In Morrissey & Marr: the Severed Alliance (Omnibus Press, London, 1992) author Johnny Rogan paraphrased & commented on a 10 page letter written by Morrissey on the 5th of August 1977 when Morrissey was 18 years old.
Even when seriously denouncing racial prejudice, he was wont to admit that he disliked Pakistanis. “I don’t hate Pakistanis, but I dislike them immensely”, he wrote in one letter of the time. It was a flippantly blunt adolescent observation. The basis of his aversion (they give off odorous aroma) was crudely stereotypical and completely out of step with his general philosophy. Then again he may simply have been indulging himself in an ironic joke, expressed in his characteristically haughty tone.
The letter has never been published, so we only have Rogan’s version to go on. Racists in the 1970s were highly unlikely to use Pakistani over the four letter offensive short form & it’s structured as a joke.
Morrissey in the 70s
It was only highlighted because of the “race row” in 1986 – when Frank Owen’s framing of Black pop as everything dumb & dancey went unchallenged while Morrissey was condemned for remarks about reggae & mid 1980s American soul.
In August 1992 the NME used it as part of their “evidence” that Morrissey was racist. A student protest, under a Union Jack on the outside of EMI’s offices, cited it as their biggest reason that Morrissey had a “case to answer”. To the NME. In an interview.
EMI, September 1992
The NME also used Morrissey’s sarcastic joke about Rogan to suggest he was no longer “gentle & kind” & his career had taken a wrong turn.
Equally, his recent response to the publication of Johnny Rogan’s Smiths book The Severed Alliance, was at best distasteful, at worst illustrative of a severe lack of perspective. Rogan’s book, which Morrissey was asked, but declined, to co-operate with (as Johnny Marr already had), is a well researched if slightly worthy account of the greatest British group of the ’80s. There seemed precious little in it for Morrissey to get upset about; indeed, members of his family have written to Rogan congratulating him on the book. Yet in an NME news story, Morrissey, while admitting that he’d never even read it, condemned the book, and said that he hoped Rogan died in a car smash on the M3. Asked in a more recent interview if he’d really meant that, he said no, what he really meant was that he hoped the journalist would meet his end in a hotel fire! Is this the same man who, in The Smiths’ finest moment (‘I Know It’s Over’) wrote “It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind”? Sadly, yes. The same man but now displaying a cruelty and lack of deftness that makes his golden days seem light years away. (NME, 22 August 1992)
Rogan either felt he couldn’t disagree with the NME (then the most powerful music publication in the UK) or he was influenced by the coverage, because in a letter to them he claimed he knew Morrissey was in trouble the moment he saw the Union Jack.
The moment Morrissey unfurled that Union Jack I knew he was in trouble. I assumed that the ‘Is Morrissey A Racist?’ debate was a discredited old chestnut, but now it’s back, bigger than ever… It’s the other trappings that I find irksome – particularly the Union Jack. Perhaps he regards the flag as a suitable prop to emphasise the sentiments of ‘Glamorous Glue’, but he well knows its other connotations. (Johnny Rogan, NME letters page, 29 August 1992)
Morrissey held the flag for less than 2 minutes, he scrunched it up & threw it away. There is absolutely no way a British Nationalist would interpret an effeminate Irish Catholic chucking away a Union Jack as a sign of support.
The people who threw missiles at him were calling him a “poof”. They started before he thrashed the flag about & they kept going long after. They weren’t interested in the flag at all.
Not to mention that any negative “connotations” were confined to squabbles on the hard left. To the vast majority of British people, it was just the flag.
Every year, including 1992, it was on prime time UK television at the Last Night of the Proms.
The Last Night of the Proms, BBC 1, 7.30pm Saturday 12th September 1992
It was on bunting, and party hats & respectable people wore it while raising money for charity.
The Mansfield Ladies Circle, 1991, concert to raise money for the Kings Mill Hospital Welcome Appeal
On February 3rd 1980, when Morrissey was 20 years old, he wrote to a friend about a protest he’d recently attended against the Corrie bill, legislation that, if passed, would have restricted access to abortion.
