Morrissey quotes from 1984

The line from This Charming Man "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear." Was that written from experience? From total experience. For years and years I never had a job, or any money. Consequently I never had any clothes whatsoever. I found that on those very rare occasions when I did get invited anywhere I would constantly sit down and say, "Good heavens, I couldn't possibly go to this place tonight because I don't have any clothes... I don't have any shoes." So I'd miss out on all those foul parties. It was really quite a blessing in disguise.

Are clothes important to you? They are. I mean I like to have them on. I wouldn't feel very secure if I didn't have any, so yes I suppose... (smothered laughter)

"If I ever got angry and dissatisfied as a child it was because there was never any angst from anybody. Personally I was very unhappy but in general, the reason I felt strange was because no-one else was saying, "I'm really miserable, I can't stand being nine years old, when are things going to change?".

"I used to have a horrible territorial complex. I would totally despise any creature that stepped across the threshhold and when somebody did, or looked at my books, or took out a record, I would seethe with anger. I was obsessive: everything was chronologically ordered - a place for everything, everything in its place. Total neurosis. My sister only ever popped her head around the door. But now, it's totally foreign. It's strange how things that seem to mean so much, ultimately don't matter."

"I was 16 or 17 and went through this mad period of trying to break into music journalism. I also wrote to everyone. I'd receive about 30 letters a day from no-one in particular. I'd enter competitions. I spent every solitary penny on postage stamps. I had this wonderful arrangement with the entire universe without actually meeting anybody, just through the wonderful postal service. The crisis of my teenage life was when postage stamps went up from 12p to 13p. I was outraged."

"I'm never interested in those murders where the wife poisons the husband and the husband suffocates the wife. Very extreme cases of murder have to be a constant source of bewilderment; where the police burst into a flat and find seven bodies in the fridge. It's not amusing, though you titter, it's a magnificent study of human nature although I wouldn't want to be so close to the actual study that I'm squashed in the fridge (chortle)."

Valerie Solanas thought so, she tried to assassinate Andy Warhol. Yes, he made a misogynistic comment and she took umbrage, loaded her pistol and aimed it at Andy's delicate little brain.

Do you admire that in a woman? I do because then she wrote a book about it, which was quite rivetting. I mean how obstreperous can you get? Shooting Andy Warhol, then going straight home, getting out the typewriter: Why I Shot Andy Warhol by Agnes Gooch. It's captivating.

Morrissey has taken the place of Duran Duran and the Thompson Twins, single-handedly wiping them out, at least on my one increasingly [used] cassette. I told him who we were taping over. "Good. I'll talk louder then."

It seems you're being cast in the role of agony aunt to a new generation! As someone who seems to feel your lot in life is an unhappy one, what qualifies you to advise others? "I can't think of anyone more qualified (laughs). I've been through it and I understand it. I don't think a happy person could ever really understand it, they think you'll grow out of it. Unhappiness is too deeply ingrained just to be solved by getting a mere job or having a whirlwind romance. But I think what you can do is just simply learn to cope with it and learn to master it on a day to day basis."

"I think that at the end of this experience, if or when The Smiths break up, I feel sure that the other three group members could walk on to something else, but I don't think I could because I fear this is absolutely it for me, and my neck is in the noose, almost. The other three can step back and they can claim disinvolvement. But I never could. I'll risk anything."

"When you get close to this industry, you see how it is orchestrated by utter apes. When you're a member of the audience, sitting in the stalls, the whole idea of making records is inexhaustibly wonderful. When you get into the thick of it, you realise that the whole thing is swamped by oafs."

"I read other people's interviews and I'm fast asleep before I reach the end of the first paragraph - people making records are so dramatically dull; the people who are considered to be the heart of the music industry and the final saviours of pop are so remarkably dim. Recently I've been out to see groups - considered to be the pulse of modern popular music - and I've come away laughing hysterically. I feel sad that so many bland creatures could be the centre of such intellectual probing."

Didn't you bury all that this year - appearing on TOTP with a bush up your backside? Weren't you parodying the image of yourself? "It was the end of a stage for us and, in a way, it was parody. But also, to me, it was high art. Now, you can snigger, but in a hundred years... people laughed at the Pre-Raphaelites, remember that! I did think it was quite artistic. For one thing, it had never been done before and to me, it's quite serious. I mean, people stop me in the street and say, 'Where's your bush?'. Which is an embarrassing question at any time of the day. I mean, what do you say to people? 'I've left it behind on the mantlepiece'.

"I read persistently. I swam in books as a child and at some point it becomes quite ruinous. It gets to the point where you can't answer the door without being heavily analytical about it. But ultimately I think they've proved to be positive weapons for me." (Feb '84)

"It's just the whole point about romance and love songs; people seem to want to make things difficult for themselves. I don't want to sit here for hours and hours talking about W H Auden when we just want to exchange underwear or something." (Feb '84)

"He just made people feel so neurotic about their lives. I mean, if you dreamt about a lampshade, it meant you wanted to be whipped by the local vicar or something." (On Freud, Feb '84)

MORRISSEY CRITIQUES THE SINGLES 1985/86

Modern Romance - Move On: "There are indeed worse groups than Modern Romance. But can anybody seriously think of one?"

Bucks Fizz - Golden Days: "One would hear more vocal passion from an ape under anaesthetic. Inexcusably dim."

David Sylvian - Pulling Punches: "Not, as yet, being dead I find David's foggy moans to be of no great comfort. Perhaps if we dropped red hot coals on his head he might feel something? I somehow doubt it. He sounds like he's about to spend his third year in bed."

Level 42 - The Chant Has Just Begun: "Having never been sufficiently drunk to enjoy a Level 42 record, I prescribe the Burmese neck ring to these chumps for being so icy."

