'Misinformed, mischievous or malevolent?': Morrissey at Glastonbury in 2011. Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty ImagesIt came upon a midnight clear. Or just after anyway, if you downloaded the ebook or queued in one of the several bookshops that opened at the witching hour just for the occasion. Morrissey once sang "there's more to life than books you know". True. But you wouldn't think so from the palaver that this particular music memoir has engendered. There have been fabulously wrong-headed pronouncements about its "TS Eliot-style" stream of consciousness format. TS Eliot never let his consciousness stream, and neither does Moz. What they mean is that there are no chapter breaks and that the breathtaking, almost insolently bravura opening pages are far, far more vital, lyrical and poetic than we have any right to expect from a pop singer's biography.
Then there is the matter of it being afforded Penguin Classic status, which has brought a huge and po-faced harrumph from the professionally offended in the literary establishment. It is, darling, a joke. A joke incidentally, that some of his shelf-mates in the Penguin Classics section, Joyce and DH Lawrence, say, would have relished.
There is more than a touch of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man about the brilliant opening chapters concerning his early life in the working-class streets of Stretford. There's a hint of Dylan Thomas, too, as well as Les Dawson and Adrian Mole. "Family life is chaotic and full of primitive drama as everything is felt intensely. There are no electronic distractions and everything is felt face to face. We are stuck in the wettest part of England in a society where we are not needed, yet we are warm and washed and well fed." This is the lodestone that he mined brilliantly in early Smiths classics such as The Headmaster Ritual writ large; he even slyly nods to his own lyrics from time to time. Some of the digressions are so odd as to be touching. There's a critique of the animation style of Captain Pugwash and a lengthy, earnest discussion of Peter Wyngarde's acting style: "he might occasionally rush into a following line without a punctuated pause (enjambment) but… he leads the way as the governing centre of Department S".
His baffling affection for the New York Dolls is in the public domain but we do learn some genuinely fresh stuff, such as his teenage love of poetry. Some of his verse enthusiasms we might have guessed at – Betjeman and Stevie Smith for instance – but others are a revelation; Auden, Robert Herrick, Housman. He quotes a stanza of the latter – "How often have I washed and dressed/and what's to show for all my pain/let me lie abed and rest/ten thousand times I've done my best/and all's to do again" – that could come straight from the lyric sheet of the first Smiths album.
It can't last of course. And it doesn't. It all starts to go wrong when, for us at least, it all started to go right, with the formation of the Smiths. On page 148, writing of an early rehearsal, there is perhaps the most tin-eared, embarrassing description of their music I have ever read. "The Smiths sound rockets with meteoric progression… bomb-burst drumming… combative bass-playing". One is reminded of that old axiom about artists being the least perceptive critics of their own work. Morrissey seems to have understood the Smiths less than we did.
The Smiths' career is dealt with in a manner that manages somehow to be both sketchy and wearisomely exhaustive. Chart positions are quoted endlessly as if crayoned in a schoolgirl's diary. There are a litany of slights, real and imagined. Scores are settled with depressing, mean-spirited regularity. Julie Burchill gets it in the neck. Geoff Travis of Rough Trade is painted as a sort of hippy Pol Pot: "Our skinny white bodies are lowered into the Rough Trade cauldron." If you know anything about the music biz you will know that this is as ludicrous a phrase as "the 1,000-year Reich of Oliver Postgate". Manchester music mogul the late Anthony H Wilson is mocked as "Meat fed Wilson". Be assured that anyone who has ever enjoyed a sausage bap or whose waistline is less than sylphlike incurs Moz's wrath regularly. Mind you, his description of the Hacienda nightclub crowd as "pork-pie chubbos" made this reviewer chuckle.
The generalised petulance reaches its nadir with 50-odd pages about the famous 90s court case brought by Smiths rhythm section Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke for unpaid earnings. It is simply too sad and dull to recount at length but suffice to say that the nastiness vented on Rourke and Joyce would seem to make the regularly discussed reunion unthinkable. Occasionally, he is just plain wrong, as when he states that there was an NME meeting in which the "unnameable" editor – it was Danny Kelly – declared that the paper should "get Morrissey". I was the deputy editor at the time and part of a small but vocal faction who fought Moz's corner and I can tell you, dear reader, that no such meeting ever took place. Misinformed, mischievous or malevolent? Who can say?
Two relationships, one with Jake Walters and one with Tina Dehgani, are described with affecting tenderness. "For the first time in my life the eternal 'I' becomes 'we', as, finally, I can get on with someone," he writes of Jake and he discussed having a child or, as he puts it, a "mewling miniature monster" with the latter. More of this would have been welcome. This is, after all the man who sang "It's so easy to laugh/It's so easy to hate/It takes guts to be gentle and kind."
"Get stewed," wrote Philip Larkin, "books are a load of crap." Autobiography is certainly not that, but it is as exasperating, coruscating, thrilling and deflating as its creator.