As far as we know Morrissey at the time had never been pregnant and had never been responsible for anyone else being pregnant – but in The Smiths, A Visual Documentary, published in 1994, Johnny Rogan calls him out for not focusing on the foetus:
Morrissey attends an anti-Abortion Act march. There are no comments on the tragic plight of the unborn child from the sensitive one, who lamely notes, ‘I love a good demonstration’.
In 1989, drummer Mike Joyce, started legal action against Morrissey and Marr to get the full 25% of past and future Smiths royalties that he claimed he was owed as part of a verbal contract with the band.
The case reached the high court in 1996 and after 7 weeks he won the case.
In his ruling Judge John Weeks called Joyce ‘honest’ and Morrissey ‘devious, truculent and unreliable’.
Morrissey appealed on the grounds that it was unfair to make a decision based on a character assassination, but he lost.
Devious, truculent and unreliable is often cited as if it’s the legal verdict:
It’s one thing to hear Morrissey obfuscating with the press, and being his playful self. But to see him grilled by a barrister is something else. Because you can’t play pop-star games in the same way, and with the rhetorical flourishes that you normally do, because it just doesn’t work in the high court. It’s just straight question and answer. And where Wildean wit would work in an interview context, in the high court they just come back to you again and again: ‘Would you please just answer the question? (Johnny Rogan, Irish Times, January 2012)
And Morrissey has never let it go, obsessively talking about John Weeks to journalist Lynn Barber in 2002, calling the NME devious, truculent and unreliable after a disastrous interview in 2007, and devoting around 50 pages to the case in his autobiography.
In one particularly gruesome online article he was accused of exploiting children:
During the trial, it emerged that Morrissey had forced an agreement on members Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke to only receive ten percent of profits each … without actually telling them. When Rourke was trapped in a heroin addiction and in desperate need of cash, Morrissey then forced him to waive future claims to his fair share in return for a quick cash injection to feed his monkey (that’s slang for addiction, not an actual pet monkey). Oh, plus there’s the fact that when the band started Morrissey was a fully grown man of 23, while the other members were teenagers barely out of high school. If there’s a better word than “devious” for describing a man who rips off teenagers for tens of thousands of dollars … no, there isn’t.
In 1992, Morrissey’s album Your Arsenal, had a track called The National Front Disco.
The National Front was a fascist political party founded in the UK in 1967.
In the 1970s they tried to appeal to youths via social events like football matches and discos, eventually becoming associated with punks, skinheads and hooligans.
They were violently homophobic & opposed Irish Republicanism.
Every adult in Morrissey’s family had been born in Ireland – it’s abusrd to think that he would be singing ‘England for the English’ as a political statement.
And Your Arsenal’s homoeroticism is obvious.
It had a variety of inspirations or antecedents – Bill Buford’s Among The Thugs that described a homoerotic National Front Disco in Bury, Nick Knight’s photoessay Skinhead, skinhead bands like Bradford, Angelic Upstarts, & Cockney Rejects, the photographs of Derek Ridgers, Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee & the pulp novels of Richard Allen.
And it’s a narrative about family and friends losing a young man to the attractions of Nationalism. If they’re losing him, they must see Nationalism as repulsive. So you could easily imagine it as family and friends in a homophobic society losing a young man to the hedonism of the gay scene.
Art comes from clashing opposites and Morrissey’s celibate kindess has always run alongside his facination with sex & violence. A juxtaposition that makes sense when you consider that gay feelings were so taboo during his teenage years in the 1970s that they had to be exlored through male friendships, psychology, crime and celebrity scandal. The people who hated and policed gay people, made them the most visible.
In the Smiths his celibate kindness was foregrounded, in his solo years there was increasing moral panic about the nature of the sex & violence.