Alphaville - Forever Young: "Alphaville embody the frustrated egos of the massively untalented. Should have been drowned at birth."

Morrissey quotes from 1985

"I'd rather be thought of as someone quite sensitive who could understand women in a way that wasn't really sexual. I hate men who can only see women in a sexual way - to me that's criminal and I want to change that. I don't recognise such terms as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual and I think it's important that there's someone in pop music who's like that. These words do great damage, they confuse people and they make people feel unhappy so I want to do away with them."

Favourite shop? Rymans, the stationers. To me it's like a sweet shop. I go in there for hours, smelling the envelopes. As I grew up I used to love stationery and pens and booklets and binders. I can get incredibly erotic about blotting paper. So for me, going into Rymans is the most extreme sexual experience one could ever have.

"Every Friday night you'll find me leaning over the bathtub, immersed in Persil. I simply cannot go to the launderette and I don't have a washing machine and I don't have time to get one. It's quite passionately romantic leaning over the bath, scrubbing one's shirts."

"I think generally that people think that meat doesn't have anything to do with animals. It's like potatoes or something - it hasn't got a cow's face and it doesn't moo, so people don't think it's animals. But of course it is - as I'm sure you've recently realised."

"We're angry about the music industry. We're very angry about pop music. And I think it's about time that somebody said something and somebody did something that is of value. Which is always very difficult because when you try to say something with value and intelligence, you have to stand trial, you have to go before the jury, as it were, and explain yourself. People who are idiots and idiotic and bland and pointless and stupid and poppy - they can do what they like and nobody pins them against a wall and says, 'Why are you doing that?' But if you try and do something with a grain of intellect, you have to answer for it every single day of your life. Which to me is the most irksome part of the music industry. In a way, it means you are being taken seriously, but then as I recollect, it was always the very, very dull people in music who were ever taken seriously. So there's really a lot to do. It's not easy."

[Nicky Wire's not as alone as he thinks in being an intelligent pop star]

"It's so difficult to name names these days... you meet people at Top Of The Pops and they're incredibly civilised and it spoils everything, because you really want to get in some horrific criticism."

Are you equating human violence towards fellow humans - 'Barbarism,' The Headmaster Ritual - with violence towards animals? Are you saying it's all the same thing? Yes, it is. Because violence towards animals, I think, is also linked to war. I think as long as human beings are so violent towards animals there will be war. It might sound absurd, but if you really think about the situation it all makes sense. Where there's this absolute lack of sensitivity where life is concerned, there will always be war. And, of course, there will always be war as long as there are people willing to fight wars in armies. Which is quite another matter, which I must cover one day on a B-side...

Do you think they [fans] maybe use you as a crutch, because they can't sort out their problems for themselves? Yes, I think so. But that shouldn't really be a shameful thing. In a very fundamental way, everybody needs friends and a lot of people don't have them. And a lot of people who buy records believe that the artists who make the records are their friends. They believe that they know these people, and they believe that they're actually involved in these people's lives and it's a comfort. We shouldn't have a condescending attitude to that.

"Even within relationships, there's no real certainty and nobody knows how anybody feels. People feel that just simply because they're having this cemented communion with another person that the two of you will become whole, which is something I detested. I hate that, that implication. It's not true, anyway. Ultimately, you're on your own, whatever happens in life, however you go through life. You die on your own. You have to go to the dentist on your own. It's like all the serious things in life are things that you feel on your own."

Would you describe yourself as a mega misery guts? "You quite like that word 'mega', don't you? It's very provincial..." One more crack like that, and I'll put you across my knee and wallop you. "At last! Prayers answered, prayers answered! Now, what was question 17?"

What's preventing you from being happy? "I don't know. I think it's something to do with the hormones. I haven't a clue." Your neuroses, perhaps? "Give me a chance to answer the question!! Good heavens, that's the first time I've shouted since 1976. Now I've forgotten the question." What's stopping you from being happy? "I've been in every conceivable situation in human existence" Every conceivable situation in human existence? You've had group sex on a rubber mat with a bowl of custard?? "Daily. It's a terrible yawn... "

Have you ever been in love? "No, I haven't." Liar. "Yes, I have. I was lying then. But only from an absurd distance." But that isn't love - that's obsession. "It - it was love... I felt it, because it was there - I squeezed the... I squeezed the - I'll find the word in a minute" I never squeeze it, so I don't know. "The aura! I felt it. Is love obsession until it becomes physical commitment? I've never had physical commitment. Oh, that sounds terrible" What a bloody fibber. I don't believe you for a minute. "I'm allowed to lie. I've got my rights."

What are the things that make you angriest? "Almost everything, I mean, you name it, it annoys me terribly. I suppose I'm quite easily angered and there's so many things certainly within the music industry but if you mean things outside, there's lots of political issues that irk me. I'm quite an irkable person. But I get angry by almost everything. Which is quite satisfying."

Does it worry you that you've got so much influence, as it were? "No, I mean, would it worry you? No, It's nice to have influence, if obviously everybody thought I was a total simpleton, I'd worry then, no, influence is quite a nice thing to have. Better than having acne or something."

The New York Dolls, what was it about them that you liked? "I still haven't a clue. I'm still trying to wipe that one out. Well, the music industry hated them and that was good enough for me. I thought well, yes, that's the group for me"

"If you really want to talk quite openly and drop your defences, as it were, it seems to be quite unnerving because people just simply aren't used to it. It's like if somebody sits next to you on the bus and says 'I really like your jacket or your trousers', you immediately run away, which is the wrong thing to do. But it's the same way within music, you know, people are just so used to this glossy nothingness, and also if you have a degree of intellect, you actually run the risk of making your critics generally seem quite dull in comparison so they don't like it . Fools, fools, fools."

