The hipster line on Morrissey, one of the most reviled and adored figures in the history of pop, is that he's become something like a character out of one of his more doleful songs - like "Little Man, What Now?" - the one about the erstwhile child star who turns into a walking anachronism. But if some of the singer/songwriter's acolytes have jumped ship with his latest record Kill Uncle, citing a diminishment of their idol's creative powers, Morrissey also seems to be on the brink of snagging a new American audience. Laudatory reviews have appeared in unlikely places (Entertainment Weekly), profiles have been popping up in major U.S. magazines and Morrissey's been invited to make several TV appearances, including "The Tonight Show". He's even planning to perform in the States this summer, something he hasn't done since 1987, when his last tour with his seminal post-punk Brit band the Smiths crashed and burned, with the group parting ways soon after.
Never quite forgiven by devout followers for that bitter breakup, Morrissey has plunged onward to forge a solo career that tests the genre-bending possibilities in the swooning vocal, acerbic turn of phrase and camp synthesizer solo. First came 1988's stunning Viva Hate, a collaboration with Smiths engineer Stephen Street that both recalled the impassioned Smiths guitar sound of Johnny Marr and pumped up the quirky orchestration and strings that have become the hallmark of Morrissey's solo work. Last year's Bona Drag, a fitfully brilliant singles collection, was widely received by detractors as a stalling measure until Morrissey could gather up enough material for a new release - a perception that overlooked that record's numerous strengths, including the bold "November Spawned a Monster," which set an unsentimental vision of a wheelchair-bound child to a spunkily irresistible beat.
Morrissey split with Street and hooked up with Mark Nevin (formerly of Fairground Attraction) and Madness producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanely to make Kill Uncle, a record far breezier than the first two. The lyrics reveal little of Morrissey's usual penchant for thick puns and adverbs - though there is, of course, the occasional killer couplet ("your frankly vulgar/red pullover"). Instead, the songs offer a more direct route to their subjects, which, despite the lighter sound, prove quintessentially Morrissey: a racially motivated beating, the bullying of a female crime witness, the (perhaps thankful) state of life outside coupledom, and the singer's blunt unwillingness to procreate.
Steven Patrick Morrissey ascended to cult status as a mordantly witty, inextricably English, depressive genius. But now, on the verge of turning 32 and seeming more serious about the state of his career than ever, that joke, to borrow a Smiths title, isn't funny anymore. The rock press always tends to reduce its key players to monodimensional types, and Morrissey's been pegged a dreary whiner. While he's hopeful that there might be a wider audience waiting for him in the States - as hopeful as a confirmed pessimist can be - he's still faced with the overwhelming negativity surrounding his image.
But Morrissey remains our greatest self-cancelling pop riddle, at once pompous and humble, famous and failed, ironic and utterly sincere, sensual and repressed, allegedly celibate and yet a brazen purveyor of playful homoeroticism (with special attention to the nude male torso). In his slightly clumsy and usually hilarious music videos, he's both mocked and indulged the mythos of his celebrity in a manner befitting a former nerd who probably still can't quite believe his late-blooming popularity.
Spied across a hotel lobby in downtown Manchester, Morrissey sits, legs crossed, recessed in a blue leather chair shaped like hair drier. From this distance he's all jutting angles - the sharp features, heavy brows, geometrically shaved sideburns and minor-league pompadour. Close up, he is softer, and his manner is soft, too. Even his trademark biting quips tumble off his tongue more gently than they read in print.
Yet there is something about Morrissey that is, inexorably, pure icon. So when he strides down a quiet Mancunian street on this drizzly Sunday afternoon, it seems completely natural that a pubescent boy should materialize seemingly out of nowhere and approached him, a cassette of Kill Uncle shakily outstretched for an autograph. It is delivered with extreme solicitude.
