Morrissey

• 1. Introduction

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  Steven Patrick Morrissey, known to the world as Morrissey, once led a tour of Manchester for the Oxford Road Show in 1985. Late in that tour he reached the secondary school he had attended. He described it in harsh terms and closed with a wry four-word verdict: "Not to be recommended."

  Born on the 22nd of May 1959, he became the frontman and lyricist of the Smiths, who were active from 1982 to 1987. He then built a long solo career. A 2006 poll for the BBC's Culture Show voted him the second-greatest living British cultural icon. Critics have credited him as a seminal figure in the emergence of indie pop, indie rock and Britpop, and academics have studied his work.

  Yet the same man has been called controversial and polarising for as long as he has been famous. How did a Manchester schoolboy who found his classrooms brutal become a subject of scholarship? What made listeners cling to a singer who wrote about isolation and embraced celibacy? And why do his forthright opinions still split the audience that adores his songs?

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• 2. Streets and Classrooms

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  Number 17 Harper Street, in the Queen's Square area of Hulme, was the first home of Steven Patrick Morrissey. The council house in inner Manchester has since been demolished. He was born in Old Trafford to Elizabeth, née Dwyer, and Peter Morrissey. Both parents were Irish Catholics who had moved from Dublin a year earlier, bringing his elder sister Jacqueline. Morrissey says he was named after the American actor Steve Cochran. He may instead have been named for his father's brother, Patrick Steven Morrissey, who died in infancy.

  The Moors murders, in which a number of local children were killed, left a lasting impression on him in Hulme. They later inspired the Smiths song "Suffer Little Children". He also noticed the anti-Irish sentiment that immigrants like his parents met in British society.

  In 1970 the "slum clearances" swept away almost all of Hulme's Victorian-era houses. The family moved to a council house at 384 King's Road in Stretford.

  St Wilfred's Primary School came first, and Morrissey later spoke fondly of it, even meeting his former teachers there. Then he failed his 11-plus exam and went to St Mary's Secondary Modern School, which he found unpleasant. He excelled at athletics but was an unpopular loner. He left in 1975 with no formal qualifications. Stretford Technical College then gave him three O-Levels, in English literature, sociology and the General Paper.

  His opinion of formal schooling stayed bleak. He said, "The education I received was so basically evil and brutal. All I learnt was to have no self-esteem and to feel ashamed without knowing why." He has also described being subjected to corporal punishment, the subject of the Smiths' 1985 song "The Headmaster Ritual".

  School kept returning in his song titles. "The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils" appears on Southpaw Grammar from 1995. "Because of My Poor Education" is a bonus track from Years of Refusal, released in 2009. His first solo album, Viva Hate, had the working title Education in Reverse. It first came out in Australia under that name, though this was later rectified.

  In that same year of 1975, he travelled to the United States to visit an aunt who lived on Staten Island.

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• 3. Idols and Obsessions

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  In December 1976 his parents separated, and his father moved out of the family home. His mother, a librarian, had encouraged his reading. In a 1983 interview with NME, he cited the feminist writers Marjorie Rosen, Molly Haskell and Susan Brownmiller. He also idolised the Irish author Oscar Wilde.

  Granada Television received scripts and storylines from the young Morrissey for Coronation Street, a soap opera about working-class communities in Manchester. All were rejected. He also loved Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and its 1961 film adaptation, a drama about working-class life in Salford. Many of his later songs directly quoted it.

  Pop music mattered even more. He once said, "Pop music was all I ever had, and it was completely entwined with the image of the pop star. I remember feeling the person singing was actually with me and understood me and my predicament." The first record he bought was Marianne Faithfull's 1965 single "Come and Stay With Me".

  In the 1970s he became a glam rock fan, enjoying T. Rex, David Bowie and Roxy Music. He liked the American acts Sparks, Jobriath and the New York Dolls too. For the Dolls he formed a British fan club, recruiting members through small adverts in the back pages of music magazines. The Dolls' interest in 1960s female pop singers led him to Sandie Shaw, Twinkle and Dusty Springfield.

  After school came a string of jobs. He worked as a clerk for the civil service, then at the Inland Revenue, then as a record-store salesperson and a hospital porter. Eventually he abandoned work and claimed unemployment benefits. Much of his earnings went on gig tickets for Talking Heads, the Ramones and Blondie.

  In November 1977 he met the guitarist Billy Duffy and agreed to sing for Duffy's punk band, the Nosebleeds. In 2024 Morrissey said he "did not ever join" them. The songs he co-wrote with the group included "Peppermint Heaven", "I Get Nervous" and "I Think I'm Ready for the Electric Chair". They played support slots for Jilted John and then Magazine before disbanding.

