Morrissey's Bedroom Walls

On my librarianship course, there's a fellow trainee "information professional" who lives near Stretford. When he turned up to lectures in a Your Arsenal T-shirt, needless to say the topic of conversation turned to Stretford's most famous export.

It just so happens that this chap knew someone in his library who lived a couple of doors down from 384 Kings Road, Morrissey's pre-fame home. Alas, S.P.M. had long since moved away by the time this other bloke arrived. However... one day he got talking to the family who'd moved into Morrissey's old house.

As anyone would do on moving into a new home, they decided to do a bit of decorating. They started work in the box bedroom, where young Morrissey had slept in his 

winceyette jimjams and dreamt of audiences calling his name. The room was covered in wallpaper, so they stripped it off to get down to the bare plaster.

But it wasn't bare at all. Because, there behind the paper (hopefully flock), the walls were covered in lyrics - written there by Morrissey.

Whether these were his own lyrics or perhaps words strung together by others which took his fancy, I don't know. But it's intriguing as to why he wrote all over his walls to begin with. Had there been a paper shortage in Manchester? Did teenage Moz prefer words to pictures? In the embryonic days of The Smiths, when Johnny Marr popped round for a cuppa to discuss their impending plan for world domination, did The Best British Guitarist of the 1980's find himself gawping at a mural of words? Or, in a fit of anarchy, did Morrissey scrawl on the paintwork the day before the wallpaper went up? If they were his own lyrics, did Morrissey scribble them up before he was famous, certain of his fate and so etch them there for archaeologists in the twenty-second century? "Moz woz ere."

Yet we shall never know. Because the new occupants of 384 Kings Road covered the carpet in dust sheets and painted all over the walls with emulsion.