"I've done so many interviews here over the years, and once you've run the gauntlet, or whatever the expression is - no, it's not gauntlet, it's..." Gamut. "Right. Where do you go?" Morrissey lifts a hot chocolate to his lips from a table designed for people 5'2" and under, which forces anyone over that height (and Morrissey is quite tall) to slump. He is explaining why he decided, midway through 1989, to stop speaking to the British press, who have breathlessly recorded his every utterance since the Smiths first emerged late in 1982. "But of course they got very angry, because they feel they giveth and they taketh away, and to say no is a snub they find very hard not to take personally. And revenge shortly ensues." But if Morrissey has clamped down on one outlet, he's opened up to another, giving a number of interviews to the American press despite the fact that he's clearly a little exhausted by all this public self-examination. "I think most of us have only one view on most subjects," Morrissey offers. "And if you're repeatedly asked the same questions, which I am, it becomes very dull. But one is not allowed to suggest even slight boredom with what one does, because it destroys everything. Especially, I believe, for the person who listens to your records."
At this juncture, George Michael's voice swells on the piped-in sound system. There's really no point in asking Morrissey his opinion on George Michael, however, because he's already delivered it in a recent interview, "If George Michael had to live my life for five minutes he'd strangle himself with the nearest piece of cord."
Certain leading questions practically beg a classically snide Morrissey retort, which at this pint he actually seems a little reluctant to deliver. He seems well aware that verbal whippings take their toll, both on himself and others. He frets about having recently been approached by a sweet, overeager lad who identified himself as "a Happy Monday," a band Morrissey had slammed in print. As one might expect, Morrissey has no threshold for the Manchester scene, blaming London journalists "who look upon Manchester like some strange psychiatric unit" for creating a false hype, then abandoning it, a situation he finds "basically witless and therefore unforgivable".
As bands like Inspiral Carpets and Charlatans U.K. rule the alternative charts, however, many people have charged that Morrissey's sound has become, um, monotonous.
"Well, that's a very kind way of using the word 'monotonous'," Morrissey chuckles, not at all miffed. "Believe me, people have always said that, people have always accused me of it, even with the Smiths. Yes! The Smiths were not, as is considered now, years past their, er, death, ever truly the darlings of the press as is commonly thought. There was a great deal of hate, there were accusations, and one was that the Smiths were always much weaker musically than they were lyrically. There's always somebody somewhere pointing the finger and saying, 'Yes, but--'"
Another frequent complaint is that Morrissey's vocal range is limited - but a careful listen reveals he's become quite an accomplished crooner, caressing the most biting remarks, clipping his syllables dramatically and luxuriating over a vowel only to turn it into a curdle of contempt.
"I agree that my voice has improved," Morrissey says, not immodestly. "It was true, initially, with the Smiths that I was very limited. But I think it's just improved and improved and improved. I don't know whether it's just healthier living." You mean your habits are cleaner? Morrissey looks horrified. "What a terrible expression!" Why? "It just implies that 10 years ago I was tramping the streets in an old overcoat covered with phlegm."
One aspect of Morrissey's songwriting that seems to get subsumed by his quippier-than-thou skills is his ability to telescope acute pain without a smirk - like on Kill Uncle's lush dirge "Asian Rut".
"Sometimes I do have a great physical need to be reasonably blunt, which most people find quite taxing," Morrissey replies without a trace of sarcasm. "That's the side of me which is unmarketable, totally unpromotable, the thing that makes people see me as a reasonably exclusive commodity and not for the vast adult world, which simply isn't true. Nonetheless, for most people it's hard to digest, and I recognize that.
"But I've become very dissatisfied with my own spluttered descriptions of the songs in an interview situation. Because I can never quite describe them, or the reason for their being, in an interesting way. It's something I can scarcely understand, personally." He pauses, then continues, "But the songs, and the album title, and the sleeve, and whatever else you might wish to investigate, are simply..." (a pregnant pause) "me."
