Alternative rock in the 1980s was defined by a handful of great bands, all moody collectives who took the negative energy of punk and fashioned a freshly beautiful noise. While U2 were busy conquering the world, R.E.M. led the alt-rock surge in the U.S. But in Britain, The Smiths ruled, all too briefly, from 1982 to their breakup in 1987. At their height, they were nearly the alt-Beatles, and by the time they split, they were a cult passion everywhere.
In the course of four brilliant albums, the quartet voiced the disillusion and lovelorn confusion of Britain's youth. More precisely, lead singer Morrissey voiced it in a mournful, angelic baritone that often rose to a ghostly falsetto, and with lyrics that seemed to take all the blame while stewing a bleak poetry of loss and no expectation ("Oh mother, I can feel, the soil falling over my head…").
Morrissey and his songwriting partner, a guitar genius named Johnny Marr, were the smiths who forged a new kind of Manchester soul. Their post-punk hymns sanctified the working-class disenchantment of that gray northern city in the conservative era of Margaret Thatcher.
But that was then. Morrissey (or Moz to the faithful) has been a solo star for the past 26 years, a British icon as beloved as the older artists he once idolized -- David Bowie, for one -- and a roof-raising act wherever he tours. His new Autobiography, a best seller in Britain, has finally been issued here, and it's a first-rate confessional that serves up Morrissey on the only terms he'll accept: his, and rightfully so.
He's the uncompromising artiste, strict vegetarian and animal protectionist who pronounced, via a Smiths album, that "Meat is Murder." And he lives his creed to the point of abruptly leaving the dinner table whenever someone orders steak or frogs legs in his presence.
The misfit lad who rose, as he writes, from Manchester's "streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you," is every bit the prose poet you'd expect. His Irish blood thrums with a Joycean music, and his tale washes over the reader like a single, gale-like exhalation of every breath he ever held.
Despite the millions he's made (and lost), the acclaim, the adulation, Morrissey rarely confesses to having any fun. He is, we glean, a solitary soul, beset on all sides by the mercenary madness and fool-suffering of the music business. In matters of the flesh, he chooses celibacy more often than not, and isn't easily reduced to a sexual orientation (he writes of "committed" relationships with women as well as men).
Of course, the narrator may be, by degrees, unreliable, since the many insults to his body politic are recollected with grave subjectivity. If the Manchester boyhood he word-paints for us seems like a Dickensian nightmare of cruel headmasters and utter, benighted poverty, more than a few details suggest otherwise.
There are nurturing parents, radiant sisters, record shops, radio and television from which the world of pop -- Bowie, T Rex, James Dean movies -- calls to the budding star, and so young Steven Patrick Morrissey is never far from inspiration. He finds role models in the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and others, and by the time of his fateful connection with Marr, he at least has the clothes, the quiff haircut, and the nascent style that will stamp The Smiths.
Morrissey complains through much of these 450 pages with terrific flair and all the aphoristic wit of his songs. He's obsessed with the rank each album or single attains on the Hot 100 and takes us with him from one delirious audience to the next.
But the book's beating heart is a painfully sardonic account of the courtroom drama Morrissey endured when he and Marr were sued by ex-Smiths drummer Mike Joyce, who contended he was not aware that he had agreed to 10% of the band's earnings while Morrissey and Marr, as songwriters, took 40% each. Despite losing some three million pounds to Joyce, Morrissey seems far more traumatized by the judge's infamous pronouncement that he is "devious, truculent, and unreliable."
Morrissey, after all, is a different animal than fellow rock-star memoirists Keith Richards and Bob Dylan, whose recent best sellers felt either defiantly self-justifying (in Richards' case) or surreally fictive (in Dylan's).
Moz, on the other hand, is candid about his "hard to take" personality and rambles on in a nakedly emotional key that matters more than the facts. As all Smiths fans know, it's an exhausting joy to spend a few tragicomic hours with this troubled, charming man.
