolutely alone. People kind of trundle through life with this very merry idea that they're not alone. And because they have a partner and because they marry or have these supposedly concrete relationships, they are not alone, and there's another person with whom they can share everything, that there are always these two people in this mystical communion.
"But I think that it's somewhat of a lie, and I think that even though the world is frenetically overpopulated, people are still quite profoundly isolated."
He had more, of course to say on the subject, and like virtually everything he had to say on anything, it was uncommonly sensible, thoroughly engaging, often touching in its persuasive sincerity.
But, as I say, this all came later.

The hotel room was small, harshly lit, anonymous; it bore no evidence of the lives that had passed through it. Morrissey was sitting on the bed, elbows on the pillow, waiting to deal with still more questions about The Smiths and their recent, dramatic ascendancy: 50 minutes had been clawed out of that evening's predictably hectic schedule to complete the interview. Outside the hotel room, fat knuckles of rain rapped down onto Reading's shivering head; The Smiths still had a gig to play it the university, where the local reporters, knee-deep in trailing coils of microphone wires and tape spools had huffily demanded exchanges of banter that Morrissey, on his way from the soundcheck, had politely declined.
These days, everyone wants a part of The Smiths. These last months since they appeared on the cover of MM, and Ian Pye confidently predicted the kind of success they are currently enjoying, have been exhilarating and potentially exhausting for the group. Since December, when Andrew Catlin's verdant MM cover shot beamed out from magazine stands, The Smiths have been an ubiquitous presence in virtually everyone's pages. And, last week, they had "What Difference Does It Make?" and "Hand In Glove" in the national Top 40; both those singles and "This Charming Man" in the independent Top Five, and, a debut LP, already praised to the hilt in these columns for its unassailable emotional whack, apparently poised to burst dramatically into the album chart, with advance orders that Rough Trade estimate should qualify for a silver disc.
The Smiths, rather clearly, aren't hanging around for anyone's blessing: they're out there making things happen for themselves. Which is the way it should be.
Predictably, Morrissey has taken most of this in a stride so confident it could quite probably straddle worlds, his only regret being that more people don't, to use his own words, thump through the attention that surrounds him and simply talk to the rest of the group; to Johnny Marr, who plays the guitar and writes all the music for the group's enormously affecting songs, or Andy Rourke who plays bass or Mike Joyce who plays drums with the unaffected simplicity of someone tuned into the perfect beat.
Morrissey's democratic concern is understandable and honourable; but after talking to the rest of The Smiths for several hours following the Reading gig, it emerges that he's their own reference point; they generously point to him as their qualified spokesman, harbour no resentments that he's become a public focal point for their ambitions. They are funny, bright and engaging themselves - the provocative Marr, especially, could hold his own in any popular debating arena - but Morrissey, somehow, for all of them, is the elusive key to The Smiths' arresting hold on a popular imagination that might otherwise elude them.
So, we return to this hotel room, this conversation, and Morrissey, fingers dampening bouts of acrobatic quiffs, telling the reporter that he hasn't been at all surprised by any of the attention that group has recently attracted.
"I could never say that," he said, his deliciously soft northern accent rolling across the bedspread. "Because I had absolute faith and absolute belief in everything we did and I really did expect what has happened to us to happen. I was quite frighteningly confident. Because it seemed like a confidence that had no real place within the whole sphere of popular music. And, if it occurred in any diluted form, it would have been quite dangerous and it would have been spat upon. Therefore, if our confidence had been diluted, I would've felt somewhat like a target for the critics' barbs as it were, and what I had to say would have been construed as boring arrogance. If the music was weak and there were enormous blemishes on what we did, I'd feel very silly and I'd obviously feel very vulnerable. It would become almost like a very dull pantomime. But since I actually believe in what I say, I want to say it as loud as possible. And if that falls on dangerous ground, well, that's the way of the world and it's a great tragedy, because it perhaps would halt us in our tracks, and I believe that, at the end of the day, the records we produce have a tremendous value.
"I think," Morrissey elaborated, responding to a request to do exactly that, "for the first time in too long a time, this is real music played by real people. The Smiths are absolutely real faces instead of the frills and the gloss and the pantomime that popular music had become immersed in, as a matter of absolute course. And there is no human element in anything anymore. And I think The Smiths reintroduce that firmly. There's no facade, and we're very open and we're simply there to be seen as very real people.
