May 23, 2004
ENCOUNTER
The New York Times Music's Misery Man Returns
By BAZ DREISINGER
mong the crew members at a music-video shoot in Glendale, Calif., was a stylist devoted to a simple directive: sustain altitude of the singer's pompadour. The singer was Morrissey, and the pompadour has been his signature ever since his debut as lead singer of the Smiths, the rock band from Manchester, England, that lived from 1982 to 1987 -- long enough to be the British music bible New Musical Express's choice for most influential pop act of the past 50 years.
Standing stoically under a haze of hair spray, the 45-year-old Morrissey -- hair a tad thinner than it was in the Smiths days, sideburns speckled gray -- wore modishly distressed jeans and a white blazer. He wore, too, his signature stare: a stony, blue-eyed gaze that toes the line between apathy and ache. Morrissey leaned forward to tell me how he feels.
''I died two days ago,'' he said.
Morrissey, you see, was sick and tired. Literally. He was taking antibiotics for a persistent bug whose timing was unfortunate, as it coincided with the release of his first studio album in seven years, ''You Are the Quarry.'' Promoting this solo effort, his eighth since the Smiths disbanded, was exhausting for an artist who, over the years, earned a reputation as the hermitlike ''pope of mope,'' a man who personified the so-called misery music he wrote.
Straightening up for another round of primping, Morrissey deadpanned, ''This is the reason people become postmen.''
The extras on the set today are all real-life Morrissey fans. ''Morrissey fan'' is not a mere statement of preference, said Roman Coppola, a co-director on the shoot, but ''a commitment.'' Morrissey concerts are more accurately called rituals. One by one, frenzied men and women bearing colossal flower arrangements leap past security to momentarily clutch any available bit of their idol: a hand, a finger, a pant leg. Morrissey devotees -- particularly Mexican Angelenos, who have been the bedrock of his fan base since he went solo in the early 90's -- have become such larger-than-life types that last year they inspired a novel (''How Soon Is Never?'' by Marc Spitz) and an independent film (''My Life With Morrissey'').
Morrissey took center stage to shoot the video for ''Irish Blood, English Heart,'' the first single from his new album. The song imagines a time when the English will ''spit upon the name Oliver Cromwell'' and be ''sick to death of Labor and Tories.'' Morrissey's fans believe he is one of the greatest living lyricists, a poet fluent in both agony and irony -- and thus able to make snobbery, sorrow and narcissism more likable than you ever thought they could be. Song titles on his new album include ''America Is Not the World,'' ''I Have Forgiven Jesus'' and ''The World Is Full of Crashing Bores.''
Watching Morrissey pose in the video light, male and female extras alike gazed longingly, as if to assert that he was fair game. ''Is he or isn't he?'' is a sport Morrissey fans engaged in well before ''gaydar'' went mainstream. Over the years, the singer has claimed only one sexual status (''sensitive'') and offered droll assertions of his celibacy (like ''Sex is a waste of batteries'').
''It's so tedious that everyone must be defined,'' Morrissey told me when I broached the subject of his sexuality weeks earlier. ''And if you pull away, why is it always assumed that you have a lurking dark secret that you're hiding in a wine cellar? All of us, ultimately, we're not that interesting, when it comes down to it. What do we all do? We read a bit. We listen to a bit of classical music. We like one or two stage actors. There's not really any unreachable depths. So perhaps the less people know, the better.''
Stephen Patrick Morrissey grew up just outside Manchester -- and spent his childhood in what he calls ''a dreadful cocoon of isolation'' -- but he has lived in sunny L.A. since 1998. He's fond of saying he moved by accident: he came; he saw; he came again; he bought a Jaguar and a Mediterranean-style home that Clark Gable built for Carole Lombard. Nancy Sinatra, Morrissey's friend of 10 years -- they met in London, when Morrissey phoned to tell her he was a fan, then stopped by her hotel bearing a stack of records for her to sign -- says that L.A. suits him just fine. ''It's a great place to escape from,'' says Sinatra, whose new album will be released on Morrissey's new record label, Attack. ''It's a great place to go home and be alone.''
Morrissey has never married or had children. His mother, a librarian, and his father, a hospital attendant, divorced when he was 17, and he moved out shortly afterward. Since then he hasn't shared a home with anyone except his pets, with whom Morrissey concedes he tends to form ''unnaturally close relationships,'' becoming ''an obsessive, perfect parent.'' He has lived alone since his recent set of cats died. ''It was just so heartbreaking,'' he said. ''It'll take me a hundred years to get over it, really.''
Even his closest friends say they are kept at some distance. Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer, Morrissey's guitarists and co-songwriters, met him at a London rockabilly club more than a decade ago. It's easy to envision both men, quick-witted and well coiffed, sharing a pint with Morrissey at a London pub -- which Boorer says they'll occasionally do. But then, talking about Morrissey's recent trip to England, Boorer adds, ''Yeah, it might seem quite a bit weird that he was staying three miles down the road from where I live and I didn't come in contact with him at all.'' Whyte chimes in: ''We get on very well, but he's his own private man. We don't always see him.''
Neither does Sinatra, who says that she and Morrissey have an ''unobtrusive'' relationship that consists primarily of e-mail, in which she calls him ''M'lord,'' and he uses her song titles for subject headings. Sinatra says that she has never met any of Morrissey's friends, and that all their time together has been shared in the privacy of each other's homes. Someday, Sinatra muses, she might take Morrissey along to her favorite L.A. haunts, maybe even share heart-to-hearts with him. ''But I don't know that we'll ever have that opportunity,'' she says. ''We're both pretty timid.'' She pauses. ''Or maybe he'll read this article, and see what I just said.''
Back at the shoot, after a series of takes, Morrissey is whisked off to his trailer, where, I'm told, he's faint and retching. He returns to the set a few minutes later, all apologies. ''I feel terrible to keep everyone standing around,'' he tells me. ''They must be so bored.'' Then he says he would be enjoying this shoot, if only he felt less weak, ''at least 90 percent.'' He sighs.
''It's just so typically Morrissey, isn't it?''
Baz Dreisinger is a writer and an adjunct professor of English at the City University of New York.
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