Your professed celibacy, no doubt, has been the subject of many letters from people. Have you had lots of advances? "Only hand written advances. Which of course are meaningless really... cases and cases and cases full of letters from people saying well I'm here, come and get me. I'll be waiting tonight, I'll be lying on the settee covered in feathers. Which is quite worrying when it comes from the woman next door"

"Audiences never want to know about that, about the PA giving trouble or someone shouting things and making life quite unbearable. They just want you to get out there and be Bugs Bunny."

"After all's said and done, I'm still here, the press are still not convinced. We're still at the stage where if I rescued a kitten from drowning they'd say, 'Morrissey Mauls Kitten's Body'. So what can you do?"

"Oh yes, I am vain. If someone punches me in the face and I lose five teeth then I'm going to be upset, make no mistake about that. Yes, it's vanity - I care about the way I look, the way I feel and the way I am - and I don't want to apologise about it"

"People can picture me laying naked in my house, covered in feathers, rubbing these pictures on myself. But that isn't the case..."

"Nothing is important so people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race 'round the supermarket and steal Mars bars and, y'know, kiss kittens and sit on the back of bread vans. Whatever makes people happy they should just do it, 'cos time is a mere scratch and life is nothing..."

"I've still a few things to say, a few comments to be aired. My notebooks are still quite bulging and like it or not they're going to be foisted on the British public."

"I learned that if I ever wanted to be educated I'd have to leave school. So anything I learned was from outside of the education system. The Catholic church has nothing in common with Christianity. I can remember being at school on a Monday and being asked, 'Did you go to church yesterday?' And if you hadn't been you literally had your arms twisted off you. It's, We'll sever your head for your own good, you'll learn my son" (June '85)

Morrissey quotes from 1986

THE BIGGEST LIE I EVER TOLD IS... Still working to good effect, so...

"I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke." (June '86)

"The Smiths speak absolutely for now, singing about the way people live as opposed to the way people don't live which seems to be the cast-iron mode of songwriting these days. We live in a world which is unlike the way Top Forty records convey it."

Do you like strong women? "Yes, I do... Germaine Greer for instance. I would like to eventually turn into Germaine Greer." At the moment, she's been harping on about how, in the post-pill age, women are treated like donuts and that sex is a waste of time. "It is! It's a waste of batteries. If we all had to face each other as individuals, as human beings, we'd all be petrified. People thrive on barriers and descriptions and loopholes."

"Hi-tech can't be liberating. It'll kill us all. You'll be strangulated by the cords of your compact disc."

Morrissey quotes from 1987

I don't really believe EMI want to sign The Smiths so they can completely change the group, turn us into something we aren't. I think they know what The Smiths are - I hope they do - and there's not really any point attempting to hoist us into gruesome manoeuvres which we've dodged in the past, or attempted to dodge. There's no point. We'll just run off. But their lawyers will run after you. Well, we're quick runners. We've got bicycles.

I'm such an obsessive creature I become so immensely devoted to the people that I like, practically to the point of hospitalisation. I have boxes and boxes at home, cuttings and old books. People who visit me can't believe the streams of documentation I have on the people I like. But because I become so obsessive I can really understand it when somebody writes to me by every post, and sends me their underwear, and feels that enormous degree of painful obsession. I can understand it completely and I wholly encourage it! I'd like it to spread, in fact. It must become burdensome after a point, surely. Yes. There are some people who take train journeys to London to try and find me. They ring up the record company and appear at the doorstep and say, "I am here and I am going to lie on the doorstep until Morrissey arrives" There are people like that. I don't disapprove of that situation; they're getting fresh air! (Laughs) Do they not look to you to solve their personal crises? Yes, it does happen a lot. There is a style of letter that I receive from very, shall we say, nervous individuals, who are very nervous about their own future. I get a lot of letters from people who don't have jobs, and from back bedroom casualties, if you like, who are very worried because they can't focus on anything in human life that makes them feel comfortable. And I get letters from people who say, "When The Smiths break up I will die, I will make a reservation for the next world." But to me that's not extreme. I don't leap back with shock, because I understand that form of expression that form of drama. I think it primarily stems from feeling quite isolated and believing that the people who make the records you buy are your personal friends, they understand you, and the more records that you buy and pictures you collect the closer you get to these people. And if you are quite isolated and you hear this voice that you identify with, it's really quite immensely important.

What are you driven by? Hate largely. This will sound almost unpleasant but distaste for normality. I've never really liked normal people and it's true to this day. I don't like normal situations. I get palpitations. I don't know what to do. So this obsessive drive against normality - which I know sounds unprintable and unfathomable - that's what it is. That is what it is.

I had a bad morning… I woke up and felt very dazed. I just had great difficulty in getting dressed. I tripped over everything. Twice. His mood probably wasn't helped by his taxi this morning bringing him past Buckingham Palace. There were crowds of people - all dressed in pink - because it's the old bat's (i.e The Queen Mother's) 85th birthday today... You obviously keep in touch with these things. Well yes, I do. I have a diary of Royal events I like to follow. Did you send her anything? Yes, a large bouquet of vegetables. I couldn't believe the number of people. If the woman had died there would have been less. But you'd have been there then. Yes. I'd have been hammering the nails in the coffin to make sure she was in there. You rotter. You've been on holiday recently, haven't you? Well. I've been away. I've been away. It wasn't really much of a holiday. Where did you go? I went to Los Angeles, which is in America. It was a silent holiday, a completely silent holiday. I went to a hotel, the hotel was empty. I never saw any people. It was like convalescing. I thought it would be exciting... Hollywood... all those famous stars. It sounds like the dullest holiday ever. Well, maybe you could match it. How was your caravan this year?

