J
Just an observer..
Guest
It's from last year but for anyone who may have missed it..
The man with the thorn in his side
He has been rejected by the music industry, but still sells out the Albert Hall and can make Lynn Barber want to kiss his feet. We catch up with Morrissey in Colorado to talk about celibacy, feuding and why he doesn't do friends.
Sunday September 15, 2002
The Observer
The Colorado Music Hall. How glamorous it sounds! How dismal it is! A bleak, concrete shed off the highway a few miles out of Colorado Springs, it looks as though it might have been built originally as a cattle pen. It has a neon sign outside, but the neon doesn't work - I can dimly make out MORRISY in straggling letters. In the foyer there is a long bar with people fighting for polystyrene beakers of beer; there is a trestle table with 'Morrissey Merchandise' which consists of an old poster and a few grey T-shirts. No one seems to be buying.
Backstage, Morrissey's dressing room is hardly more than a lavatory with a couple of plastic bags on the floor (there is no table) containing sliced bread. In his 80s heyday, with The Smiths, his contract used to stipulate that his dressing-room should contain vegetarian food, wine, fruit juice and 'flowers to the approximate value of £50 sterling, including gladioli, no roses or flowers with thorns' though later he replaced this with the demand for 'a live tree with a minimum height of 3ft and a maximum height of 5ft'. The tour manager used to carry a saw in his briefcase in case the tree provided was too tall. But there is no tree in tonight's dressing-room.
Morrissey's set begins with a recording of John Betjeman reading his poem A Child Ill, which might as well be in Urdu for all the impact it makes. Morrissey wanders onstage, looking portly in a long, brown cardigan. A few fans in the front cheer, but most of the audience are still milling round buying beer. Then he sings - and suddenly I see the whole point of Morrissey which was a mystery to me before. He is amazing - not just the lyrics and the voice, and the weird barks and yelps - but also his strange movements, the diva-like caressing of his body, the writhing on the floor, the almost Greta Garbo way he arches his neck. It is wildly camp, insanely provocative for Hicksville, USA. When he sings his vegetarian anthem, 'Meat is Murder', you think all these beef-fed cowboys in the audience might rush the stage and kill him. The grandeur, the sheer courage of his performance, completely transcends the dinginess of his surroundings. I am quite seriously tempted to run onstage and kiss his feet.
I had been warned that Morrissey could be flakey and difficult. But when I'd interviewed him earlier in the day, I found him exceptionally polite, friendly and tolerant of my ignorance of pop music. He went to great lengths to explain to me why Jarvis Cocker was not a patch on him - basically, he said, because he can't sing - while also claiming that he never listened to Pulp. He made good jokes, including jokes against himself. When I asked why he was so anti drink and drugs, he said, 'It's really self control, isn't it? I don't mind getting drunk, but it's not something I do very often. I mean - I am quite human. From a distance.'
He is 43 and looks it - a bit thickening around the middle, a bit greying at the temples. He is wearing a denim suit so ludicrously tight and pintucked it must be by some famous designer, but otherwise he seems quite normal. He has a Manchester accent and a dry Mancunian wit, but he also often says 'Bejaysus!' which presumably he gets from his Irish parents. He explains that he is in the middle of a three-month tour, going round American towns, then to England for two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, and on to Australia and Paris. He likes to tour, he says, because he likes singing in front of audiences - simple as that. He admits that Colorado Springs is a bit off the beaten track, but 'I think it's a test of one's own private strengths that you can go to the more obscure markets.'
His career is at an odd point. He always tells the British press that he is 'big in the States' but actually no one I met in the States had even heard of him. On the other hand, his two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall next week are fully sold out, which suggests that he still has a good fan base in the UK. But are these merely old Smiths fans, still holding the torch? He says not - he says he attracts teenagers who were barely born when The Smiths were around. But if so, it's a bit of a mystery how he gets them because he hasn't had a recording deal since 1996, when Mercury signed him for three albums, but dropped him after the first.