The faint hint of homoeroticism around ‘The Last of the International Playboys’, the first promotional video on ‘Hulmerist’, opens a whole different can of worms. Is the tee shirt thing a big, sick joke – the celebrated celibate getting his kicks sticking to the sweaty skin of every boy and girl in the hall? (Steve Sutherland, Melody Maker, 26 May 1990)
In August 1992 Morrissey played a gig with Madness at Finsbury Park. It was reported that the crowd threw missiles and yelled homophobic slurs like ‘poofy bastard’. Morrissey finished his set, but refused to return for the next date. This refusal was widely condemned in the music press culminating in the NME running an article accusing him of encouraging racism with his ‘fascist iconography’ – a union jack and a picture of two female skinheads – and citing The National Front Disco as the latest of a series of racist statements in his interviews and lyrics, none of which are actually racist.
In The Observer, December 1992, Robert Chalmers, thought he was ‘perversely attracted to the iconography of the far right.’
Morrissey said: ‘I like the flag. I think it’s very attractive. When does a Union Jack become racist?… The National Front interests me, like it interests everyone. Just as all manner of sexuality interests everyone. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to take part.’
Billy Bragg was guoted saying ‘I don’t think Morrissey has ever quite got his politics worked out… The real problem with neo-fascist symbolism’ – that’s two girls and the UK’s official flag on a stage with a poofy bastard – ‘is that it is extremely difficult to retain an attitude which is neutral or ironic, which is what I think he is attempting to do.’
Except Morrissey’s politics were clear at the time. He hated Mrs Thatcher. He said he was a socialist. Much of the left shared his dislike of American hegemony and saw the European Union as a continuation of Imperialism. And while he was never keen on benefits and boycotts, he had dutifully turned up.
Beyond wanting to give him a kicking for not fulfilling professional engagements, and a desire to protect the reputation of men’s men, Madness, there was a suspicion that it was a kink.
Unlike safe showbiz gays who played into gay stereotypes (Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood) or kept their inclinations private (George Michael, Freddie Mercury) Morrissey was queering masculine things like football & gangsters – violating boundaries that were put in place to reassure men that they were men. One way to rationalise the discomfort was to put him ‘beyond the pale’ – smear him as a child molestor or a racist – or contain him by framing it as ironic or neutral.
Morrissey of course – cannot be contained.
On A Side Note: the media doesn’t even try to hide their double standards – homophobia runs so deep that it’s like breathing.
They’re happy to wax nostalgic about larky bad boys regardless of violence, homophobia and David Icke conspiracy theories:
Mark himself had once had his head banged repeatedly against a wall byElvis Costello’s combative manager, Jake Riviera; one of his former NME colleagues was set on fire by Rat Scabies from The Damned, and another was left gaffer-taped to a tree in a desert by The Stranglers… Being “duffed up” (as Mark put it) by disgruntled rock stars was, I realised, a journalistic rite-of-passage. Still, he recommended I call (Ian) Brown’s record company and tell them that their “talent” was going around threatening critics… Within two weeks of our phone “chat” came the infamous air-rage incident, when he threatened to cut off the hands of a British Airways stewardess, then hammered on the cockpit door as the flight came into land… Brown was arrested. (He was eventually sentenced to four months in Strangeways, of which he served eight weeks.)… And, a few months later, Brown launched into a bizarre homophobic rant… ”I don’t trust the British fascination with homosexuals… Violence comes from Romans, Nazis, Greeks – they were all homosexuals.”… How did the lead singer of such an epoch-defining band become a swivel-eyed Covid-denier and online truth warrior? Well, one could plausibly point to a heady cocktail of toxic masculinity, over-inflated ego and drug use… A more sympathetic reading is that the 57-year-old divorced father-of-three might not be feeling quite himself in this new normal™, as is the case with many of us right now. Brown’s “me against the world” complex could be heightened by his counter-cultural leanings, instinctive anti-establishment beliefs and estrangement from his former bandmates. (Michael Hogan, October 2020, The Telegraph)
