A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable and inexhaustible topic of Morrissey. We were discussing his gestures, in particular when he augments the percussive spondee that opens ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ with two magnificent jabs of his right elbow. So back we went to my friend’s flat to study it again. In goes the DVD; bang go the drums; jab goes the elbow, and my dear friend gives a small cheer of delight, dancing his dance of Rumpelstiltskin glee. ‘Genius!,’ he declares. And he is right.
It is a small moment, one of those preposterously arcane details beloved of a devotee of the Smiths, but it somehow seems to say everything about our artistic hero. It is an example of what Morrissey means when he says that, when it comes to music, ‘All we want to see is the sculpted singer — alone, carrying all, sub-plot and sub-text, the physical autobiography.’
The sentence appears in this Autobiography, now finally published as a Penguin Classic. What can a man who places such faith in the revelatory powers of performance and who claims that forming the Smiths was like launching his diary to music, have to say that we cannot already glean from his work? The answer is, a great deal.
Over the course of the book, Morrissey guides us through his childhood in Manchester, his years of unemployment, his tenure as lead singer of the Smiths, and his 26 years as a solo artist. The result isidiosyncratic, uneven, occasionally gauche, sometimes beautiful, tendentious, moving and funny. Morrissey himself exists somewhere on the outer margins of sanity, and has a kind of anti-talent for misfortune and deprivation. ‘You are obsessed with dead people’, his father tells him.
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