He still goes to see record companies in search of a deal: 'But they all ask me how much I'm prepared to compromise, and I say "Nothing." One company said, "Yes, we'll sign you, but we'd like you to make an album with Radiohead" - which doesn't mean anything to me. And several labels have said, "Yes, we'd like to sign you but we don't want to sign your musicians." There's always some absurd condition which makes absolutely no sense. And all the labels in America have said: "Will your music fit in with what is successful in the American charts?" To which I reply: "Bejaysus, I hope it doesn't!" And then I'm out on the street immediately. If you saw me at those meetings, you'd feel really pitifully sorry for me.'
So no record deal then. Which means no radio play. Which means no new fans. Which means that his career - which already looks pretty flakey in Colorado Springs - is bound to dwindle. Of course at present, he still gets a good income from The Smiths royalties but he admits, 'I don't know whether it will keep rolling in - it's not for me to say. I don't really try to make anything happen - I don't force anything at all. I don't feel that I'm in the midst of a career and I don't feel good grief, I must make money - that never occurs to me. Everything evolves quite naturally, as if some unseen guiding hand is in the background.'
Anyway, he can still afford to live very comfortably. He has a house in Ireland, but for the past four years he has lived in Los Angeles, off Sunset Boulevard, in a house that was built by Clark Gable for Carole Lombard. When I ask if he lives next door to Johnny Depp, as the press always says, he corrects me, 'No - he lives next door to me.' Los Angeles suits him, he says, because 'it's a particularly sexless city. Everybody's bodies are so sanitised, so caked in every conceivable exfoliation, cologne and mousse, they have no trace of any kind of sexuality, nothing real and earthy. So I blend in very well!'
Nowadays he is a fairly rare visitor to Manchester - he pays flying visits to see his mother, sister, and father who all live in the area, but never for very long. 'I feel a cavalcade of very strange emotions when I go there - a city that turned me away and then accepted me under very peculiar circumstances. When I was a teenager it was always very difficult. At the age of 12, I would go and see David Bowie and Roxy Music, and that's very young to be wandering about Manchester by yourself. I saw all the important concerts at the time, but it was a very solitary experience, there was no gang, no camaraderie, no union of any kind. Nobody really understood the music that I liked. People forget how austere the early 70s were. There weren't that many people who would confess to liking David Bowie, let alone the New York Dolls, certainly not among the hard cases of Manchester.'
He was a classic bedroom pop obsessive, but of course even more obsessive than most. From the age of 10 he bought all the music papers and would be 'inconsolable' if one of them was missing. He also wrote endless nitpicking letters - sometimes 30 a day - to the NME and other music papers, correcting their mistakes and lambasting their opinions. Before he was even a teenager, he was a walking expert on pop music. 'I never fell in love with people or places: I always fell in love with 7in singles. I took pop music very seriously. I thought it was the heart of everything, I thought it affected everybody and moved everybody. It started me as a person. As a child I would sing every single night - and the neighbours would complain - because I had this insane desire to sing. I was obsessed with vocal melody - and remain so. So it's been a lifetime's preoccupation really. And at the expense of everything else you could possibly name.'
But despite a brief involvement with a group called The Nosebleeds, it seemed he might be singing to his bedroom wall for ever. Until, in 1982, Johnny Marr walked into his life. Marr was four years younger than Morrissey, but already had good contacts in the Manchester music scene. Morrissey showed him the lyrics he had written; Marr set them to music; they went out and hired two other musicians, called themselves The Smiths (an odd choice of name, given that most of them had Irish parents) and within a year they were famous. 'It was a very overnight success,' Morrissey agrees. 'And to step from the huddled shyness of my life - I had never had a life, I had never had a bank account, or a car - and to be the one stepping forward, explaining this magnificent game plan, which only ever existed in my head, was a fantastic learning process.'
In their five-year reign, The Smiths produced five bestselling albums and 14 hit singles. It was, as Morrissey says, 'a very, very pure success story'. But in 1987, Johnny Marr announced that he was leaving and that was the end of The Smiths. Morrissey was devastated - it came out of the blue as far as he was concerned. He has not seen Marr since, except in court, and claims he has no desire to see him. 'Why would you want to see someone who'd said bad things about you? It doesn't occur to me. He's never said anything nice about the solo music I've made. And he knows that at the end of The Smiths I was in a very depressed state - and that possibly the fact that he broke The Smiths up could have killed me. But, instead, I triumphed somewhat - and he's never said well done.'