They will collect together anti-Morrissey songs that include homophobic lyrics because paraphrases of his ‘inflammatory’ statements make him fair game:
All you do is hate life and tell me about it. You’re a homosexual, just keep me out of it. All your music sounds the same I don’t even like your art fag name. Cause I hate The Smiths and Steven Morrissey (I Hate The Smiths, Ween)
That crybaby son of bitch, no-talent motherfucker/Bastard-ass dickhead, ball-flapping dicksucker/Baggy-shirted depressed Dean-loving bonehead/Making lots of money with boring songs like Suedehead. (Morrissey Rides A Cockhorse, Warlock Pinchers)
Slap that fag with a toe tag , If you won’t do it then I will. (Morrissey Must Die, Meatmen)
Shaking hands with Morrissey, Sucking cock in East Africa, Ask a lesbian for a fuck, Take a shower in…Auschwitz (Deathtime, Turbonegro)
They print homophobic anecdotes without fear of denting anyone’s career:
When Julian Casablancas (Strokes) has a drink” Jimi (Goodwin, Doves) warns “he goes nuts.” He launches into his favourite Strokes anecdote. Apparently the two bands were in LA having post-gig drinks in a British theme bar. None other than Morrissey was nearby, at a table with 3 girls. “It was fucking strange, man” Jimi laughs “He kept sending these girls over to say ‘Morrissey is sat in the corner if you’d like to talk to him’. He is dead shy, but it was like he was holding fucking court. We were like “We’re cool, tell him to come over and join us”. So he came over and sat down, and Julian started calling him a fucking faggot. I was like “just leave it out, Julian” and he was all “Jimi’s upset with me, man – what’s the problem?” and then he kept doing it! (NME, August, 2001)
Straight male rock stars can routinely demand everything from drugs to groupies, but Morrissey can’t get a towel:
‘He’s a woman in a man’s body… I remember a feeling of absolute revulsion standing at the side of the stage at the palace watching Stuart James, who’s a brilliant engineer, a good producer and a fine young man, scurrying across the stage with eight freshly cleaned towels for Morrissey.’ (Tony Wilson, The Severed Alliance by Johnny Rogan)
Their casual racism is just a snappy lead:
OK. So it’s not the same as having millions of Muslims baying for your blood, but being at the receiving end of a fatwah issued by Pop’s most vehement star is not an uninteresting circumstance in which to find oneself. (Hot Press, March 2001)
Captions can be in bad taste:
The Smiths, Johnny Rogan, 1994
And they never need to Pariah another hack:
No, because your Rabbi respects PIG ISLAM. (Julie Burchill, Independent, September 2014)
Julie Burchill, the funniest, brightest writer I ever met… (David Quantick, Le Document, July 2020)
It does in a way, and it’s nice in a way… but the change in England is so rapid… I would like the freedom to go around the world and be anywhere. So you have to allow others the same freedom, really. So I’m not sitting here saying it’s a terrible thing. (Morrissey, NME, December 2007)
I loathe him with a passion… Morrissey is a vile scumbag… a nasty, nasty man… I’ve been waiting years for Morrissey to trip himself up in the media. (David Quantick, Richard Bacon Show, Five Live, November 29th 2007)
The National Front Disco
David, the wind blows, The wind blows Bits of your life away. Your friends all say, “Where is our boy? Ah, we’ve lost our boy”. But they should know, Where you’ve gone, Because again and again you’ve explained That you’re going to . . . Oh, oh, oh, going to . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah “England for the English”, “England for the English”. David, the wind’s blown, The wind’s blown All of my dreams away. And I still say, “Where is our boy? Ah, we’ve lost our boy”. But I should know Why you’ve gone, Because again and again you’ve explained You’re going to the National . . . Ah, to the National . . . There’s a country, You don’t live there, But one day you would like to. And if you show them what you’re made of, Ah, then you might do. But David, we wonder, We wonder if the thunder Is ever really gonna begin, Begin, begin Your mum says, “I’ve lost my boy”. But she should know Why you’ve gone, Because again and again you’ve explained You’re going to the National, To the National, To the National Front disco, Because you want the day to come sooner, You want the day to come sooner, You want the day to come sooner, When you’ve settled the score. Oh, the National, Oh, the National, Oh, the National, Oh, the National, Oh, the National
Folk Devil 