More anxiety symbol than heartthrob, Morrissey may have found that in Britain gloom doesn't pay. In America, however, the man who doesn't eat can feast on his success.

In the gardens of the Sunset Marquis Hotel, in West Hollywood, there lives a family of rabbits. They are shy, gentle, endearing creatures, who are happy to be admired from a distance, but are nervous of close human contact. Staying at the Sunset Marquis, one weekend late in July, was Morrissey, a 33-year-old singer from Manchester. He was, in many ways, just like the rabbits. Before I left for America to meet Morrissey, I was given a whole series of warnings. I shouldn't, for example, talk to him about his old band, the Smiths, because Morrissey could not bear the mention of their name. I shouldn't refer to anything that I might have read in press cuttings, because Morrissey didn't like anyone reading old stories about him. And, above all, I mustn't mention a newly published book called Morrissey and Marr, the Severed Alliance (Johnny Marr being the former Smiths guitarist) because, well, he might just fall into itty-bitty pieces at the very mention of the thing. I flew to Los Angeles and checked into the hotel. Morrissey was halfway thorugh a promotional tour of the United States, plugging his new album Your Arsenal and preparing the ground for a concert tour later in the year. I was due to spend several days in his company, so I called up his personal assistant, Jo Slee. 'Why don't we all have a drink?' I suggested. 'Just to say hello. No tape recorder, no notebook — this one's entirely off the record.' 'Morrissey doesn't do drinks,' Jo said. 'All right then: how about a bite to eat?' 'Morrissey doesn't eat.' By this, she meant two things. In the first place, Morrissey couldn't handle the whole business of sitting at a table and actually having to talk to anybody. And in the second place, he really doesn't eat. Morrissey survives on a diet of occasional potatoes, bread, scrambled eggs and the odd orange. Meat, as one of his old album titles once remarked, is murder. And he's not too fond of vegetables either. Don't mention the Smiths: Morrissey apparently can't bear to discuss his old band, above. Over the next few days I made two more discoveries. Firstly, the list of things that Morrissey doesn't do covers a substantial proportion of the activities that make up a normal human life (the fact that he doesn't do sex, either, has long been a source of fascination for music press and tabloids alike). And secondly, in America at least, Morrissey is God. This may be hard to believe in England, where opinion on Morrissey ranges from a small but passionate pocket of support, via general indifference to the view subscribed to by Viz magazine, which recently announced, 'At last... it's OFFICIAL! Morrissey is a twit.' Except that when they wrote it, one of the vowels was slightly different. What the boys from Viz might be surprised to hear is that on Saturday, August 8, just as Morrissey was being driven from the stage at Finsbury Park by a horde of missile-lobbing Madness fans, some 20,000 tickets went on sale for a Morrissey concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Every single one of them was snapped up within 23 minutes. Meanwhile, Your Arsenal is confidently expected to pass the million-sales mark. It's not just the extent of Morrisseymania that is surprising, it is its intensity. Wherever he goes in America, he is followed by small knots of disciples. They lay flowers at his feet. They ask him, in polite but trembling voices, for hugs. They talk to him about poetry and the meaning of life. What, you might wonder, do these people see in Morrissey? He's perfectly presentable to look at, but, by his own admission, he's no sex symbol. If you're the kind of clever, neurotic teenager who thinks too much, who is obsessed about everyone else's opinions of himself, who reckons that life just seems too ghastly to handle... well, you pop on a Morrissey album and it soon becomes obvious that he feels just the same way, too. Morrissey gets his self-pity in family-sized packs. We finally met, after days of pleading and hanging around. I was lucky — all over America, journalists and TV crews were reeling from cancelled appointments. Within minutes, Morrissey launched into an attack on the music business for ignoring his achievements. 'Last year, I sold out Madison Square Gardens. There was no publicity before the concert, no publicity after the concert, and I thought, "I wonder if many artists in the history of the entire world have ever sold out this venue with no publicity?" My entire experience, my career, if you like, is littered with items like that, and it never, ever gets documented. I wonder why certain people are deliberately neglected. Is it a form of censorship?' No, I said, it's a form of not playing the game. If you turn down 99 percent of all known forms of media exposure, you'll tend to be ignored. To which he replied, just as his young fans might do, 'That isn't fair. If you achieve you should be recognised in some way.' This is Morrissey the silly bunny, the person that Viz is going on about. But a few more minutes of conversation quickly reveal a man who is wittier and more articulate not just than the average rock star but than the vast majority of interviewees. No man who can call a song 'You're The One For Me, Fatty' can be entirely bereft of humour. And, sure enough, just as Morrissey is making some outrageously pretentious remark, a smile will start to flicker around his mouth.. He will actually bite his lower lip in an attempt to stop himself laughing at his own foolishness, and then he'll go ahead and make a joke anyway. For example, he said, 'What I do is not pop music. It's not rock music. And that's why I feel insulted if I am viewed as a pop or rock star. And you may almost smile as I say that,' he said, laughing, 'but it's just beyond that. It's actually something else.' 