"Also, I think the lyrics that I use are very direct and, as I often say, I feel the words haven't been heard before. It's not the usual humdrum terminology. It's something quite different. I could never use words that rhymed in a very traditional way. It would become absolutely pointless. So everything I write is terribly important to me. Similarly the music is terribly fundamental. But not in a sheepish or unworthy way. It's very strong, in fact. It's like saying, "Look, you don't need all this fabrication, you don't need all this quite, quite, phenomenal equipment. It's the way you use the basic utensils, like talent."
I wondered for just how long Morrissey had nurtured this enormous and not at all disagreeable faith in his own idea of The Smiths and their music.
"For too long!" he replied with a flourish that nearly set the curtains on fire. "And this is why when people come to me and say, "Well, it's happened dramatically quickly for The Smiths," I have to disagree. I feel as if I've waited a very long time for his. So it's really quite boring when people say it's happened perhaps too quickly, because it hasn't."
There seemed no doubt to me, as the author of last week's thoroughly impressed review, that The Smiths deserved to be whatever they wanted to be. I had a feeling, though, that some of Morrissey's bugle-blasting announcements on the relative worth of The Smiths might somehow detract from the qualities of the group's music, which was eloquent enough to speak for itself.
Of course, Morrissey had already thought this through: "I think people can spot fakes quite easily," he said, unruffled. "And the big bores in the music industry, people laugh at them and chuckle along, but, at the end of the day, we really know where everybody stands and we really know everybody's value. Everything has to be taken into account, not just the fact that I stand on the table and say, 'YES! The Smiths are absolutely wonderful.' So, looking beyond the quotes, people must surely see that there are reasons why I say these things and I'm not just dreaming out loud."
It seemed to me that Morrissey still ran a distinct risk of ending up sounding like a kind of Interflora Bob Geldof, all mouth and tulips.
"Of course that would be the worst possible thing that could happen!" he squirmed, visibly aghast at such comparisons. "But because I'm interviewed so much and in so many ways I'm almost always asked the same questions, when these things emerge in print, it constantly seems as though I'm saying the same things all the time, and I could quite imagine that boring people to death very quickly. So it's really just a harder job for me, and I have to think about things a little bit more. But, again, that's just one of those wonderful dilemmas.
"I mean, I can't see any benefit whatsoever in being absolutely mute or really having nothing to say or having no opinions whatsoever. And regardless of what one says, there will always be someone in the shadows ready to point and sneer and spit. And you sound say something that would appeal enormously to one person, but another person could see it as absolutely hysterical buffoonery. I feel quite comfortable, really, with the way things are, and I still have some degree of confidence in the future. Nothing's changed."

Morrissey had been written about so much recently, in such a variety of contexts, that I wondered whether he'd begun to lose sight of himself. Did he still recognise the portraits drawn of him by so many inquisitive journalists, all of whom must have thought they'd cut through the bluff to the tremor of bone?
"Perhaps in a few paragraphs," he said, "but most of it is just peripheral drivel, and a misquote simply floors me. I really can't survive being misquoted. And that happens so much, I sit down almost daily and wonder why it happens. But the positive stuff, one always wants to believe, and the insults one always wants not to believe. When one reads of this monster of arrogance, one doesn't want to feel that one is that person.
"Because," he continued, nosing ahead, "in reality, I'm all of those very boring things: shy, and retiring. But, simply, when one is questioned about the group, one becomes terribly, terribly defensive and almost loud. But in daily life, I'm almost too retiring for comfort, really."
What do you do when you're not working with The Smiths?
"I just lead a terribly solitary life, without any human beings involved whatsoever," Morrissey said. "And that to me is almost a perfect situation. I don't know why, exactly... I'm just terribly selfish, I suppose. Privacy to me is like the old life support machine. I really hate mounds of people, simply bounding into the room and taking over. So, when the work is finished, I just bolt the door and draw the blinds and dive under the bed.
"It's essential to me. One must, I find, in order to work seriously, be detached. It's quite crucial to be a step away from the throng of daily bores and the throng of mordant daily life."