  By 1981 he was close friends with Linder Sterling, frontwoman of the punk jazz ensemble Ludus. Her lyrics and singing style influenced him, and through her he met Howard Devoto and Richard Boon. His best male friend at the time was James Maker. Wanting to be a professional writer, he wrote letters to the music press and was eventually hired by Record Mirror.

  Babylon Books, a local publisher, issued his 24-page booklet on the New York Dolls in 1981, and it sold 3,000 copies. A second book, James Dean is Not Dead, followed. By then Morrissey had covered his bedroom with pictures of the film star.

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• 4. Marr's Doorstep

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  In August 1978, at a Patti Smith gig at Manchester's Apollo Theatre, mutual acquaintances briefly introduced Morrissey to a 14-year-old named Johnny Marr. In May 1982 Marr turned up on Morrissey's doorstep to propose forming a band. He had been impressed by the Dolls book. He was also copying Jerry Leiber, who had formed his partnership with Mike Stoller by appearing at Stoller's door. Morrissey later said, "We got on absolutely famously. We were very similar in drive."

  Morrissey phoned Marr the next day to confirm. Around then he decided to be known publicly only by his surname, while Marr called him "Mozzer" or "Moz". In 1983 he forbade those around him from using "Steven", a name he despised. He also chose the band's name, telling an interviewer, "it was the most ordinary name and I thought it was time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces".

  The lineup took time to settle. Steve Pomfret was the first bassist, followed by Dale Hibbert. Mike Joyce became the drummer in late summer 1982. Hibbert disliked what he saw as the band's gay aesthetic, and Morrissey and Marr disliked his playing, so Marr's old school friend Andy Rourke replaced him. They made a demo at Manchester's Decibel Studios in August 1982, and Factory Records passed. Their first public show came in October 1982, supporting Blue Rondo à la Turk at The Ritz.

  EMI also turned them down. Geoff Travis of the independent label Rough Trade Records then agreed to release "Hand in Glove" as a single, though he did not sign them at once. Morrissey chose a homoerotic Jim French photograph for the sleeve, and the single appeared in May 1983. Garry Bushell of the tabloid The Sun alleged that its B-side, "Handsome Devil", endorsed paedophilia. The band denied it, and Morrissey said the song had "nothing to do with children".

  A John Peel session and their first major London show followed. "This Charming Man" reached number 25 and "What Difference Does It Make?" reached number 12. The debut album The Smiths reached number 2 in February 1984. Meat Is Murder, released early in 1985, became their only studio album to top the UK charts. The Queen Is Dead arrived in June 1986, a legal dispute with Rough Trade having delayed it by almost seven months.

  Strain was building. Rourke was fired in early 1986 for heroin use, and Craig Gannon briefly filled in on bass. Rourke returned after a fortnight, and Gannon stayed on as rhythm guitarist until October 1986. Hoping for a major label, the band signed with EMI, which drew criticism from some fans. In July 1987 Marr left, and auditions for a replacement came to nothing. By the time Strangeways, Here We Come appeared in September, the Smiths were finished. In a 1989 interview with a teenage fan named Tim Samuels, Morrissey blamed the lack of a managerial figure.

  The quarrel did not end there. In August 2024 Morrissey said on his website that he and Marr had received a "lucrative offer" to tour as the Smiths in 2025. He said he accepted, but Marr never replied. Marr's statement said he had registered the band's trademark in his own name after a third party tried to use the name in 2018. He also said Morrissey and his representatives had not responded to him. In January 2024 Marr had signed an agreement to share ownership, and he said Morrissey had yet to follow up.

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• 5. The Anti-Pop Idol

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  "Lanky, soft-spoken, bequiffed and bespectacled" was one description of Morrissey fronting the Smiths. He avoided rock machismo and cultivated the image of a sexually ambiguous social outsider who embraced celibacy. The band's plain look reacted against the excess of the New Romantics. One commentator wrote, "he was bookish; he wore NHS spectacles and a hearing aid on stage; he was celibate. Worst of all, he was sincere."

  The writer Mark Simpson called him "the anti-pop idol", the "last, greatest and most gravely worrying product of an era when pop music was all there was". The biographer Johnny Rogan saw an "endlessly re-examining a lost, painful past". Other writers praised lyrics full of "dramatic, bleak, funny vignettes about doomed relationships, lonely nightclubs, the burden of the past and the prison of the home". Black humour and self-deprecation ran through them.

