There may not be a more Smiths-fan thing to say about “Autobiography” (and Morrissey would certainly disagree), but put into true record-snob parlance, the early stuff just works better. Wilfrid’s is “erself, a sexual hoax” the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees is “a strict ice bath of nightmare and caution,” and of Los Angeles, he observes “f people only spoke of what they had done as opposed to what they were about to do, it would be the most silent city on the face of the earth.” Small knives, as we know, can sting more than battle axes.
(This particular section, while giving full, robust voice to Morrissey’s fury toward Judge John Weeks - and the corruption he smells all over the UK justice system - couldn’t be any more detailed and sure, nor more exhausting and drab.) It rounds out with a less-than-revealing tour of an impressive solo career with more time spent digging into personnel issues and the fervor of his fans than into any of the material itself.Īs expected, Morrissey’s pen is often just an inky claw.
Just as often, it’s Moz’s doing, as he over-peppers his prose with relevant lyrics, sometimes with barely appropriate resonance (after the disastrous LAWSUIT INVOLVING DRUMMER Mike Joyce, “it’s so lonely on a limb”), and frequently with a groan-worthy ham factor (“Could life ever be sane again?” he opines after a squabble with a filmmaker).Īvuncular chuckles aside, the back alleys of back story that make up the book’s first third not only offer some of the book’s lushest language - Moz at his Mozziest - but a fuller understanding of why the steadily stoked despair of his youth was perhaps more effectively conveyed in snatches of song than stretches of prose.Īnd like any of his albums, Morrissey’s story is given to grand overhauls of tone - first tossing and turning between Manchester’s many cruelties and the respite he found in music and poetry then grasping for bearings as the fitful, fateful five-year rise of the Smiths rushes by later lapsing into defiance and frothing defensiveness when outlining his outrage over Joyce’s legal battle for a quarter of the Smiths’ earnings. Sometimes this is circumstantial - internal flashbulbs may go off as we meet his mother’s sister Jeane (of “Jeane”!), or as we roll through Whalley Range, or as Strangeways prison makes a foreboding early appearance. For fans, a stroll through the streets of Morrissey’s source material can feel a bit touristy.
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