Authors: Morrissey
Hazel was careless but greatly likeable. She was scatter-shot but loyal. She was tough but funny, and anything is forgiven of anyone who makes us laugh. Kath Moores and her Dukinfield friends were all lascivious young women, and they liked their men to look like the Dolls or Bowie. They despised the macho Boddington’s-eloquent chat-up drunks of which Manchester produced nothing but. Male beauty was Mick Ronson or Jerry Nolan, and any man wearing makeup rang all the right bells. For me, it is a relief to be with people who are not shockable, although my own style is Antique Market baggy trousers and cord jackets of men long dead. I know only lodging-house thrift, and I do not ever attempt glamor in this city of gangs. From this time, it is Hazel Bowden who attempts to prolong our friendship, baffled as I am, since her life in Romiley is nothing like mine – with all of its redundantly difficult circumstances. I like Hazel whilst understanding nothing about her.
Suddenly and without necessity, Jon Daley takes up the sport of shoplifting. He favors the larger stores such as Lewis’s, Kendals and Debenhams, but for one so eloquent he cannot explain why he does what he does. Often he would throw the stolen items away, and would always be in possession of enough money to cover the cost of whatever he had just lifted. I do not ever accompany Jon on his excursions, but the impressive spoils were often laid out before me with poacher’s pride. Oasis on Market Street is regularly marked out by Jon, where Stolen From Ivor offers a cubicle curtain so large that Jon can make anything disappear. These are not yet the years of imposing security guards or intrusive
CCTV
cameras. Behind Lewis’s stands a fancy art-supplies shop called Megsons, where the materials are unaffordably dazzling and priced out of my range (for, as ever, I have no range). Jon manages to haul in a host of notebooks, heavy paper, fancy pens, wax pastels, and water-soluble Caran d’Ache – all free of charge to those who have no intentions of paying in the first place. It is funny, but probably wrong. At some faraway track at Wellacre School, Jon arrived one day to watch me run for St Mary’s (although I was actually running
from
St Mary’s). He is a standout oddity in an exhaustingly straitlaced crowd (for
what else
in Sale in 1974?), and I begin to understand how things must seem. Wellacre are roughish posh boys with Garden of Eden facilities, and none of the put-up-and-shut-up regimented mildew and mold of St Mary’s. I am jealous and I stay jealous.
It is Hazel Bowden who stays close to Jon in the fading days of friendship, long after Jon and I find we have less to say to each other. There is a natural phasing out without a falling out, and it is Hazel who tells me that Jon has been killed in a horrific motorway crash. Driving alone to Birmingham, Jon is crushed by a tailing juggernaut that fails to brake. The story makes the national television news, and, as it does, this period of my life loses itself to the lap of memory. I stand at Jon’s grave at Moston cemetery and I see that his name is spelled with an ‘h’, and that both of his parents are encased on top or beneath him. It is too much to bear, and in this dank November air I hear voices of people who are not there.
From St Stephenson Square I take a beetroot Ribble bus north to Accrington, near where Anji Hardy lives, in Haslingden. It’s always a slow and laborious journey, and a chill drizzle never fails on arrival. The short and cold streets of Haslingden are full of cramped clumsiness and the slate-landscape of out-of-time Lancashire. An eternity of repetitive streets of Victorian terraced houses rest on one another for fear of being wiped out, their windows like empty eye-sockets hiding secrets in back bedrooms and dingy parlors. How, I wonder, would Lou Reed cope with this?
In its midst, Anji Hardy uses her madcap humor as an excuse for everything, and every single day is an orgy of hysterical sensation. Inertia was unwelcome in the house that Anji shared with her Scottish mother; a house oddly laid out with large, bare bedrooms over-run with mice. (I never see one myself, but Anji assures me.) I climb into the single
bed in the dreary back room and my feet slip into a mass of knitting needles; Anji’s humor is there to be relished. She rarely leaves the house, but when she does we allow ourselves to be thrown about by Haslingden’s unfailing winds. This is a forgotten and daft-as-a-brush town where locals might say ‘
I were agate’
to emphasize surprise. It is true that nothing happens in Haslingden, and only fantasies sap Anji’s strength, although there is occasionally a strong and unsmiling teenager who often appears in the house, and I assume that his trousers are apt to come undone, for why else is he there? He works for Holland’s Pies, and will tell no more than that. I don’t ask, anyway. In the town center everything looks awful; pigs’ feet are displayed in shop windows, and tripe is listed proudly on café menus. One day we bump into four of Anji’s girlfriends, and they are pleasant and tough and unvarnished. They are mad about boys and are typical girls of their day, of intense expression and Boots makeup.
