Saint Morrissey by Mark Simpson

Saint Morrissey is not a Mojo-sponsored list of what Moz said and when, is not a ball-achingly dense study of his family tree, is not a comprehensive checklist of all his recorded works, is not a hack biog. Music biography, especially pop biography, is such a dull genre ordinarily because it's all about enforcing facts (BORING!) when the reason we fell in love with pop music in the first place is because it was about people who let us transcend facts and escape into fantasy. BUT...! What if we're dealing with a subject who rarely, if ever, talks about his life in specific terms?; who chooses instead to regale us with bizarre apocrypha about throwing coins from the windows of GM buses or playing for ladies' football teams?; who presents himself to the listening public not so much as a rounded ordinary human being but as a mono-monickered pop concept/genre, 'Morrissey'? Why, in that case you would need to play such a subject at their own game (or play with him). Mark Simpson does exactly that. (er, the playing him at his own game bit. I'm not accusing him of being a Moz-fiddler, much as we'd all love THAT accolade!)

Saint Morrissey then is about Moz's life as he portrays, dramatises, documents, infers, fictionalises and re-edits it within his own lyrics. It is a "psycho-bio" that sees these lyrics as both legal evidence and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and endeavours to piece together an accurate biographical narrative from them. "Morrissey's work is his life: there is no 'clocking off'... [he] is a record to be played, never a life to be lived." So although he plays Moz's game (plays his records) with all the arm wind-milling, gladioli-waving sense of fervour that's inherent in it, and is never anything less than an amusingly guide, this is a serious work. It goes one step further than just dancing to Moz's songs - it is a very real attempt at imagining what it might actually be like inside his head.

In one sense this makes it the cheapest of cheap dates, a lipstick-smeared notebook rather than a wined-and-dined respectable chronicle, with minimal research involved and a list of interviewees in zero figures. But God knows there's enough of that kind of thing! Press quotes in Saint Morrissey are more likely to come from a crumpled issue of something called Star Hits (no doubt with its pullout pin-ups missing) than (BORING!) the NME. Simpson knows enough to be able to mention where Moz's movie samples come from, but his story is not about dwelling on such things, is not about the maths and mechanics of making pop records. Morrissey himself famously issued a fatwah on Johnny Rogan after the 'exhaustive' (read 'exhausting') trivia-packed Severed Alliance, and the semi-pseudo-official David Bret books, although crammed with eye-witness reports are, one suspects, rarely perused chez Moz (unless it's to snigger at all those bits about Edith Piaf).

Saint Morrissey however is genuinely worthy of the man himself and is probably the only book about himself that you can actually imagine him reading, and enjoying. Simpson understands the complexities and ambiguities of his subject because they are the same complexities and ambiguities of pop, of self-invention/promotion, of literature, of queer theory, of the media - all of these waters that he navigates in his pirate ship inbetween honest commissions (Simpson, like Moz, is part folk-hero, part stab+grab cut-throat). He is also, crucially, very funny. Rarely has Smiths journalism been this delicious, witty and stinging. Maladjusted is described as having a poignancy "which, say, Radiohead or their well-brought up imitators will never achieve, no matter how much angst they sprinkle on their Coco Pops of a morning." The pop/prostitution process, with gay managers pimping out their acts after giving them a bath, a haircut and a microphone, "continues to the present day, although in the case of some contemporary boy bands, apparently without the benefit of a bath." The Sun mentality is subjected to some crisp and incisive kickings - "If 'Handsome Devil' had been unambiguously about a schoolgirl the tabloids would probably have described the song as 'raunchy' instead of 'sick' and run a Page Three topless schoolgirl 'Handsome Devil' special." Even the casual asides glow with Morrisseyan wit: Wham! cursorily defined as "Southern career-girls." The Queen is not dead but is in very rude health.

The only real failure in the entire book is a misguidedly ambitious attempt to join the cultural dots between late 80s Britain and its Britpop-era counterpart, something that is impossible to do without sounding glib and is in any case irrelevant to the main story. The rest of the book is wildly, Wildely engaging.

All of this would count for little though if it weren't for the fact that the book succeeds in its main intention and provides the reader with, shockingly, the first sustained and full-length telling of Morrissey's mental and emotional life. 'Shockingly', because despite the forests' worth of press the man has generated he is still regularly tarred with the 'enigmatic' brush - an 'enigma' myth that Simpson convincingly strips away, not with the prosecuting zeal of somebody who wants to show that the Emperor has no clothes, but with the passion of someone who quite simply is sick to the back teeth of idiots hearing Moz say those words and still they don't believe him. "Morrissey is not a mystery at all... there is only one thing you need to do. Listen to him."

With almost frightening ease and using supporting quotes from across his oeuvre, this telling of Moz's story factors in all the unfairness of his Manchester youth and upbringing in a way that dares the critic to ever again trot out the familiar 'miserablist' cliches whilst keeping a straight face. It's sometimes contentious stuff and is utterly unflinching. Simpson presents us with something approaching a pathology that makes sense of, for instance, Moz's lyrical and interview statements on suicide. The Morrissey world-view that has so often been interpreted as eccentricity or playful contrariness is, here, something that is actually quite coherent and self-consistent. As Moz's career and life changes, adapts, meets its highs and lows, the book reveals the impact these events have on the Morrissey mind, how they are interpreted and processed by him according to this existing pathology.

His lyrics are not just pretty vocal utterances but very real statements from his heart, in fact sometimes almost TOO real. That they're well-crafted gems has never been in doubt, but the degree to which they reflect how he thinks and feels can be often clouded by what WE think they actually mean, to him or to us. Saint Morrissey's achievement is to put Moz at the dead centre of his own lyrics and get the fan to see him in a different light, one that if anything commands even greater respect for the man. As uncomfortable as this story sometimes gets (one segment hauntingly repeats "they catch him, and they say 'e's mental" twice to emphasise that particular chapter's seriousness) it's a story that needed to be told. It makes the whole question of miserablism, and the harm that may have done, a done-and-dusted irrelevance, taking a really quite gloriously pop (brief, dramatic, selfish) stand against, well, anything un-pop (healthy, stable, not confused, worthy). Which is precisely (THANK GOD!) what Moz does.

We've sucked him and seen, and if most of us want to stick around for more of that gorgeous Moz flavour (slurp!) then that's because it's 100% tastier and 100% better/worse for you than other 'leading' brands. Moz is - and this is the only sane way to make sense of a soul who so continually relives his torment on record and in concerts - Here For Us, making a virtue of the impulses and neuroses that us mere mortals would be ill-advised to cling to in daily life because they'd drive us stark staring bonkers. Saint Morrissey is a massively apt title, and a massively special book. So go buy it!