Authors: Morrissey
At Kings Road my appointed boyhood lot is injured birds and broken typewriters; a bulging box-bedroom of American paperbacks bought carefully at the Grass Roots shop on Newton Street, where a fascinating flood of feminist literature signposts the way, as we wait for a genius to state the obvious. The shelves of Grass Roots raise consciousness through the roof, and the staff is fittingly unfriendly in an aura of root vegetables and patchouli oil
...
as Jill comes tumbling after. Books on non-sexist language flip my life for the better, and I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man’s health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives. If a man is measured by however he approaches a swimming pool, or whether or not he confidently fills whatever chair he decides to sit in (as opposed to perching nervously on its edge), then I continue only as a clanking Edward Ardizzone sketch, miles from obvious definition, and alive only because the 3p stamp connects me to those beyond the barbed wire.
Robinsons Records on Blackfriars Street offers a vast warehouse of extraordinary stock – pristine pressings lovingly racked and dazzlingly stacked, tearfully beyond my budget. I stand for hours flipping each sleeve, examined and memorized, domestic and American, always, always out of reach. On John Dalton Street there is Rare Records, whose records are not rare at all, but whose air is the leathery and old giving way to the young sounds. Rare Records is the last to offer listening booths, yet it is cosmopolitan enough to display the first album by Jobriath – somehow assuming that a pained wretch will part with £2.10 for the pleasure; thus I sense my cue. Although masterfully talented, Jobriath has already been laughed off the face of the planet (
this
one, and quite possibly other planets, too) as a beautiful blunder whose lyrics read like an exchange of under-the-dryer face-pack gossip. On every level, the press work against him, and his name is generally only heard as a punch line. My duty is to run to his rescue, and thankfully he makes it all worthwhile – some songs commanding, some even imperative – but he is already being snuffed
out and no amount of carbon-dioxide foam can extinguish the flames. On Lever Street, the cramped Virgin Records is heavy on prog and student notice boards, and always first with American imports – unaffordable at £5.25 when £2.25 is the general retail ceiling. When HMV appears on Market Street its stock is stylishly shrinkwrapped, and this out-dazzles Virgin’s unvarnished and bending manhandled presentations. Piccadilly Records is awkwardly run-of-the-mill, yet it is here that £2.29 secures the New York Dolls’ first LP as the main window of the shop blazes with thirty Dolls sleeves stapled together in a dramatic traffic-stopping mosaic, 50 million unimpressed shoppers running by with a speed suddenly increased by the sight of Arthur Kane. Like a lost lark I drag all curiosities back to the sanctity of my bedroom where the door closes and
James Dead is not Dean
art fills wall and headspace as neat boxes of 7-inch discs explain me to any passing psychiatrist. I have no other identity and I wish for none. These were times when all were judged squarely and fairly on their musical tastes, and a personal music collection read as private medical records. You should, after all, judge a book by its cover, and any poor fool anointed by heavy rock or smocky folk begged and pleaded for a public hanging. Music was rarely heard anywhere – never on television apart from
Top of the
Pops
,
Disco 2
,
Lift Off with Ayshea
, or the unreliably placed
Old Grey Whistle Test.
Department stores, television commercials, lifts, escalators, airports, shopping areas had yet to discover the advantages of pop noise. For me, there was no one available with whom to discuss these urgings of the heart, because nobody could understand how the head could ring persistently with song. In 1972 I had played
All the young dudes
by Mott the Hoople to my father, and as it spun innocently before us on orange CBS, he stands to leave.
‘O
oh no, I’m not having that,’
were his words as he vanished in disgust. What exactly he wasn’t having I still do not know
. He walks around the house singing
Four in the morning
by
Faron Young, or
Scarlet ribbons
by somebody else.
My sister and my mother never sing, but my sister and I were united in the glorification of the social problem film – a fly-by television treat never to be missed, especially the school-as-cesspit honesty of
Spare the R
od
(1961),
Term of Trial
(1962),
Up the Down Staircase
(1967) or
To Sir, With Love
(1967), wherein slum kids are shown to endure in sufferance the pointlessness of secondary education (for what use is anything at all that is secondary?).