Suddenly the strumming guitar chords of yet another George Michael song fill the room. "As if on cue," Morrissey laughs. "But it is simply what you see before you. I don't sit down and deliberate and say, 'Now it's time to write. Now it's time to shape an album, and tomorrow maybe I'll go skydiving.' I mean, if I said to you, 'How do you explain yourself? How do you explain your reason for living? How do you explain your character?' you might presumably find it very hard. Because you're presumably a multidimensional person." Morrissey smiles. "I'm being very kind."
Yes, but then there's the matter of the Morrissey image that is put before the world. Take the home video collection Hulmerist, which stitches together Morrissey's videos - directed by Tim Broad, with whom the singer is about to embark on a feature film depicting his life, "God forbid that anybody should be subjected to it" - with footage of Morrissey clones in Smiths T-shirts bellowing for their idol. Or the fact that Morrissey's taken to being photographed, epic-style, from below.
"I think the question is, 'Below what?'" Morrissey laughs, then adds, "Within England at least, I have curiously and accidentally become a type, and whether it is a question of a string of photographs where I'm reaching skywards, or whatever, I will unavoidably be referred to, attractively or unattractively, as a specific type."
But isn't it more a question of having invented a persona that's been imitated? "Well, I didn't crawl into the broom cupboard and find a bit of string and a bit of glue and a bit of paper and create this image," he says with slight irritation. "I find that most personalities within pop music are in actuality so shallow, or not really worth investigating, that if you have even a vague angle about what you do, it instantly seems that you have an, inverted commas, 'image.' You've labored harder than the rest to attract people's attention. Which in my case is absolutely not true."
Except that you seem well aware that you've established an image that's all about being adored. "Yes, but what is very close to that blind adoration is a creeping jealousy, a creeping envy," Morrissey replies. "And the slightest miscalculation on the part of the adored is the basis for a dreadful punishment from the one who adores, shall we say. But people who are famous, or who have minor fame, still live very basic lives, really. They may have larger bank accounts than the rest of the world, but they still fray at the edges. And it gets increasingly difficult when your audience is somewhat large and so many sectors of your audience expect different things from you. Some of them expect you to be funny, others expect you to be political. And other expect you to be neither one. Therefore it's very difficult when you meet people fact to face to understand why it is exactly that they are attracted to you."
Do you think your songwriting is political?
"I think it's all political, I think my very being is political in some untapped way," Morrissey replies. "Certainly in England my name is synonymous with danger." So you feel like you still have the power to startle people? "Yes, yes, I do. They lead me to believe I do, at any rate. I don't do it with a very crafty, cunning... eh... I don't plot nastiness. Quite the reverse. I find that, not at all by design, I am considered subversive. I always was considered such. It has always been considered slightly anarchic to have any vague interest in vegetarianism, for instance. And to sing about it is considered pure insanity. So I rest my case. I suppose I feel, for better or wise, reasonably unique," he adds, suppressing a smile. "And I know I'm making your stomach churn as I say those words, but I do feel like a one-off. You can hate the sight of me, or you can cherish every word I've uttered. But I do feel reasonably unique, I do." Then he says, semi-convincingly, "It's a terrible, terrible curse. I wish I could just blend in."
The likelihood of that, however, is next to nil. For one thing, Morrissey is, just as one might suspect, extremely hermetic and given to spending hours on end alone, indoors, listening to music and reading. (Abiding passions include Nancy Friday books and biographies.) He says occasionally he'd like "the opportunity to go out and just talk to someone alone about drivel and get drunk and throw up," but that public appearances tend to provoke scrutiny, and that he's never been even remotely prone to excessive behavior anyway.
At least not certain kinds of excessive behavior. When he moved back to his native Manchester in 1989 after nearly four years spent living in London, Morrissey bought an old Victorian house outside of won, "which meant that I could finally play music at the most unbearable human volume. When I was young, we lived in such a tiny house that whatever record I played would be heard by the entire family and I would always - I mean, the chorus of my youth was 'Turn it down!' I woke up this morning and put the music system on just painfully loud and I felt the thrill of a 13-year-old. That still happens to me. I'm still making the biggest mistake of believing that music and records and so forth is life."