  Many of his lyrics never state the narrator's gender, so male and female listeners could each find a way in. Simpson felt they often highlighted "the essential absurdity of gender". In the Smiths' songs, sex itself is rarely consummated on the page. Instead he sings of anticipation, frustration, aversion or final disappointment.

  The scholar Julian Stringer called the Smiths "one of Britain's most overtly political groups". Andrew Warns, in a study of their work, termed them "this most anti-capitalist of bands". Stringer noted their heavy emphasis on Englishness, focused on white England rather than its multi-cultural side. He argued they were "the only sustained response that white, English pop/rock music was able to make" to Margaret Thatcher's government and its "appropriation of white, English national identity". He read the avoidance of sex as typically English reticence about expressing feeling.

  His targets were political as well. After the October 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, he commented that "the only sorrow" was "that Thatcher escaped unscathed". In 1988 he said Section 28 "embodies Thatcher's very nature and her quite natural hatred".

  Violence haunts the songs too. Morrissey has spoken of "a macabre fascination" with it. Simpson pointed to bus crashes and suicide pacts in "There is a Light that Never Goes Out", smashed teeth in "Bigmouth Strikes Again", and nuclear apocalypse in "Ask" and "Everyday is Like Sunday". Thuggery in general drew him, whether murderers, gangsters, rough trade or skinheads.

  Then there is the voice, a baritone that sometimes slips into falsetto. Simpson heard in it the speech of the "Northern Women", and named Cilla Black and Viv Nicholson as influences. Lulu and Sandie Shaw are also cited. Stringer countered that Morrissey did not sing in a Mancunian accent. He used "very clipped, precise enunciation" and "clear English diction".

  On stage he whips his microphone cord about, especially on up-tempo songs. On Top of the Pops he mimed shooting at the audience during "Shoplifters of the World Unite". Another time he turned the cord into a hangman's noose for "Hang the DJ" in "Panic". Rogan wrote that he showed "a power onstage which I have seldom seen from any other artiste of his generation".

  He also reacts when security treats fans roughly. At San Antonio, on the Your Arsenal tour, he stopped the show to rebuke bouncers for hitting people in the crowd.

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• 6. Solo Ascent

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  The Wool Hall studio near Bath was where Morrissey began his first solo album by September 1987. Stephen Street produced and co-wrote, and the musicians included Vini Reilly and Andrew Paresi. Unlike Smiths sleeves, which used existing images of celebrities, the cover of Viva Hate carried a photograph of Morrissey by Anton Corbijn. EMI released "Suedehead" in February 1988, and it reached number 5, higher than any Smiths single. "Everyday Is Like Sunday" reached number 9, and the album went to number 1.

  The closing track, "Margaret on the Guillotine", described Thatcher being executed. The Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens accused Morrissey of involvement in a terrorist network, and police Special Branch searched his Manchester home. His first solo performance, at Wolverhampton Civic Hall in December 1988, drew huge crowds. The NME journalist James Brown said it felt "like nothing I have ever experienced at any public event".

  "The Last of the Famous International Playboys", about the gangsters the Kray twins, reached number 6. "Interesting Drug" reached number 9. In November 1989 "Ouija Board, Ouija Board" reached number 18. Christian spokespeople and tabloids condemned it as promoting occultism. Morrissey replied that "the only contact I ever made with the dead was when I spoke to a journalist from The Sun."

  Bona Drag, with only six new songs among his recent singles and B-sides, reached number 9. "November Spawned a Monster" reached number 12 but was accused of mocking disabled people. "Piccadilly Palare", released in November 1990, used polari slang and reached number 19. Some in the British gay press felt he should not use it while not openly gay, though in 1989 he had acknowledged attraction to both men and women.

  Kill Uncle, written with Mark E. Nevin, reached number 8 in March 1991. Its singles stalled at numbers 26 and 33. For his first solo tour he gathered rockabilly-schooled players, including Boz Boorer, Alain Whyte and Spencer Cobrin. The singer Phranc supported him, and a large image of Edith Sitwell decorated each stage. In the United States he sold out Los Angeles' 18,000-seat Forum in fifteen minutes, faster than Michael Jackson or Madonna had. David Bowie joined him on stage for T. Rex's "Cosmic Dancer". He sold out 25 of his 26 other US dates, and a Texas show was filmed as the VHS Live in Dallas.

  The biographer David Bret called the early 1990s the "black phase" in his relationship with the British music press. Some criticism, such as pieces by Barbara Ellen in NME, read closer to personal attack than review. Morrissey grew reluctant to speak to British journalists and complained about constant comparisons with the Smiths. "My past is almost denying me a future," he said.