Morrissey claims 'nobody was more surprised than I was' when he successfully started a solo career. His first album, Viva Hate, was a hit. But then successive albums did less well, and his last one, Maladjusted, hardly sold at all. It didn't help that he kept switching managers, and walked out of a tour with David Bowie in 1995. His then assistant Jo Slee said it was because 'he was very ill with depression. He was coming apart at the seams.' But Morrissey says it was because Bowie kept badgering him to sing one of his songs.
And then there was the court case. I made the mistake of raising the subject by asking - in passing, I thought - whether he'd now settled his long-running lawsuit with Mike Joyce, the former Smiths drummer. Suddenly Morrissey was off, galloping into a monologue which became increasingly weird as it went on. He said he'd 'never come face to face with human evil' until he encountered the judge, John Weeks. He uses the name John Weeks like an incantation or a curse.
The court case arose because, after The Smiths ended in 1987 and Morrissey and Marr went their separate ways, the two other Smiths, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, began thinking they'd been underpaid, in that they only got 10 per cent of The Smiths earnings, instead of 25 per cent. (This is performing royalties, not composing royalties, to which obviously only Morrissey and Marr were entitled.) The situation was complicated because Joyce and Rourke had never had a contract - in fact, legally, they didn't exist. Anyway, Rourke and Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr for back earnings. Rourke soon dropped out, but Joyce persisted and the case came to the high court in 1996. Summing up in favour of Joyce, the judge pronounced Morrissey 'devious, truculent, and unreliable' and ordered him and Marr to pay Joyce £1.25m in back earnings. Marr paid up, but Morrissey pursued the case to appeal - where it was dismissed.
Obviously it must have been a blow - but it was six years ago, you'd think Morrissey would have got over it by now. Ha! 'It was an extraordinary miscarriage of justice,' he rants. 'The whole point of this court case was to say Mr Joyce is a poor shambolic character in desperate need of money who has been treated abysmally by Morrissey and Marr - when the fact was he had been treated with absolute generosity, considering the minor role that he played. He played his instrument and went home. He was always in search of more shags. Now Johnny Marr and myself, throughout the history of The Smiths, never slept with anybody, and took The Smiths very seriously. We stayed up till the small hours perfecting and shaping everything. Joyce was the exact opposite - he had no sense of duty. So when this person therefore, 10 years after the group has ended, starts demanding £1m...'
Marr and Morrissey were in court together, but didn't speak except through their lawyers. At the end, Marr accepted the judgement ,but Morrissey took the case to appeal where he fared no better. 'You go to the appeal court and you come across three judges who are the same age, colour, background, demeanour, as the judge about whom you are complaining. And their attitude is, "How dare you disagree with one of our friends?"' So Morrissey complained to the Prime Minister, the Queen ('Tony Blair was not at all interested; the Queen was very nice'), the Lord Chancellor, the ombudsman, the Law Society, the Bar Council - 'But they just collect complaints in order to protect the judges.' Joyce meanwhile put a charge on Morrissey's mother's house and his sister's house, (presumably because Morrissey has no property in the UK) which makes them unsellable until the claim is settled.
Morrissey is now taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights, though he admits it is costing him a fortune - 'because with each new solicitor that I get to defend me, they view the overall situation and find it so extraordinary that they immediately place a bill before me for 100 grand before they do anything'. Wouldn't it be healthier, saner and cheaper just to cut his losses? 'No. I will never give up. I will fight till the last fibre of my body is spilled. I will go down with the ship. And my mother as well. We will never be beaten, not at all, because we have right on our side.' But meanwhile, the case seems to be blighting his life. 'No. it has strengthened my resolve. I'm not shrivelled up in a box in Manchester surrounded by empty beer bottles. They're going to have to fight long and hard to bring me down.'
