Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Were you being slightly flippant when you said your love songs were written from total guesswork?
No, I was being absolutely serious. Which isn't really funny."
-- Melody Maker, 1985
Perhaps, as many people appear to be convinced, Morrissey is simply lying. Perhaps secretly he is the life and soul of Elton John's hot-tub parties, has his own booth at Heaven nightclub, possesses Europe's largest collection of peaked caps, and has a live-in boyfriend who is Kylie Minogue's personal stylist and colonic-irrigationist. (Funnily enough, no one ever seems to think that Morrissey's "really" covering up a life of secret heterosexual bliss, even though being outed as straight, i.e. post-Seventies Bowie, would probably be much more embarrassing for him).
But if Morrissey is just fooling us, just "living a lie," how do you explain his work? How do you explain the obvious, undeniable, massive, throbbing sublimation not just of eros but life into his songs? Why, in other words, would this pathologically, paralytically, criminally shy creature bother to get up on the stage and sing at all?
Despite an acknowledgement of sorts in 1997 that he had finally succumbed, albeit briefly, to some kind of relationship with a young Cockney boxer (and, in all honesty, who wouldn't?), and heavy hints that celibacy and he had parted company, Morrissey resolutely refused the blandishments of the press and refused to kiss and tell and show the home video -- except in his "enigmatic" songs -- and the gossip and speculation continued. Perhaps because he was not vulgarly famous enough to warrant the kind of media gang-bang at gunpoint which Mr Michael endured, perhaps because he was not quite as reckless, or perhaps simply because he still didn't really have much of a "sex life" at all, Morrissey was able to continue protecting and preserving the virtue of his private life -- such as it is.
Many of Morrissey's fans however recognize his celibacy as a saintly gesture and continue to believe in it rather like Catholics believe in the virgin birth (which is to say: "I know very well that ..., nevertheless ..."). For most of his career it had proved the seriousness of his commitment, even if it was to his own misery. He might perform before a crowd of thousands, he might be mobbed by ecstatic, sweating fans, male and female, eager to hug and kiss him until they were finally dragged away by bouncers, but he returned to an empty bed every night -- the perfect vantage-point from which to observe other people's messy love lives.
"I find that people who are knee-deep in emotion and physical commitment with human beings, I find they're often totally empty of any real passion ... I mean, if we look back on the history of literature, it's always these really creased, repressed hysterics, if you like, who are enchained in these squalor-ridden rooms, who say the most poetic things about the human race."
-- Melody Maker, 1984
Celibacy, which as has been pointed out by others, actually, pedantically means a refusal to get married, crystallized Morrissey's image as the loneliest man in the world, and only enhanced his appeal to those proceeding through the loneliest time of life -- adolescence. It is a period which is often -- even in this day and age when sex is more compulsory than taxes -- excruciatingly characterized in the relationship department by lots of thought but little action; a peculiarly pleasurable pain which Morrissey vocalizes as no other has. In publicly eschewing the consolations of coupledom, perhaps the only remaining religious faith in the Western world, he once again displays his genius for turning a powerless, frustrating situation (rejection) into an extremely powerful and satisfying one (rejecting) -- again, something which powerless, frustrated adolescents under an entirely inhuman pressure to couple/conform could relate to.
"I constantly spectate upon people who are entwined and frankly I'm looking upon souls in agony. I can't think of one relationship in the world which has been harmonious. It just doesn't happen."
-- NME, 1984
Morrissey's refusal to cop off was not a cop-out but an extremely brave avowal of his understanding of human relations and the futility, as he saw it, of intimacy; his life was the theory and his work was the practice, not the other way round. Pop music was his exhibitionistic route to a virtual, ironic intimacy -- which in some ways has turned out to be rather more successful, and certainly longer-lasting, than the usual, "real" variety. When, during a particularly extravagant performance of "William, It Was Really Nothing" on "Top of the Pops" in 1984, he tore off his shirt to show the family audience tucking into their tea the words MARRY ME scrawled in magic marker across his scrawny chest, he was making a proposition to everyone in general and no one in particular -- or was it vice versa? Whatever, his proposal was accepted wholeheartedly by millions, many of whom, twenty years on, still remain faithful; countless actual, living human beings have come and gone out of their lives and have been forgotten. But not Morrissey. Even those who think they're over him, who think they walked out on him or that he walked out on them years ago, know deep down, in those really squidgy bits they don't let anyone else see, that they'll never ever be rid of him. The more they ignore him, the closer he gets.
