Every time Morrissey mentioned David Bowie in “Autobiography”

Presented in the order with which they appear in the book.

The topsy-turvydom of 1972 had brought an explosion of music and art and newness into my life and I was now in full self-development mode and desperate to be free of censure. There was no one with whom to discuss these understandings, and certainly any interest in art and self-expression through music was something to keep hidden throughout the cracked corridors of St Mary’s.

I had bought the Starman single by David Bowie, which had climbed to number 42 in the chart, and I catch this epoch of self-realization for the first time on television as the exotic and shapely Ayshea Brough celebrates newly distributed color television with her show Lift Off with Ayshea.



As David Bowie appears, the child dies. The vision is profound – a sanity heralding the coming of consciousness from someone who – at last! – transcends our gloomy coal-fire existence. David Bowie is detached from everything, yet open to everything; stripped of the notion that both art and life are impossible. He is quite real, impossibly glamorous, fearless, and quite British. How could this possibly be?

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T. Rex are my first concert and my dad and sister drop me off at daunting Belle Vue on June 16th 1972, watching me waddle away alone in my purple satin jacket – a sight ripe for psychiatric scrutiny. I am now determined, and newly emerged from Groovin’ with Mr Bloe by Mr Bloe. England was already set to change trains from Marc Bolan to David Bowie, whose Starman single had shaken everyone with its somewhere-over-the-rainbow chorus and Blue Mink’s Melting pot bridge.



Full-page advertising for David Bowie’s new Top Rank tour causes me to laugh excitedly as I see the now famous shot of spike-thin Bowie half-propped on a high stool, wearing tight white satin pants tucked into plastic boxer-boots, one hand on hip, the other hand pointing the way to somewhere, quite fanatically homosexual.



The face is damned-soul-as-savior-of-society, preacher and reformer, now free of his own unhappy childhood and willing to help you through yours should Black Sabbath and Deep Purple prove insufficient.



I crawl from the cultureless world to Stretford Hardrock in September 1972, where David Bowie is showcasing the venue. At mid-day he emerges from a black Mercedes, every inch the eighth dimension, teetering on high heels, with all the wisdom of our ancestors. Smiling keenly, he accepts the note of a dull schoolboy whose overblown soul is more ablaze than the school blazer he wears, and thus I touch the hand of this inexplicably liberating reformer; he, a Wildean visionary about to re-mold England, and I, a spectacle of suffering in a blue school uniform.

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The womanly David Bowie is attacked by the Daily Mirror as being ‘a disgrace’ – although how he is a disgrace, or why, is not explained. Bowie’s extraordinary effect of menace upon British culture is largely forgotten now, but I watched it break like a thundercloud in 1972, and its presence was as volcanic as that which later would be termed Punk. An even darker force controlled the personalities of the New York Dolls, who are younger than Bowie and who are more-or-less transgender in appearance.

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Jon Daley walked along Great Stone Road towards the Hardrock wearing silver knee-length boots, tight sky-blue jeans, blouse open to expose hairless body and flat belly, his spiked yellow hair expertly snipped, his eyebrows shaven off; nail polish and thin silver bracelets completing the dare. He looks sensational, as if plucked from the interplanetary beyond, living the trans earth Bowie reflection as beautiful creature – fearless and resolute.



So striking is he that a passing lorry slows down beside him and gruff voices call out in order to throw Jon off balance (well, this is the north) – a compliment, of sorts, since it proves just how much you are getting at people, pinging their own self-doubts. Jon doesn’t flinch. In this year of Aladdin Sane, Jon is the cover artwork in living form. The afternoon sun burns as Jon makes his way alone.

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Moores and her Dukinfield friends were all lascivious young women, and they liked their men to look like the Dolls or Bowie. They despised the macho Boddington’s-eloquent chat-up drunks of which Manchester produced nothing but. Male beauty was Mick Ronson or Jerry Nolan, and any man wearing makeup rang all the right bells. For me, it is a relief to be with people who are not shockable, although my own style is Antique Market baggy trousers and cord jackets of men long dead. I know only lodging-house thrift, and I do not ever attempt glamor in this city of gangs.

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By extreme contrast I see David Bowie in 1976 at Wembley. He is already cold in form and un-giving, and as I spend the night hanging around Euston Station awaiting the first train back to Manchester, I am lost in Bowie’s loss. It is Patti Smith, though, who rings as the first musical artist who promises nothing, and who gives nothing other than the sordid actuality of fact.

