"Fame, Fame, fatal Fame/It can play hideous tricks on the brain" - "Frankly, Mr Shankly"

One of the best tracks on "Viva Hate" is "Little Man, What Now?", an eerie, enchanted, rather chilling song in which Morrissey ponders the fate of a young TV actor ("a real person - but I don't want to name names") he remembers from "Friday nights 1969", briefly elevated to the level of minor celebrity before being abruptly dispatched back into obscurity, never to return - except for an afternoon TV nostalgia show, where the panel "couldn't name you". It's another example of Morrissey's unusual awareness of the trajectories of fame, and the ways in which fans use and are used by stars. He's personally experienced the extremes of both sides of the double-monologue that is the fan/star "relationship".
"Fame is the most fascinating subject in the world and I'm keenly interested in speaking to certain people who've had fame and then lost it."
Was there ever a point when you considered that it might all dry up for you, that you might have to go back to being a nobody?
"I do think about it, but I somehow think, with the intensity of the last five years, that even if, through some dramatic personal desire, I tried to obtain anonymity, it would be impossible. One way and another, I will always be somewhere just skating about the edges of global fame, pestering people and throwing glasses."
Did you always crave fame?
"I always had a religious obsession with fame. I always thought being famous was the only thing worth doing in human life, and anything else was just perfunctory. I thought anonymity was easy: it was easy to be a simple, nodding individual who got on the bus. I wasn't terribly impressed by obscurity."
Did you have a rich sense of destiny and difference?
"I always knew something, shall we say, peculiar was going to happen. I think real, true artists do have that instinct."
From the age of what, nine, 10?
"Much earlier. In some form. I saw a multitude of options and the dilemma was just which one to concentrate on. Obviously, I wrote. At the age of six I compiled a personal magazine every week. I was intensely interested in journalism, and all the things around it, whether it was performing or actually playing records. I intensely envied dee-jays. To simply sit on this cushion at the BBC day after day and flip on anything they thought was moving - well, I thought that was the most sacred and powerful position in the universe. To me, it was more important than politics."
You wanted to be a dee-jay?!
"At a tender age, I craved that power - to impose one's record collection on people in launderettes and on scaffolding. But now I think it's such a terrible job that dee-jays should be the highest paid people in the country. To have to sit in an office all day playing the same records - all of which are awful - over and over and over again - well, it's not funny, is it?! We shouldn't pick on these people. We should send them parcels!"
About this early magazine...
"I was only six, so... the art direction let it down a bit, really. It was simply the Top 10, then certain pin-ups of artists of my personal choice... sketched, in fact, by the editor himself."
What kind of circulation did it have?
"There was just the one copy, which limited readership somewhat."
So you quickly became an avid reader and writer?
"I very quickly became obsessed by music papers and pop journalism, and collected them ravenously."
So did you turn to music as an avenue for writing, or were you driven by musical instincts?
"By staunch instincts of very brittle criticism. Developed through having had this magazine of my own since the age of six, and listening to the Top 30 every Tuesday only to run off instantly to the typewriter in order to compile my own personal Top 30 which totally conflicted with how the world really was. But in my sense, my Top 30 was how the world should have been. It was a Top 30 of contemporary records, but the new entries were very unlikely, and obviously I favoured certain artists, like T. Rex.
"I can remember writing an extravagant critique of 'Cinderella Rockefeller'. I was always a totally dissatisfied consumer, aflood with complaints. It seemed to me that the world of pop music, which I worshipped, was there to be altered and corrected."

That feeling - that pop belongs to "us", so how come it's blocked up with all this other people's stuff - has been an abiding feeling on the rock "left" for some 15 years. (Punk had very little impact on the charts, on what sold.) So Morrissey's infantile gainsaying of pop reality, was the chrysalis for indie pop's wistful, wishful fantasies of a "perfect pop" returning to oust the imposters in the hit parade.
"I think it's fact, things have reached an unthinkable state, where things are orchestrated entirely by unsympathetic and unmusical hands and ears. The people in key positions are people who don't consider pop culture to have any serious importance whatsoever."
So you believe pop is, or can be, art - but it's a belief that is only sustained by very rare instances. You seem to have very specific ideas about what constitutes art. The other day it occurred to me that there are maybe two kinds of intelligence in the world: one that's very open, that tries to take on everything, and accordingly gets paralysed by choice; another kind that's narrow, that finds strength by focusing on some things and excluding most everything else...
"If I liked everything, I'd be very hard to understand. I always found the idea of people who were very hard to please, including journalists who were very critical - I always found they were almost right when they found something praiseworthy. I find people who are unbudgeably fair, quite time-consuming. I find agreeable people immensely disagreeable."
Is that the idea of "Viva Hate": that we need bigotries in order to make sense of the world, make it actionable? (The hankering for a punk-style commotion is for precisely such an illiberalism, a taking of sides, a new order.)
"Sadly, a lot of people need to be told, rather than asked. Also, I often feel I can gain from venomously critical views of me as an artist, more than I can from dithery, sloppily fawning, supportive views."