You've got lots of cousins? Yes. Yes. I get on with them quite well. I can manage courteous responses to their questions. Could you bear being with some one? Sharing yoghurt and things, you mean? No. I don't like to share really. Are you selfish? I'm selfish in a positive way. Self preservation and all that. Sharing is a funny word. I do send off money to the Blue Cross - animal refuges, things like that. Don't you worry you'll end up 55 and all alone? Yes, but it seems unavoidable really. It seems totally unavoidable.

There are quite a lot of people who don't like The Smiths ... You do surprise me. I hadn't noticed. And the main reason seems to be... Is that they like The Smiths but hate the singer? No, that they think you're always whining and miserable. I can totally understand that and it's generally said by lesser individuals, to my mind. It's generally people with a very clumpish intellectual state. It's never people who are vastly intelligent, I find - it's always very unthinking, unlistening people. So I don't really mind that much. Are you saying The Smiths only make music for clever clogs? Not at all, but there is a certain, shall we say, social standing that you have to take in to consume The Smiths without any degree of ruffled feather. I think you have to be, er, "with it". "With it"??? You have to be awake. You have to be... up early. Please stop using silly expressions and say what you mean. Do you mean you have to be a clever clogs? Yes. You have to be "with it", really. I can't believe I've said that twice.

A lot of people - a lot more than buy Smiths records - are very happy... Oh we'll soon change that - give me a few more minutes...

Are you the sort of person who's embarrassed to walk into the local grocer's to buy loo paper? I get very embarrassed, I don't know why. I just go quite specifically to one shop and they always speak to me and they're always very nice and I start bumbling and they ask me very easy questions and I can never answer them. Yesterday she said to me "you like the rain, don't you?". I couldn't answer, I really couldn't answer her. But you do love it? Yes. I love weather like this (there's thunder and lightning outside) Just to make other people as unhappy as you? Yes (laughs). I really like 3.30 in the afternoon when the sky is overcast and there's thunder and there's rain and you're watching the Monday Matinee and you've got a nice big solid piece of toast in front of you. That to me is life lived to its fullest.

"I truly believe that to make any impact at all you have to get into the big, bad world of major record companies, ruffle a lot of feathers and kick a lot of bottoms."

"I often wonder if we shouldn't explain ourselves more, especially as an astonishing number of people completely misunderstand The Smiths "humour". Take Bigmouth - I would call it a parody if THAT sounded less like self-celebration, which it definitely wasn't. It was just a really funny song - whenever I heard it on the radio it made me laugh and the same was true of at least half The Queen Is Dead. The Smiths do tease people - making them laugh, then making them cry - operating at opposite ends of the emotional scale. What we're ultimately hoping to do is make them laugh and cry at the same time."

"Someone coined it as disability chic, through which The Smiths reached out to certain parts of the public who never felt they fit the perfect mould of "pop fan". There are lots of people who want to be a member of the audience, want to get involved in the music and the lifestyle but don't feel interested in the constant chase for fashion perfection that most bands inflict on their audience. Fashion has gone through periods of being completely redundant - mainly the fault of fashion magazines illustrating the things you can buy if you're dramatically, overbearingly rich, but are of no use at all to ordinary people living in humble places."

"Southerners always regard having lived in the north as a strange medical phenomenon or the reason for having an unusual diet or peculiar haircut. But I was never aware of people in the north sharing my views on furniture or housing. I do not think taste is something you automatically acquire by virtue of being born south of Milton Keynes."

"People tend to look at my interviews and regard me as some kind of character from a Dickensian soup kitchen. There ARE plenty of things that do give me pleasure - although I can't actually think of any at the moment. I've been termed a manic depressive - usually by people who've never met me, but I am capable of looking on the bright side - I just don't do it very often."

"Finding people with genuine, bona-fide taste is such a very rare thing nowadays. I believe that everything went downhill from the moment the McDonald's chain was given license to invade England - don't laugh, I'm serious - to me it was like the outbreak of war and I couldn't understand why English troops weren't retaliating. The Americanisation of England is such a terminal illness - I think England should be English and Americans should go home and spoil their own country. Shopping centres are the worst - they're a boil on the face of the Earth. I regard modern architecture as more dangerous than nuclear war - it'll absolutely slaughter the human race. And as for council houses - they can only be designed for the purpose of eliminating the working classes from the face of the Earth."

"I do object to the level of taxes I have to pay - every time I get a tax demand and I look at the figures, I literally drop 11 stone in weight. Which makes me a very light person. Other pop people have similar reactions - mostly they cry, openly cry in the middle of the street. It is truly a terrible sight for onlookers to behold."

"I could never make do. I find there are so many people who start out 'making do' with certain things in their life and find out 30 years later they are still 'making do' and waiting for their lives to begin."

"I can't think of any 'institutions' I'd particularly like to attack at the moment, but I'm always on the look-out and if I think of any new ones, I'll let you know. When it comes to ruffling feathers I think I'm doing pretty well, don't you? I'm certainly getting about - in fact there isn't really much left. That's another function of songwriting - if people double-cross me, I'll just sit down and write a nasty song about them."

"When they bury me in church and chuck earth on my grave, I'd like the words 'Well at least he tried' engraved on my tombstone."

Morrissey quotes from 1988

"EMI had put us into the studio and we recorded What Difference Does It Make?, Handsome Devil and Miserable Lie. We presented the tapes at Manchester Square to the head of A&R at EMI... I can't remember his name... Hugh Potty-head or something... and we were promptly rejected after one play. We were temporarily devastated, I had to sell three sheep and a cow in order to get to London, and we weren't even offered a digestive biscuit."

"Pop video is a very stupid genre. No one really respects it. I once said that a drunken goat could produce a Duran Duran video, and I still believe that, only these days the goat need not necessarily be alive."

"I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing."

"I once bought a Manchester United hat, which I think was 12 shillings, and somebody ran up behind me and pulled it off and just ran ahead. So I thought, 'It's a very cruel world, I'm not prepared for this.' And I decided to get my revenge on society."