  Your Arsenal, released in July 1992, reached number 2. It was the last release from the producer Mick Ronson, whom Morrissey called "the greatest privilege of my life". The album mourned the decline of British culture under Americanisation. Songs such as "Certain People I Know" and "The National Front Disco" dealt with tough, working-class youths. A 53-date tour followed, with backdrops of skinhead girls, Diana Dors, Elvis Presley and Charlie Richardson.

  His image had hardened. Simpson wrote that he had gone "from the aesthete interested in rough lads into a rough lad interested in aestheticism". Simon Armitage described a shift from "stick-thin, knock-me-over-with-a-feather campness" to a "mobster and bare-knuckle boxer image". On the cover, a photograph by Linder Sterling, he stands onstage with his shirt open.

  Vauxhall and I, co-written with Whyte and Boorer and produced by Steve Lillywhite, topped the UK album chart in March 1994. Morrissey thought it was the best he had made, and expected it might be his last or second-to-last. The title nods to Vauxhall, home of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern gay pub. Jake Walters, a skinhead then living with Morrissey, appeared on the sleeve of "The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get", which reached number 8. Walters introduced him to York Hall, a Bethnal Green boxing venue.

  Boxing images then filled his work. "Boxers" reached number 23 in January 1995. Southpaw Grammar, with a cover of the boxer Kenny Lane, reached number 4 in August 1995. It made far less impact than its predecessors. In December 1995 "Sunny", a lament for his ended relationship with Walters, became his first single not to chart.

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• 7. Courts and Labels

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  Seven days of hearings at the High Court in December 1996 pitted Morrissey and Marr against their old drummer Mike Joyce. Joyce said he had not received his fair share of royalties, and sought at least £1 million in damages and 25% of future Smiths album sales. The judge sided with Joyce and called Morrissey "devious, truculent and unreliable when his own interests were at stake". Press coverage widely used "devious" and "truculent".

  Marr paid what he legally owed. Morrissey appealed and lost in July 1998, then tried again without success. He argued the judge was biased because of his criticism of Thatcher. In a November 2005 statement, he said the case had cost him £600,000 in legal fees and roughly £1,515,000 in total.

  Meanwhile his recording life was unsettled. Maladjusted came out in August 1997 on Island Records and reached number 8. Unhappy with the cover of Southpaw Grammar, he left Maladjusted's cover to his label, but disliked that result too. In 1998 Uncut reported that he had no record deal. The next year he played the Oye Esteban Tour and headlined Coachella in California.

  Then he left Britain. In Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, he bought a house once owned by Carole Lombard and redesigned by William Haines. For the next few years he rarely returned. His hiatus ran from 1998 to 2003. A 2002 world tour ended with two sold-out nights at the Royal Albert Hall, and Channel 4's documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey aired in 2003.

  Sanctuary Records signed him in 2003 and gave him the defunct reggae label Attack Records. The resulting album, You Are the Quarry, appeared in May 2004, produced by Jerry Finn, with a cover showing Morrissey holding a Tommy gun. It reached number 2 in the UK and number 11 on the US Billboard chart. "Irish Blood, English Heart" reached number 3, the highest position of any of his singles. He gave his first television interview in 17 years on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and looked visibly uncomfortable.

  That year he marked his 45th birthday at the Manchester Arena with Franz Ferdinand in support, released as the DVD Who Put the M in Manchester? He also curated the Meltdown festival at London's Southbank Centre. Sparks, Nancy Sinatra, the Libertines and the playwright Alan Bennett were among the guests. He failed to book Brigitte Bardot or Maya Angelou.

  Ringleader of the Tormentors, recorded in Rome with Tony Visconti, debuted at number 1 in the UK in April 2006. Years of Refusal was delayed from September until February 2009 by the death of producer Jerry Finn and the lack of an American label. Pitchfork said it showed Morrissey had "rediscovered himself", and called it his "most venomous, score-settling album". Jeff Beck played guitar on "Black Cloud". Later Morrissey called the B-sides collection Swords "a meek disaster", and he collapsed on stage in Swindon.

  In 2013 he published Autobiography, a 660-page book issued under the Penguin Classics label at his own request. Some critics felt this devalued the label. The Daily Telegraph praised it as "the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan's Chronicles", while The Independent criticised its "droning narcissism". Nearly 35,000 copies sold in its first week, and it entered the UK book charts at number 1. His first novel, List of the Lost, followed in September 2015.

  Illness kept interrupting. A bleeding ulcer arrived in January 2013, and on the 7th of March that year he was hospitalised with pneumonia in both lungs. In 2015 he disclosed treatment for Barrett's oesophageal cancer. Albums continued: World Peace Is None of Your Business in 2014, Low in High School in 2017 and the covers album California Son in 2019. I Am Not a Dog on a Chain followed in March 2020.