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Mainstream success can often be the worst thing that can befall a true artist. Imagine David Bowie without his EMI America years – better to be absent and inactive in Hannover, or better my lover dead. Iggy was a face and a voice that had not been stated before his time. He recorded Raw Power as a moment of life that could never again be lived. It spat at you. Ask a boy from Michigan to be Elgar; he can’t. Ask a boy from Michigan to be Iggy; he can’t.

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Johnny and I then have tea with Tony Visconti, most famously associated with the supremely noble works of T. Rex and David Bowie, but after our meeting Tony also declines. Free to howl again, I do so, and we record The Queen is Dead as we had recorded Meat is Murder – with Stephen Street making sense of it all.

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In America, The Smiths album had stalled at number 150, and Meat is Murder spent thirty-two weeks meandering around the 110 position, whereas The Queen is Dead finally clipped into the 100 at number 70, and managed to cling on for thirty-seven weeks. Sire attempted appeasement by assuring me that neither the Sex Pistols’ album nor David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust had entered the Billboard 100 – as if this should be our eternal blueprint.

—-



The Smiths fallout continues in Denver, where someone has held an entire radio station at gunpoint until DJs make the promise to play Smiths music. Unwittingly, this gunman is providing the very first active radio promotion on behalf of the Smiths, and evidently a loaded gun is what it takes to get a Smiths song on the airwaves.



David Bowie, who feeds on the blood of living mammals, rises like Christopher Lee to present a bouquet of flowers to Johnny. But Johnny is not taken in. If I had felt that the Smiths’ demise had left me on the scaffold, then Johnny surely felt the same. He quickly joins the Pretenders, and he just as quickly is ‘asked to leave’. Chrissie Hynde explains to me that Johnny’s perpetual lateness made progress impossible.

—-

I meet David Bowie for breakfast at a discreet restaurant at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Both standing at the buffet with our empty plates, David hovers over what are horrifically called ‘cold cuts’. I nestle up beside him.

‘David, you’re not actually going to eat that stuff, are you?’



Rumbled, he snaps: ‘Oh, you must be HELL to live with.’

‘Yes, I am,’ I say proudly, as David changes course and sidles off towards the fruit salad, and another soul is saved from the burning fires of self-imposed eternal damnation.



David quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’ and I loudly tell him, ‘You know, I’ve had SO LITTLE sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.’

—-

At The Forum in Los Angeles a royal David Bowie walks onstage to join me for the encore; he is stately against my last-gasp exhaustion. The 12-year-old within me – unable to leave for school unless I’d soothed my sickness with at least one spin of Starman – bathes in the moment with disbelief. But there it is.

—-

For the sweeping coda on I know it’s gonna happen someday Mick utilizes a heavily orchestrated pattern which we are certain echoes the falling moments of David Bowie’s Rock ’n roll suicide. I am slightly troubled by this resemblance, and I point out to Mick that the envelope has been pushed too far. ‘Yes, well,’ says Mick, ‘I wrote that original piece for Rock ’n roll suicide, so there won’t be any legal comeback.’ Mick goes on to say how he wrote the guitar parts for Starman and The man who sold the world. Mick had been naive in the past, but it was not for me to comment since I continued to be naive in the present.



Suddenly David Bowie telephones the studio and asks to speak to me. I am thrilled, but he tells me that he would like me to do a cover of one of his recent songs, and he stresses that if I don’t do the cover, ‘I will never speak to you again, haha,’ which is hardly much of a loss since David doesn’t ever speak to me. The song he’d like me to cover is called Mr Ed, and although I listen to the tape that he sends to the studio, nothing within the song shouts out to me.

A few months later I am at my mother’s house when the telephone rings. My mother hands me the 1940s shellac antique. ‘It’s for you – it’s David Bowie,’ and boyhood’s fire is all aglow again, although I cannot understand how David found my mother’s number. He explains that he would like to send me something through the post. ‘Do you have an address?’ I ask. ‘Oh, just write to me care of the management,’ he replies. ‘No, I meant do YOU have an address for ME?’ I say.