"Some people are very funny. Some people are athletic. Some people are very hateful. It's whatever is in the blood"

"I care because I have always loved passionately popular music. I think even as each day passes and popular music becomes more & more distasteful, its actual history becomes more & more important. I do not like to see it invaded, trampled upon. It meant so much to me."

"I have always been intrigued by writers and singers and jounalists whose opinions and attitudes seemed to be unpopular but who attained a certain status precisely because of their displeasure with the world. I see nothing wrong with being hard to please. It has its own grace, it's the very least we should expect. I feel that the opinions of the hard to please people are the ones that really count. They are prepared for discovery and change."

"It wasn't really my fault that images rather than people appealed to me. There were a lot of people about... I went to school and briefly to work, I did see people. I lived on a heavily populated council estate. There were people all around. But no one bothered to penetrate this great wall there was between us."

"I remember it all in great detail, I seem to remember it every night and re-experience the embarrassment of it. It was horror. The entire school experience, a secondary modern in Stretford called St Mary's. The horror of it cannot be over-emphasised. Every single day was a human nightmare. In every single way that you could possibly want to imagine. Worse... the total hatred. The fear and anguish of waking up, of having to get dressed, having to walk down the road, having to walk into assembly, having to do those lessons... I'm sure most people at school are very depressed. I seemed to be more depressed than anyone else. I noticed it more."

"I was initially very confused when people wrote that my songs were adolescent. I was 24, 25, so they weren't adolescent, they were something totally new, something that had never been expressed before. It was not adolescent. It was not that easy."

"Let's talk about the window cleaner. I'm still in the position that when the window cleaner calls, I have to go in another room than the one he is cleaning. It's very silly. At the time I feel like a bespectacled six-year-old. I always find when the door bell rings that my automatic response is to hide or run away, to be quiet. They might want you to do something that you don't want to do, want you to go where you don't want to go. It's one of those trivial obsessive fears, like being on an airplane... which troubles me enormously. I always feel when I'm on a plane that I have to be racked by physical fear, and if I am I'll arrive safely. I feel if I relax, drink a whisky, converse, the plane will crash. I have to be in total turmoil or the plane won't make it. That's the way I am and always will be (chuckle). The terrifying thing is, as you get older, it doesn't get any easier. Fears just seem to cement into place."

In a way, I believe that all those things like love, sex, sharing a life with somebody, are actually quite vague. Being only with yourself can be much more intense. I personally have always felt trapped within the feeling of being constantly disappointed with people. In a way I do feel things that are conceivably better and more important than sexual situations. I mean, sex is presumably the final point one reaches, I don't know. It doesn't matter to me. All the emotions I need to express come from within me. They don't really come from other people. I seem to feel things far more intensely and precisely than people who express a rag-bag of emotions and survive, just, loads of relationships. I see all situations, even when I'm not involved and it's nothing to do with me, in a very dramatic way.

You're something of a drama queen? If you like. That will do. So when the tabloids write nonsense, you're truly offended? It does hurt me, because it isn't true. They compile fictitious quotes. Don't you take it too personally? What else can I do? It all makes me out to be a very silly and thoughtless person, and that annoys me, because I am not, and there are enough of them in the world. I'm not thoughtless at all, I think all the time. But as long as you know you're not silly and thoughtless, then so what? Well, I accept that... but people are reading it, people are thinking it might be true, and I don't like that. I don't get drunk and forget. I just wish that people would represent me as being more fascinating than I actually am instead of so much less. When these fictitious quotes appear, why can't they just be fabulous? It's out of your control. Yes, and I don't like that. It might ruin all my carefully prepared work!

"I went to discos that were quite violent, and youth discos in the afternoons. I have certain fond memories... the grime, certain records like 'Double Barrel' and 'Young, Gifted And Black'. There was a tremendous air of intensity and potential unpleasantness - something interesting grabbed me about the whole thing. Perhaps only in retrospect, not at the time, because on your way home you'd always get duffed up."

Did he really sing, "It was a good lay" at the end of "Suedehead," his first solo single? "No, 'It was a bootleg'. I mean, good heavens, in my vocabulary? Please..." Honestly? "Well, have I ever been dishonest?" he laughs. "Do people think it was 'a good lay'?" I do. "And is that quite racy?" Oh, yes. "Well, it was actually a good lay" And was there one? "No, I just thought it might amuse someone living in Hartlepool."

"A few bricks need to be thrown through a few specific windows, whether we're discussing Tiffany or nuclear waste." He looks around the room again. "I gladly would if there were any troops, but a one-man army can get a little strenuous. Who would make the tea?"

"Desparation, humour, what's the difference?"

That superficial image of you as some depressed nutter walking around with flowers in his back pocket is perpetuated because even the most serious music journalists haven't delved behind the feelings in the songs. I think we have to assume that journalists do actually try. I mean a lot of them aren't massively equipped upstairs. I don't want to be rude but it's the case, it's a cast iron fact. Some journalists do astound me, they get the spade out and try to dig but can't quite manage it. As far as the depressed obsessive smothered in flowers, well that sounds superficial as you put it, but to me that, the archetypal caricature, I find mildly interesting. I find people who are steeped in plunging depression rapturously interesting and if I saw an individual smothered in flowers I'd have to run up to him. Happiness is still something to be attained. I don't think I know anyone who is truly happy, I suppose it's something worth waiting for. The suicide rate is enormously high and as time goes by more pressures occur. They are pressures I resent but not just for me but for most people. It's just not enough to be oneself. Everyone is obsessed with materialism.

"I think things have changed. I think we've left everything beautiful behind. It's practically 1990, why deny it? I have a natural aversion to change. Yes, social change, sorry. And because Thatcherites embrace it willy-nilly at the expense of nature, beauty, and tradition I feel a little bit lost really. Because I don't want to live next to a transparent telephone box."