Going back to fame, to your intimate knowledge of the processes of identification and obsession... having been through various manic fixations, you have progressed to being a star, the subject of fixations yourself. Most of your fans though, will remain condemned in a lonely monologue with their distant idol...
"Condemned sounds a bit rough... but, nonetheless, I can't help but agree, really."
You encourage the obsessiveness, though, don't you? I remember you once saying you were delighted people sent you underwear, or demands for underwear...
"Yes, both! No, I do get lots of very fascinating and fascinated letters, and lots of fascinating gifts. I can very clearly understand obsessiveness, and the people who write to me see that I understand obsession and preciousness. And I respond in the same way. I still get very nervous when I meet people who I admire..."
Like who?
"Avril Angus..."
Who?
"Well, exactly - Avril Angus! She acts. I get very nervous when I meet people from the theatre. I think that's a very hallowed, sacred thing to be in. And I still have scrapbooks."
What does it feel like to see your proliferated image about, on hoardings, in magazines, to hear your voice on the radio?
"It's very odd. I was in a shop once, buying scented candles, and on the radio came Steve Wright with a collage of Smiths songs, and I got a distinct chill, almost as though the hand of Death was tapping me on the shoulder, saying: 'put yer candles down, it's time to go!'"

About the split... there seems to be a desire, on the part of both you and Marr, to represent the end of The Smiths as though there was little or no acrimony involved. But if a band ends, after a period in which the main protagonists hadn't communicated for some three or four months, surely some kind of serious conflict was going down...
"I expect it's hard to believe there weren't some elements of hatred slipping in and out. I don't think I'd believe that there was no acrimony. But it became a situation where people around the band began to take sites, and there was even a belief that within the audience there was a Morrissey contingent and a Marr contingent. And critics began to separate, and praise one and condemn the other.
"I personally did not find this a strain. But I find acrimony and even dwelling on the final events very futile; although in a sense I feel reportable, in another, more affecting way, I don't. And I think explanations create their own suspicions that things were much worse than they were. And that's what happened. Because there were so many people around the group, everyone had their own exaggerations, and stories began to breed."
Was the question of conquering America a problem, Marr being keener to undertake a world tour than you were?
"Once again, this was fabricated. Although I had very little passion to do a proposed world tour, and had less passion than any other member, I always thought my opinion was totally, totally valid. But it's true, if I'd nodded, a world tour would have happened. But I wasn't prepared to become that stale pop baggage, simply checking in and checking out, not knowing where I was or what clothes I was wearing, and quite ritually standing onstage singing."
The other Smiths had more of a taste for that?
"Not exactly, but they were more realistic and adaptable."
It wouldn't have been so wearing for them as for you?
"No."
Do you think Johnny is possibly even more into being famous than you are?
"It's very difficult for me to answer that question. People often tap me on the shoulder and ask me that, and it's a general assumption that he must have been. But my general impression is that he wasn't. He had many opportunities to talk to the press, and I was always the only person who encouraged him to do extra-curricular activities. But I also do become very confused by the number of people he does become involved with..."
Do you blame Ken Friedman (ex-Smiths manager and now Marr's personal manager) for the split?
"Um... I'd rather not discuss that."