The aloofness from the spit and blood of the daily grind, this assumed seperateness from the graft of living, seemed at odds with the sense of communion and compassion from the victims of life's deadly circumstances that he articulated to such an unforgettable effect in many of the songs on The Smiths.
"But in a way," Morrissey argued, with a weight of conviction I knew would be difficult to deny, "the two are probably combined. I find that people that are knee-deep in emotion and physical commitment with human beings, I find they're often totally empty of any real passion. Simply because one is closely involved with human beings doesn't mean that you understand the human race in a serious, sensitive way. I find that it often takes people who are totally detached from much that is considered commonplace to really make strong comments about these things and to really say things that make people stop and think. I mean, if we took back on the history of literature, it's always these really creased, repressed hysterics, if you like, who are enchained in these squalor-ridden rooms, who say the most poetic things about the human race. And you often find that the life and soul of the party, the person with all the punch-lines, had just nothing of any consequence to say about anything.
"So I think it takes that detachment because, when you're detached and sealed off, you have a very clear view of what's going on. You can stand back and you can look and you can assess. And you can't do that when you're totally immersed in people."
In this context, it seemed that Morrissey's self-proclaimed celibacy, his abstention from sex, his withdrawal from physical communication, was more integral to a general creative philosophy, as a way of coping, perhaps, than it might appear to the kind of cynical eye that would immediately equate any such admission with a totting up of column inches, an eagerness, in its way, for publicity.
Or maybe Morrissey was simply frightened by the kind of physical involvement, frightened by sex, the sweat and tears, ecstasy being more easily imagined than achieved by effort or technique, and celibacy was a state of mind and body that evaded responsibility to another person.
"It's not really fear," he replied. "I just don't really have a tremendously strong belief that relationships can work. I'm really quite convinced that they don't. And, if they do, it's really quite terribly brief and sporadic. It's just something, really, that I eradicated from my life quite a few years ago and I saw things more clearly afterwards.
"I always found it particularly unenjoyable," Morrissey says of sex. "But that again is something that's totally associated with my past and the particular views I have. I wouldn't stand on a box and say, 'Look, this is he way to do it, break off that relationship at once.'
"But, for me, it was the right decision. And it's one that I stand by and I'm not ashamed or embarrassed by. It was simply provoked by a series of very blunt and thankfully brief and horrendous experiences that made me decide upon abstaining and it seems quite an easy natural decision."

There are some records, some songs, some twists of lyric and melody that can make you feel that the substance, the very fabric of your life, is being disrupted, enlightened, touched by an inspiration that won't easily be erased.
These are the kinds of music that most of us listen to when, somehow, for reasons best kept to ourselves, we feel like we're falling out of windows, or simply spent, or rotten, or badly used, by lovers or friends, when we're crawling face down on the carpet, eating shit but looking for romance, for a taste of times that have passed us by and the people that went with them. And the best of this music will remind us not only of what it was like then but of what it will be like again. his kind of music transcends time, contravenes even the most reasonable contexts.
For my own part, the music that twists my tail in these moods includes ... well, no names this time around, let's just say that, last year, R.E.M.'s Murmur joined the list. This year, The Smiths', The Smiths is alongside it, for songs like "Pretty Girls Make Graves", "Reel Around The Fountain", "Suffer Little Children" and "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle", songs that will whistle down the years.
But that week, the papers had been full of other people's opinions about the album. Since Morrissey's lyrics and Morrissey's voice had coloured any interpretation of the LP, what did he think of it?
"I'm really ready," he said, "to be burned at the stake in total defence of that record. It means so much to me that I could never explain, however long you gave me. It becomes almost difficult and one is just simply swamped in emotion about the whole thing. It's getting to the point where I almost can't even talk about it, which many people will see as an absolute blessing. It just seems absolutely perfect to me. From my own personal standpoint, it seems to convey exactly what I wanted it to."
And why would you tell people to buy it in preference to anything by Duran Duran, say, or Culture Club or Simple Minds?
"Oh, I dunno," Morrissey laughed. "I don't think I should say anything else. I think I've been snotty enough already."

The above interview was originally published in the March 3, 1984 issue of Melody Maker magazine and was submitted to this site by naomi.
Reprinted without permission for non-profit use only.