Phew. I'm sorry I ever raised that subject because it was half an hour of almost undiluted venom. And I noticed later, when Morrissey's assistant Blossom asked what we talked about and I told her, 'The court case quite a lot', her face fell. I bet all his friends - not that he has any friends according to him - know not to press that button. Anyway, I was glad to change the subject and ask about his nonexistent love life, which he always seems happy to discuss.
Does he have relationships ever? 'Not physical relationships, no. I mean there are some people on this planet who aren't obsessed with sex, and I'm one of them. I'm not interested. And I'm not cloaking something, I'm not going somewhere under cover of night and existing in some wild secretive way. I wasn't interested when I was 17, I wasn't interested when I was 27, I was less interested when I was 37 and I'm even less interested now. I really enjoy my own company enormously, so I don't feel a great gaping hole. I sit at home at night and I feel absolutely honoured not having to cater for anybody, or listen, or put up with anybody. I feel it's a great privilege to live alone.'
Who is his best friend? He laughs derisively, 'My best friend? At the age of 43? My credit card!' Not even a cat? 'No. My best friend is myself. I look after myself very, very well. I can rely on myself never to let myself down. I'm the last person I want to see at night and the first in the morning. I am endlessly fascinating - at eight o clock at night, at midnight, I'm fascinated. It's a lifelong relationship and divorce will never come into it. That's why, as I say, I feel privileged. And that is an honest reply.'
I believe him. But given his admitted self-obsession, it seems extraordinary that he is in an industry like pop music, which by definition entails being popular and communicating with other people. 'Yes,' he agrees. 'It's an enormous contradiction really. But the fluffy elements of pop stardom, if you like, are not why I'm here. I'm generally very interested in the written word and changing the poetic landscape of pop music, and I think I've achieved that. I think, with The Smiths, I introduced a harsh romanticism which has been picked up by many people and which didn't exist previously. And it's nice to be a curious footnote to the whole story of British popular music. And not to be compliant, smiling, bland.' And with that, he goes off, smiling, to his concert at the Colorado Music Hall, where I suddenly - too late - discover the point of Morrissey.
The man with the thorn in his side
He has been rejected by the music industry, but still sells out the Albert Hall and can make Lynn Barber want to kiss his feet. We catch up with Morrissey in Colorado to talk about celibacy, feuding and why he doesn't do friends.
Sunday September 15, 2002
The Observer
The Colorado Music Hall. How glamorous it sounds! How dismal it is! A bleak, concrete shed off the highway a few miles out of Colorado Springs, it looks as though it might have been built originally as a cattle pen. It has a neon sign outside, but the neon doesn't work - I can dimly make out MORRISY in straggling letters. In the foyer there is a long bar with people fighting for polystyrene beakers of beer; there is a trestle table with 'Morrissey Merchandise' which consists of an old poster and a few grey T-shirts. No one seems to be buying.
Backstage, Morrissey's dressing room is hardly more than a lavatory with a couple of plastic bags on the floor (there is no table) containing sliced bread. In his 80s heyday, with The Smiths, his contract used to stipulate that his dressing-room should contain vegetarian food, wine, fruit juice and 'flowers to the approximate value of £50 sterling, including gladioli, no roses or flowers with thorns' though later he replaced this with the demand for 'a live tree with a minimum height of 3ft and a maximum height of 5ft'. The tour manager used to carry a saw in his briefcase in case the tree provided was too tall. But there is no tree in tonight's dressing-room.
Morrissey's set begins with a recording of John Betjeman reading his poem A Child Ill, which might as well be in Urdu for all the impact it makes. Morrissey wanders onstage, looking portly in a long, brown cardigan. A few fans in the front cheer, but most of the audience are still milling round buying beer. Then he sings - and suddenly I see the whole point of Morrissey which was a mystery to me before. He is amazing - not just the lyrics and the voice, and the weird barks and yelps - but also his strange movements, the diva-like caressing of his body, the writhing on the floor, the almost Greta Garbo way he arches his neck. It is wildly camp, insanely provocative for Hicksville, USA. When he sings his vegetarian anthem, 'Meat is Murder', you think all these beef-fed cowboys in the audience might rush the stage and kill him. The grandeur, the sheer courage of his performance, completely transcends the dinginess of his surroundings. I am quite seriously tempted to run onstage and kiss his feet.