"I simply don't feel that the changes that occur are for the better. The Channel Tunnel completely mystifies me. Ripping through the countryside and all those gardens mystifies me. The levels of toxic waste in this country mystifies me. I can't believe the way the world revolves in this depressingly destructive state. Whenever I go past McDonalds I get very, very angry. No, as a boy I would not have queued in McDonalds, not at all. I know vegetarian toddlers who are members of Green Scene. So there's hope. And interestingly McDonalds have vowed to use bio-degradeable plastics in their funny little cartons. It proves that somewhere in McDonalds, in that morass of ineptitude, there's a working brain."

Viva Hate - what's the thinking behind the title? "Like many other titles, it simply suggested itself and had to be. It was absolutely how I felt post-Smiths and the way I continue to feel. That's just the way the world is. I find hate omnipresent, and love very difficult to find. Hate makes the world go round." Does that sadden you? Or do you have a need to hate? Is hate one of the things we do to reinforce the sense of our own identity, our separateness? "I do find people quite hateful, naturally. I think people feel hate very easily, and they need it in their lives, they need to distrust and to criticise." Is that bad? Natural? "Well, it's just there really. But then I always thought the human race was very very over-rated - by rock critics generally."

And your gang, were you outcasts, victimised by "The Ordinary Boys"? "Yes, but half of it, I have to confess, was the effect of deliberate choosing. We chose to reject the normality of life, and be intense and individual." Do you think, in 10 or 20 years, your life will still be structured around these playground antagonisms? "Yes. People don't really change, do they? They don't change. And the playground antagonisms are replaced by other... more adult antagonisms." Office antagonisms. "Yes. Canteen antagonisms... getting heavily antagonised while you're queuing up to purchase a doughnut"

"At a tender age, I craved that power - to impose one's record collection on people in launderettes and on scaffolding. But now I think it's such a terrible job that dee-jays should be the highest paid people in the country. To have to sit in an office all day playing the same records - all of which are awful - over & over & over again - well, it's not funny, is it?! We shouldn't pick on these people. We should send them parcels!"

Morrissey quotes from 1990

"I think there's always a danger in trying to give an audience what it wants. I think it's more interesting to give an audience something it might not want."

Morrissey quotes from 1991

"It's so easy to throw that old word 'obsession' around. We often hear about, Oh, I'm obsessed with that, I'm obsessed with music, I'm obsessed with theorising about music. All of us secretly think we're musicologists and that only we know what's good and what's bad. But the word 'obsession' - which is freqently applied to me - is a pretty dangerous one, really. I did fall in love with the voices I heard, whether they were male or female. I loved those people. I really, really did love those people. For what it was worth, I gave them my life... my youth. Beyond the perimeter of pop music there was a drop at the edge of the world."

"When I was young, I instantly excluded the human race in favour of pop music, and you can't live a fulfilled existence like that. People are invariably there. You have to go to school; you have to try to communicate with those around you. But when you've sealed up your bedroom doors and you've blackened your windows, and all you want in the world are those tiny crackles that are about to introduce that record - and you love the crackles that you hear from the needle on the vinyl as much as you love what will follow - then I don't think you will turn out to be a very level-headed human being. Music is like a drug, but there are no rehabiliation centers."

"Tonight, on this very day that you and I are speaking, I will go home and I will play music very, very, very loudly, and I will be absolutely transported to a delightful new planet. I will listen to a record which I can't stop playing at the moment, a single called 'Good Timin'' by Jimmy Jones - an old American MGM yellow label record. It's just simple, straight, boring, dull, floppy old pop music, but to me it's... (he lowers his voice to a whisper) it's like skin against skin. It's better than fine cuisine. It's better than sex! There, now, that's how I feel."

"I know I'm making your stomach churn as I say those words, but I do feel like a one-off. You can hate the sight of me, or you can cherish every word I've uttered. But I do feel reasonably unique, I do." Then he says, semi-convincingly, "It's a terrible, terrible curse. I wish I could just blend in."

"It's fine if you can dip into music and then have a social life, and then you have another portion of your life, perhaps a place of work or college or et cetera. But for me it was never that way. I was always absolutely embroiled and totally, inescapably, 24-hours-a-day, I would have to have music. Which is like skidding on very, very thin ice because sooner or later you're going to have to meet the rest of the world."

"It's quite safe to be affectionate about something that isn't really there anymore. That's the absolutely classic case in British pop, that we must mourn what we didn't comment upon at the time of its existence. We must mourn what we made no effort to save when it was dying."

Morrissey interviews from 1992

Seen any good films lately? "No. I don't watch anything post-1970. I refuse, on the grounds that I'm completely caught in a time warp! And happily so." So you've never seen E.T.? "I saw it once on television. That doesn't count. It's completely different, because you just flick and there it is. You don't just flick and find yourself in a cinema, do you?" No, not unless you're a... "Well I'm not." Clearly, although you have been called one. "Only very quietly, in whispered terms." Do you have a daily routine? "It's a very quiet, very private life. It doesn't involve that many people. I usually rise quite early, have a leisurely breakfast, and go out walking or visit somebody. Most of the band live within walking proximity." Do you have a car for longer journeys? "I always walk." You don't drive? "I always walk." So you don't have a car. "I have two." What kind? "One is a very old car, and one is a very snazzy sports car. But I can't describe them because certain people where I live ..." Will start looking for them? "Well that's point A, but point B is finding them and running off with aerials and number plates and my wig..." Your wig? You keep your wigs in the car? "On the backseat. It's nice and airy."

