Recorded 20 years ago, Steven Patrick Morrissey’s throwaway B-side Get Off the Stage was a funny, biting attack on the dinosaur rock stars of the early 1990s. “It’s really about the Rolling Stones,” he told me at the time, “people of that ilk who just refuse to die in the physical sense; all these boring old faces … I don’t understand why they’re still omnipresent, why they have this ubiquitousness.”
Yet on Friday this poet, former Smith and ever-controversial solo artist turned 50 himself, joining, against all grave expectations and protestations, the ever-burgeoning ranks of rock ’n’ roll’s seniors’ tour.
Feted by artists as diverse as Bono, JK Rowling, Michael Stipe, David Walliams, Noel Gallagher and Rufus Wainwright, the impact of Morrissey’s lyrics on wider popular culture is greater than ever. Following Douglas Coupland’s novel Girlfriend in a Coma, Jo Brand’s latest book is titled The More You Ignore Me the Closer I Get. Then there’s the recent, celebrated Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, not forgetting Keri Koch’s new feature about Morrissey’s extraordinary Latino fan base, Passions Just Like Mine.
All are titles stolen from the big-mouthed bard’s own songs; fitting tributes to a man who has spent the last three decades plagiarizing ideas from Warhol and Virginia Woolf, from Patti Smith and Sandie Shaw, from Alan Bennett and George Eliot, from the New York Dolls and Anthony Newley, from the TV soap Coronation Street and the Carry On films. As a recent two-day Irish symposium on his lyricism showed, international academics now queue up alongside the passionate fans to celebrate Morrissey as a living work of art.
He has, without doubt, extended the subject matter of popular songs more than any artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Child murder, working-class poverty, suicide, soccer hooliganism, mental illness, police corruption, disability, animal cruelty, violence, pedophilia, racism, death, the loss of faith — all have been addressed. Typically and topically, the recent track Children In Pieces deals with the abuse of children in schools run by the Roman Catholic church.
I first encountered Morrissey at London’s Venue back in September 1983. Against the post-Falklands backdrop of New Romanticism, unemployment and rampant Thatcherism, Morrissey’s disillusioned but desperately funny lyrics struck a chord. In the summer of 1984, when I was living with my parents in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, following my younger brother’s suicide, the Smiths’ Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now seemed to capture the battered spirit of Northern England during the miners’ strike.
On joining the NME music paper as a youthful reporter, I followed the Smiths passionately, reporting on their brief involvement with Red Wedge, struggling to capture in words the power and chaos of their 1986 Queen Is Dead tour, gradually becoming aware of the internal frictions that would soon destroy this extraordinary band. I was shattered when they split and, given that Morrissey had declared “the Smiths were like a life-support machine to me,” I was also concerned about his future. Like all who had studied his lyrics about mortality and suicide (Shakespeare’s Sister, Stretch Out and Wait, Asleep, Cemetry Gates, Death at One’s Elbow), I feared the collapse of the Smiths might push him over the edge.
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