Autobiography

by Morrissey

Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big,

I know I must molder in silence for many tears to come.

the gasping Off Licence – a beacon of bacon with the wonder of Wonderloaf.

I will sing, too. If not, I will have to die.

Putrid smells reduce me to a pitiful pile, and none are more vomitarian than school dinners.

Vincent Morgan is the Headmaster whose voice is a sigh, whose carriage is militantly empirical, and although a spectacle of suffering, he is mysteriously tuned in to God. Well past middle-age, he is rigorous in grey suit and gleaming black shoes, the sag of cruelty in his face a clue to the torrential capacity for violence. Sealed up like an envelope, he is unable to act with kindness or humanity, for he has neither, and there is evidently nothing to humanize him. For five years I witness the monumental loneliness of Vincent Morgan as he busies himself day after day with the beatings of small boys.

I long to the point of tears to be released from this prison maze, or this maze prison,

In the swell-elegant world of success it was always the case that most bands of dapper style nonetheless also contained members whose natural ugliness let the team down.

You should, after all, judge a book by its cover, and any poor fool anointed by heavy rock or smocky folk begged and pleaded for a public hanging.

In what could be termed sheer panic I buy a drum kit, and suddenly I am in mortal danger of doing something productive.

mental illness is artistic activity is mental illness is artistic activity.

Ron Mael sat at the keyboard like an abandoned ventriloquist’s doll, and brother Russell sang in French italics with the mad urgency of someone tied to a tree.

Several war-torn months are spent kowtowing to the rigors of gabbling clerical ciphers in a fate worse than life.

The artist is the enemy. Solicitors are trained to squeeze as much money out of their own client as possible, and accountants might deliberately steer their client into tax troubles so that those very same accountants are further needed to unravel the mess that they created in the first place.

I vomit profusely when I discover that the album has been pressed in Japan with Sandie Shaw’s version of Hand in glove included. I am so disgusted by this that I beg people to kill me. Many rush forward.

Why was anything anything?

Some murders are well worth their prison term.

the rest a checkered career in rock management (which is not the management of rocks, as such).

Humans are certainly oddities.

David hovers over what are horrifically called ‘cold cuts’. I nestle up beside him. ‘David, you’re not actually going to eat that stuff, are you?’ Rumbled, he snaps: ‘Oh, you must be HELL to live with.’

On page 6, Weeks refers to Arthur Young accountants being instructed to do the partnership and the company accounts, and highlights a meeting in the spring of 1984 at which Mr Morrissey was ‘surprised’ to see Rourke and Joyce in attendance, and states that Arthur Young were also Marr’s representatives.

It is evident here (as elsewhere) that Joyce and Rourke were not considered to be equal partners to Morrissey and Marr by either set of reputable accountancy firms. If Joyce and Rourke had been recognized as equal partners to Morrissey and Marr, then surely neither Arthur Young nor Ross Bennet-Smith would accept such a critical move without the approval of Joyce and Rourke.

a judgment that lists no less than thirty devious, truculent and unreliable errors on behalf of its author.

In Göteborg I indulge myself with the child-like pleasure of taking photographs. I quite possibly will never look at them.

I begin to worry that my humility can be seen as a part of an act, but then, to edify my natural feelings is to then become an act. What do you do?

Must it all be intellectualized? Yes.