The B
lackboard Jungle
(1957) had been the first to free teachers – spouting resentment at the no-hope kids who were, by birth, three rungs below scum – and boundaries of frankness snapped. Jackie and I would watch as many films as we could, long before the days when television channels refused to transmit monochrome films for fear that no one would watch.
Back at St Mary’s, my life harnessed and travestied beyond belief, there is only one teacher whom I physically fear, yet this is not the fear of bulk or brawn because rakish Mr Chew has neither, but he is manically loud and always upset, and it is this offhand agitation as he marches squarely around the classroom that disturbs me to such a degree that I close the book on mathematics and successfully avoid the subject for five years. Instead, I curve left rather than right as everyone swarms to his calling, and I skip every lesson simply by sliding out a side door that leads to the bike sheds. This is the rear of the skanky and stinky canteen – where none dare pass – and where I am never to be detected, or missed as absent. As long as Mr Chew has his trapped audience before him, he is in
Measure
for Measure
delight. Nothing, I have decided, could waste precious life more than trigonometry and logarithms. Meriting equally fully plumbed hatred is Mr Hawthorn, who wastes each woodwork lesson by roasting and scorching every boy before him; no intellectual distinction, yet a fascinating study in volatility, Mr Hawthorn is pitiful to watch – every word uttered without hope, his Eric Morecambe spectacles completing the nightmare unleashed. No one laughs at his jokes, because they are not funny, and they are always hurtful. Mr Chesworth runs the metalwork class, but he does not teach it because his irritability causes the boys to close down and back off. His favorite trick is to creep up behind a boy and then pull the boy’s head back by the hair, to which the rest of the class fall silent at the vocational hatred.
A single minute is not allowed to pass without fiery physical attack from teacher to boy. With no identifiable human being behind the agonized persona, such teachers are restored only by the general truth that the trapped audience before them cannot squeal, for no one would listen. The classroom is their stage, and each day is their theatrical execution – to our joint disadvantage. What gives these teachers the green light for such relentless physical harm? And who, without seeing it, could ever believe it? Warped with trial–sentence–death affixed to their brows, the teachers of St Mary’s block the route to education, because, after all, why bother? The rabble before them are refuse – future postmen at best, largely unemployable, unfit, and ripe for life’s incinerator. Ruggedly rugger-grunting Mr Thomas’s concentrated insults are his only connecting moments with the boys stuck in his company – boys who surely hammer-rammer his nightly dreams.
‘Does your mother know you’re truanting?’
Mr Pink leans from his car window as I sidle along the street. I had discovered that if you were to walk out of the school building with concentrated quietism that you would be neither stopped nor thought to be suspicious, and this I did regularly for days of self-exile in Longford Park – awaiting signs of 3:40 movement when it would be safe to be seen on civilian streets. All of the vile merging forces of St Mary’s reduced me to nobody, and it could only be by fleeing the wreckage that I saved myself. To know this was to be guilty – guilty of
something.
To vary facial expression could lead to a beating, and boys would be forced to hang from the wall-bars in the gym with their bodies facing outwards as Mr Kijowski kicked a football towards them, targeting the stomach whilst demanding that they do not raise their legs in self-protection. It is barbarism. On days of whipping rain we are nonetheless forced outside into a wet yard for what was known as ‘break time’ as – blatantly beyond logic – we are herded out into the rain with all of its obvious detriments. We are then brought back into the school, ravaged and soaked by the bad weather. During several lessons, I stand up and protest against this mayhem, explaining how no one should be forced to go out into a blizzard of rain that will leave them drenched for the rest of the day. But no matter what one thought one knew, if the boys remained inside the building then the teachers must lose their own ‘break’ in order to watch them, and it was for this reason only that dry kids were ordered outside into cloud juice.
‘Yes,’
snaps Miss Power,
‘and YOU’RE another one not content with the hair color given to you by Christ.’