I had been warned that Morrissey could be flakey and difficult. But when I'd interviewed him earlier in the day, I found him exceptionally polite, friendly and tolerant of my ignorance of pop music. He went to great lengths to explain to me why Jarvis Cocker was not a patch on him - basically, he said, because he can't sing - while also claiming that he never listened to Pulp. He made good jokes, including jokes against himself. When I asked why he was so anti drink and drugs, he said, 'It's really self control, isn't it? I don't mind getting drunk, but it's not something I do very often. I mean - I am quite human. From a distance.'
He is 43 and looks it - a bit thickening around the middle, a bit greying at the temples. He is wearing a denim suit so ludicrously tight and pintucked it must be by some famous designer, but otherwise he seems quite normal. He has a Manchester accent and a dry Mancunian wit, but he also often says 'Bejaysus!' which presumably he gets from his Irish parents. He explains that he is in the middle of a three-month tour, going round American towns, then to England for two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, and on to Australia and Paris. He likes to tour, he says, because he likes singing in front of audiences - simple as that. He admits that Colorado Springs is a bit off the beaten track, but 'I think it's a test of one's own private strengths that you can go to the more obscure markets.'
His career is at an odd point. He always tells the British press that he is 'big in the States' but actually no one I met in the States had even heard of him. On the other hand, his two concerts at the Royal Albert Hall next week are fully sold out, which suggests that he still has a good fan base in the UK. But are these merely old Smiths fans, still holding the torch? He says not - he says he attracts teenagers who were barely born when The Smiths were around. But if so, it's a bit of a mystery how he gets them because he hasn't had a recording deal since 1996, when Mercury signed him for three albums, but dropped him after the first.
He still goes to see record companies in search of a deal: 'But they all ask me how much I'm prepared to compromise, and I say "Nothing." One company said, "Yes, we'll sign you, but we'd like you to make an album with Radiohead" - which doesn't mean anything to me. And several labels have said, "Yes, we'd like to sign you but we don't want to sign your musicians." There's always some absurd condition which makes absolutely no sense. And all the labels in America have said: "Will your music fit in with what is successful in the American charts?" To which I reply: "Bejaysus, I hope it doesn't!" And then I'm out on the street immediately. If you saw me at those meetings, you'd feel really pitifully sorry for me.'
So no record deal then. Which means no radio play. Which means no new fans. Which means that his career - which already looks pretty flakey in Colorado Springs - is bound to dwindle. Of course at present, he still gets a good income from The Smiths royalties but he admits, 'I don't know whether it will keep rolling in - it's not for me to say. I don't really try to make anything happen - I don't force anything at all. I don't feel that I'm in the midst of a career and I don't feel good grief, I must make money - that never occurs to me. Everything evolves quite naturally, as if some unseen guiding hand is in the background.'
Anyway, he can still afford to live very comfortably. He has a house in Ireland, but for the past four years he has lived in Los Angeles, off Sunset Boulevard, in a house that was built by Clark Gable for Carole Lombard. When I ask if he lives next door to Johnny Depp, as the press always says, he corrects me, 'No - he lives next door to me.' Los Angeles suits him, he says, because 'it's a particularly sexless city. Everybody's bodies are so sanitised, so caked in every conceivable exfoliation, cologne and mousse, they have no trace of any kind of sexuality, nothing real and earthy. So I blend in very well!'
Nowadays he is a fairly rare visitor to Manchester - he pays flying visits to see his mother, sister, and father who all live in the area, but never for very long. 'I feel a cavalcade of very strange emotions when I go there - a city that turned me away and then accepted me under very peculiar circumstances. When I was a teenager it was always very difficult. At the age of 12, I would go and see David Bowie and Roxy Music, and that's very young to be wandering about Manchester by yourself. I saw all the important concerts at the time, but it was a very solitary experience, there was no gang, no camaraderie, no union of any kind. Nobody really understood the music that I liked. People forget how austere the early 70s were. There weren't that many people who would confess to liking David Bowie, let alone the New York Dolls, certainly not among the hard cases of Manchester.'
