In book Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor, the DJ recalls how the Smiths changed British music, and his charming days spent with Morrissey – on photo shoots, at the Haçienda, and over cauliflower cheese

The second issue of Debris [Haslam’s fanzine] wasn’t going to write itself, so I made plans, wrote some ideas on scraps of paper and knocked on doors. Within a couple of weeks of the launch party, I’d arranged for Morrissey to come to my flat in Hulme.

The day after Boxing Day, 1983. That was the day Morrissey came for tea and I cooked him cauliflower cheese. Sometimes stuff happens and it’s only later you realise it was one of the highlights of your life.

I was always wandering in and out of the Crazy Face offices where the Smiths’ management was based, saying hello to Liz Taylor [who worked for the band’s manager, Joe Moss] and nosing about. Most of the visitors were people in the rag trade; it was through Joe that I met Leo Stanley, who ran the clothes shop Identity in Affleck’s Palace. You could always tell if Joe Moss was in the office as the cassette player would be belting out the likes of Chuck Berry or John Lee Hooker.

When I first started this stalking stuff, the Smiths had just released Hand in Glove. By November 1983, I was popping in once or twice a week. I asked Liz if she would ask Joe to ask whether Morrissey would grant me an interview, and word came back via Liz that he was happy to oblige.

I panicked a little because I didn’t know where to go to do the interview. It was scheduled for when Joe was having a day off, so we couldn’t meet at the management’s office. I didn’t know much about Morrissey and there was no internet to go on to search and research. I’d heard two singles and their B-sides and some other stuff on the radio; I’d seen the Smiths play; I knew Morrissey was a vegetarian, and I knew he was celibate (or, at least, he said he was); from what I’d seen and heard, I concluded he was a delicate soul and I decided that maybe we’d not meet in the pub. He didn’t give me the impression of a man who wanted to be out in public, sinking pints all evening.

Another major reason for avoiding the pub was that I needed somewhere quiet. It was only the second interview I’d ever done. I had a tape machine that recorded on to cassettes, it was bulky, and you had to press “play” and “record” at the same time, plus you had to make sure that neither you nor the interviewee was too far away from the built-in and not very clever microphone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Haslam’s fanzine, Debris, which he ran from 1983-87. Photograph: Courtesy Dave Haslam

With all these issues worrying me, I decided that the best rendezvous point for me and Morrissey was my horrible little flat in Amberidge Walk in Hulme. I’d be there on my own and we’d not be disturbed. So I asked Joe if he thought Morrissey would mind coming round to my place. Joe said it wouldn’t be a problem, and Liz said, “I’ll pick him up in the car and come over.”

I was 21 and Morrissey was 24. I suspect Joe had told Morrissey I was enthusiastic and harmless, and encouraged Morrissey to accept my request for an interview.

Ian Curtis had once said, “Fanzines are the future of the world.” Morrissey was another true believer in the importance and potential of fanzines in that era, and in the local scene.

Morrissey was a fan of City Fun fanzine, as was Linder Sterling, Morrissey’s close friend from the band Ludus (her work for City Fun included the front-cover design of issue eight).

Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll, the main characters piloting the fanzine in 1982, were also in a band together, the Gay Animals, and they managed Ludus for a time. City Fun printed the first ever Smiths review, from their gig at Manhattan Sound in January 1983. A few months later, Morrissey, using the pseudonym Burt Macho, wrote an 800-word feature for City Fun about Sandie Shaw. If you followed only the mainstream media, you’d never have known all this stuff was happening.

Thinking ahead to my evening with Morrissey, I wondered if I should cook him his tea, because we’d agreed he’d come round at seven o’clock and I wanted to be hospitable. Liz Taylor said, “Yes, I think he’d like that,” and we talked about what I might cook. These were the days before Quorn or ready-meal veggie versions of meat dishes, and I didn’t do dinner parties, so I had a very limited repertoire in any case, meat or non-meat. Liz told me Morrissey liked eggs, but I was much less of a fan. So I decided to make a massive bowl of cauliflower cheese.

Morrissey arrived wearing a dark grey pullover, brown shoes and what appeared to be the same jeans he wore on Top of the Pops during the week of the Haçienda gig (or maybe he had a whole stock of 32-34in jeans that sagged off his backside). I spent some time getting the cheese sauce just right while he browsed my bookshelves and cast his eye over a pile of magazines next to the TV. I put on some music.

It turned out that Morrissey’s mum had already cooked him something, so he wasn’t hungry. He told me to go ahead and feed myself and Liz, though, and then sat there and watched us eat cauliflower cheese with some carrots and a slice of white bread. A New Order track started playing, and he asked who it was. I told him I thought he might have known it was New Order. “Oh,” he said and melodramatically raised his eyebrows.