Baffled, I immediately imagined Christ setting my hair beneath a blow-dryer, but of course this is in fact Miss Power’s boorish way of drawing attention to my 14th-year adventure of hair of canary-yellow streak. Kath Moores, a close friend who lived in Dukinfield, had whisked the yellow streak through my hair from left corner front to right corner back. The effect was impressive and suddenly I was famous. No awards for confidence or originality ensued. Previously unknown in the mob-rule dehumanization of St Mary’s history, I stood before their world as a frozen target; a boy with a dyed yellow streak in his hair paying a deathly price for a stab at living artistry. In these days of Arthur Scargill and Brian Clough, somehow a schoolboy with inventively colored hair disgusted art teacher Miss Power. What kind of ‘art’ was she teaching, anyway?
The art of non-expression?
Swashbuckling Mr Thomas sniffs out burgeoning transsexuality as I sit front row in his history class, and of course he cannot miss the opportunity to sneer, leer and jeer. Under St Mary’s roof, 1974 magically rings with the intolerance of 1850. My hair is, after all, my own, and nobody else’s. Mr Thomas, for example, doesn’t have any – or very little. The abyss in which I live hasn’t the wit to save itself from savage ignorance, and I now feel assured that I am not in the company of my own species (or, at least, I
hope
I am not, for if I am, then I am
they
). Dear God, let time pass quickly, and let this end. Let me be older and let this mediocrity pass as a dream – one in which the utmost was done to bury me alive.
‘Morrissey, you were absent last week – where were you?’
asks Mr Barry.
‘I went to Preston to see Roxy Music,’
I explain in perfectly level tone.
‘Oooooooooh, no you don’t!’
booms Mr Barry, full of civic bureaucracy and clan-in-the-right. This recalcitrant malaise! Punish the boy!
Punish! Punish! Punish!
The price you pay for the quest of art. But Roxy Music will drop quickly from the emotional radar soon, as singer Bryan Ferry announces that his favorite food is veal – second only to foie gras in savage cruelty.
The terrors of releasing the self and enjoying the self swamped the school corridors. With undercurrents of sorrow, teachers are unable to give heart or encouragement, and it must all be beaten back, and the disease spreads into the kids who must bear it for the rest of their lives – as here I am, now, writing this. My mother is asked into the school to explain my fragmentary absences. I see her walk across the yard in a stylishly short black coat, her hair an insignia of pride, her accessories skilfully impressive. But she is nobody’s fool. Exuding feminine goodness, her set expression is determined and fearless. Mr Barry looks up from his desk and bullishly throws in:
‘She’s great looking your mum, isn’t she?’
I can only imagine what will pass between my mother and the war-ruined husk of Vincent Morgan.
Whilst it is obvious that school teaches me nothing useful, its unsettlement is relieved by sports – all of which I find easy. By accident I am enlisted to represent the school in track events for the 100 meters and the 400 meters for which, unthinkably, I receive schoolboy medals. For this, my Saturdays are marked out by solitary excursions to woe-begone stadiums in child-gorging Gorton or dishearteningly dented Denton. I am obliged to make my own way, and I am obliged to feel honored and to dream of the 14-second dash, or the one-minute 400. I arrive in the always wet and windy north Manchester, where other boys vary in nationality against the virtual whiteness of St Mary’s. Frozen amongst the pugilistic roughnecks whose kits don’t fit, I await the starting pistol, always relieved to let loose on a grey granite track with its wet chalky smells. The school-doom factories of north Manchester are as pitiful as those of St Mary’s south; foul-smelling changing rooms – their tiled floors alive with disease, or awash with disinfectant that is more dangerous to the skin than the athlete’s foot that it sandblasts. How to change into your kit without bare feet touching the floor, lest contamination paralyze you for life or chew your legs off? Bullish and half-grown juvenescents shout under cold showers, and dare you muster the nerve to stand alongside them and show whatever it is you’ve got? The little mannish machine affects indifference to nudity, and personal comments can only be made via gibberished jokes that will allow mutual study. Female nudity is generally easy to find – if not actually unavoidable – but male nudity is still a glimpse of something that one is not meant to see. In mid-70s Manchester there must be obsessive love of vagina, otherwise your life dooms itself forever.