He was a classic bedroom pop obsessive, but of course even more obsessive than most. From the age of 10 he bought all the music papers and would be 'inconsolable' if one of them was missing. He also wrote endless nitpicking letters - sometimes 30 a day - to the NME and other music papers, correcting their mistakes and lambasting their opinions. Before he was even a teenager, he was a walking expert on pop music. 'I never fell in love with people or places: I always fell in love with 7in singles. I took pop music very seriously. I thought it was the heart of everything, I thought it affected everybody and moved everybody. It started me as a person. As a child I would sing every single night - and the neighbours would complain - because I had this insane desire to sing. I was obsessed with vocal melody - and remain so. So it's been a lifetime's preoccupation really. And at the expense of everything else you could possibly name.'
But despite a brief involvement with a group called The Nosebleeds, it seemed he might be singing to his bedroom wall for ever. Until, in 1982, Johnny Marr walked into his life. Marr was four years younger than Morrissey, but already had good contacts in the Manchester music scene. Morrissey showed him the lyrics he had written; Marr set them to music; they went out and hired two other musicians, called themselves The Smiths (an odd choice of name, given that most of them had Irish parents) and within a year they were famous. 'It was a very overnight success,' Morrissey agrees. 'And to step from the huddled shyness of my life - I had never had a life, I had never had a bank account, or a car - and to be the one stepping forward, explaining this magnificent game plan, which only ever existed in my head, was a fantastic learning process.'
In their five-year reign, The Smiths produced five bestselling albums and 14 hit singles. It was, as Morrissey says, 'a very, very pure success story'. But in 1987, Johnny Marr announced that he was leaving and that was the end of The Smiths. Morrissey was devastated - it came out of the blue as far as he was concerned. He has not seen Marr since, except in court, and claims he has no desire to see him. 'Why would you want to see someone who'd said bad things about you? It doesn't occur to me. He's never said anything nice about the solo music I've made. And he knows that at the end of The Smiths I was in a very depressed state - and that possibly the fact that he broke The Smiths up could have killed me. But, instead, I triumphed somewhat - and he's never said well done.'
Morrissey claims 'nobody was more surprised than I was' when he successfully started a solo career. His first album, Viva Hate, was a hit. But then successive albums did less well, and his last one, Maladjusted, hardly sold at all. It didn't help that he kept switching managers, and walked out of a tour with David Bowie in 1995. His then assistant Jo Slee said it was because 'he was very ill with depression. He was coming apart at the seams.' But Morrissey says it was because Bowie kept badgering him to sing one of his songs.
And then there was the court case. I made the mistake of raising the subject by asking - in passing, I thought - whether he'd now settled his long-running lawsuit with Mike Joyce, the former Smiths drummer. Suddenly Morrissey was off, galloping into a monologue which became increasingly weird as it went on. He said he'd 'never come face to face with human evil' until he encountered the judge, John Weeks. He uses the name John Weeks like an incantation or a curse.
The court case arose because, after The Smiths ended in 1987 and Morrissey and Marr went their separate ways, the two other Smiths, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, began thinking they'd been underpaid, in that they only got 10 per cent of The Smiths earnings, instead of 25 per cent. (This is performing royalties, not composing royalties, to which obviously only Morrissey and Marr were entitled.) The situation was complicated because Joyce and Rourke had never had a contract - in fact, legally, they didn't exist. Anyway, Rourke and Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr for back earnings. Rourke soon dropped out, but Joyce persisted and the case came to the high court in 1996. Summing up in favour of Joyce, the judge pronounced Morrissey 'devious, truculent, and unreliable' and ordered him and Marr to pay Joyce £1.25m in back earnings. Marr paid up, but Morrissey pursued the case to appeal - where it was dismissed.