After the food, I pressed “play” and “record” simultaneously and we talked. He told me he’d had “a very monotonous teenage existence”. We talked about how he’d fallen in love with music. He recalled buying Come and Stay With Me by Marianne Faithfull (the first record he ever bought, purchased from the Paul Marsh record shop on Alexandra Road in Moss Side). “In the history of my life,” he said, “the high points were always buying particular records. And hearing records and being immersed in them, and really believing that these people understood how I felt about certain situations.”

I asked him about the Haçienda show from a few weeks earlier, and the fact that Joe and the Smiths had spent £200 on flowers. He linked the flowers to CND and the nuclear debate. I remember several years earlier being struck by the power of a photo of a young woman at an anti-Vietnam war demo in Washington, confronting armed soldiers by holding up a flower. It was a strong image, so I knew what Morrissey was getting at. He was very specific, though, and had a more contemporary anti-war movement on his mind. “At the time I introduced the flowers, the daffodil had become like the Greenham women’s symbol,” he said. “I wanted to introduce something on that level that could speak politically. But people never actually saw it that way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Morrissey performing with the Smiths in 1983. Photograph: AF archive/Alamy

We talked about some of his songs being “genderless” (he said, “We’re dominated by very cemented and boring ideas about what is sexual; this completely revealed sexuality”). Cath Carroll rang up for Morrissey and he said he’d call her back. The conversation spiralled off into a discussion about “the cult of the beautiful”, the François Kevorkian remix of This Charming Man and Morrissey’s frustration that “you can say something flippantly which will be written in blood in the music press and it sounds as though you’re deadly serious”.

We finished the interview and I said, “So, shall we go to the pub?” and, contrary to my preconceptions, he was up for it.

He called Cath from my phone and we arranged to meet at a pub near where I lived, called the Grants Arms, on Royce Road (near the PSV Club). We got into Liz’s car and drove along Boundary Lane and over Princess Road.

We ordered bottles of lager and sat there cringing at whatever people put on the jukebox. Liz (Taylor) was still with us, and then Cath and the other Liz (Naylor) arrived. I still threw questions at him, and we chatted for another hour or so. We returned to talking about the François Kevorkian remix, which Rough Trade distributed even though Morrissey hated it, and he consequently told fans not to buy it. Morrissey was annoyed with Rough Trade, and looking back I guess it was one of the first of several incidents that caused him and the band to fall out of love with the label. At the time, though, everyone was convinced that the only way for a band to keep their vision pure was to sign to an independent. He said he hadn’t wanted to sign to a major record label because “it just seemed like going back to school”.

I took off on some long exposition of the status of the artist in a capitalist society, saying that all relationships, including those between a band and a label and between a band and an audience, are no more and no less than one based on money.

“You’re a commodity, Morrissey. Our connection is really a transaction. And don’t you think the whole idea of ‘artistic integrity’ is a fallacy?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

It was a lovely first encounter with Morrissey, and very funny.

Morrissey and I really did get on. I’d never met anyone like him before. He wasn’t flippant but, on the other hand, he was far from earnest. There was a coyness about him, a playfulness that was very attractive. I called the interview “Up the Garden Path With Morrissey”.

My diary for 1984 gives me the full rundown of all the encounters with Morrissey that year. On my birthday, 10 January, in addition to a package of presents from Tracey [Thorn], I also received a postcard from Morrissey. A day or two after he’d been round to my flat, the Smiths had jetted over to New York. The postcard depicted a New York street scene on one side, and on the other Morrissey had written, “Hello Dave, At the Danceteria I fell off the stage. I am critically maimed. Does this interest you? Morrissey”.

Two weeks after the postcard, I phoned Morrissey. What Difference Does It Make? had just come out and the band were scheduled to do a couple of TV shows that week. I was at home watching a drama series on TV called The Jewel in the Crown. It was boring me, so I turned off the telly and called up the singer from the Smiths. My diary entry reads: “I was bored so I rang Morrissey and we talked about snow, Debris, his move to London, the tour, Top of the Pops on Thursday, The Tube on Friday, the Shangri-Las etc.” I have no idea what that etc might have been. From snow to the Shangri-Las, what else was left for us to discuss?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dave Haslam aged 18. Photograph: Courtesy: Dave Haslam

Two days later, around eight o’clock in the evening, just after that week’s Top of the Pops, which I had sat and watched, the phone rang. It was Morrissey calling. “What did you think, Dave?” He wanted to get my feedback on the TV performance.

I guess I could have asked him why he performed wearing a hearing aid. Or suggested he should have undone the last button on his shirt at the end to give us a real treat. But I said, “It was magnificent.”

I loved how the Smiths connected with their audience and I enjoyed watching their emergence. One reason for my delight was the way they challenged the mainstream version of what great pop music was. To me, they seemed like the antithesis of the likes of Duran Duran. As in every era, episodes of Top of the Pops featured a mix of music and you’d occasionally get a real gem, perhaps two; but generally in the early 1980s, the producers and the presenters turned each episode into a headless, over-lit and cheesy office party. In this context, when the Smiths were on the show performing This Charming Man or What Difference Does It Make? they were like gatecrashers from another planet, bringing with them a heavenly dose of reality.