Let's stay with fashion. You've introduced quite a few accessories... "Yes, I invented the refrigerator, I invented Lucille Ball, let's be honest..." Eyeglasses and hearing aids... "Well, I can't see very well..." So only the hearing aid was artifice? "It was purely sexual, part of the disability-chic movement that I created in 1983." And your hair, often imitated and never equalled. Does that give you any pleasure? "Enormous pleasure. To look at the audience and see almost a mirror image is extraordinary. People will shave their hairline back and dye their hair. That's commitment." Is it true you sleep in the nude? "Yes I do. I like the freedom of movement, especially in the event of a fire." Does that mean boxer shorts for day? "Are you asking me what type of underwear I wear? I didn't until about a month ago." Did you have some untoward incident? "No, I just suddenly decided that I wanted to. No reason. I wasn't involved in any political royal scandal. So I tried Calvin Klein. The briefs. White." It's of compelling interest. "I wouldn't doubt it for a split second"

Do you receive a lot of fan mail? "Yes, a great lot. Mostly complaints, actually. And they complain about precisely anything. If someone lost his ticket to a concert he writes to me and complains. Or if some other person can't manage to find his seat to the same concert, they also write to me and claim it's my fault. And it actually isn't but I understand that they write. It's often parents to fans who write and ask me to stop existing. Someone wrote that she couldn't manage to walk past her daughter's room, because she constantly played records by a man who had his legs sawed off."

"I still don't want to live a so-called normal life. I don't want to sell oranges or pack great quantities of the already mentioned fruit into boxes. I don't want to sew little grey buttons on to grey winter coats. So here I sit..."

I'm intrigued, because when I meet people here, they always say, "Can I hug you?" I've seen security guys at your signing sessions standing with their walkie-talkies and talking about "the hugging thing" and what they were going to do about it. Well, in Houston, there was a woman reportedly shouting, "No hugging, no hugging!" and I thought, that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. No hugging. Why not? Maybe you're giving them the hugs they don't get anywhere else. I thought they were giving me the hug that I didn't get anywhere else! Well, you're both giving each other the hugs. Yes, but my need's greater!

Are you lonely? Yes, I am extremely lonely. How would you think about solving that? I don't think about that now, because when you've struck the grand old age of 33, you have to come to some basic conclusions about your lifestyle and practically every night of my life has been the same, so it's not as if I've had ups and downs. The day always ends the same way, with exactly the same scenario. I'm closing the door and putting the lights out and fumbling for a book. And that's it. I find that very unfortunate, but then, I could have a wooden leg.

Do you like yourself? No, I don't. That is the actual truth, but I know that there is no way that that sentence can be printed and not seem like anything other than extreme nonsense. But, objectively, it doesn't seem to me that you have a reason not to like yourself. More to the point, I don't have a reason to like myself. I did an interview once with Mavis Nicholson. And after the interview, she whispered to a friend of mine, "There's nothing he likes about himself, is there?" And it was a crushing moment. I thought, well, Mavis, 30 minutes is all it took you to find out. Oh come on. You're indulging yourself. Why? Because it's a security blanket to say that. You've got the parameters of your life all laid out. It's like your suitcase. Yes, but if I worked for British Rail, I'd just have another suitcase.

Morrissey quotes from 1993

"Every time I leave the country I have difficulties holding back my tears. I never want to go abroad. I need Britain for my personal stability. This is the only place where I can do absolutely nothing without feeling the least guilt. And to me it's the ideal life. Doing nothing gives me great pleasure. And believe me, I succeed wonderfully in it."

"People can't deal with emotions at all in human life. It doesn't matter what they are - if someone close to you is dying, or having a baby, or whatever, most people can't deal with it. They can't say the right things at the right time. And certainly rock music or pop music doesn't really convey much these days. It doesn't really convey any raw emotion and so therefore, people who do such as I, it just can't be dealt with. It can't be accepted. I feel like I'm embarrassing to a lot of people but I never feel embarrassed at all." Perhaps you're reminding those who bury their emotions of what's really down there. "Well," he smiles, "it shouldn't be 'down there'."

Morrissey quotes from 1994

Do you mind if I smoke? "I don't mind if you do, as long as you don't light that cigarette" That's okay. If you rather I didn't... "I'd rather you didn't. I don't want to sound like an old prune, but if I get cancer, will you drive me to the hospital?"

"He sent me a card the other day..." Who, Dirk Bogarde? Are you sure? "Yes, and I almost cried with joy when it arrived. I thought, Put it this way, Mozzer, you have a card from Dirk Bogarde here (and he slapped the settee). You have Alan Bennett sitting in your kitchen having tea. You have David Bowie having sung one of your songs quite beautifully. What else are you looking for? What right do I have to be sour-faced and complaining, queuing up at Waitrose in Holloway being annoyed because somebody in front of me has got a leg of lamb? What more could there be?"

"Around me, I only see uncommunicative people who only think of themselves and don't understand. People lack so much poetry. They don't know how to read their souls, how to look at the beauty in them. They only think about moving forward, overtaking others. "

"To me, violence is an everyday reality in relations. People treat me as if I were abnormal, as if I weren't like them - and this is already a beginning of violence."

In concrete terms, what is it? Depression? (Long hesitation) It's certainly more complex than that. Let's say that I feel attracted by something impalpable. Not identifiable. I've always felt unique - I've always had a strange life, not the golden existence of pop music singers. I've always felt this presence, this thing which grabbed me, which told me where to go. It's maybe that, my illness. That's exactly the kind of speech you held forth at the beginning of The Smiths. You said you found an energy, something which guided you. Despite all those years I've never been able to identify the origin of this energy. Only, today, I think that everything's organized. I have the feeling of going with the current, being only a piece of this destiny. But in England if you start talking of this kind of thing, they laugh at you, you're taken for some ridiculous dandy. So I keep all this for me.