  The album Bonfire of Teenagers then entered a long limbo. It had eleven songs produced by Andrew Watt, with Chad Smith, Flea and Josh Klinghoffer, and Iggy Pop contributing backing vocals. Miley Cyrus asked for her vocals to be removed. Capitol Records declined to release it, and Morrissey suggested it had been "sabotaged". In April 2024 he regained the rights, but it remains unreleased. A later album was partly re-recorded in France and renamed more than once.

  On the 18th of December 2025, Morrissey announced he had signed to Sire Records. The lead single "Make-Up Is a Lie" arrived on the 6th of January 2026. The album of the same name came out on the 6th of March 2026, his first in over six years, to mixed reviews.

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• 8. Causes and Quarrels

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  Since the age of 11, Morrissey has been a vegetarian. He explains it simply: "if you love animals, obviously it doesn't make sense to hurt them". In 2015 he announced he was vegan. In 2018 he said he "refuses to eat anything that had a mother" and eats only bread, potatoes, pasta and nuts. He supports People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which gave him its Linda McCartney Memorial Award on the 10th of September 2005. In 2014 the group made the cartoon Someday, about a chick, in honour of his 55th birthday.

  In January 2006 Morrissey said he understood why fur-farmers and laboratory scientists were "repaid with violence", because they deal in violence themselves. The chef Clarissa Dickson Wright said he was encouraging violence and that she was constantly aware something might happen to her. The Conservative MP David Davis said incitement to violence should be investigated by police. That year Morrissey left Canada off his world tour to protest its annual seal hunt, which he called "barbaric and cruel slaughter". In 2018 he changed approach, saying his earlier "stance was ultimately of no use and helped no one". He pledged to donate to animal protection groups in the cities where he performed.

  His remarks about animals have repeatedly landed him in trouble. At a concert in Warsaw on the 24th of July 2011, he compared the Norway attacks to the daily killing of animals at fast-food restaurants. NME described the comment as crude and insensitive. In an interview with Simon Armitage in 2010, he made a disparaging remark about Chinese people because of their treatment of animals. Armitage said he must have known it would make waves.

  He also clashed with power. At Glastonbury in 2011 he called David Cameron a "silly twit" over circus animals. Morrissey's March 2013 show at the Staples Center was reported to have vegetarian vendors only, with McDonald's closed. He cancelled a Jimmy Kimmel Live! appearance after learning the cast of Duck Dynasty would also be guests, whom he called "animal serial killers". In 2019 he banned meat from a Houston venue, and the rapper Jake Hill cancelled his own show in protest.

  Politics have divided audiences as well. He has criticised royalty and prominent politicians, supported right-wing activism on British heritage, and defended a particular vision of national identity. In November 2017 Der Spiegel quoted him saying it was "quite sad" that European national identities were being undermined by a "multicultural aspect to everything". It also quoted him saying some who claimed victimhood under the Me Too movement were "simply disappointed". He accused the magazine of misquoting him and said it would be his last print interview. In July 2012 the mayor of Tel Aviv, Ron Huldai, awarded him a symbolic key to the city.

  Morrissey keeps a private personal life. He is a longtime Los Angeles resident with homes in Italy, Switzerland and the UK, and the city declared the 10th of November 2017 "Morrissey Day". He dislikes the nickname "Moz", telling an interviewer, "it's like something you'd squirt on the kitchen floor". In 2023 he revealed in New York that he has never owned a cell phone. He calls himself a lapsed Catholic and has criticised the Church. He has described clinical depression, for which he has sought professional help. His mother, Elizabeth Anne Dwyer, died in August 2020, aged 82, of gallbladder cancer.

  His cousin is the Irish footballer Robbie Keane, whom he praised as "pacing like a lion, as weightless as an astronaut". He is also a boxing fan. Speculation about his sexuality has long filled the British press, with claims that he was celibate, a frustrated heterosexual or bisexual.

  Stringer saw contradictions in him: "an ordinary, working-class 'anti-star' who nevertheless loves to hog the spotlight, a nice man who says the nastiest things about other people, a shy man who is also an outrageous narcissist". Interviewers have often found him good company. Eddie Sanderson of The Mail on Sunday called him "a very nice chap" in 1992, and the photographer Mischa Richter called him "genuinely lovely".

  In September 2025, two shows on his US tour were cancelled after what he called "a credible threat" on his life. They were at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston and the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut. The threat had been received before a concert at TD Place Stadium in Ottawa, which went ahead as planned.

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