When I interviewed John Taylor of Duran Duran, I told him all this, even though I felt a bit mean doing so. I did know that when he was a teenager in the 1970s, he’d liked a lot of the same music Morrissey and Marr had, including Bowie and Mick Ronson, of course, but that their tastes and their bands had diverged. I told him that every time I got a glimpse of a Duran Duran video, with the band and a load of half-dressed women all aboard a yacht in the Indian Ocean or whatever, in an era of rising youth unemployment and the miners’ strike, I just couldn’t cope. It was a weird juxtaposition. I told him there’s a lot I like about Duran Duran now, but back then we needed the Smiths. John was very understanding and very gentlemanly about it: “I know, Dave. I appreciate what you’re saying.”

On 13 March 1984, the Smiths played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. My evening started off in a basement bar called Corbières, as many evenings did (the bar had the best jukebox selection in town). I met Liz Taylor and her friend Kim. Liz had a stack of T-shirts for the merchandise stall, so we went down to the Free Trade Hall early and I tried to sell some copies of my fanzine to the queue. I’d sold a record number of copies of Debris (90) to people queuing at the Smiths gig in Hanley a fortnight earlier, and this time I got rid of loads again, but with a twist, as my diary records: “I ended up giving lots away because I liked everyone so much.”

I made a couple of other visits to the Free Trade Hall over the next few years, including to host a disastrous spoken-word event featuring the American writer Kathy Acker. Only 30 people came, and Kathy was in a bad mood because Graham Massey from 808 State had created a pre-show tape of someone intoning “Kathy Acker” over and over again and treated it with weird sound effects, so it sounded like “Kaaaaaaaaaathy Ackeeeeeeurgggggh”. She thought we were taking the piss.

After the Smiths gig there, my next trip to the Free Trade Hall was to see Arthur Scargill deliver a speech to miners and their supporters. I resolved to do more than wear Coal Not Dole stickers and go on marches, so, later in 1984, I organised a couple of benefit concerts to show solidarity and to raise money for the striking miners and their families. I also wanted to push back against the propaganda poured out by the media in order to trash the miners and their cause.

Through that winter, my reasons for going to the Haçienda multiplied beyond watching gigs and selling fanzines. I began to be asked to DJ before and after bands, not as cover for Andrew [Berry – a regular Hacienda DJ], but in my own right.

In January 1985, I was the extra entertainment on a night headlined by Marc Almond. Fifteen minutes or so before Marc was due on stage, there was a knock on the DJ-box door. I opened the top half of it, and there was Morrissey. I ushered him in and told him, yes, for sure you can watch Marc from here, so he took off his coat and stood next to me. We had a great view.

Less than three weeks later, I met him again, this time at Rough Trade’s London offices on Thursday, 14 February 1985, for a feature in Melody Maker. Editor Allan Jones had arranged for Morrissey to be interviewed by six editors of various fanzines (including me, Rob Deacon from Abstract and Lesley O’Toole from Inside Out).

This is when I quizzed Morrissey about adolescence, and we also talked about Pete Burns: “I think he’s a wonderful person. He’s one of the few people I can feel a great affinity with,” said Morrissey.

He also talked about his sympathy for the miners: “Completely. I mean, just endless sympathy. What can one say? It’s more distressing than most people realise, I think. I think it’s the end if they go down, the absolute end.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dave Haslam in Manchester’s Northern Quarter this month. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

We also talked about his close relationship to his listeners: “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.”

I knew that in the past he had relied heavily for lyrics on phrases from Shelagh Delaney, Victoria Wood and others, so I asked him where he had sourced the lyrics for Meat Is Murder, the new album.

“Well,” he said, and paused, “Debris magazine…”

On the tape recording you can hear me do a stupid little half-giggle, even though I knew it wasn’t true and Moz was just teasing me. I have no idea where the follow-up question came from: “Do you consider yourself to be an ordinary or an extraordinary person?”

No guessing Morrissey’s reply: “I’m probably extraordinary.”

A photographer was on hand taking photographs while we were asking questions and, at the end, attempts were made to get a group photo. The photographer’s idea, endorsed by Morrissey, was that he should be sitting on a big chair and that all the fanzine editors should kneel in front of him, with our tape machines pointing in his direction, compliant disciples prostrate at his feet. I thought this was daft, even demeaning. Someone said, “Dave, this is your chance to be famous,” but I really didn’t care.

I reckoned Morrissey of all people would understand that I was allowed to be choosy about how I was represented. Maybe he appreciated the diva-ish nature of my behaviour. He watched as I walked out of the room. I left Rough Trade, went through King’s Cross to Euston and got the train home.

It was Valentine’s Day 1985 when I walked out on Morrissey, but I guess if you’re going to say goodbye to someone – and that someone is the lovelorn Morrissey, the poet laureate of unrequited love – then why not pick Valentine’s Day?

• This is an edited extract from Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor by Dave Haslam (Constable & Robinson, £20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99