My repartee goes no further than music, and I ask them who they listen to. All four reply at once:
‘Glitter Band and t’New York Dolls.’
‘What?’
I say, falling backwards gently.
‘Glitter Band and t’New York Dolls. We’ve seen t’Glitter Band four times.’
I push a little, and the fresh young life of Haslingden tell me that they have pictures of the Dolls on their bedroom walls – amongst the usual run of unnameable others. They tell me that they had all bought the Dolls album in Accrington. This outer reality hits me like a discovery of tombs in Luxor, for I had no idea that truly ordinary Lancashire girls might take on the New York Dolls when press reports make it clear that the Dolls are out of bounds to anyone other than the sexual outcast. In fact, David Johansen himself had said,
‘We have come to redeem the social outcast.’
Attempting to expand my horizons further, Anji’s mother asks me to meet her one day in central Manchester. I do so, and she leads me to a doorway by the Britons Protection pub just below St Peter’s Square. As she hands me a lit cigarette, we are ushered into a private club. I am 15 years old, a pale mask of clumsiness, holding a cigarette that I cannot smoke, and here is something interesting. We are the only two white faces in a darkened cellar where we are encircled by up to thirty
black men, none young, all locked in 1960s speakeasy tight pants and tight shirts, like immigrants of 1955 looking for digs and a job on the docks. The music is soft Blue Note jazz, and the air is south of the midriff, and everyone is relaxed behind bolted doors. Anji’s mother is a familiar face here. She is life-loving and ready to laugh, and it is time to wonder what and who one really is.
Anji’s nightly telephone calls to Kings Road are marathon, and even the most vague generalities of her day are spiced with such absurd account that the two hours kneeling in an unheated hall, ears numb and jaw aching, are always worth the labor.
‘Oh, I went to the doctor today,’
begins Anji.
‘Y-e-e-s?’
I say, impatient for Part Two.
‘He said I’ve got six weeks to live,’
she breezes, almost throwaway. I laugh because everything in Anji’s delivery is funny – and she knows it.
‘Yeah – leukemia
...
hang on, there’s someone at the door
...
’
Some weeks later Anji’s life has met its deadline, liberating laughter leading her every step to the grave, never losing her edge for an instant, bearing sadness with dignity, and always explaining herself so well, at peace with death as she was with life, the black earth of Haslingden entombing seventeen years of best endeavor and generosity. I see her now – peeling potatoes in the sun and laughing her head off.
For reasons too terrifying to analyze I had found myself walking around Macclesfield town center one sorry-assed Saturday in 1975. Such jaunts are typical of those scattered days when you aren’t quite sure what to do with yourself and you appear to be the bounty that nobody especially wants. These are Saturdays when the content is always the same, and the search for a listener is fruitless. Lured into Boots the Chemist I pass ten minutes flicking through their routine selection of best-selling long-players only to inexplicably find
Horses
by Patti Smith, unfathomably racked as an import at five pounds. Precisely why such a record was for sale (on import!) in such a frowsy frumps’ paradise as Boots the Chemist is something that foxes me to this day. The distinction of this LP was that it had recently been reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray for the
New Musical Express
, and then a week later it had been re-reviewed with equal exhilarating commotion. It was, in fact, the only album I had ever known to be re-reviewed. The galloping joy of Charles Shaar Murray urged me to take the risk. Cross-legged by a dying fire later that night, and with only a side-light for company, I allowed
Horses
to enter my body like a spear, and as I listened to the bare lyrics of public lecture, I examined the genderless singer on the heavyweight album sleeve. So surly and stark and betrayed, Patti Smith was the cynical voice radiating love; pain sourced as inspiration, an individual mission drunk on words – and my heart leapt hurdles, scaling and vaulting; something won and overcome. Unfulfilled as a woman, impotent as a man, Patti Smith cut right through – singing and looking and saying absolutely everything that would be thought to go against the listener’s sympathy. But the reverse happened, and the wisdom of centuries shook me and told me that, however heavy-hearted and impossible you might feel about yourself, you can still bestow love through recorded song – which just might even be the
only
place where you have the chance to show yourself as you really are since nothing in your disposed life gives you encouragement. The fact that you do not look like a pop-star-in-waiting should not dishearten you because your oddness could become the deciding wind of change for others. There is nothing obvious about Patti Smith, least of all any obvious biological conclusions, and this gives its own erotic reality in a shyness of arrogant pride. The past snaps. I have never heard or seen anything like Patti Smith previously, and I have never heard truth established so sincerely. The female voice in rock music had rattled with fathomless depths of insincerity, whereas Patti Smith spoke with a boy’s bluntness, and she looked for squabbles wherever she went.