'What would that be?' I asked. 'Oh, I don't know,' he said, languidly. 'Let's look through the Yellow Pages.' Pop music, he said, 'is all a matter of exorcising private obsessions, from a record sleeve, to a song, to a stage set. And before you exorcise them, you can't really discuss them with anybody else. They're private until the moment you perform them, or sing them, or design them. The unfortunate aspect of being a pop artist is that up until the point where you fulfil your obsessions, it can only be recognised as madness. When you do fulfil them, it is afforded some seal, not necessarily of approval, but at least of vague understanding.' 'Pop music for pop artists is really salvation. It's either that or extreme social ridicule. Making records seems to legitimise one's insanity, which is very useful!' Was he, I asked, still possessed by all his private demons? 'Yes, and the biggest demon of all is the self-critic, the little person inside you who's always saying, "No, no, no, that's not good enough. No, no, no, you don't look good, that wasn't great, start again, you've not done anything yet." That's why any journalist who wants to do a savage critique of what I've done is wasting their time, because I get there before they do.' I wondered whether Morrissey actually liked himself. 'No, I don't,' he said. Morrissey is, he says, extremely lonely. He suffers from bouts of depression, by which he means the real, crushing, numbing McCoy, rather than the odd fit of pique. He seems incapable of trusting either himself or anyone else enough to form a satisfactory relationship. The roots of this malaise lie in childhood wounds that are still as fresh as ever. He was raised as Steven Patrick Morrissey in a working-class family of Irish immigrants in Manchester. His parents' marriage was not a happy one. Morrisseymania is rife in the States, with fans camped outside his hotel every night. 'What happens if you never saw your parents kiss, or you never saw your parents hug each other?' he asks. 'If, as a small child in an environment where your own parents don't actually get on, you believe that this is a microcosm of the rest of the world — that that is how life is — it's quite crippling. Even if you can overcome it, it's very debilitating.' Except that Morrissey can't overcome it. Or won't. Or isn't allowed to. His emotional life is a self-fulfilling prophecy that parallels his complaints about professional publicity. He wants to be written and talked about, but makes it incredibly difficult for any journalist to get close to him. He wants to be loved, but behaves in a way that makes it impossible. This would not matter in the slightest, were it not for the fact that, underneath all the rock star flimflam, Morrissey is actually an extremely nice chap, who is excellent company and perfectly willing and able to talk about any subject one cares to throw at him. As time goes by, it becomes harder and harder for him to break out of his emotional prison. And, of course, like so many prisoners, he may feel a strange sort of security in being where he is. 'When you've struck the grand old age of 33, you have to come to some very basic conclusions about your lifestyle, and practically every night of my life has been the same, so it's not as if it's had its ups and downs. The day always ends the same way, with exactly the same scenario. I'm closing the door and putting the lights out, fumbling for a book. And that's it. I find that very unfortunate, but when all is said and done, the predicament I am in has not been that bad really, when you look at people living in... oh, I don't know... the Upper Volta.' Desperation, of course, is Morrissey's stock in trade. Perhaps if he ever became happy he might lose the demons that inspire his work. To his credit, Morrissey was having none of it. 'It's extremely unlikely in any case, but I'd reply to that by saying that I actually feel the opposite. I feel that if I were suddenly attacked by an outburst of happiness, that I'd suddenly write in a better way, look better, everything would be better. That's my new philosophy — it would broaden everything.' But how is he ever going to achieve that breakthrough with so many defense mechanisms attached to his personality? 'The strain for me is that most people don't talk in a personal way. I don't want to sit down with head and shoulders arched, with a crack in the voice, 24 hours a day, talking about every human ill imaginable. But I would like people to talk to me directly.' The people who do this, of course, are his fans. The reason that the bond between this artist and his followers is so strong is that it is mutually dependent. The kids hanging around outside the Sunset Marquis Hotel all day, every day of Morrissey's stay, believe that he really needs them, and they're absolutely right. This autumn, Morrissey will make a triumphant progress through America. He will be hailed as a conquering hero and make an enormous amount of money. He will be adored by hundreds of thousands of fans and, for the brief hours that he spends on stage, he will, he says, feel completely natural and at ease. Then he will pack his bags, fly first class back to England, and go back to his home in Primrose Hill. And that night, just like every other night, Morrissey will close the door, turn out the lights and fumble for his book. Alone.

This article was originally published in the September 20, 1992 issue of You magazine.
Reprinted without permission for personal use only.