Dear Morrissey, Came by to see if you were OK. Called a couple of times but no answer. If I don’t hear from you or don’t see you, have a right smashin’ time in the States, and I will see you in the NY area. Take care of yourself. I’ll look forward to seeing you soon, OK. Mick.

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The order of the universe calls upon Mick in April 1993, the year still so young, but already it has taken three close friends from my dishearteningly slim roster. The telephone rang and it was Suzi Fussey – once the girl of a Beckenham High Street hair salon who had created David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy’ cut, and then married Mick. Twenty-three years on from that day, Suzi says ‘My baby has gone,’ and I knew Mick was no more. I am asked to write about Mick in the Guardian newspaper, and talk about him on Radio One, but indecent haste forbids. Mick certainly saved Your Arsenal, and by extension he saved me.

—-

A note arrives at the Mark Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York. It is addressed to my pseudonym Vince Eager, and is from David Bowie. That evening I am called over to David’s recording studio, where he guides me into a favored chair at the control desk – central to the speakers. David flicks on the tape and the mammoth waft of his version of my own I know it’s gonna happen someday attacks the room with tsunami turbulence. Seated beside me in spiritual quietude, Linder is pale with emotional understanding. David’s beautiful wife, Iman, folds herself away in a corner seat.

Iman had been plucked from the streets of Kenya to illuminate catwalks all over the world, and had become one of the first women of color to grace the covers of style magazines that had not previously given space to women who were non-Caucasian. Iman has a gentle patience and a friendly perception. She does not edge into the conversation until invited, yet her comments are always thoughtful and precise. I like her a great deal. Now launching her own skin-care range, I ask her what products other than her own does she use on her skin. ‘Oh, I just mix bits of everything,’ she says.



The sound coming from the speakers is the gift of life, and nothing will keep me level after David’s bestowal. Here is the unimaginable culmination of a mad process that began for me sometime in 1970, as On the Buses chirped annoyingly in the background. Jets of steam rise in the New York streets as Linder and I walk slowly back to the hotel, scrutinizing events. David had been an infallible guide, and these are the years when he still developed his ideas with pride, and always at considerable distance from the sparkl-ing modernities of pop. I am all parts gratitude.

—-



‘I suppose you’re enormous in Cleveland?’ asks David Bowie. ‘No,’ I reply, utterly baffled. ‘Oh.’ He slumps.

—-

Back in New York, David Bowie asks me, ‘Do you, er, still have the same band?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, and he looks downwards. The word is well established that the Morrissey band is not as good as the Smiths, or even up to much in their own right. It is an accusation that I must live with for the rest of my life, irrespective of how often the line-up changes.

—-

The Lowry is the sharpest of Manchester’s hotels, many of which I stood outside for hours awaiting a squinted glimpse of Marc Bolan or David Bowie. And now it’s my turn. The bar is cleared as my private party is ushered in to take over.

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The reclusive cardinal of Italian music is Ennio Morricone. Although historical and royal, he has agreed to conduct his orchestra on the track Dear God, please help me. This is unusual, since the maestro of maestros has refused U2 and David Bowie, but somehow says yes to porky me. The grandeur engulfs us, and my heart is pushed to the point of collapse as I watch Ennio in studio action. I find myself wishing for tears that don’t come. Oddly, I introduce Ennio to Tony Visconti, to whom Ennio gives one very quick up-and-down disdainful look, says nothing, and turns away. Tony is not troubled by this, whereas I would slit my own throat at the shock of such a rebuff.

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Whilst recording in Rome I meet Elton John, who is shockingly down-to-earth and gives me high praise for You Are the Quarry. He tells me how he loved the New York Dolls and Jobriath, but how he considered Bowie to be ‘a vampire’. A pleasant evening passes under a Rome sun which – even into late evening – seems not to go away.

—-

Up here in Spokane on May 6th we are in bear-baiting country, which grants me dutiful attack. I suggest we hunt the hunters, and the crowd roar approval. By Friday we are in Omaha, America’s bosom, city of sawdust and mockingbird houses. Daytime streets are dry and wide and always empty, but the audience at the Orpheum belies Nebraska’s poverty of spirit as parents hold their small children up to the stage to be kissed or hugged by a baffled singer.



The art of song lights the touch-paper in a way that nothing else can. The audience is confused, though, when I sing David Bowie’s Drive-in Saturday, because evidently they don’t know what it is. It is the only moment when I lose the crowd.