Horses
pinned all opponents to the ground. It shook the very laws of existence, and was part musical recording and part throwing up. Its discovery was the reason why we could never give up on music, and its effects were huge. 1976 slapped the face of the world with the first album by the Ramones, who were so negatively disposed that it seemed difficult to imagine them attracting anyone at all. At first I felt galled by
Ramones
because I had so earnestly wanted the Dolls to be the ones to reshape the planet, and here were the Ramones moving in with their own style and with songs that sweat blood – all trashcan-in-the-sun New York. The Ramones told me there was nothing I could do to prevent the Dolls from becoming fagged-out back-numbers, and as I catch the Ramones’ first Manchester gig (at the Electric Circus in Collyhurst) my mouth is a big round O. It is mesmeric. The Ramones are models of ill-health, playing backwards, human remains washed ashore, so much condensed into a single presentation, and it is outstanding. Change! Change! Change! It doesn’t happen by being the same as everybody else.
Now
I could accept all the suffering that came my way as long as the Ramones were in the world. Singer Joey looked as if he had been murdered in a hospital bed. I’ve found my twin. The following year Jackie and I would see them at the Lyceum in London, and I would spend the night on Birmingham’s New Street Station in order to witness Patti Smith at the Birmingham Odeon. In a dream state I watch her explode as she takes on the lesbian contingent at the front who are calling to Patti to ‘come out’ (where to? from what?), and they heckle her in almost every song. By extreme contrast I see David Bowie in 1976 at Wembley. He is already cold in form and ungiving, and as I spend the night hanging around Euston Station awaiting the first train back to Manchester, I am lost in Bowie’s loss. It is Patti Smith, though, who rings as the first musical artist who promises nothing, and who gives nothing other than the sordid actuality of fact.
The frayed threads of Iggy and the Stooges on 1973’s
Raw Power
were, as with the Dolls’ debut, a disconcerting reply to the macho men of rock. Lipsticked Iggy was tougher than them all, and each night on stage he sang and he moved as if he might possibly die at any moment, whilst also diving offstage like a wild schoolboy who can do nothing in secret. Iggy does not so much sing as relieve himself.
Your pretty face is going to Hell
has a quality of emotion in line with Paul Robeson, and this is why I am still writing about it forty years on. I am not writing about
Goats Head Soup
. All of the body is thrown into the vocal delivery; bare-chested in tight silver pants, Iggy defined the new manhood that the world so badly needed, lest we die beneath the wheels of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. No one represents Iggy other than Iggy, and commercial success is not necessary to Iggy’s own success. He heads the secret stream of inspiration granted to the active few. Mainstream success can often be the worst thing that can befall a true artist. Imagine David Bowie without his EMI America years – better to be absent and inactive in Hannover, or better my lover dead. Iggy was a face and a voice that had not been stated before his time. He recorded
Raw Power
as a moment of life that could never again be lived. It spat at you. Ask a boy from Michigan to be Elgar; he can’t. Ask a boy from Michigan to be Iggy; he can’t.
Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Patti Smith have secrets that have never been lost because the inquisitive mind can’t get in. This trinity is decorative art with an incredible understanding of effect. Their contribution to thought marks them out as our very own Goethe, Gide and Gertrude Stein, and it tells us that we all might come to whatever it is we seek – with flickering irony. They pawn everything of themselves into the current moment. The daring brilliance of early Lou Reed takes its place with the literary greats partly because he denied all tradition in his writing and physical presentation. With his Velvet Underground, life itself was the movable stage; lowbrow, imaginer, maker, self-regarding, susceptible to the will to corrupt. It is a proud sign of bad breeding, and of carrying within us everything we seek outside of us. You have their insolence at hand still, and now, but when the morgue yawns for them, their harsh expressionism will clank its way into hagiography as the new saints, and you will understand their meaning to be far greater than whatever seems logical during their lifetime.