Obviously it must have been a blow - but it was six years ago, you'd think Morrissey would have got over it by now. Ha! 'It was an extraordinary miscarriage of justice,' he rants. 'The whole point of this court case was to say Mr Joyce is a poor shambolic character in desperate need of money who has been treated abysmally by Morrissey and Marr - when the fact was he had been treated with absolute generosity, considering the minor role that he played. He played his instrument and went home. He was always in search of more shags. Now Johnny Marr and myself, throughout the history of The Smiths, never slept with anybody, and took The Smiths very seriously. We stayed up till the small hours perfecting and shaping everything. Joyce was the exact opposite - he had no sense of duty. So when this person therefore, 10 years after the group has ended, starts demanding £1m...'
Marr and Morrissey were in court together, but didn't speak except through their lawyers. At the end, Marr accepted the judgement ,but Morrissey took the case to appeal where he fared no better. 'You go to the appeal court and you come across three judges who are the same age, colour, background, demeanour, as the judge about whom you are complaining. And their attitude is, "How dare you disagree with one of our friends?"' So Morrissey complained to the Prime Minister, the Queen ('Tony Blair was not at all interested; the Queen was very nice'), the Lord Chancellor, the ombudsman, the Law Society, the Bar Council - 'But they just collect complaints in order to protect the judges.' Joyce meanwhile put a charge on Morrissey's mother's house and his sister's house, (presumably because Morrissey has no property in the UK) which makes them unsellable until the claim is settled.
Morrissey is now taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights, though he admits it is costing him a fortune - 'because with each new solicitor that I get to defend me, they view the overall situation and find it so extraordinary that they immediately place a bill before me for 100 grand before they do anything'. Wouldn't it be healthier, saner and cheaper just to cut his losses? 'No. I will never give up. I will fight till the last fibre of my body is spilled. I will go down with the ship. And my mother as well. We will never be beaten, not at all, because we have right on our side.' But meanwhile, the case seems to be blighting his life. 'No. it has strengthened my resolve. I'm not shrivelled up in a box in Manchester surrounded by empty beer bottles. They're going to have to fight long and hard to bring me down.'
Phew. I'm sorry I ever raised that subject because it was half an hour of almost undiluted venom. And I noticed later, when Morrissey's assistant Blossom asked what we talked about and I told her, 'The court case quite a lot', her face fell. I bet all his friends - not that he has any friends according to him - know not to press that button. Anyway, I was glad to change the subject and ask about his nonexistent love life, which he always seems happy to discuss.
Does he have relationships ever? 'Not physical relationships, no. I mean there are some people on this planet who aren't obsessed with sex, and I'm one of them. I'm not interested. And I'm not cloaking something, I'm not going somewhere under cover of night and existing in some wild secretive way. I wasn't interested when I was 17, I wasn't interested when I was 27, I was less interested when I was 37 and I'm even less interested now. I really enjoy my own company enormously, so I don't feel a great gaping hole. I sit at home at night and I feel absolutely honoured not having to cater for anybody, or listen, or put up with anybody. I feel it's a great privilege to live alone.'
Who is his best friend? He laughs derisively, 'My best friend? At the age of 43? My credit card!' Not even a cat? 'No. My best friend is myself. I look after myself very, very well. I can rely on myself never to let myself down. I'm the last person I want to see at night and the first in the morning. I am endlessly fascinating - at eight o clock at night, at midnight, I'm fascinated. It's a lifelong relationship and divorce will never come into it. That's why, as I say, I feel privileged. And that is an honest reply.'
I believe him. But given his admitted self-obsession, it seems extraordinary that he is in an industry like pop music, which by definition entails being popular and communicating with other people. 'Yes,' he agrees. 'It's an enormous contradiction really. But the fluffy elements of pop stardom, if you like, are not why I'm here. I'm generally very interested in the written word and changing the poetic landscape of pop music, and I think I've achieved that. I think, with The Smiths, I introduced a harsh romanticism which has been picked up by many people and which didn't exist previously. And it's nice to be a curious footnote to the whole story of British popular music. And not to be compliant, smiling, bland.' And with that, he goes off, smiling, to his concert at the Colorado Music Hall, where I suddenly - too late - discover the point of Morrissey.