Is Speedway as knotty and complicated a song as it appears. It seems to be about the gentlemen of my profession. It's even knottier than it appears to you! And I've never met any gentlemen of your profession.

As a lyricist, are you peerless? Well, the obvious answer is yes, but as people read these lines they would hate me for saying so, particularly those people who make music and perhaps think they are peerless. But I say it with the maximum concern for the future of pop music and, let's face it, it doesn't really have one. Although I will go home tonight and play music very loudly and get very excited, I rarely hear lyrics sung by others which motivate me in any way. Even the people I quite like are quite silly, really, lyrically. Who would these records be by? It would be The Angelic Upstarts, Echobelly, The Ramones, Gallon Drunk... and me. Me at a higher volume, of course.

What do you read? Nothing at all. I've given it up. It was giving me yellow jaundice. I've stopped. What's the point? I know everything.

Morrissey quotes from 1997

"It's fascinating to wake up and have no idea what's about to happen," he says. "I can't imagine standing at a bus stop at 10 to eight every morning. Tea, books, a sofa ... that's a great way to live."

"At 22 I felt like something that had died seven years previous, so the prospect of being 40 is a doddle really."

Do you drink tea? "Oh yes, I do." Do you ever get sick of drinking tea? "I absolutely never get sick of drinking tea. It's a psychological thing really, it's just very composing and makes me relax." It's just so much a part of your culture! "Oh yes, yes. I'm very avid, I have to have at least four pots a day." For those of us who don't know how to make a pot of tea, what do you do? "Well, you really have to put the milk in first, which many people don't." Put the milk in with the water, before you boil the water? "No, you're confused already" (laughs). "No, you put the milk in before you pour the water in, or the tea, whichever..." Well, I would do that without even thinking about it. "Right, and also you have to use real milk, you can't use the UHT fake stuff. You have to use proper milk." OK, so what about the actual brewing of the tea? "The brewing of the tea - it's very important that you heat the pot before you put the water in - if you use a pot, I know most people who just throw a teabag into a cup. But in England of course, you have to make a pot of tea. And you have to heat the pot first with hot water, and then put the teabags in. I can't believe I'm saying this. And then put the hot water in and then just throw it all over yourself. Rush to outpatients and write a really good song" (laughs).

I joke that he really should have a trapdoor to get rid of interviewers who stay too long and he says sweetly, "Well, there is one, but it didn't work; I've been pressing the button for the last 15 minutes."

"I don't have sympathy for anyone," Morrissey tilts his head back. "It's such a wasted emotion. I'd rather keep it all for myself. God knows I need it."

I have a theory, you know, I say as I pack up, that we'll always judge your recorded work more harshly than anyone else's because you've always meant so much more. Because, in some way, you broke all our hearts and never said sorry. Morrissey smiles. "That's because I never was sorry." Are you a bad man? "Only inwardly."

Morrissey is incontrovertibly strange. Everybody says so, including the man himself. "God forbid that I should be normal." The form his strangeness takes is harder to fathom. The entire time I was with him, he tittered away at his own jokes, one plentiful eyebrow raised; stared out of the bright, blue, combative eyes - full of things he's not going to tell you, should you ever dare to ask; and exuded a surface impatience not that distinct from outright hostility. His big square face tilted to one side and sort of perched on his shoulder, so creating the impression that any moment - should things get any more boring - he might just nod off. And to his bosom he clutched a very large sofa cushion - on the mildly annoying tacit assumption that I might at any moment lunge for his throat. Meanwhile, he's all the time jousting. "Any pets?" he says. "Let me guess, a tortoise and a budgerigar," at which he giggles and nibbles away at the palm of his hand. "Do you eat meat? Would you eat your pets? I rest my case." At times the conversation dwindles into Morrissey's private jokes about himself. I have, for instance, no idea why we are talking about Margate. "Margate is a gigantic ham butty," he muses. "Margate is not what it never was." And it is as if I am not there at all. Does he talk to himself a lot? "It's the only way to get a decent conversation," he quips.

"This is what I call 'the tragedy of the pop-fan'. You always think that the people you're listening to are as great in their life as they are through what they're singing or writing. But it's very seldom the case.. Whenever you see them on the TV or on stage, they seem to be enormous and great. Whereas when you actually meet them in everyday life, they are very, very, very small..."

Childhood is a recurrent theme in your songs. If someday you become a father, what name would you give to your children? "Morrissey 1, Morrissey 2, Morrissey 3..." And if it's a girl? (hesitates a few seconds) "Morrissette!" (laughs) What kind of a father would you be? "I'd be a terrible father, and very strict. I wouldn't let my children get out of the house." Are you serious? "Absolutely. I would enjoy it. They will be Oliver Twist-like. No food, no bed, no baths. The very minimum." But we live in the 20th century! "No matter! I like to revive things. It's my favorite hobby!" (laughs)

Morrissey quotes 2002

"I began to buy the music press in 1969 and I would never miss. And if I'd go on holiday, I'd order everything, so that when I returned 6 weeks later, there were 75 magazines waiting for me. And I was more than a typical pop kid, I was just dangerously obsessed with all that. And given the alternatives in life, it's not been so bad."

[undated]

"At the risk of sounding more pompous than I am, I was always more loved than admired. I think musicians are admired, but I was always loved and I felt it. And I prefer that. Eric Clapton is admired, but who could love him? His own mother. Perhaps."

Morrissey on Kurt Cobain

"In truth, I actually knew very little about him until he died. For some reason, I managed to avoid the music. And when he died, like many other people, I suddenly noticed him. But really I wouldn't say I had a special time set aside for him. Obviously I knew of his death. Lots of people manage to weather fame and they don't self destruct. And lots of people remain reasonably happy. Yes, lots of people are ruined by it, but I feel that dying isn't worth it. Perhaps he could have changed his life and been a completely different person and tried to do different things. I don't know."