Oh, it might not be such a big mistake. "It is, really," Morrissey insists. "It's fine if you can dip into music and then have a social life, and then you have another portion of your life, perhaps a place of work or college or et cetera. But for me it was never that way. I was always absolutely embroiled and totally, inescapably, 24-hours-a-day, I would have to have music. Which is like skidding on very, very thin ice because sooner or later you're going to have to meet the rest of the world."
Is it strange to be in your 30's and still feel like a teenager? "Yes, because I always had a high expectation that I would go through magical transformations into adulthood and on to less trivial things, shall we say. But unfortunately, that hasn't happened. I think your seventeenth year stays with you for the rest of your life, for better or worse, and you just learn how to cope with that. We all of us carry an image inside ourselves of how we'd like to be. But sadly, that image is always unreachable, totally unreachable."
One might say that Morrissey's own image, willfully developed or not, stems from his happy enslavement to popular music: He rehearsed for stardom by studying it thoroughly. His knowledge is dauntingly encyclopedic, and his otherwise becalmed demeanor disappears when he speaks of favorite records and books, reciting titles with the uncontrived fervor of the truly obsessed. He bought his first British single when he was six (Marianne Faithfull's "Come Stay With Me"), and became caught up in American pop music in the early 1970's when he was still a preteen - including collecting the most treacly 45's.
"I remember buying the Starland Vocal Band single 'Afternoon Delight' and absolutely loving it despite myself," he recalls, "but realizing that was kind of the first germ within my body, and I was slowly being infiltrated by something terribly devious. In general, though, I always liked the American artists that weren't all that popular in America, like the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Ramones. And I would collect music magazines from America, such as Hit Parader and papers covering the New York scene, like Wayne County. And I would become very excited by people like Wayne County when he had the Dave Clark 5 in his hair."
Excuse me? Morrissey looks surprised. "You don't know Wayne County? He was an extraordinary figure in the early '70's - well, he still exists, only he's altered his gender and now his name is Jane County. But he made records like 'I Am Man Enough to Be a Woman,' and 'It Takes a Man Like Me to Know a Woman Like Me,' and 'Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?'." He laughs. "And he'd put the words Dave-Clark-Five" - Morrissey gestures it out in his own not-unformidable coif - "in his bouffant in rhinestones. And, you know, compared to what was happening in England at the time, this was really... personality! But the center of it all, of course, were the New York Dolls, who completely destroyed and changed my life."
Why destroyed? "Because, naturally, if you liked the New York Dolls in England in 1973, and you were 13 pushing 14, you were bound to be faced with national unpopularity. England absolutely hated the New York Dolls, they though they were the most absurd rock creation ever. They considered them to be clamorous transsexuals, which of course was not acceptable, and which of course they weren't, anyway. But English music, apart from David Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex, was so unchangeably staid and impenetrable. Bowie at that time was despised, which made him absolutely lovable to me. I first saw him in '72, and it was an amazing vision, but it was not popular by any means. In retrospect, people consider such artists as Bowie and the early Roxy Music to be much more popular than they actually were at the time."
So when did that attitude change? "It simply changed when Bowie began to wear suits and Mott the Hoople broke up and Bryan Ferry went to Hollywood and the New York Dolls were history. And then, you know, it's quite safe to be affectionate about something that isn't really there anymore. That's the absolutely classic case in British pop, that we must mourn what we didn't comment upon at the time of its existence. We must mourn what we made no effort to save when it was dying."
There seems to be an inevitable leap here, and sure enough, it comes. "I mean," Morrissey says, "if I were knocked down tomorrow by a passing train, I would be considered the most important artist ever in the history of English pop music, which today I am not considered to be."
He chuckles dryly, but not bitterly. "That's just a rough guess."

The above interview was originally published in the June, 1991 issue of Musician and is reprinted without permission for non-profit use only.