Is it hard to maintain a barrier between your inner self and the worldiness of the biz and its machinations?
"There is a lot that's unavoidable. Money is a constantly draining occupation - trying to deal with it, keep it, get it. I find the business side very distasteful, harrowing and soul-destroying. I could talk about tax, which I find quite frightening. But this always sounds like a soft and phoney complaint. Because even though I'm taxed to an extreme and impossible degree, I still at the end have a lot of money. I do get the sense, though, that it's illegal to earn money in this country."
Surely you're not with Margaret on this one, up there on the guillotine? Presumably you believe the disadvantaged ought to be supported and enabled?
"It's very difficult. I always had a very basic view that if you earned money it belongs to you. But that is obviously not the case. People have very slim rights over the money they earn.
"You have to get up very early and concentrate very hard to ever see any of it. The Smiths never earned any money touring. We'd come off remarkably successful tours and have to sit down and sign 80 cheques. Johnny and I would just look at each other and all of a sudden get very... old."

Did it feel like it was all getting out of control?
"Oh, it got entirely out of control, totally, totally out of control. This, if anything, was the cause of The Smiths' death. Especially the monetary side. We were making huge amounts of money and it was going everywhere but in the personal bank accounts of the four group members. Johnny and I would be walking offstage in the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, after playing an insanely devastating performance, and instantly have to sign cheques, while we were still euphoric and dripping with sweat, otherwise we couldn't put our trousers on.
"And finally, I think, Johnny had to back off from that, and put his entire life into the hands of his manager, because there was too much pressure. And there were too many people around the group saying, 'pacify me, say something nice, make me feel needed.' All people surrounding groups are like that, they need to be needed, they need to telephone you at strange hours to find out if they are still liked and still included. And that's very annoying, because the only two people who needed to be supported were Johnny and me."

So The Smiths: ye olde stories of something unspoilt being strangled by the success engendered by its very novelty, of love, crushed by the wheels of industry. It's the tragedy at the core of rock: how can something essentially private withstand the pressure of going pubic. Morrissey's answer is to retreat still further into his memories.
The Smiths were prime movers in what you could call the depoliticisation of personal life after punk's initial scornful demystification. Remember 1980: "personal politics" was the phrase that tripped off every lip, groups like Gang Of Four ("Love Like Anthrax") and Au Pairs worked towards their dream of the equal relationship liberated from the veils of romantic "false consciousness" - unconsciously mimicking the pragmatism of therapists and counsellors, with their notion of love as contract.
Then 1982: attention shifted to the public language of love, to pop's iconography - the buzzwords were "the language of love", "the lexicon of love", "the lover's discourse", demystification was superceded by deconstruction and ambiguity.
Finally, with Nick Cave's misogynist agonies, the Jesus And Mary Chain's candyskin classicism, and The Smiths' eternally unrequited gaze, came the return of romanticism in all its purity and privacy. Pop had returned to what it has always been about: the privileging of the personal as the realm in which the meaning of your life is resolved. The motor-idea of romanticism - the dream of the redemptive love that will make everything alright, resolve all difference - has, in the 20th Century, replaced religion as the opium of the people.
But it's the dream that continues to speak most deeply to us. And maybe the superstition of love is our last reservoir of spirituality in the face of those "specialists of the soul" who would seek to reform relationships in accordance with their ghastly notions of "negotiation", "support", "partnership".

I always come back to the Stones when I think of The Smiths, because of the camp, but mainly because of the way each band illuminates their era for us. For the Stones, satisfaction was the goal: everything would be alright if we shed the inhibitions that held us back and down. Revolution meant good sex on the 'morrow.
But the Stones were the product of expansive times, The Smiths the product of contracted and beleaguered times. With The Smiths it was a question not of desire but of longing - the yearning to belong to or with someone, to belong somewhere. The dream that two half-a-persons can make a whole, fit hand-in-glove. The Stones and their time were all about leaving home; The Smiths and our time are about pining for a home.
It's a sign of the times, maybe, that pop-as-reinvention-of-the-self is something that resonates for fewer and fewer people in the little world that is the music press readership; that the pollwinner, the figure you most identify with is Morrissey, victim of his past, chained to his memories. And as he says, artists don't really "develop", they have their act, gift, whatever, and stick with it.
That peal of exile first heard in "Hand In Glove" still rings true in moments on "Viva Hate", and no doubt always will, no matter what follows, in the same way that traces of wantonness persist in Jagger's voice beneath all the mannered overlay of time.

As I neurotically double-check if the tape is running, I mutter by way of apology, "I've had some bad experiences with tape recorders."
"Oh, I've had some bad experiences with people actually... you're very lucky."

This article was culled from the March 19, 1988 issue of Melody Maker magazine.
Reprinted without permission for non-profit use only.